Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Europe and Anarchy


AnarchyDraw back from the day-to-day news in Europe and think a bit about the wider trends, globally and regionally. Without a feeling for these, it’s harder to make sense of individual items in the news.
The eerie thing about Trump is that his campaign echoes so many themes of the so-called European far-right. I say “so-called,” because the word “right” confuses matters. These parties go beyond traditional left-right categories. I’d prefer to call them “Trumpist” or “Putinist” parties, and call their opponents, “traditional” or “establishment” parties.
Like Trump, these candidates tend to run on platforms of protecting very high levels of welfare and social spending. Thrift and budget discipline are not part of the program. Like Trump, they’re protectionist, anti-globalist, and thoroughly unimpressed by the blessings of free trade. Like Trump, they promise to limit or end immigration, and like Trump, they’re particularly concerned about Muslim immigration. Like Trump, they admire Vladimir Putin, and don’t see why there should be such a fuss about Ukraine.
They suggest that if voters are economically frustrated, it’s because the Establishment — be it the Acela corridor or the Eurostar corridor — is comprised of a bunch of Davos-brained idiots who’ve determined to rip them off, or permit them to be ripped off, or to destroy their national sovereignty. They hate and distrust the media. Like Trump, even if the candidates are not themselves anti-Semitic, they’re the candidates of choice for those who are. In Europe, these parties also tend to be anti-American.
Most people who vote for these parties have been on the losing side of globalization and technology change. If neoliberal trade regimes have benefitted anyone, it sure hasn’t been them.
What differs, of course, is the country that’s the star of the story. In every case, the candidates appeal to a time when his or her own country — be it the United States, France, Russia, or Great Britain — was “great,” “respected,” and less embedded in an international system that deprives it of sovereignty. (Obviously, if all of these countries become “great” again in the way these candidates suggest, this will be a planet with too many pigeons and not enough statues.)
Is the deeper story behind all of this the seemingly-eternal fallout of the financial and the Eurozone crises? Or is it something even bigger?
If you grew up reading Robert Kaplan’s thoughts about geopolitics, you’ll know that he’s been predicting anarchy since 1994, when he wrote his famous, Malthusian essay, “The Coming Anarchy.” I don’t always agree with him, but he’s a writer for whom I always have time. First, because he’s deeply learned. Second, because he gets out of his armchair and spends time in the places he writes about, a lot of time. He isn’t just building geopolitical models from the comfort of his mom’s basement. Third, because he’s a pessimist to the bone, which is of course the correct foundation for conservatism. So whenever things seem to be falling apart, I think, “Perhaps it’s time to read Kaplan again. He did predict this, after all.”
In 1997, well before it was fashionable to ask this question, he wrote “Was Democracy Just a Moment?”
The collapse of communism from internal stresses says nothing about the long-term viability of Western democracy. Marxism’s natural death in Eastern Europe is no guarantee that subtler tyrannies do not await us, here and abroad. History has demonstrated that there is no final triumph of reason, whether it goes by the name of Christianity, the Enlightenment, or, now, democracy. To think that democracy as we know it will triumph—or is even here to stay—is itself a form of determinism, driven by our own ethnocentricity. Indeed, those who quote Alexis de Tocqueville in support of democracy’s inevitability should pay heed to his observation that Americans, because of their (comparative) equality, exaggerate “the scope of human perfectibility.” Despotism, Tocqueville went on, “is more particularly to be feared in democratic ages,” because it thrives on the obsession with self and one’s own security which equality fosters.
I submit that the democracy we are encouraging in many poor parts of the world is an integral part of a transformation toward new forms of authoritarianism; that democracy in the United States is at greater risk than ever before, and from obscure sources; and that many future regimes, ours especially, could resemble the oligarchies of ancient Athens and Sparta more than they do the current government in Washington. History teaches that it is exactly at such prosperous times as these that we need to maintain a sense of the tragic, however unnecessary it may seem. The Greek historian Polybius, of the second century B.C., interpreted what we consider the Golden Age of Athens as the beginning of its decline. To Thucydides, the very security and satisfactory life that the Athenians enjoyed under Pericles blinded them to the bleak forces of human nature that were gradually to be their undoing in the Peloponnesian War.
I know I recommend a lot of articles, but I recommend that one particularly highly. It’s prescient. That’s one among a number of passages that makes the essay worth reading. Here’s another:
Democracy loses meaning if both rulers and ruled cease to be part of a community tied to a specific territory. In this historical transition phase, lasting perhaps a century or more, in which globalization has begun but is not complete and loyalties are highly confused, civil society will be harder to maintain. How and when we vote during the next hundred years may be a minor detail for historians.
