The Republic of Dissent

Churchill and the British Empire

Piers Brendon reviews Richard Toye's upcoming book, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made in the Literary Review:

The Empire, indeed, was the main bone of contention between Churchill and Roosevelt during the war. The President found it hard to believe that they were fighting Axis tyranny but not working to free people all over the world from colonial oppression. He openly disagreed with Churchill's assertion that the promises of self-government in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to the British Empire. The Prime Minister thought it was 'pretty good cheek' for the Americans, who had blood on their hands in the Philippines, to try 'to school-marm us into proper behaviour' in the Empire. And with the Empire behind him, he felt able to stand up to the Great Republic. According to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's plea that India should be allowed to rule itself wrung from Churchill a 'string of cuss words [that] lasted for two hours in the middle of the night'.
Young Winston had vowed to devote his life to the maintenance of the British Empire. As warlord during the struggle against Hitler he fought to preserve it even though that meant testing the Anglo-American alliance, which he also championed. As an old man he lamented that his life had been for nothing: 'The Empire I believed in has gone.' In view of all that it is remarkable that no substantial scholarly work on this subject has hitherto appeared. There have been essays and a couple of partial studies, and the topic has been aired in some of the many volumes about Churchill published since the opening and electronic cataloguing of his papers. But Churchill's Empire is the first book to cover all the ground. It does so in a masterly fashion, drawing on much fresh evidence, teasing out the nuances of Churchill's attitudes and providing a marvellously illuminating appraisal.

Well, at least and at last, Churchill has something in common with Charles de Gaulle, but should we expected that men who grew in times when empire is synonymous not to say equaled to their nation's grandeur are reluctant to give it up and to see decolonization as a plus?

Israel as a European country

I would have taken the following statement seriously if it had come from a political leader other than Berlusconi:

My greatest desire, as long as I am a protagonist in politics, is to bring Israel into membership of the European Union.

Assuming that it were possible, why would Israel join the EU? To be protected by it? Right, let's be serious!

Les rois sont petits

Charles Bremmer on Yesterday the latest Sarko's show on French TV:

When Pierre accused him of ignorance over the lives of ordinary people, Sarkozy replied: "I am not going to put ashes on my head, excusing myself for not being a worker at Renault." 
And, not to be forgotten, Sarkozy took his usual swipe at the President of the United States. Defending his multitude of simultaneous reforms, he said: "Take my friend Barack Obama... He went with just one reform and look what has happened to it."
Also worth noting: In neither the talk show nor the interview that preceded it, did anyone mention Muslim  veils, which shows that this is not one of the matters that are really worrying people.   
Sarkozy's performance, imposed on TV in a way that only Silvio Berlusconi could rival, has naturally been mocked by the Socialists and other opponents. But it scored surprisingly good reviews in the press today. The most unusual one came from Laurent Joffrin, Editor of Libération,who is Sarkozy's bête noire. "The President defended his policies with indisputable mastery," he wrote.

I have to admit that Sarkozy's Obama obsession betrays his "Americacentrism." Anytime, Sarkozy hits Obama with just words (can he do anything else?), I want to say to him, "It is so unnecessary. Don't worry, you are his equal. You have so much in common that it is scary." That said, I believed that if these two could switch roles, their countries would be better off for it. Sarkozy would make a better American president for he likes action and has his political vision is more in tune with the American compact. Obama would, undoubtedly, make a better French president, for he is so good with the symbolic and representative side of power, which the French want their republican monarch to be great at to reassure themselves that although the king may relate to and understand them, he is better than them in the sense that he has great skills and that therefore his majesty  is unquestionable and his great powers well used.

There is nothing left to the Left of the Left

Sugary excerpt from an editorial from the Guardian on Oskar Lafontaine, the German Left, and its lessons from the European left:

But there is no disguising the continuing weakness and gradual decline of the German centre-left as a potential party of federal government. Failure to adapt to globalisation has produced weakness. Weakness has caused splits and the splits are reflected in further weakness.These current travails of the German centre-left are part of a wider European pattern of division and defeat. Something of this sort has happened in many EU nations. But they are also a cautionary tale for the Labour party. Those who believe that the only problem with the Labour governments is that they have not been left-wing enough, or that everything will be solved by a proportional representation system that would allow the left to "be itself again", need a reality check.

Hum, I have the strong suspicion that the argument made here is more circular than anything else. The problem for the Left in most industrialized countries is that it has lost It in the sense that it does not believe in Leftism for it really believes in Fukuyamamism and in the theory that we are living the end of history for there are no alternative to the market, capitalism, free trade and other goodies. I remember during the Ohio primary how stupid both Clinton and Obama were sounding when they were trying to convince the people that they were never really for NAFTA. What I wanted to ask them was "what's your plan B?" This isn't a cynical, but a realistic question for it seems to me that the Left solely believes in the heart, that it is better than the right because it is more compassionate (that's why Bush created compassionate conservatism. At the time I wondered what was the point of being compassionate if you are not helping fixing the ill that creates your self-serving compassion). The problem when the heart is at the heart of politics is that any policy becomes justifiable when the argument that the heart of the policymakers is in the right place becomes plausible for the media and the masses. Is there really nothing left Left to the Left? I don't think that's the real question for liberalism in the American sense of the word has stopped to be a political ideology, to be just a societal one where the compassionate are separated from the mean zealots like Sarah Palin and the greedy. Leftism has no backbone. It is too busy admiring its grandeur and nobility in the mirror.

