1. Even if you’re getting that 1933 feeling, Trump is (probably) not Hitler.
2. I waffled on prediction, because prediction is crap. But please note that reporting a 30 percent chance of victory is not the same as 0 percent. The model used is not necessarily wrong, it’s merely that, given the inputs, n percent is still n percent — i.e., possible. In general, you shouldn’t “call” anything until the outcome has more than a 95 percent chance of being true, is a good rule of thumb.
3. The worst aspect of this is the validation of the alt-right narrative. That’s the most Hitleriffic aspect of this. I think it’s still likely that there’s a lot of projection, from both sides — Trump saw them as a lever and happily used them, but whether he really believes in white nationalism is another matter. But their organization (via instrumentalization) is the most dangerous outcome of all of this. At the very least, it means that the possibility of creating cross-racial economic solidarity recedes further into the future.
4. I think that Trump is unlikely to solve the economic problems of the white working class, but if he does so, it will naturally have to be via public spending and protectionism, something that he seems inclined to do. The problem is, especially on the spending file, his own party has a large congressional delegation that has made much of their careers on the ideological rejection of public spending. If he can get around that, he has a chance at a second term. If not, not. If he breaks the current system without having an economic replacement, he will simply make the economic insecurity of his voters worse.
Whatever you feel about WikiLeaks and Assange himself, you must at least agree that his apparent strategy of getting involved in the US elections against Hillary Clinton has been remarkably tone-deaf. (And no, I’m not going to argue that any of the leaks are false. Why does that even matter?) If Clinton had been running against a more boring, vaguely mainstream-acceptable candidate, like even Ted Cruz, the email-release strategy that WikiLeaks is running might have done the couple of percentage points of damage to Clinton needed to prevent her victory.
Instead, Assange has ended up painting himself in everyone’s mind, forever, as the little pipsqueak rapist abetting the Big Daddy Rapist. (Again, as I roll my eyes heavenward, whether the Swedish rape charges are true is totally irrelevant for this discussion or any discussion like it. Also, forget Bill Clinton, even if he actually does have something to do with Hillary. Just. Forget. Him. And pull yourself together. Geez.) Trump, alas, is not merely someone with a skeleton or three in the closet. He’s someone who has made that skeleton into his standard, his brand, and the prospect of his election to the presidency is now actively dangerous to segments of the US population, simply (and that is very much enough!) in the sense that it provides a notional victory to some of US society’s worst and most hateful elements.
If Assange wanted to drop-kick Hillary Clinton, or stick a finger in the eye of the Democratic Party policy establishment, he should have found way to help make sure Trump did not win the Republican Party nomination. Perhaps he didn’t have the means. Perhaps he didn’t have a hold of this information when it might have been possible to make Sanders the nominee. What he has done, however, is ruin WikiLeaks credibility forever — because it matters, you know, that the organization absolutely refused to consider that the AKP leaks might have not been such a good idea, if they didn’t want to get tarred with sense that they didn’t care about women.
But in some ways, this outcome was predetermined. It’s typical of what I’ve been calling guns-and-butterism around these parts. So determined are some people to ignore what they think are the “unreal,” ephemeral parts of American politics, that they simply cannot see where it has a material effect on the (to them) “real” parts. At this point, at least, Clinton is now very likely to go into the Oval Office–not with grudging support, but with the enthusiastic backing of people who might otherwise have taken a more withholding stance.
If you followed the very real, indispensible logic of identity politics in the US, and if you realized that the gender issue wasn’t merely just voting because of matching genitals, but because these labels and their validation or rejection has real, material effects on people and the political landscape in which they are really immersed, then you would have predicted this outcome. WikiLeaks and, most likely, Assange did not. And they’ll regret it. One way or another.
…The chances are we’ve gone too far,
You took my time and you took my money,
Now I fear you’ve left me standing,
In a world that’s so demanding…
— New Order, “True Faith”
In this post, I discuss the options for the UK in its relationship to the EU after the Brexit vote, particularly in light of the fact that Theresa May’s government has decided that freedom of labour movement is to be sacrificed on the altar of the hostility towards immigration–which is held to have driven much of the support for Leave. It is also increasingly clear that the EU will take a harsh view of British attempts to separate trade access to the EU from the access of EU citizens to British work opportunities. I argue that, overall, this position is justified and mostly reflects an EU leadership representing the interests of their citizens in the face of a United Kingdom that, for whatever reason, believes that it can take what it believes to be the beneficial parts of its relationship with continential Europe and leave behind what it mostly (and wrongly) considers to be the costly parts. I make this argument despite a dislike of and disagreement with some of the governing attitudes in continental Europe: The historic demands of conservative, Eurosceptic UK politicians would have exacerbated what is bad about the EU and attenuated what is good about it.
