European Politics

I’ve been remiss in not posting anything about the results of the Italian election – the result of a number of deadlines crashing in on me at once. But in lieu of proper analysis, it’s worth noting that the biggest winner in the elections – the _Lega Nord_ – is one of the most genuinely revolting political parties in the Western world. The picture below (nicked from “Foreign Policy’s Passport blog”:http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/8692) gives some idea of what their winning electoral strategy involved.

According to _Passport_, it appears that Lega leading light Roberto Calderoli is likely to become deputy Prime Minister. Regular CT readers may “recall”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/18/follies-berlesque/ his resignation from a previous government after wearing a t-shirt with one of the Danish anti-Muslim cartoons; he has distinguished himself in the meantime with his dismissal of the French football team as “negroes, communists and Muslims” after Italy beat them in the infamous Zidane-headbutt game and by threatening to have a pig ‘defile’ a site in Bologna where a mosque was to be built. US readers who aren’t familiar with European politics should try to imagine a political party with a program co-written by Mark Steyn, David Duke and Tom Tancredo, and they’ll be at least half-way there.

Clive Crook is probably my favourite sort-of-conservative big media commentator. But his “new piece”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803u/no-american-exceptionalism on ‘the End of the American Exception’ seems to me to be seriously out of whack.

That the United States stands apart is something Americans and Europeans have agreed on for a long time … Modern America has limited government, weak unions, high-powered incentives, capitalism red in tooth and claw. Post-war Europe has tax-and-spend, transport strikes, six-week vacations, and the welfare state. …Caricatures are well and good, but this one is just too much. In economic matters, America is far more like Europe, and Europe more like America, than either cares to admit. … health care … is America’s biggest social-policy exception …And it is marked for abolition. … . Consider regulation of business and finance. Few seem to question that the weight of regulation is less in the United States. In one area, anyway, this is true: Worker protections are weaker in America than in Western Europe … But think about product-safety regulation, or environmental regulation. … On regulation of corporate governance, Democrats are still calling for stricter rules … since Sarbanes Oxley, American financial and corporate regulation has been probably the most stringent and complex in the world.

…The unions are weaker here, it is said. To be sure, they have fewer members as a proportion of the workforce than in Britain, or (even more so) continental Europe. … proposed card-check legislation is expressly intended to slow and reverse the decline in union membership. This is a goal which few European governments would any longer think to embrace. In Britain it would be regarded as crazy … American unions remind me of the old-fashioned British kind. They seem anachronistically angry and assertive. … See what America’s unions have done to the auto industry. The Writers’ Guild just shut Hollywood down for several months. …I cannot think of a British union that any longer has that kind of muscle, or would think of exerting it if it did. In much of the rest of Europe, unions have become a quietly co-operative part of management more than militant champions of workers’ rights.

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The Washington Post has a “story”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/18/AR2008031802971.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR today on the problems of US terrorist watchlists. The emphasis of the story is on the nightmare that these lists generate for people who have names similar to those of people on the watchlist, and the difficulties that they have in getting off. There’s an interesting parallel debate happening in Europe at the moment, but it’s about a more profound question – are these terrorist lists, as they currently stand, a violation of human rights? And where there is disagreement over them, whose laws should apply? [click to continue…]

Further to my post the other day on Kosovo, and whether or not it sets a precedent for other would-be secessionist movements, I’d just like to note a very interesting piece by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express, which I found thanks to Chris Brooke at the Virtual Stoa. Mehta draws on Michael Mann’s work on “the dark side of democracy” to argue that the Kosovo case does indeed threaten future instability. On the immediate political pragmatics, whilst Mehta is surely right to argue that the backing of the US and other Western powers meant that the Kosovo Albanians were under no pressure to negotiate a solution that fell short of independence, defenders of independence can reply that, given what has gone on since 1990, they would have had no reason to believe anyway that remaining within a Serb-dominated state would given them even basic safety, let alone more extensive human rights guarantees. That disagreement aside, Mehta makes a good deal of sense on the connections between democracy, ethnic homogenization and the disastrous doctrine of national self-determination:

bq. In the 19th century, there was a memorable debate between John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton. John Stuart Mill had argued, in a text that was to become the bible for separatists all over, including Jinnah and Savarkar, that democracy functions best in a mono-ethnic societies. Lord Acton had replied that a consequence of this belief would be bloodletting and migration on an unprecedented scale; it was more important to secure liberal protections than link ethnicity to democracy. It was this link that Woodrow Wilson elevated to a simple-minded defence of self-determination. The result, as Mann demonstrated with great empirical rigour, was that European nation states, 150 years later, were far more ethnically homogenous than they were in the 19th century; most EU countries were more than 85 per cent mono-ethnic. Most of this homogeneity was produced by horrendous violence, of which Milosevic’s marauding henchmen were only the latest incarnation. This homogeneity was complicated somewhat by migration from some former colonies. But very few nation states in Europe remained zones where indigenous multi-ethnicity could be accommodated.

