European Politics

A new “bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=233 between Dan Drezner and meself is up, in which, as the blurb puts it, “Dan and Henry analyze Bh.tv’s new business model and then defy it by failing to yell at each other.” One of the topics we discuss is the economic future of the EU, and Andy Moravcsik’s recent “article”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17659940/site/newsweek/ on it. As a slightly belated EU 50th birthday post, and an addendum to my previous “disagreement with Andy”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/16/not-frightening-the-horses/, I’d like to point to this “brand new paper”:http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp07-4.pdf (pdf) by Martin Höpner and Armin Schäfer at the Max-Planck Institut in Cologne. The take home point is that the EU’s market integration processes aren’t neutral and technical, as they are often described as being, but are instead highly political, and have adverse consequences for coordinated market economies. This feeds into the EU’s legitimation problems.

Deregulating the economy is a genuinely political decision that cannot be left to independent agents. … Whether the member states need a ‘neo-liberal’ corrective is not for the observer to choose but must be the result of public deliberation and parliamentary decisions – otherwise, the price to pay is a serious democratic deficit. However, instead of a strengthening of input-oriented legitimacy, we witness ongoing – yet increasingly unsuccessful – attempts to de-politicize EU politics. European-level actors transform essentially political matters into apparently technical ones. An extensive interpretation of the ‘four freedoms’ of the European Treaty allows Commission and Court to enforce
liberalization measures juridically. The law shields these attempts from political resistance especially in organized economies.

Which leads me to wonder, after having read Dani Rodrik’s “critique”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/1b13320e-dbb5-11db-9233-000b5df10621.html of the cheerleaders of globalization in the _FT_ yesterday whether the EU isn’t being badly misinterpreted by outside observers, especially in the US. The usual claim that one reads is that the EU’s problems are the problems of creaking economies refusing to modernize, rejecting sensible proposals such as the original, tougher form of the Services Directive etc. But can’t this be interpreted from the other direction? Couldn’t one reasonably argue that the near-stalling of the EU’s market integration process demonstrates how over-strident efforts to deregulate are liable to result in political stalemate and backlash from an increasingly truculent public? In short, can’t the EU’s political problems be interpreted not as a failure of the European social state, but as a demonstration of the political limits of attempts to introduce global deregulation, free trade in services _und so weiter_ without real public discussion?

There’s been just about nothing in the Anglophone media about the controversy surrounding Volker Schlöndorff’s new film “Strajk: die Heldin von Danzig”:http://www.strajk-derfilm.de/ which deals with the birth of Poland’s Solidarity movement and is loosely based on the role of Anna Walentynowicz in the union. Walentynowicz is outraged at Schlöndorff’s movie which portrays her as illiterate and the shipyard workers as, among other things, hard drinkers. She’s threatening legal action. There’s some coverage “here”:http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/1232.html , “here”:http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2377595,00.html and “here”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aVmHZrXT7C6g&refer=muse . I’d be interested to read comments from Polish or German readers about how the row is being reported in those countries.

OpenDemocracy has a “very good article by Martin Shaw”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/icj_bosnia_serbia_4392.jsp on the recent International Court of Justice decision that found that the charge of genocide against Serbia in relation to the Bosnian was not established, a finding that has been seized upon by Milosevic apologists everywhere. As Shaw points out, the court did find that members of a protected group were systematically killed, raped and abused, and did decide that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide. Perversely, though it also found that it had not “been conclusively established that the massive killings of members of the protected group were committed with the specific intent (dolus specialis) on the part of the perpetrators to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such.” Also whilst conceding the involvement of the regular Yugoslav forces with the Bosnian Serb perpetrators of the pre-Srebrenica (and therefore not-genocidal) operations, the court limits their responsibility for the massacre that they are forced to characterize as genocide principally to that of mere omission. A feeble verdict.

I made the mistake of surfing over to Jeff Weintraub’s blog earlier, which is currently featuring “lengthy coverage of Andrei Markovits’s book _Uncouth Nation_ “:http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2007/02/andy-markovits-western-europes-america.html . Markovits argues that all the social strata of Europe are in the grip of a pervasive anti-Americanism, and that this is closely related to anti-semitism. Evidence for this thesis includes the fact that British sports journalists often moan about the Americanization of soccer. You know, I’m puzzled. Does this mean that those Budweiser ads which mocked American commentators for their poor grasp of football during the World Cup were borderline anti-semitic? Were the people who produced them self-hating Americans? And could I get funding to write a book about the pervasive anti-Europeanism of America and cite as evidence disparaging remarks about European sport from US commentators? And would blogospheric and op-ed moanings about the European welfare-state, immigrants, old Europe and cheese count as good evidence for such a thesis? And could I get a leading European intellectual to come up with a quote for the cover saying that anti-Europeanism is “the cousin” of Islamophobia? And if I had tenure in the political science department of a leading European university, would such a book enhance its research reputation? Just wondering.