And remember, he wrote this in 1997, when this wasn’t an especially fashionable view:
… trouble awaits us, if only because the “triumph” of democracy in the developing world will cause great upheavals before many places settle into more practical—and, it is to be hoped, benign—hybrid regimes. In the Middle East, for instance, countries like Syria, Iraq, and the Gulf sheikhdoms—with artificial borders, rising populations, and rising numbers of working-age youths—will not instantly become stable democracies once their absolute dictators and medieval ruling families pass from the scene. As in the early centuries of Christianity, there will be a mess.
Last February, he wrote a piece for Stratfor titled “Why So Much Anarchy?” He elaborates his argument and updates it with new observations. Also worth reading. I’m thinking about Kaplan this morning because of this item in the news. Mario Monti, the former Italian prime minister and European commissioner, is alarmed:
“The EU is going through a crisis which leads me and others for the first time to consider whether we are not heading towards disintegration,” Monti said, with his calm tone and deliberate cadence only emphasizing the seriousness of his words.
“The EU has never been hit by such a high number of different crises of this gravity,” he continued, referring to the migration problem, the rise of terrorism, and the bloc’s persistent economic malaise. “What I am concerned about is that, although the EU has developed itself historically through a process of crisis, response to the crisis, and advancement, this time around it may well not happen.”
“The degree of mistrust and sheer prejudices between North and South and between East and West has never been so high and so unashamedly voiced,” he said. …
“Unfortunately, this has started to pay off, at least in the short-term, for politicians who cultivate the gut feelings of their citizens. Even heads of government and ministers belonging to traditionally pro-European parties now indulge in this habit. They hit out at the EU and also to other member states in bilateral acrimony.”
I have no special affection for the EU, which is indeed as bloated, bureaucratic, and inefficient as reputed. But I see no reason to expect it to be replaced by something better. On what historical experience would that expectation be founded? People who suggest that Europe’s future without it would naturally be more peaceful, prosperous, and democratic have no evidence to which they can appeal. The condition of Europe before the EU was none of those things. I’d feel much more confident in the Euroskeptics if I saw from them realistic proposals to build new mechanisms for European trade and cooperation, rather than just the proposal to tear this one down.
Kaplan’s just written another piece, for the National Interest, in which he argues thatvulgar, populist anarchy will define the 21st century. He accounts for these political movements in terms of growing world disorder, this occasioned among other things by the end of the American imperial moment:
[T]he underpinnings of the global order today attempt to replace the functions of empire—from the rules-based international system to the raft of supranational and multinational groupings, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the International Court of Justice and the World Economic Forum. Silently undergirding this process since World War II has been the undeniable fact of American power—military, diplomatic and economic—protecting sea lanes, maritime choke points, access to hydrocarbons and, in general, providing some measure of security to the world. These tasks are amoral to the extent that they do not involve lofty principles, but without them there is no possibility for moral action anywhere. This is not traditional imperialism, which is no longer an option, but it is a far more humane replacement for it.
And this is his prediction:
World disorder will only grow. The weakening and dissolution of small- and medium-size states in Africa and the Middle East will advance to quasi-anarchy in larger states on which the geographic organization of Eurasia hinges: Russia and China. For the external aggression of these new regional hegemons is, in part, motivated by internal weakness. They’re using nationalism to assuage the unraveling domestic economies upon which their societies’ stability rests. Then there is the European Union, which is enfeebled, if not crumbling. Rather than a unified and coherent superstate, Europe will increasingly be a less-than-coherent confection of states and regions, dissolving into the fluid geography of Eurasia, the Levant and North Africa.
With the great multinational empires and totalitarian regimes gone, and their surrogates — the United States and the EU — fading, he predicts “a maelstrom of national and subnational groups in violent competition.”
And so, geopolitics—the battle for space and power—now occurs within states as well as between them. Cultural and religious differences are particularly exacerbated: as group differences melt down in the crucible of globalization, they have to be reforged in a blunter and more ideological form. It isn’t the clash of civilizations so much as the clash of artificially reconstructed civilizations that is taking place.
Kaplan has been predicting anarchy for years, so it’s no surprise he’s predicting it again, but might he be right?
In sum, everything is interlinked as never before, even as there is less and less of a night watchman to keep the peace worldwide. Hierarchies everywhere are breaking down. Just look at the presidential primaries in the United States—an upheaval from below for which the political establishment has no answer. … vulgar, populist anarchy that elites at places like Aspen and Davos will struggle to influence or even comprehend will help define the twenty-first century. The multinational empires of the early-modern and modern past, as well as the ideological divisions of the Cold War, will then be viewed almost as much with nostalgia as with disdain.