The Taxonomy of Brexits
In practice, the European Union is actually a constellation (or maybe nebula) of treaty-defined entities. An EU member is a country that participates in a certain subset of them, but not necessarily all of them (there is of course a more formal definition, but I am talking about the institutional mechanics)–the UK is one of the exemplars of this choice. Conversely, there are countries that participate in some of the EU institutions, but are not members–the best exemplar of this is Norway, which participates in the single market, the unified visa area under Schengen, in the scientific bodies, and pays a significant charge in lieu of membership dues.
We are now months after the Brexit referendum returned a clear Leave result (52-48 is not a small margin, and immediate do-overs after buyer’s remorse is a democratically terrible idea), and the United Kingdom faces a choice in how to implement the referendum. The taxonomy of choices resolves to two major taxa of future possibilities: “hard” or “soft” Brexit. Under a “hard” Brexit, the UK effectively reverts unilaterally to a mostly exterior relationship with the countries of the European Union without (much) special status or access to EU-related institutions. The UK becomes like a nearby Canada, in other words. There’s no question that the border will remain open for Brits to visit the EU, but they will likely do so under the same visa waiver terms under which Canadians and Australians live, which generally excludes labour competition with EU citizens and permanent residents, outside of designated priority professions. Goods and services will have to be negotiated by treaty separately, but they will have to be agreed-upon by the entire EU, meaning that everything, absolutely everything, would be on the table, and more favorable terms than the current access to the single market would not be on offer.
Under “soft” Brexit, the UK becomes, in practice, mostly like Norway. That is, it would retain access to the single market, have to pay dues, and remain a participant in many of the institutions–but will emerge from the direct, if often only superficial, supervision of the European Commission. Much less, in terms of the UK’s real capabilities, would change, but some aspects of internal policy and regulation become officially independent of EU authority, and much influence in EU institutions would, of course, be lost.
The division between these two types of Brexits turns out to revolve around one issue: The separability of the Four Freedoms of the European Single Market. These are: freedom of movement of (1) goods; (2) labour; (3) capital, and; (4) services. These freedoms, presently well-entrenched in the EU treaty framework, are supposed to guide convergence towards a fully-implemented, single market (meaning: It’s not fully implemented). If, as a Leave supporter, your problem with the EU lies elsewhere, for instance, in its economic regulatory framework, then you would still be willing to accept the Four Freedoms, and soft Brexit is an option that other EU partners would accept in overall good faith, especially since the departure of Britain from the rest of the EU’s convergence framework would enable other agenda items, that the UK has deliberately hindered, to go forward with minimal overall disruption.
Economic Freedom as Compromise
If, however, your problem with the EU is with the implementation of the Four Freedoms, then, Houston, you have a real problem as a Brexiteer. Because every country in the EU has some significant sectors vulnerable or sensitive to one or more of the Four Freedoms. The Four Freedoms establishes a relatively simple guiding framework for compromise among these issues. I hope that it is not too difficult to see that allowing countries to withdraw in spirit and practice from one or more of these freedoms, while retaining full privileges on the rest, is a recipe for disaster for the entire Single Market project, because some countries would become “free riders” to the detriment of the other countries, which would in turn cause the disadvantaged countries to withdraw from other freedoms, in a downward spiral that would dismantle European economic unity.
The Four Freedoms and the regulatory framework that accompanies them makes the Single Market a far superior trading arrangement to treaties like NAFTA, and, yes, TTIP. The common regulatory framework, needless to say, impedes (however, does not prevent) the degree of race-to-the-bottom behaviour that you see in NAFTA-like deals, by creating a regulatory and arbitration system that is, yes, considerably more accountable to the public than the infamous investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) that is a common practice in bilateral treaties. European, particularly British critics, decry the European Commission and its institutions as being very distant from popular sovereignty, and the criticism is true, to some extent; but that the road to accountability is long does not mean that there is no road at all, in contrast to international arbitration tribunals, which are sensitive to very little.
But more importantly, the free movement of labour is essential if you decide you want to have free trade at all. It is increasingly clear that trade deals like NAFTA, alleged to lift poor countries out of poverty by exporting low-skilled economic activity to these countries, actually have deleterious effects on developing countries. Mexico has experienced a great labour dislocation from exposure to competition from sectors that were domestically important but more productive and heavily subsidized in the US. Free movement of labour at least slightly ameliorates this by permitting workers in sectors negatively affected by this dislocation to find work in countries that directly benefited from it (overall). Because NAFTA does not lift border controls on the free movement of labour, Mexican workers who go where the work has gone (to the US) cannot send back remittances that reflect the higher US value of their labour, because they live under a wage-suppressive environment of immigration control. Needless to say, US workers do not benefit from the immigration controls as much as they are told.
What UK Eurosceptics are demanding, when they demand immigration controls for EU labour while retaining access to freedom of goods, capital, and services, is that UK business be able to profit from access to new markets in Bulgaria and Romania, countries that cannot yet compete in productivity with the UK, and yet fail to offer Bulgarian and Romanian workers the ability to improve their lot and their skills in higher-wage, higher-productivity environments with UK domestic labour protection, such as exist. It should not be hard to see why this is toxic.