I’ve been following the French presidential elections at second hand; as “Philip Stevens”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/dc241e40-b261-11db-a79f-0000779e2340.html says in the _FT_, they seem to herald some interesting political changes, no matter who wins.

As one shrewd observer puts it, Mr Sarkozy is a social outsider but a political insider. Ms Royal is a social insider who has reinvented herself as a political outsider. No matter. Neither pays homage to the ancien régime. Talk to those who grace Paris’s political salons and the first thing they will say is that Mr Sarkozy is not an énarque – a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration. The second, that he is not an intellectual. The third – by now the scorn crackles in the air – that, until recently, he has not even sought the counsel of intellectuals. … Ms Royal similarly seems an unlikely king. … The daughter of an army officer, she is an énarque. It was as a student at ENA that she met her partner, François Hollande, the Socialist party leader. Something, though, went awry. To snatch the candidacy, she scorned the party chiefs. She made herself the choice instead of public opinion – a brutal affront to the authority of the old guard as well as to the presidential ambitions of her partner.

Sarkozy in particular is fascinating. While journalists usually compare him with Margaret Thatcher, he seems to me to to have a lot more in common with Richard Nixon (I’ve recently read a draft of Rick Perlstein’s _Nixonland_, so this analogy is on my mind). Sarkozy isn’t a true believer; what marks him is less his commitment to a cause than his extraordinary ideological suppleness. He’s been quite happy to abandon his pro-US stance, and to moderate his opinions on free markets to boost his chances of winning (Nixon went through similar ideological contortions on his way to power). But where the Nixon comparison really seems apt is in the source of his appeal and the psychological factors driving him. The first is a combination of law-and-order, barely concealed appeals to racism, and capitalization on widespread and not unjustified resentment of the dominance of political elites. His anti-intellectualism isn’t a bug; it’s part of what makes him attractive to many voters. The second is that like Nixon, he wasn’t a member of aforementioned elite, nor did he have a happy upbringing, and both continue to rankle. According to an interview quoted in a 2002 _Le Monde_ article (“behind a paywall”:http://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type_item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_id=775337) Sarkozy claims that “what made me is the sum of my childhood humiliations.” As best as I’m aware, Sarkozy, despite his fine gift for political opportunism, hasn’t done anything that begins to resemble Nixon’s assemblage of dirty tricks – insofar as I understand the Clearstream affair (which isn’t very far), he’s more sinned against than sinning. So the analogy isn’t perfect. Nonetheless, he surely deserves to someday have his very own Garry Wills.

Dan Drezner looks at the “FT”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0dc53342-af08-11db-a446-0000779e2340.html and “wonders”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003125.html why economists are debating whether the euro might become the world’s reserve currency at the same time that EU citizens say that they don’t much like it. Perhaps some of the answer lies in the different priorities of citizens and central bank economists, as described in another FT article “on the same topic”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0706b982-af3e-11db-a446-0000779e2340.html.

But the results at least offer the European Central Bank comfort on one front: expectations of inflation-beating wage rises are not widespread. Just under half of adults in employment across the countries surveyed expect to receive a pay rise this year. Of those expecting a pay rise, roughly 23 per cent expect a rise above the rate of inflation but 24 per cent expect an increase below the rate. … Fears about inflationary pressures from the labour market are a main reason why the ECB has signalled further interest rate rises are likely.

This suggests that under 11.5% of citizens in the countries surveyed expect that their pay will increase in real terms this year (this at the same time, by the way, that London City types are “writing op-eds”:http://search.ft.com/ftArticle?queryText=city%20bonuses&y=0&aje=true&id=061219007448&x=0 telling readers how “we can all profit from million dollar City bonuses.”) Wage-inflation spirals how are ya. While the average punter may not draw the precise causal connections between (a) the institutionalized imperative for the European Central Bank to avoid inflation at all costs and (b) high interest rates and slow growth, he wouldn’t be all wrong to suspect that there’s something decidedly funny about the ECB’s priorities in setting monetary policy for the euro.

There’s a somewhat “weird article in the Guardian today by Simon Tisdall”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1996355,00.html , which rather highlights a question that has been bothering me for a while. There’s been a rumbling debate in the UK for a while now about the possibility that the Scottish National Party might gain a majority in Scotland and then win a referendum on independence, thus ending the union. Tisdall cites possible Kosovan secession as an important possible precedent for this on no stronger grounds than the fact that, like Scotland, Kosovo has been an integral part of a larger entity for several centuries.

