by Henry Farrell on November 2, 2006
Just in case they were wondering. The riots in France weren’t “Muslim riots”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/spine?pid=53207 that are only likely to end “when the muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from Notre Dame.” Nor does anyone except Stanley Kurtz and the more or less deranged (but I repeat myself) believe that France is descending into a ‘civil war’ where ‘Islamic militias [will] tear [the] capital apart.’ To quote two sources that, like, actually know what they’re talking about.
“Mitchell Cohen”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=659 in _Dissent_.
Media often made it appear that everyone detained in last fall’s violence was North African, but recent studies complicate the picture. A study of the Yvelines suburb near Paris showed that 33 percent of those questioned by authorities were “European” in origin, 35.5 percent were North African, and 28.9 percent African.
Last week’s “Economist”:http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_RDQRPVN
When the riots started, they were treated in some quarters as a “suburban intifada”. “Jihad comes home”, ran one newspaper headline. Some American observers regarded the uprising as further proof of Europe’s inability to control the spread of radical Islam. … A report into the riots by the French Renseignements Généraux, the domestic intelligence-gathering service, however, found the opposite. Islamists had “no role in setting off the violence or in fanning it,” it concluded. Clichy’s mayor agrees. “I completely reject the idea that the riots were an Islamist plot,” he says. “During the rioting I never heard of a young man burning a car in the name of Allah; but I heard of plenty of Muslims saying, ‘go home in the name of Allah’.” Instead, the intelligence officers reckoned, the rioting was a “popular revolt” provoked by a toxic concentration of social problems: joblessness, poverty, illegal immigration, organised crime, family breakdown and a lack of parental authority. France had been so preoccupied with watching Islamic radicals, said the report, that it had neglected the wider problems in its banlieues.
by Matthew Yglesias on October 31, 2006
With The Primacy of Politics Sherri Berman has given us a magnificent intellectual history of the debates within the left in the first half of the twentieth century that led to the rise of ideologies — social democracy and fascism — that rejected the economic determinism of Marx and Engels in favor of political activism aimed at curtailing, rather than eliminating, free markets. What she hasn’t given us, I’m afraid, is an especially convincing causal story that the unfolding of these debates really was the key to the establishment of the distinctive post-war social, political, and economic settlement in Europe. [click to continue…]
by Sheri Berman on October 31, 2006
Thanks so much for all the interesting and insightful comments, which have given me a lot to think about. Serious exchanges like this are truly an author’s dream. Although I would love to discuss each and every point, in the interests of sparing less-obsessed readers let me focus on some broad themes. [click to continue…]
by Tyler Cowen on October 30, 2006
“Political history in the advanced industrial world has indeed ended, argues this pioneering study, but the winner has been social democracy…”
So runs the opening blurb on Sheri Berman’s The Primary of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. Most of the book is a well-researched account of the history and subtlety of social democratic thought, but I wish to consider the broader framing of the argument. In the last chapter the author returns to her apparent view that social democracy is fundamentally a solution to the problem of politics and it will remain relevant, indeed dominant, throughout the twenty-first century. [click to continue…]
by John Q on October 26, 2006
Reading recent posts, it’s clear nearly everyone here knows more about Eastern Europe than me I do, so probably others won’t be surprised as I was, by the information in this Washington Post story that Russia, as a member of the Council of Europe, is subject to the European Court of Justice Human Rights, and that
Russians now file more complaints with the court — 10,583 in 2005 — than people from any of the 46 countries that make up the Council of Europe, according to court statistics
Among other stats, the Court has issued 362 rulings on Russia, all but 10 going against the government.
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by John Q on October 4, 2006
The Socialists won a surprise victory (or at least plurality) in the recent Austrian elections. The outcome appears to promise a departure from power for Jorg Haider, although the combined vote of the far-right parties was still 15 per cent, which is disappointing.
For CT election-followers, the outcome is of interest in another respect. According to the reports I’ve read, all the polls and all the pundits got this one wrong. So, if betting markets got it right, that would be pretty strong support for claims about the wisdom of crowds. But my (admittedly desultory) scan hasn’t produced any info. Can anyone point to market odds for this outcome?
by John Q on August 31, 2006
I was also going to review Glyn Morgan’s The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration, but it’s fortunate I didn’t, as Henry has done a better job of most of the points I was going to make. So let me make just one more point, about the implications of soft power.