I’ve been too busy with teaching responsibilities the last several days to link or respond to various posts that other people have put up on taxes, collective goods, and related questions, so I’m going to declare intellectual bankruptcy, and just tell you to read “Laura McKenna”:http://11d.typepad.com/blog/2008/02/more-on-the-tax.html, “Will Wilkinson”:http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/02/22/moral-duties-in-contexts-of-partial-compliance/ and “Russell Arben Fox”:http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2008/02/taxation-and-democracy-101-on-lucky.html. But I also wanted to point to some interesting stuff that’s been happening in Germany, which is sort of related to this question. The _Financial Times_ has been running stories for the last week or so about a disgruntled former employee of a Liechtenstein bank, who has sold a list of the beneficial owners of various trusts in Liechtenstein to the German tax authorities for several million dollars.
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Various European governments (and sundry commentators) are exercised by the Kosovan declaration of independence, on the grounds that this creates a dangerous precedent and will undermine the integrity of sovereign states. If Kosovo gets independence, they worry, then the Scots, the Welsh, the Basques and the Catalans won’t be far behind. Well that would indeed be a worry if the right principle is one that national groups may simply elect to separate on the basis of some supposed right of nations to self-determination. But as I’ve blogged before, there are other candidate principles that we could invoke. If we follow Allen Buchanan, and see secession as a remedial right for groups that have suffered serious injustice and sought and failed to obtain a remedy, then things will look different. The Catalans, Welsh and Basques may have been in this position in the past, but it is hard to see that they are now, given the combination of regional autonomy and language rights that they enjoy. The Kosovo Albanians, on the other hand have both suffered injustice and have no good reason to believe that a just settlement is possible within Serbia. Buchanan’s principle seems to discriminate in a plausible way.

A few years ago, I was quite pleased that no one in Ireland seemed too bothered that our married but separated prime minister Bertie Aherne lived with his mistress/girlfriend/partner and even brought her on foreign trips. Bertie hasn’t given me a lot of joy overall, but it was nice to think that the Irish public had better things to do than worry about his marital status. (A couple of years previously, a government front-bencher had been apprehended by the police in a park at night, in an area popular with rent boys and their clients. The media unsuccessfully tried to whip up a moral panic, and within 24 hours most callers to talk radio shows were expressing sympathy to the man’s family but saying the issue wasn’t of enormous public interest.)

My idea of our newfound sophistication was punctured by a couple of Brussels diplomats. The French were particularly annoyed as they felt everyone should understand the mistress’s carefully delineated position. It was just gauche, they thought, to bring one’s mistress to an official dinner and expect other people’s wives to sit down beside her. Soon enough, Bertie dumped poor Celia – and the press did take a great interest in that – and began to go to official functions by himself.

But now the French are hoisted on their own petard! Sarkozy’s man-eating girlfriend, who happens to be the spit of his recent ex-wife, might accompany him on a state visit to India next week. And because the Indians are particularly conservative when it comes to recognising non-marital relations, they don’t know where to seat Ms. Bruni for dinner or where she should sleep. It really is a bit rude to put your hosts in such a quandary. So much for Sarko being anything but gauche.

This “piece”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3f03314e-bd3e-11dc-b7e6-0000779fd2ac.html by Stefan Theil in the _FT_ today on the biases of French and German high school economics textbooks is pretty bad, but it turns out to consist of edited extracts from an “even worse essay”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4095 that he’s published in _Foreign Policy._ [click to continue…]

When leafing through a copy of the _New York Review of Books_ from a few weeks back, I came across Patricia Meehan’s “review”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=20693 (behind paywall, unfortunately) of Giles MacDonogh’s _After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation._ It’s an eye-opener. [click to continue…]

My (longish) review of Roberto Saviano’s _Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System_ is “now out”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071210/farrell in _The Nation_. I liked the book quite a lot – as I say in the review it’s a little like Ryszard Kapuscinkski’s melanges of fiction and journalism, but it’s far starker, more direct, and angrier in its conclusions. One of the things I found most interesting about the book (although I don’t think his argument ultimately works), is Saviano’s efforts to connect together the Camorra and global capitalism. This is something that the “NYT reviewer”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/books/14grim.html didn’t get – he complains that the first chapter of the book (on Chinese smugglers) doesn’t say anything about the Camorra at all. As I read the book, that was rather the point that Saviano was trying to make – that the fundamental problem lies not so much in the florid stories about the Camorra clans as in the underbelly of globalization; the myriads of clandestine and informal markets and of relationships between the legal and illegal economies that help sustain global capitalism. The book is at least as much about markets as about crime – two extended quotes after the jump give some of the flavor. [click to continue…]

The FT “reports”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/02c2471c-943d-11dc-9aaf-0000779fd2ac.html that the OSCE has withdrawn from monitoring elections in Russia.