European Unity and Freedom of Movement
The choice that Theresa May seems to be making is for a hard Brexit, particularly as signaled by some public pronouncements suggesting that existing EU-citizen workers in the UK would not be fully protected and grandfathered into the post-Brexit arrangement–that is, they are being designated as bargaining chips. The only condition under which it makes sense to use their status as a bargaining chip is to make an attempt for the UK to have privileged access to the EU without accepting any reciprocal obligations. (Whether it is actually possible to use them as bargaining chips this way is another matter.)
For the choice to be something in the middle between a hard and a soft Brexit, the EU would have to allow cherry-picking among the four freedoms, and therefore its own demise as a political project. I have described some of the reasons for this above. The EU is not going to passively accept its own demise at the hands of right-wing British Eurosceptics, some of whom have made no secret of their desire not only for Britain to leave the EU, but for the EU project itself to fail.
The mistake of British Eurosceptics, at least those who care about maintaining a privileged economic relationship with the European Union, is to fail to understand many continental politicians and bureaucrats, and significant portions of the continental public really “mean it” when it comes to European convergence. While the spectre of WW2 hangs in the air, somewhat faded due to the inevitable passing of those who survived it, continental Europe has still had regular reminders that it, the originator of colonialism, is in the modern world now itself susceptible to divide-and-conquer politics steered by greater, exterior powers. Critics of the EU say that the democratic legitimacy of its institutions is undermined by the non-existence of a European “demos,” but policy-makers are well aware of that. That is the whole point of the convergence process. The EU, in fact, has programmes to encourage social relationships between citizens of member states, precisely out of a desire to ensure that a European demos emerges in a future generation, and, yes, the United States of Europe can thereby be finally constructed.
Freedom of labour movement is a element of the unification of peoples explicitly envisaged by the construction of the European Union. In addition to its role in helping the Single Market to be mutually beneficial, the workplace is a key element of social integration and the building of trust between peoples at an individual level. Among younger British people, the policy has already shown signs of working–one of the complaints of younger Brits about Brexit is precisely that they were the generation that had both the most developed European identity and the highest intention of taking advantage of freedom of labour movement, of educational movement, and other related European freedoms.
National and Personal Factors
I would be remiss if I stayed only at the “high” institutional levels when discussing the dilemma into which the EU must now force the UK. There is certainly a personal dimension that cannot be ignored. British Eurosceptic politicians and media, both UKIP and Tory, have attacked what most continental Europhiles, both official and otherwise, see as the emotional core of the EU project, and did so consistently and constantly, so much so that EU immigration is seen as a prime driver of the Leave vote. Indeed, so much so that Theresa May feels compelled to choose it over Single Market access. Anyone who believes that such a consistent attack on a core belief and life work of many European politicians and bureaucrats would have no effect on how the negotiation proceeds is fooling themselves. Greece’s and Syriza’s offense during the 2015 negotiations was to attempt to step off script and make it politically impossible for German politicians to sell the band-aid to their own public; this is nowhere near as offensive as a direct political attack on free labour movement. If the UK gets off this with less visible damage than Greece, it is only because the UK is, for various reasons, economically much stronger than Greece–and not a member of the Eurozone.
Furthermore, it evidently became a bad habit in UK politics to blame domestic policy failures on the EU. The UK was never a member of the Eurozone, and there is nothing about the EU that prevents the UK from running a more social-democratic economy than it has. It was always within the power of the UK to handle its own housing crisis, its economic inequality issues, its infrastructure issues, and so on. What flaws the EU has (and it definitely has flaws!) cannot be blamed for very many of the problems now viewed as causing the political alienation that has led to the Brexit vote. Now, yes, it is a common sport across the EU for national politicians to blame Brussels officials for preventing them from doing things, and this is often true: The Commission has known democratic legitimacy issues, even if it is better legitimized than ISDS arbitration tribunals. Eurocrats are used to serving as the “distant scapegoat” function. The problem is that UK politicians did not, apparently, know when to pull back, or they knew it and chose to go over the cliff anyway, because an internal Tory party battle was more important than keeping the European project together. EU negotiators are human; they are not going to simply accept that they were the cruel masters from whom the British people needed freeing.
Therein lies a major, unavoidable issue. There are parties, particularly in countries like France and the Netherlands, that would likewise wish to scapegoat Brussels for whatever goes wrong and sell an EU breakup as a panacea. Former (?) colonialist countries like France have populations that share the imperial nostalgia issues that right-wing British Eurosceptics do. It would be actually irresponsible if EU negotiators simply attempted to go for the narrow-sense, economically most mutually beneficial deal with the UK possible. It must be seen that the EU was not the author of British woes, but at worst neutral. This is quite a different situation from Greece and the Eurozone, where, in material terms, the structure of the Eurozone acted as a real straitjacket on Greek well-being and Greek fiscal democracy.