Most popular discussion of the Scottish case has simply assumed that Scotland ought to be able to secede if the nationalists win a referendum. But, whatever the merits of that view, it isn’t one that would draw much strength from recent work in political philosophy (so much the worse for political philosophy, I hear you say). Allen Buchanan’s article “Theories of Secession”, (PPA 1997) for example, argues for a remedial right to secede – that is a right, akin, to the right to revolution – to depart an entity if the seceding party has sought and failed to remedy a serious injustice of which they are the victims. Buchanan does not support a “primary right” to secede by national or other groups, partly on the grounds that to grant such a right would generate perverse incentives against many desirable policies, including ones favouring decentralized or devolved administration.

I think the disanalogies between Scotland and and Kosovo are pretty clear. Albanian Kosovans are the recent victims of sustained injustice and rights violations; modern Scots, who provide a good proportion of cabinet minister for the UK, who benefit from significant flows of revenues and who have their own parliament, are not. [1] Kosovans therefore meet Buchanan’s test for a remedial right to secede and Scots do not. Whether permitting Scottish secession would be a good or bad thing _prudentially_ is another question, but I can’t see that it would be _unjust_ to refuse such secession even if there were a majority for it in a referendum. Scottish secession, and the break-up of the UK, might have all kinds of desirable consequences, including for democracy and for the effective control of resources by people, especially if Scotland were to stay within the EU. But as a _right_ , inherent in the Scottish people and exercisable by a one-off vote? I’m not convinced.

fn1. I don’t deny, of course, that Scots have been the victims of serious injustice in the historic past, just that they are presently the victims of such injustice.

I’ve just finished watching “Das Leben der Anderen”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/, which I was given on DVD for Christmas. It was a bit of a struggle, linguistically, and I missed a fair bit of dialogue, but it is a very powerful film which I strongly recommend. The setting is East Berlin in 1984 and the plot concerns the Stasi surveillance of a playwright and his lover. I won’t post more in the way of spoilers but I’ll just say that the movie gives a very strong impression of what it must be like to live in a police state and of the corrupting effects of dictatorship on watchers and those they watch. I had “a bit of a disagreement with Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/11/east_germany_ci.html recently about the former GDR, when he took issue with me for saying:

bq. the real problem with East Germany was not its comparative level of economic development or the level of health care its citizens could receive (rather good, actually). It was the fact that it was a police state where people were denied the basic liberties.

I have to say that’s an opinion that has been reinforced by the film: a (far) worse choice of fruit and vegetables is as nothing to the corrosive effects on the soul of a political tyranny. The film also constitutes a very concrete rebuttal of Volokh guest blogger Fernando Tesón’s “strange polemic against political art”:http://volokh.com/posts/1166215181.shtml . Art can contribute to political understanding by making vivid to people what a state of affairs is like in a way that no mere enumeration of facts can. The level of surveillance that citizens of the GDR were subject to is shocking, but it takes art to depict the effect of such a system on their inner lives.

Orson Scott Card’s new ‘American libruls start a new Civil War’ novel has been provoking well deserved hilarity. “Scott Lemiuex”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2006/11/today-in-aesthetic-stalinism.html quotes one of the choicer descriptions of the Evils of Leftist Professors.

He kept thinking, the first couple of semesters, that maybe his attitude toward them was just as short-sighted and bigoted and wrong as theirs was of him. But in class after class, seminar after seminar, he learned that far too many students were determined to remain ignorant of any real-world data that didn’t fit their preconceived notions. And even those who tried to remain genuinely open-minded simply did not realize the magnitude of the lies they had been told about history, about values, about religion, about everything. So they took the facts of history and averaged them with the dogmas of the leftist university professors and thought that the truth lay somewhere in the middle.

But for my money, John Ringo and Tom Kratman’s forthcoming current Watch on the Rhine (die Wacht am Rhein), billed by Baen Books as “The Most Un-PC Book of the Year,” sounds even juicier.

A man-eating Posleen horde invades Earth and Germany is forced to rejuvenate its most reviled warrior caste: the Waffen SS. With peacenik and under-prepared modern Europe reeling, it’s up to these old soldiers to reforge the steel of hard regimen and redeem their honor as warriors. It’s a chance for Europe’s fighting spirit to reawaken, weed out the lingering rot, and fight for the survival of humanity itself. Politically correct? No way! Thoughtful and action-packed? Absolutely!