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by Henry Farrell on August 30, 2006
This review is a year late – the delay is thanks to the birth of our first-born, the urgency of getting my own book into a fit state to be submitted to publishers, and repeated and extended fits of procrastination. I hope to be starting to review political science books more regularly from here on in, with a particular focus on books that touch upon areas that I do academic work on (EU politics, the politics of the Internet and e-commerce, institutional theory, trust), or that are topical for one reason or another. Some of these books are likely to be of interest to the general CT reader, some not.
Glyn Morgan, _The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration_ (Princeton University Press 2005), review beneath fold. “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=glyn%20morgan%20european%20superstate. Amazon.
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by Henry Farrell on August 4, 2006
Over at TAPPED, it being a Friday evening, Michael Tomasky complains about “receipts”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2006/08/post_1036.html#005644.
bq. What bugs me is receipts. In this town, sales clerks everywhere are ceaselessly forcing sales receipts into your hand. What the hell is this about? I go into a CVS (a horrifying experience under any circumstance). I get a couple things. It comes to $4.38. Do most people really want a receipt for $4.38? Who still goes home and enters $4.38 into a checkbook? I simply cannot believe that 51 percent of consumers really want their receipts for small purchases like this.
He wouldn’t want to be “travelling to Italy”:http://www.iht.com/articles/1992/04/10/rece_0.php any time soon.
bq. It was a classic stakeout: for some time government agents had the Bar Venezia in Stigliano, a small town in Italy’s deep south, under surveillance. This February, as Salvatore, oblivious of the trap about to be sprung, came out into the street the team moved in with cool efficiency. … The crime: dealing a 100-lire bag of popcorn without a scontrino (cash register receipt). The penalty: a 300,000-lire (about $240) fine for the bar owner who had sold the popcorn, and one of 33,000 lire for Salvatore – who had to be bailed out by his father, seeing that he is only 7 years old.
In Italy, if you purchase something, you need to get the receipt and keep it handy for a few minutes. Otherwise, you’re liable to be fined if a member of the Guardia di Finanzia asks you to produce your receipt and you can’t. The rationale is that shopkeepers aren’t liable to ring up purchases and provide receipts if they can get away with it; the cashflows from receiptless purchases are easier to hide from the relentless gaze of the tax inspectorate. Thus, the law tries to force the issue by pressganging citizens into demanding receipts under the threat of (admittedly not very large) fines. It’s a bit of a shock to the system for people brought up on Anglo-American notions of the law (certainly, I found it rather surprising when I found out about it myself).
Update: “Bruce Schneier”:http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/aligning_intere.html has an interesting essay on the ways in which receipts help counter fraud.
by Henry Farrell on July 28, 2006
Via “Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002818.html, this fun little “article”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002818.html by James Surowiecki in the _New Yorker_.
bq. Airbus’s woes are being held up as proof that it is, in the words of one columnist, “a textbook example of how not to run a commercial enterprise.” The Wall Street Journal explained that Airbus was failing because of its “politicized management,” while the Times suggested that Airbus had to decide whether it was a company or a European “employment project.” … What much of the talk about the inherent weakness of Airbus ignores is that, just a few years ago, it was Boeing that looked fundamentally flawed, while Airbus was seen as the future of the industry. … The problem with such prognostications is that they infer basic truths about a company’s prospects from its short-term performance. … People are generally bad at accepting the importance of context and chance. We fall prey to what the social psychologist Lee Ross called “the fundamental attribution error”—the tendency to ascribe success or failure to innate characteristics, even when context is overwhelmingly important. … Because we underestimate how much variation can be caused simply by luck, we see patterns where none exist. It’s no wonder that management theory is dominated by fads: every few years, new companies succeed, and they are scrutinized for the underlying truths that they might reveal. But often there is no underlying truth; the companies just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
This applies not only to judgements about the success of companies, but to judgements about the success of countries. A few years ago, the political scientist Peter Katzenstein went through a couple of decades worth of those special issues that the _Economist_ runs on particular countries for his own amusement. He found that there wasn’t any long term consistency in judgement – a country cited as a model of how to create a thriving economy in one special issue might be cited as a prime example of political dysfunction the next time round, and back in the good books a few years later. This isn’t a problem that’s specific to the _Economist_; it’s a more general one of how the political wisdom on the sources of economic success is incredibly unstable. A couple of decades ago, the shelves were filled with books on Japan Inc., and nasty xenophobic bestsellers like Michael Crichton’s _Rising Sun_ claiming that Japan was going to gobble up America unless it fought back. Before that, there was a lot of talk about _Modell Deutschland_ as the way forward. _Und so weiter_. We don’t know very much at all about the root reasons why economies succeed or fail, for some of the reasons that Surowiecki cites. Countries too can happen to be in the right place at the right time, and may find their luck running out unexpectedly when conditions change.