Brexit, Boiled Hard
If there’s anything underhanded about the EU position on these matters, the blame goes principally to the people who set up the EU treaties well before this point. The article 50 exit procedure is deliberately designed to disadvantage the exiter by turning the tables: Exit is turned into exclusion, and exclusion happens automatically after the (too-short) deadline. No negotiation is possible until the country in question puts on the article 50 dunce cap and sits in the corner of shame. The architects of European convergence have always been especially careful to ensure that convergence is a one-way procedure wherein departure is so costly as to be better to be avoided at all. This was done, to put it in Ianwelshian terms, because they thought it was the right thing. Otherwise, European convergence would not be externally credible, and its lack of external credibility would be a further invitation for foreign powers to play wedge games.
One may argue that a hard Brexit also damages Europe as it disrupts the flows that currently exist, and this is always costly. European leaders have made it crystal clear that the project is more important to them than the short-term cash flows. Just as the British say that they can find substitute buyers and sellers, so can the rest-of-EU–with, in some ways, greater efficiency, because manufacturing still significantly exists on the continent. And everyone, even German industry, knows that the destabilization caused by separation of the four freedoms of the Single Market would, in the medium term, be more costly than putting up tariffs against the UK, to be negotiated down in a later and less UK-favorable process than full UK membership.
In this instance, I do explicitly take a strongly EU-sympathetic position on this. The aftermath of the Leave campaign has shown that anti-immigrant hysteria, nationalist nativism, and colonial/imperial nostalgia had a major impact on the shape of this, not a major desire for either libertarian economics or left-wing fiscal expansion. These are real dangers and ought not to be rewarded by political victories. Even under a hard Brexit, it still remains fully within the power of UK politicians to ensure that ordinary people are at least exposed to only minimal immediate suffering, and if they are not willing to use their means to protect their people, we know, once-and-for-all, that the woes and alienation of the people of the UK were never because of Europe.
(Just so no one misunderstands, this is Mandos writing, not Ian.)
Over the years I’ve collected a laundry list of potential problems that left-wing movements have in obtaining and exercising official power “through the system” in developed Western societies, but at least two of them have to do with the question of personnel and talent. These are problems that that manifest themselves both in the way that movements operate in the electoral space and then again reveal themselves if the progressive-leftist party gets really lucky and manages to hold official power. Some of them apply to populist right-wing movements too (but I think less so; the reasons for this we can leave to another day) and is at least a contributing factor to the extent to which the neoliberal order appears so crisis-resilient.
(1) Personnel for Getting into Power: We live in a mass media society where cheap communications means that messages are propagated very quickly. This means that almost all political campaigning is going to involve an aspect of mass advertising and marketing. I know that a lot of lefty people for obvious reasons have a bit of an allergy to the idea of political ideation as selling something, but unfortunately, that’s what it is. Selling stuff is a profession, talent, and skill.
The neoliberal establishment side of the equation has a lot of money to attract the kind of talent who can sell stuff. But that’s true of everything: The left always lives with a headwind of money that favours the establishment. What is more fundamentally difficult, however, is that the neoliberal demeanour has a very natural and smooth affinity to the notion of selling and is very deeply founded on the idea of competing psychological influence over individual choice; in fact, it openly celebrates this as a cornerstone of its fundamental political truth. The modern left, on the other hand, views advertising and marketing as an attempt at corrupting individual authentic choice. But in an environment of technologically-accelerated information dissemination, there’s no escape from selling political ideas and from a need for the talent required to do that. It seems unlikely to me, however, that, money aside, the sales talent is in large numbers going to abandon an ideological affinity for the governing neoliberal attitude.
(2) Personnel to Run the Show: Once in power, the problems have only started. Large industrial societies actually require a great deal of technical skill to run, both on matters of economy and finance as well as general administration and regulation. While leftists deride the prognostications of academic economics, there are nevertheless technical skills and concepts that are still required to have a modicum of control. Unfortunately, most people educated in these disciplines were also made sympathetic to neoliberalism. We saw in the Greek crisis that there was a layer of Greek bureaucracy that actively resisted the original form of the Syriza government. That is partly class interest — but a lot of “technocrats” genuinely believed that they were doing a good deed from preventing what they thought was stupid or impossible policy from being implemented, rather than respect democratic decision-making or question the political assumptions they take as positive truths. This is potentially a deeper and more difficult problem than (1).
The problem of finding technocrats willing to administer a moderately left-wing, post-neoliberal state feeds back into the original problem of electability. If the public (quite reasonably) gets the sense that left-wing parties simply lack the expertise to make existing systems work on a day-to-day basis, they’ll choose a seemingly better-administered political outcome, even if it actually represents long-term decline.
Remember during the Greek crisis when I said that one of the reasons why Brussels Eurocrats had a low opinion of national democracy was how the whole refugee debacle was unfolding…even back then? The “Brussels solution” to the refugee crisis, which hadn’t even taken on the dimensions and scale that it has now, was essentially that refugees arriving on the shores of Greece and Italy, at least 160K of them (now a laughable pittance), would be divided up among EU member countries by economic weight. This would mean that Germany and France and so on would still be taking the lion’s share of them, while Estonia very few of them, but everyone would be participating in the process without effectively putting the entire burden on peripheral countries.