“Und so weiter” to use what I suppose is the appropriate phrase under the circumstances. All the book needs is a “blurb”:http://sadlyno.com/archives/4424.html from Glenn “flat out racist”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/06/compare-and-contrast-2/ Reynolds. “Is Europe going to revive the Waffen-SS to stiffen up its drooping manliness in the face of invasion by cannibalistic aliens? Not immediately, perhaps, but famed science fiction writer John Ringo thinks that we’re in enough danger that he’s co-authored a cautionary tale that’s set in more-or-less present times.”

I suspect these two books are the first blossoms of a sub-sub-genre of revanchist sf warporn that will develop over the next couple of years to console warblogger-types and to tell them that they will be justified by history when the cyber-empowered Islamo-Nazis/man-eating aliens/liberal-comsymp-guerillas come marching over the horizon. There’s sure to be a dissertation in here somewhere for some hard-working grad student.

I’ve just noticed that we haven’t had a specific post on the Litvinenko poisoning, despite the fact that it’s an interesting subject. I don’t really have anything to say on this, except that I would point out that this is a good refutation of those self-consciously “level-headed” types who like to believe that “most suspicious things are a case of cock-up rather than conspiracy”, that “you can’t put together any big plan without someone talking about it” or that there is something intrinsically weird or tin-foil-hattish about assuming that political ends of one sort or another are often advanced by illegal means. The most interesting thing about this case to me is that whoever is responsible for killing Litvinenko (and I suppose that the truly “rational” point of view of the non-conspiracy-theorist might be that the polonium got into his sushi by a series of coincidences), they will almost certainly get away with it. All of the main suspects are simply too geopolitically important in one way or another to ever be charged with or punished for anything as simple as murder. Informed opinions solicited, the other sort welcomed, try not to libel anyone please.

Last week, having wondered about how Europe should approach a resurgent Russia, I asked for recommendations of books and other sources that may give some insight into Russia today, and into relations with its former satellite states. Then I disappeared off for the weekend and neglected the comments of what became quite a long thread.

So, for people who are just as curious as me, or who, in one commenter’s rather flattering put-down, wish to have the correct talking points for glamorous euro dinner parties, here are some of the suggestions CT commenters shared: [click to continue…]

In Europe, we’re having to re-evaluate and re-negotiate our relationship with Russia. Not easy, when you consider that Russia’s ‘relationships’ with its Near Abroad – the very countries whose love the EU hopes to earn using soft power and economic enticement – are toxic, violent and dysfunctional. Russia truly is the jealous wifebeater of eastern Europe and central Asia.

From the outside, Russia looks like a poisonous nest of oligarchs, ex-spies, energy tycoons who are both oligarchs and ex-spies, and an increasingly indifferent populace and authoritarian centre. We watch but don’t understand as their poisonous games are played out in London football clubs and sushi bars. And we can see the power games Russia plays to try to isolate or simply antagonise former Soviet and now EU states (and also how states like Poland rather clumsily try to use the EU to retaliate). But there’s so much long history and bad blood, that most Europeans can’t really understand what’s going on.

So, with Christmas stockings in mind, what are the best new books/sources in English on modern Russia? (or in French) And any on the ex-Soviet new member states and their relations with Russia?

More generally, how do we Europeans come to terms with a resurgent Russia (without the Germans breaking ranks)? Should we continue to woo the Near Abroad? Even when it’s clear the Belarussians are only courting us to wind up Putin, and we’ve wrongly encouraged the Georgians to believe they’re not on their own?

Big questions for a Friday afternoon. But maybe while CT’s US readers are sleeping off the turkey, some of the rest of us can think about how Europe in particular needs to approach Russia.

Well worth reading; Alex Harrowell at Fistful of Euros dissects the difficulties of the French right following the left’s decision to run Sego in next year’s presidential election;

‘The problem being, of course, that De Villepin is damaged goods, Juppé is a rush-job and a crook, having just returned from trouble with the law, and Chirac is old, unpopular and has scandals like a dog has fleas. Sarkozy, for his part, represents the heritage of the non-Gaullist “droite classique” and, more importantly, appeals to the cult of America. His argument (everything is terrible and only I, the new young US-style leader, know what to do) and his prescription (free markets and mass surveillance) bear a far closer resemblance to Tony Blair than anything found on Ségolene Royal.’

The elections for parliament are held in the Netherlands today. The first exit polls are expected at just after 9 pm Dutch time. While in general elections in small countries are not particularly interesting for an international audience, one never knows what surprises (which may be relevant also beyond the national borders) are waiting for us. Apart from the question which party will become the biggest and hence (most probably) deliver the prime minister, here are two other prominent issues of the current Dutch elections. [click to continue…]