In a nightmare scenario, radicalisation and unrest could emerge in Catalonia, with division between Catalans and memories of the Spanish Civil War coming to the fore. In this context, it might become very difficult to prevent violence. …
In that event, the peninsula will become the hottest point in an emerging “arc of crisis” across the southern flank of the EU, stretching from Portugal across Spain, an Italy struggling along with everything else to cope with the flow of migrants, the troubled Balkans, to Greece, which is perpetually perturbed. This highlights yet another flaw in the EU. It has no institutional framework for dealing with Catalan demands to become a nation within the Union, or those of other populations. Merely insisting on Spanish state sovereignty will not make the problem go away for Brussels, or for Europe as a whole. This is a potential matter of life and death not only for Spaniards and Catalans, but perhaps for the EU itself.
My larger question, for the purposes of this book, is whether this series of crises in Europe will result in a kind of muddling-through, with or without the EU, which preserves a Europe much like the one we’ve known in the past half-century. That is, a Europe comprised of nation-states that have embraced a tolerant and democratic form of governance, and which trade and cooperate peacefully among themselves.
Or is it more likely to result in competing authoritarian and nationalist regimes? Would this return Europe to its traditional bloody past, or to an inter-European arms race and Cold War?
Or is the more likely outcome outright anarchy?
What do you think, and why?
Thank you for making it possible for me to work.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Ach So … A Dispatch From the Brave Old World


JusuisbohmiYou may recall that the Chancellor Angela Merkel, bizarrely, authorized German prosecutors to investigate the German comedian Jan Böhmermann on charges of violating Germany’s lèse-majesté laws, this because he recited a poem suggesting that Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, enjoyed carnal knowledge of goats.
I was flabbergasted, as I’m sure you were, by this development. I was particularly astonished that Merkel could make such a blunder in the runup to the Brexit referendum. Merkel’s a highly intelligent woman: It didn’t seem plausible to me that she would have no clue how outraged her own citizens and those of the rest of Europe would be by this.
The views of the latter are perhaps even more important, one could argue, given that Merkel’s put keeping the EU together, come hell or high water, at the center of her agenda. She clearly sees a united Europe as central to Germany’s interests. Yet it would be hard to have handed the Out campaign in Britain a bigger gift, and impossible further to delight Vladimir Putin.
Her refugee policy is not universally admired on Ricochet. But I’m sure we’d all agree that the case for it may be made by reasonable people. The decision to allow a comedian to be prosecuted for being a comedian can’t. It’s outrageous. It was widely and immediately recognized as outrageous, and Europe was widely and immediately outraged, as the “Je suis Böhmi” hashtag suggests.
Merkel’s explanation, you may remember, was that the law was on the books, and Germany was a country under the rule of law. She would move to have the law changed as quickly as possible, she said, but until then, the decision was not properly hers to make. It was a matter for the judiciary.
But this was patent nonsense, and immediately understood to be nonsense. A probe under section 103 of Germany’s criminal code — “insulting organs or representatives of foreign states” — can only proceed with the approval of the federal government. The law specifies this deliberately, presumably because its original purpose was to allow the criminal law to be deployed as an instrument of foreign policy. Previous German governments have rejected requests made on behalf of President George W. Bush (yes, really) and Pope Benedict XVI. Germany did accept a case on behalf of the Swiss president, oddly enough, in 2007: A Swiss man living in Bavaria was fined for insulting the Swiss president in comments posted on the Internet.
The Swiss also have a lèse majesté law, by the way. It was used in the 1970s by the Shah of Iran, who was displeased with his depiction in a Swiss satirical magazine, and used again in 2010, when a group in Geneva put up posters depicting Moammar Gaddafi with the tagline “He Wants to Destroy Switzerland.” The case was dropped a few months before Gaddafi was killed.
In one sense, we have to give Merkel credit for uniting Europe: She united it against Merkel. The Greek Finance Minister Yanis “Stinkefinger” Varoufakis was thrilled to be able to stick it both to Merkel and Erdoğan at the same time. O, happy day!
Fury as Merkel bows to Erdogan over sex slur, reported the Times of London. Angela Merkel must go, intoned the World Post. The Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen went into high-arch postmodern mode. (Strong language warning on that one.) German intellectuals went berserk. German satirists competed to improve upon the original poem:
Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter got into the Merkel-must-go act. The Spectator introduced The President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition. An anonymous reader offered a £1000 prize to the victor (a language warning on that link, too). The Economist headlined the story in verse: “There once was a prickly sultan/Whom Germans were fond of insultin’ …” Foreign Policy joined in: How Many Angela Merkels Does It Take to Screw German Comedy?