Here, I will elaborate on the practical and ethical logic of this plan: Peripheral EU countries were, I might add, intended to be burdened with the bulk of refugee processing, by the Dublin treaty, which demands that refugees be returned to the first country in which they arrived, even if they manage to make it to countries with less capricious refugee processing. It was part of the generally awful “safe third country” trend that degenerated immediately into a purely political tool with often little relationship to the reality of migration and refuge. Dublin was signed in a time when refugee influxes were comparatively small. For peripheral countries, accepting the burden of shoreline refugee processing was a no-brainer compared to the benefits they thought they would get by being cooperative with EU-interior countries’ desire to be in control not only of immigration, but of arrival itself, a luxury that is physically, morally, and legally impossible for shoreline countries. However, when refugee arrivals are not so small, Dublin is unenforcible. It is the public acknowledgement of this that is blamed for the influx into Germany right now — what people are calling Merkel’s “invitation.” The alternative was not to acknowledge this and to attempt to deport migrants en masse back along the Balkan route, to countries not willing or able to process the full load. The Merkel administration’s act of acknowledgement (aka the “invitation” in many quarters) was both politically and morally the right thing, even if it has the character of one of Merkel’s time-buying tactics. It was the right time to buy time.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
Why is it impossible for peripheral countries to control their own borders, particularly those on the sea? It comes down to a matter of rescue. Dragging refugee boats back to the shorelines from whence they came requires the legal cooperation of the countries on those shores, some of which are producers of refugees themselves. One may indulge in a false European fantasy of omnipotence, but Europe does not have the ability to impose refoulement on many of the “origin” shoreline countries. So the question becomes: Do EU-peripheral countries have an obligation to rescue those who come, at least, by sea? The legal and moral answer is: Yes. Once they are rescued, the requirement to do something with them — meaning, of course, process their refugee claim — falls upon the rescuer.
But if the burden is too large for peripheral countries, of course they have an incentive to send refugees on towards the center. Not merely an incentive, but in some sense an obligation. Hence, as I said, the Dublin suspension. But why is the burden so large? It is large, particularly in this instance, because of the size of the migration from Turkey. Why is the size of the migration from Turkey large? It is large because the size of the migration from Syria and other war-torn countries is large. Turkey hosts many more refugees from this crisis than all of Europe. (I will leave aside for this post the extent to which Turkey contributed to creating these refugees.) So do many countries neighbouring Syria, particularly Jordan and Lebanon. They all, one way or another, must accommodate a refugee crisis far larger than what Europe has handled. They do so very imperfectly, with the expectation of foreign aid and the desire to prevent the situation from becoming permanent. (Lebanon cannot simply make a million people its permanent residents and future citizens, but the EU, as a whole, certainly can.) But the situation is such that it is entirely possible that many of the refugees will never even have the opportunity to safely go back to Syria.
Of course, many of the refugees are not actually Syrian. These are the dreaded “economic migrants.” The problem is, with no legal way created for Syrian refugees (or other refugees) to arrive in the EU without illegally crossing borders, but no ability to have a future, even for many of them in Turkey, Syrians must take clandestine approaches to moving westward. This effectively creates a massive flow of refugees, which creates an elaborate market and services which non-refugees can exploit. (The distinction between economic migrants and refugees is morally and functionally dubious, and we may have to rethink the entire basis of citizenship and sovereignty to de-couple it from territorial borders, but that is for another time.) In order to stop economic migration, one must either stop refugees entirely or one must provide another route for refugees in the hope that that will dry up some of the illegal transit market. To stop refugees entirely, one must either drown them or treat them so terribly on arrival that they act as living warnings against attempting to transit (this is the Australian “solution”) and view their present precarious situation as the same or superior to severe maltreatment. Needless to say, much of this could have been avoided by earlier action resettling Syrians — and others! — away from the Middle East.
If one is not willing to let refugees drown or to torment them, and one is not willing to let an EU country become a “warehouse of souls,” then one must permit refugees and potentially non-deportable economic migrants to proceed. This is essentially the route that Angela Merkel chose by suspending the Dublin Treaty. She and her government treated Greece very poorly in the financial crisis, but, in this, she effectively attempted to both rescue Greece and the dignity (i.e., appearance of unity) of the Union, and bought time to find a more permanent and less haphazard solution. While I dislike many of her policy choices, and I don’t believe the bandied-about (and probably sexist) claim that she suddenly became “soft-hearted,” or something. Give credit where credit is due: I do believe that she did the right thing for the European Union and for the refugees simultaneously.
The problem is that the only country that is willing to take refugees is Germany, and it will eventually be politically unsupportable for Germany to be the sole player in this game. While proportionately falling far short in terms of actual numbers, compared to some Middle Eastern countries, Germany has still taken on a million refugees (and/or economic migrants) and has, under stressful conditions, started to organize the terms of their integration. Even then, Germany has done what its alleged EU ‘partners’ have been unwilling to do. If there must be refugee transit within Europe, the only fair way to implement it is by the very redistribution proposal I mention above.