Europe’s main election monitoring group said on Friday it was scrapping plans to deploy observers to Russia’s forthcoming parliamentary elections in a decision that could cast doubt on the integrity of the poll. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe claimed Moscow had imposed “unprecedented restrictions” on its activities. Russia had slashed the number of observers it would admit to the December 2 election and then repeatedly delayed issuing visas for OSCE monitors.

It may be that this is (as a quoted Russian deputy claims) the prelude to mass falsification of results, but my impression (as a non-Russia specialist) is that the government doesn’t need to do much falsifying of polls, if any, to win. They’ve already succeeded in stage-managing democracy so well that they won’t need to (admittedly, the more liberal parties in Russia haven’t done very much to help their own cause either). This is more likely a product of Russia’s general desire to revise the post-Cold War international order, and get rid of the bits (such as election monitoring) that it thinks limits its autonomy both at home, and in neighboring states (for background information, see this “earlier post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/12/out-of-control-ios/).

For me, there are two interesting questions going forward. First: are other countries (perhaps more importantly the EU than the US), going to take this quietly, or are they going to seek to embarrass the Russians in some way, claiming that there are problems with their democracy, and perhaps seeking to sideline Russia from complete participation in some of the clubs that it has joined since the demise of the USSR?

Second, how are autocrats in other states (e.g. those in Central Asia) going to respond? My best guess is that those countries that see benefits from closer integration with the West (e.g. Georgia, the Ukraine) will continue to invite external election monitors, while those that don’t will follow Russia’s lead. If this prediction bears out, we will see a little bit of Cold War politics beginning to seep back, with an increase in hostility between Russia and its satellites in Central Asia and elsewhere (anomalies such as Belarus and Moldova) on the one hand, and West and Central European democracies on the other, with both sides contending for influence over shaky democracies in between (such as Georgia and the Ukraine). All of which would intersect in complicated ways with energy politics in the region. This is only a best guess from a non-expert on the region (albeit someone who does know a fair amount about the OSCE) – agreements/disagreements welcome in comments.

Simon Kuper, to my mind one of the sharpest journalists around, has “a nice review”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4cf288ba-8c13-11dc-af4d-0000779fd2ac.html of four books in the “Eurabia” genre. The general thesis originates with Bat Ye’or and has Europe sleepwalking into “dhimmi” status as the (mysteriously unified) Muslims press home their demographic advantage against natives befuddled by multiculturalism and moral relativism. Mark Steyn is the great popularizer of all this, and the “decent left” are a minor sect in the Eurabian church (as can be seen by how readily their blogs recycle this tripe). You should “read the whole thing”, as a credulous Islamophobe likes to say.

Today is 150 days after the Belgian elections, and there is still no government. The crisis is as deep as it was when I last “wrote about it”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/19/the-ingredients-of-the-belgian-cocktail/. There have been partial agreements between the negotiating parties over the last weeks, but for none of the crucial issues there is an agreement yet – the situation of the Francophone population in the Flemish border communes around Brussels, a solution to the crisis in the election district Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, some aspects of the welfare state reform, and the government budget.

And it is a crucial day: the Commission Internal Affairs of the National Parliament (where the Flemish make up the majority) has a meeting today, and the Flemish parties have threatened that if there is no (for them acceptable) compromise (or at least the beginning of a compromise) on Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde in the coalition negotiations, they will use their majority position to vote for the splitting of this election district. Such a Flemish-Francophone majority-minority decision would be unheard off for Belgian political norms, since it would basically imply that the Flemish majority imposes its will on the Francophone minority. All political commentators argue that this would only deepen the political crisis.

I haven’t been following each and every detail of Belgian politics in the last two months – even for a Belgian it is rather complicated, and the constant political incidents and provocations (from both sides), which have continued even after the negotiations have been resumed, are making me tired and slightly depressed. Readers who had more time and energy to follow the debate are very welcome to expand below. In the meantime we’ll be waiting to see what happens on this crucial day – the Commission Internal Affairs meets in 4 hours and 55 minutes, and so far there is no sight on any solution for Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde in the coalition negotiations.

Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi at “VoxEU”:http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/596.

Our point is that the goals that are traditionally held dear by the European left – like protection of the economically weakest and aversion to excessive inequality and un-earned rewards to insiders – should lead the left to adopt pro-market policies. What has often been the norm in Europe from the 60s until recently – heavy market regulation, protection of the status quo, an enormous public sector which rewards not the very poor but the most-connected and requires highly distortionary taxation, universities which often produce mediocrity in the name of egalitarianism (while the very rich get a good education anyway, somehow) –all end up decreasing efficiency and justice at the same time. … A good example can be found in the labour market. In Italy, Spain, and France, the labour market is split. The young are hired with temporary contracts which offer no social security and no prospects. When the contract expires, the employer opts not to renew it, so as not to run the risk of having to convert temporary hires into permanent employees who would de facto immediately acquire the right never to be fired. Reforms that eliminate this duality by making the entire labour market flexible with an appropriate scheme of unemployment compensation would not only reduce unemployment but, most importantly, would favour the really poor and the young entry-level workers.

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