The Hague promptly and wisely voted to abolish the Netherlands’ own lèse-majesté laws. (The last person to be prosecuted for insulting a foreign head of state there, by the way, was a student named Geert Mak who in 1968 likened LBJ to a Nuremberg war criminal. Yes, really. I was quite surprised to learn that American presidents, too, have in recent memory made use of these laws. They should not have.)
Austrians showed their dismay by voting for a pro-Putin wingnut.
Merkel managed to earn the disapprobation of the European Council president, Donald Tusk: “The line between criticism, insult and defamation is very thin and relative,” he said, correctly, recalling his own imprisonment for opposing Poland’s communist regime, “and the moment politicians decide which is which can mean the end between freedom of expression, in Europe, in Turkey, in Africa and Russia, everywhere.”
She likewise managed to earn the disapprobation of the head of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker: “One thing is clear to me: no matter how important the work for refugees may be, our values on press freedom and fundamental values do not change,” he said to lawmakers in Strasbourg.
Even her press flacks seemed baffled, reported Der Spiegel:
On Monday morning, during a press conference that itself almost bordered on satire, Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert and Sawsan Chebli, the deputy spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, answered questions about Böhmermann’s broadcast. They came across as being confused and perplexed — as if they had been caught off guard.
Then Bruno Kramm, the head of the Berlin branch of Germany’s Pirate Party, protested by reciting the original poem in front of the Turkish embassy in Berlin — and was promptly arrested:
Obviously, we’re now in total cuckooland territory. Russia Today and Sputnik news have gone into raptures:
The head of the Berlin branch of Germany’s Pirate Party, who was arrested for citing an insulting poem about Turkish President Erdogan, has told RT people should expect to lose their freedom of speech when their government “signs deals with dictators.”
And everyone (pretty much) in Europe has been asking the same question:
By giving the green light for Mr Böhmermann’s prosecution for mocking a foreign government, under an obscure section of Germany’s 19th-century penal code, she has indulged repression abroad, and tarnished her own country’s reputation for freedom. So how on earth did Angela Merkel allow a joke to go so wrong?
She has, the Guardian correctly observed, emboldened “every over-sensitive authoritarian leader around the world to start demanding that foreign courts step in to save them from being mocked.”
Erdoğan’s certainly been emboldened. The Turkish consulate in Rotterdam has sent e-mails to Turkish groups in the Netherlands encouraging them to report any insult to Erdoğan they spot on social media. Turkey just deported one of my American colleagues, no doubt having properly understood the message: Prosecute our comedians, deport our journalists, lock up your own journalists, whatever — the West doesn’t care. 
According to pretty much everyone, the answer to the question, “What on earth was Merkel thinking?” is that Germany, because of its refugee deal with Turkey, made itself vulnerable to blackmail.
But this didn’t quite make sense to me. The point of the refugee deal, after all, was to save the European Union, not hand it to Russia. Merkel may quite badly need Turkish cooperation on managing the refugee influx, but the idea that she would cave on a matter like this just to protect the deal seemed to me implausible.
Then another colleague in Turkey sent me an e-mail with the subject line, Ach so. It linked to a small news item, barely noted anywhere else.
“So it is true,” he wrote:
Ach so.
The air base, according to a planning paper from the Defence Ministry leaked to Der Spiegel, will be built at Incirlik where the Bundeswehr is now flying reconnaissance and refuelling missions into Syria. Germany is reportedly in discussions with Ankara about a treaty for stationing German soldiers on Turkish soil for long-term deployments.
The plans foresee that in the coming six months Germany will invest around €10 million in an air controller area which is especially for the German aircraft, a further €15 million in accommodation for around 400 soldiers, and €34 million in building a combat headquarters from where missions will be coordinated.
Ach so.
Meanwhile, Obama has been in Hannover, scolding Europe for being complacent about its own defense.
Be careful what you wish for.
“When ISIS is defeated will they will pack up and go home?” wrote my colleage. “Or replace the departing Americans? It didn’t work out too happily last time around.”
The return of Germany to great power politics — and to the Middle East — is at hand. Yet no one seems to have noticed. It’s been buried in the back pages of the news.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it won’t be under NATO’s command, a point that’s probably worth some thought from the White House and some debate among Americans.
What do you think: What might the consequences of this be?