Unfortunately, a large number of EU states, particularly the so-called Visegrad states of Eastern European countries, are simply unwilling to share any burden at all, even a couple of dozen. That is due to naked racism (and yes, you can be racist against Muslims, even though Islam is not a ‘race’; you don’t need a ‘race’ for racism to occur, quite the contrary). The expansion eastward was ill-advised; these countries suffer in part from a post-communist nationalist ‘adolescence’ that is not really compatible with European convergence, and from that, an effective requirement to be a participant in dealing with refugees from on-going conflicts in the very much neighbouring Muslim world. Unfortunately, and further, even countries that were considered core European countries, such as France, are not willing to be part of a common solution to the refugee crisis.
Europe has so far flailed around attempting to come to a resolution of this impasse. While I gave credit to Merkel above for doing the right thing by suspending the Dublin treaty, unfortunately, her solution, possibly a matter of necessity, has been to attempt to bribe Turkey to accept deportations. The political situation in Turkey is not pleasant, to put it mildly. Ankara is in the strange situation of being both partly at fault for the refugee crisis, and yet for a power that is partly at fault, it is still not possible to force it to handle the entire burden. Consequently, one either deals with Turkey, or one doesn’t deal with Turkey, at which point, the choice between letting boats sink or rescuing them and taking on the refugees once again presents itself. Dealing with Turkey involves paying it money, giving it better access to the EU economy, and directly shouldering some of the refugee burden. For both good and bad reasons, the deal with Turkey is not universally popular in the EU, and there have been a number of false starts in which the deal has been claimed to have taken effect, when it has not.
This whole situation has now come to a head with Austria conspiring with other EU and non-EU states to cut off Greece, unless Greece gets “control” over its borders. Make no mistake; the “control” in question is a weasel-word. Greece has an indefinite sea border with Turkey, and no ability on its own to force Turkey to take back anyone who leaves from the Turkish coast. Greece was receiving tens of thousands of migrants before Germany suspended the Dublin deportation process. So what “control” could they possibly mean? That question is certainly rhetorical.
No, the only solution that has a modicum of humanity involves European countries sharing the burden, which is what was proposed for months in Brussels and is the principal position of Germany, Greece, and Italy. But if this doesn’t happen, it amounts to additional evidence in favour of Brussels’ contempt for national democracy. Make no mistake: I think that this contempt, given the conditions under which the EU has been constructed, is a mistake. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a grain of truth to it. Unless the European Union countries can come up with a joint solution to the problem, the whole thing will fall apart. And if the joint solution is boat pushback in the Aegean, then the whole thing isn’t worth keeping together.
The Syriza government in Greece just made the move of proposing a referendum on the creditors’ last (unacceptable) offer, so the Greek people can now choose a destiny from a set of unpleasant destinies to which history has brought them. From the creditor’s perspective, this pushes them into precisely the situation they have spent the last seven years (at least) avoiding at all costs–the holding of a democratic dialogue on any part of the bailout. Even their threats to remove the proposal and to cut off ELA are acts of participation in this utterly unwanted dialogue. If Syriza proceeds with this, it will have turned the “sea lion” strategy around and on its head.
The bank bailouts were a “metacrime,” a moral monstrosity by which the productive economy was sacrificed to save what should be merely the money conduit system, rather than sacrificing the finance industry to save the productive economy, and all to conceal crimes and failures inside the money conduit system. However, while the immediate precipitation of the ongoing European/Greek crisis can be attributed to this, the route to such an unstable situation is rather more complex.
Ian asked me to put together some thoughts on the matter of the attitudes, aspirations, and motives of the participants at a “cultural” and interest group level, which I believe are non-trivial drivers of this conflict. For me, at least, when people do wrong things and get themselves into bad situations, I feel it is not enough to turn them into cartoon villains; often outwardly (or “functionally”) sociopathic behaviour has an aetiology in more conventional human failings. Humans often climb up ideological trees from which it is difficult to talk them down. That doesn’t mean I necessarily take a position of pure relativism; being unable to come down from that tree is itself a moral failing.
Before I begin, a disclaimer: I’m going to be painting with a broad brush here. A few years of living in Europe have taught me how impossible it is to live without a certain quota of “pragmatic” stereotyping—whereas it is genuinely easier, in my experience, to act as though one can avoid mentally assigning group characteristics in the USA and Canada. This, I acknowledge, is very dangerous; there are, for example, many Germans who see through what it is their elites have wrought in Greece. Secondly, that I try to write with a layer of sympathy doesn’t mean that I agree with the positions–for some reason, I always have to emphasize this.