by Henry Farrell on July 11, 2006
This “FT”:http://us.rd.yahoo.com/finance/news/ft/SIG=119k1ua5r/*http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto070920061427320025&referrer_id=yahoofinance op-ed by Timothy Garton Ash, Dominique Moisi and Alexsander Smolar makes some good trenchant points about the EU’s increasingly tricky relationship with Russia.
bq. Europeans are faced with a delicate balancing act in their policy towards Russia. Should the message be one of trust in a re-emerging power whose energy resources are vital to us, or wariness of a regime whose authoritarian instincts are clearer than ever? … Today we may be witnessing the emergence of competition between European states for privileged relations with Moscow and favoured access to Russian gas. … he time has come for the EU to develop a genuinely European policy towards Russia. While seeking a long-term strategic partnership with its giant Eurasian neighbour, the EU should not hesitate to ask three elementary things of Russia. …The first of these requirements is that Russia should allow its neighbours to determine their own futures. … The second requirement … Energy contracts should be clear, binding and respected … The third strategic requirement has to do with certain minimal standards of legal and political conduct inside Russia’s borders. …Non-governmental organisations should be allowed to function properly in civil society and media independence should be a reality. … The concepts of “sovereign democracy” or “managed democracy” advanced by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, remind us of yesterday’s concept of “people’s democracy.”
I was too busy grading to write a post a few weeks ago on Cheney’s comments on Russia’s slide into autocracy. These were undoubtedly hypocritical (Cheney was perfectly happy to kiss up to nasty Central Asian autocrats a couple of days later) but nonetheless dead on target. Russia is a real problem for both the US and Europe, but EU member states don’t want to face up to it. They’re increasingly dependent on Russian energy resources, and Russia has made it clear that it’s willing to exploit this dependency towards political ends. It has very successfully been playing the game of divide and rule, making individual deals with EU member states (many of which have been notably willing to reach agreement, sometimes under rather dubious circumstances). There were some mutterings a month or two ago about a special energy summit to be convened by the Finns, but as far as I know, nothing has come of this. Unless the EU comes up with a common approach to energy policy, its member states are likely to find their political choices greatly curtailed in coming decades. As far as I can see, there’s no sign that the EU is willing to do this.
by Henry Farrell on July 9, 2006
From the “FT”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/6129251e-0de3-11db-a385-0000779e2340.html yesterday.
bq. Just before or after Sunday’s Italy-France final in Berlin, a sports tribunal in Rome is expected to decide whether four leading Italian clubs systematically influenced referees. A lawyer for Juventus, Italy’s most popular club, says a punitive relegation to the second division would be “acceptable”. … Silvio Berlusconi became another divisive force. In 1994 he became prime minister with a party called Forza Italia (Go Italy), his attempt to borrow the team’s aura. The fact that Mr Berlusconi was voted out of office in April makes it easier for some leftwingers to support Italy on Sunday. If he is unlucky, his club, AC Milan, will be relegated by the tribunal on the day his rival Romano Prodi, the prime minister, may see Italy crowned world champions in Berlin.
Which reminds me that Scott McLemee emailed me an “article”:http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2006/06/1092553.php a while back where Toni Negri declares that he’s an AC Milan fan. Whoda thunk it?
by Henry Farrell on July 6, 2006
More on the Mancini affair. First, the foreign minister, Massimo D’Alema (who’s one of the less pleasant operators on the Italian left imo) has suggested that the Italian government “knew about Abu Omar’s kidnapping”:http://www.repubblica.it/2006/07/sezioni/cronaca/arrestato-mancini/amatop-riforma-servizi/amatop-riforma-servizi.html.
bq. It appears to me unlikely that operations of this sort, which seems to have involved actors at the highest level of the services, could have taken place totally unbeknownst to the political authorities (my translation).