EUians and Eurocrats
The first group I’ll discuss isn’t really a “national” grouping at all, but rather a stratum of mostly continental Europeans who view themselves as first and foremost “Europeans” as in citizens of the European Union. I am going to dub them “EUians” from this point on. On the extreme end, I have met EUians who explicitly believe that European countries should abandon their national languages and just adopt a lingua franca (i.e., English). All in all, they believe that Europeans need to “grow up” and accept that the era of the culturally-defined nation state is “over” and that it is a monkey on the back of Europa herself.
Some of you may see this as a pathetic self-abnegation, and maybe it is. But Europe spent the Cold War and maybe before that as a kind of chessboard on which great powers, including powers within Europe, play their games. The only way to evade this fate is to convert Europe into a single, possibly diverse nation on its own — and the only game in town is the EU.
In this worldview, it is only progress that national politics become increasingly devoid of content, and it is only necessary to build European-level democracy when the Europeans have finally, ironically, swallowed the medicine of their own mission civilisatrice. A case in point that is unfolding right now is the drama over refugees, specifically, how to settle them. Brussels had a perfectly reasonable and fair idea that refugees be allocated to countries in proportion to countries’ relative economic weight. This was met with absolute rejection, particularly by newer EU countries in Eastern Europe, who explicitly do not want even a small increase in the proportion of brown people who live there. Behind these countries hid some of the older, larger countries, whose national politics are already burdened by immigration-fatigue.
To EUians, this can only be confirmation that, at the national-political level, Europeans are only a hair’s breadth away from poking each other with sharp sticks in order to maintain ethnoreligious homogeneity. And they may be. But is it a sustainable solution to gradually dilute their democratic rights? To EUians, it is the only answer.
And that bring us to the inner cadre of EUians: the Eurocracy, the elite bureaucrats whose job it is to ^manage^ European economic and political convergence. One of the principal political functions of the Eurocracy is precisely to circumvent national politics. Eurocrats are to act as would-be philosopher-kings, coming up with reasonable solutions based on scientific principles. Oh, they’re human and can be corrupt and venal, but so can elected politicians. Whence the repeated referenda, and then adopting the Lisbon treaty anyway? Well, if the people say “no,” it’s not like the philosopher-kings are going to come up with a better answer–they already emitted the best answer! That’s why they’re Eurocrats.
Now consider the position of Greece at Syriza’s election. Yes, some Eurocrats might have been willing to admit that IMF predictions of Greek GDP growth were just the teensiest bit awry. But there is a procedure for these things, and that is definitely not the demand for changes to existing political agreements, which must then go through the process of national democracy. And Greek leftists just aren’t popular enough to withstand that in the rest of Europe, quite the contrary–by making explicitly left-wing demands, they have asked other populations that are not left-wing to support what they believe is a long-discredited experiment.
@WhelanKarl but the opposite view implies that democracies can’t sign binding agreements rich is surely crazier
No, the from the Eurocracy’s point of view, the correct way to go about solving this problem is by the baking of fudge. If Syriza had agreed in February to support something memorandum shaped — taken the short-term pain of adopting a kolotoumba — the Eurocracy could have given it a little quid pro quo through the back doors of Brussels. But for EUians and Eurocrats, the bad signs started off very early — choosing ANEL over To Potami as a partner. Readers here probably think of To Potami as a Quisling, capitulationist part, but for the Eurocracy, an alliance with To Potami would have signalled that Syriza could be mollified ultimately through fudging an agreement and was not itself a dangerous populist party. But Syriza chose the spear-carrying nationalist Greeks instead.
So from their perspective, Syriza wanted to play populist politics on the open field of democracy and is reaping what it sowed. Europe does not, cannot, should not have room for a populist left, regardless of whether or not the policy proposed makes sense. European politics is about giving cover, and rational, professorial arguments embedded in a dangerous “democratic mandate” framework is just not on. Even this referendum, which the now apparently non-existent proposal might actually win, is a simply unacceptable exercise that, if repeated elsewhere, will destroy the European project, which is an inherent good that cannot survive the popular sovereignty of barbarian peoples.
The poster children
This is sometimes an overlooked aspect of the discussion, but the views of Baltic and East European states do matter. Some of the Baltic states took very painful medicine recently, and not medicine that different in character from what Greece was being asked to take, but has either refused (under Syriza) or only fudged (under ND, etc). And a lot of these countries have populations that are already poorer than Greeks are now.
Now many of you will retort that these countries, instead of joining in solidarity with the creditors, should likewise have the higher ideological standards that Greeks seem to have. But from their perspective, they embraced austerity and social pain as a manner of slicing off their own forearm in order to escape from the bear that has it by the wrist. Yes, I’m talking about Russia. I know that a good number of readers here think of Russia and Vladimir Putin as a kind of last-stand resistor against “AngloZionist” world domination, but for these countries, what they want to know is how soon the West can bring them that sweet, sweet AngloZionism.
So in a sense, Greece’s apparent cozying up to Putin is in some ways a worse affront than its apparent sense of entitlement. Greece is playing with existential fire for these countries, instead of thanking its lucky stars that’s it’s under the AngloZionist umbrella and putting their grandmothers on ice floes of austerity in gratitude.
(As I said above, I am painting with a broad brush. I have an Estonian colleague who is at least neutral on the matter of Greece, but it is clear to me that in terms of European politics, the existential threat of Russia is not far from his mind in any discussion, and Russia for him is his people’s most recent colonial dominator, not the EU.)
Germany (and Northern Europe)
Germany and German politics have been conceived as the other pole in a kind of Athens-Berlin conflict, as Germany is the Eurozone’s largest economy and its most successful. A lot of things have been said about the German role, and some of the criticisms are correct. And it’s true that to some extent, popular tabloid German media is all about the lazy Greeks, lolling about in the sun with one hand in the pocket of the hardworking German. It’s become a cliché.
But one thing to emphasize is that the debate about economic reason itself is quite different in Germany. Outside of Germany, many people can agree that Yanis Varoufakis’ proposals are economically reasonable and possibly even mainstream while criticizing him for his political approach. But within Germany, the proposals themselves—and the logic of anti-austerity thinking—are widely seen as coming from another planet. That’s because popular discussion on economics within present-day Germany does not really emphasize the notion of flows and balances. What does it matter that everyone can’t simultaneously be an export superpower? It’s everyone’s duty to try and find something they can offer to the world, and in terms of nations, that is expressed in terms of their export power. The US import “power” is viewed by many Germans as an unsustainable boondoggle…but the German export power is not. Germany even exports to the exporters.
From this perspective, the proper domain of economic policymaking isn’t to be playing some kind of Rube Goldberg game of who should be paid what when to make the balances work out, but instead it is about removing the obstacles to economic agility and to everyone reaching a Platonic state of optimal social contribution. The German mainstream isn’t like English-language conservatism — you can believe in principle in a generous welfare state along most of the German political spectrum, but it needs to be a welfare state designed around facilitating life transitions. And that sometimes means giving employers a little flexibility.
It’s on this basis that left-wing government in the rest of Europe provokes little sympathy in Germany, particularly in the case of Syriza (but not even French dirigisme gets any quarter). From the German perspective, far from Syriza having been forced to retract its programme, the last proposal of the creditors was actually quite generous and full of compromises on the things that Germans think matters. Syriza’s Red Lines are exactly the things that show that Syriza isn’t seriously different from any other clientelistic party of Greece, and therefore it deserves no sympathy, leftist or otherwise. Germany is willing to open its pocketbook to Greece — through the back door, of course, via Eurofudge — to ensure that Greece looks like a success story. But only if things like pension reform, privatization, labour reform, take place, and not just in a recalcitrant way, but in a way that shows that the Greek government believes in a reasonable “soziale Marktwirtshaft.”
But, from a German perspective, Alexis Tsipras wants to run non-surpluses without figuring out what Greece’s contribution to the world will be as it is, and neither the Eurozone nor the EU itself needs that. In fact, Tsipras wants to propagate this ideology in Europe elsewhere, and to them, that’s neither right nor tolerable.
Finally, Greece
Even with the proposals offically off the table (the fact that a referendum on them is a dealbreaker is in itself very telling!), the referendum is a useful exercise, especially if the “real” question in people’s minds is formulated correctly. It’s important to know “for real” if the kind of thing that the creditors were asking on Thursday would be acceptable to the average Greek, at least in its broad outline — not just some deal, but that deal, even if it is hypothetical.
But a lot of readers here may be disappointed to know that many Greeks would vote for such a deal anyway, even if it meant that Greece became a “debt colony” of the EU. Why would a people voluntarily choose such abjection, even if the Grexit path is hard?
The truth is that Greece sits in a perfect storm of historical factors and cultural memes that primes it specifically to be a chief candidate for a crisis like this. And the form that Greek nationalism has taken up to now doesn’t help at all. At the point at which Greece is “finally” free to take up its place in heart of the Europe whose mother it is, how is it conceivable that it could be facing ejection from what was supposed to be Europe’s cornerstone? How could it be possible that Greece could actually always have been, effectively, an Orthodox Turkey, when it suffered so much under the Ottomans? And how likely is it that, left to their own devices, the Greek elite would actually themselves choose to turn the corner and build a state administration as good as Germany’s? Isn’t it more likely that outside the Euro, Greece will just follow it’s old trajectory, and not become the devalued competitive powerhouse that Grexit-boosters believe it can be?
These are the questions that Greek citizens are going to be asking themselves over the next week, the real issues of the referendum, and it may be that a lot of participants on Ian’s blog won’t like the answers they come up with. Because a “No” most likely means a Grexit forced by the creditors, and while I believe the Greek government is technically correct in not making this explicit, everyone knows what it means. But it is nevertheless important to have had this exercise, because whatever the outcome of the proposed referendum, it will be contingent on and subordinate to the democratic choice of a people, exactly what the Eurocracy has been avoiding, unsustainably in my opinion.
(Brief Ian notes:
1) I asked Mandos to write this because I think it’s important.
2) Greece has now imposed capital controls. Five years later than it should have been done, but a good step.)