Second, the justice minister, Giuliano Amato has suggested that there may be a need to reform the secret services. There appears to be a debate taking place within the Italian government over whether the blame should be laid at the door of individual actors within SISMI or SISMI as a whole. Amato is being quite cautious – but hinting that serious reforms are needed. Prodi is even more cautious – but may become less so as this develops (see below).
Finally, Laura Rozen links to a “story”:http://www.eurotrib.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2006/7/6/184443/8436 at the _European Tribune_ suggesting that Mancini was running an elaborate dirty tricks operation with dossiers on thousands of Italians considered enemies of the previous Italian government. I’m not sure what the sourcing is for this piece, but it’s certainly interesting and consistent with much of what we know already.
Now on the one hand, as “Robert Waldmann”:http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2006/07/not-seeing-forest-for-trees-brad_06.html suggests, none of this is likely to surprise many Italians. There’s a long tradition in Italy of “dietrologia” – of assuming that politics is a shadow play, where the really important things happen back stage among clandestine actors of one sort or another. Most Italians will likely be less surprised that SISMI was involved than at the revelation that some within SISMI seem to have resisted the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar. But on the other, there does seem to be an interesting political realignment taking place. I wouldn’t like to bet hard money that the Italian government is going to use the scandal as an excuse to clear out some of the rotten wood from the Italian intelligence services, which have traditionally been run like a state within a state (think of a combination of the worst attributes of J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton and you won’t go far wrong). But Romano Prodi is among those who have suffered directly from smear campaigns run by people with SISMI connections in the past, and may well be personally inclined to do something about it, as the scandal gathers force. It’s also becoming increasingly clear that there were connections between SISMI and the Berlusconi government which went considerably beyond formal lines of authority, suggesting that there may be some political gains to be made by investigating further. More as this develops.
by Henry Farrell on July 5, 2006
A rather important political development in Italy. Marco Mancini, the second-in-command of SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency has been “arrested”:http://www.repubblica.it/2006/07/sezioni/cronaca/arrestato-mancini/arrestato-mancini/arrestato-mancini.html, along with his former boss, General Gustavo Pignero, for his part in the extraordinary rendition/kidnapping of Abu Omar. The “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/world/europe/05cnd-italy.html?hp&ex=1152158400&en=4d148c71cfab4a33&ei=5094&partner=homepage also has a piece on this, but its focus is on the magistrates’ decisions to issue arrest warrants for four Americans who were allegedly involved. It seems to me that the SISMI part of the story is the more important one. There’s no prospect that the US is going to comply with warrants issued against its agents, but there is a real possibility of substantial political repercussions from the SISMI arrests.
The path to justice in Italy is a long and tortuous one – arrest by magistrates is no guarantee of successful prosecution. But the arrest of a key figure in the Italian intelligence agency suggests that the unwritten rules of Italian politics are changing. SISMI has traditionally been a law unto itself, with many connections to shady right wing groups in Italian politics, and an unstated presumption of judicial immunity. This may not be true any longer. The Italian government has issued a statement which is a quite perfect example of the art of flowery Italian political rhetoric – effusive and entirely meaningless expressions of confidence in the loyalty of the Italian intelligence apparatus to the state, which strongly suggest to me that some of the principals of aforementioned intelligence apparatus are being measured for the chopping block. Readers of “Laura Rozen”:http://warandpiece.com/ and “Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ will remember that there are many interesting things that Mancini’s boss, Nicolo Pollari, could reveal about Nigerien uranium and forged documents should he choose to. It’s still unlikely that he’ll be forced to make that choice, but it’s a little more likely than it was yesterday.
by Henry Farrell on July 2, 2006
I have an op-ed in the _Financial Times_ tomorrow on Swift and privacy in Europe and the US – link “here”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/52fc56ba-09f5-11db-ac3b-0000779e2340,_i_email=y.html, but subject to rapid linkrot. NB that a final correction appears not to have made it into the online version – the opening sentences:
bq. In the increasingly bitter dispute over press freedom in America, some Republicans are pressing for The New York Times to be charged with espionage. The editor of The New York Times has claimed for his part that the US government is out of control over the newspaper’s disclosures that the government was monitoring international financial transactions.
should read
bq. In the increasingly bitter dispute over press freedom in America, some Republicans are pressing for the New York Times to be charged with espionage for disclosing that the government was monitoring international financial transactions. The editor of the New York Times has claimed for his part that government surveillance programs are effectively out of control.