The end of American exceptionalism

I would like to be able to disagree vehemently with Nick Cohen on this, but I cannot because experience has shown me that he is, alas, in part right when he makes the following point although it takes him to another direction than I because I don't make the mistake of confusing a symptom with the disease:

Pride in American exceptionalism ran through Obama's Nobel peace prize acceptance speech. "In many countries, there is a deep ambivalence about military action today," he told his doubtless deeply ambivalent Norwegian audience. "At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America." He would take no notice of it. "Make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms." Obama drew a map of a pacifist Europe, unwilling to face reality, and a tough-minded but idealist America ready to defend civilisation with "the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms".
Nowhere has American satisfaction with its uniqueness been more noticeable than in the applause it awards itself for its treatment of immigrants. Articles contrasting the success of the US in integrating Muslims against the failures of Britain have been a regular feature of the American press. Liberals emphasised that immigrants who wanted to leave their old identities behind were helped by a constitution and bill of rights that accepted them as equal citizens.
Conservatives claimed that immigrants could not sit resentfully at home living on welfare payments and developing sectarian grievances, as they could in corrupt Europe, but had to find jobs that inevitably brought them into contact with Americans from other cultures.
(...) Depressingly, Americans seem to be as bad as the British are at recognising the differences between Islam and Islamism. They can no longer, however, get away with pretending that Islamism is an un-American disease. Trying to explain the rise of religious hatreds and identity politics, Obama said in Oslo that "given the dizzying pace of globalisation, and the cultural levelling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities", which was true enough in a platitudinous way.
I wonder if he yet understands that Americans are not exempt from the manias of our time and that his formerly special country is not looking so exceptional any more.

Filling up space

Interesting and sad:

As an anorexic teenager, I never went anywhere without the slogan "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" written in a notebook or on my hand.
I had found the words in a women's magazine, along with yet another editorial designed to persuade women readers that shrinking our bodies would improve our lives, and I adopted them as a mantra to help diminish the terrible hunger I felt inside. I was ferociously hungry, not just for the food I was avoiding, but for love, learning and adventure – all the good things in life that felt out of my reach.
Like most anorexics, my eating disorder was not a girlish fad or a diet gone wrong but a private, violent strategy for exerting control on the body when life felt beyond my control. Eating disorders can strike people of all ages and both genders, but for young women like me, growing up in a society which demands impossible perfection and peddles airbrushed beauty, eating disorders pose a particular threat.
I soon discovered that skinny tastes of nothing at all. Living with an eating disorder is a bland, cold, joyless experience. But it took me five years to let go of the idea that in order to be loved, I had to take up as little space as possible.

The death of idealism

I agree partly with Ian Buruma on this:

The way it looks now, liberals, in the “progressive” American sense of the word, may actually have been among the losers of 1989. Social democrats were always despised by communists, and vice versa. But many social democratic ideals, rooted in Marxist notions of social justice and equality, were thrown out, like the proverbial baby, with the bathwater of communism.
This process was already under way before the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the free-market radicalism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Society doesn't exist, Mrs. Thatcher once famously declared – only individuals and families count. Everyone is for themselves.
For many people, this had the ring of liberation – from overregulated markets, from overbearing trade unions, from class privilege. That is why it was called neo-liberalism. But free-market radicalism undermined the role of the state in building a better, more just, more equal society. Neo-liberals are less interested in justice than in greater efficiency, more productivity, the bottom line.
While the neo-liberals were slashing and burning their way through old social democratic arrangements, the left was dissipating its energies on cultural politics, “identity” and ideological multiculturalism. Democratic idealism was once the domain of the left, including social democrats and liberals. In the United States, it had been the Democratic Party, embodied by John Kennedy, that promoted freedom around the world.
But in the late 20th century, it became more important to many leftists to save “Third World” culture, no matter how barbaric, from “neo-colonialism” than it was to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Mao, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Ruhollah Khomaini) simply because they opposed “Western imperialism.”
As a result, all politics derived from Marxism, no matter how loosely, lost credibility and finally died in 1989. This was, naturally, a disaster for communists and socialists – but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests.

Vibrant recent history

I can't believe it has been 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, that's probably because I was too young when it happened to understand the meaning of the moment and the fact that East Germany was hell as this sugary excerpt shows ... :

The brutal nature of the East German regime means that Monday's celebrations will be tinged with melancholy. Dozens died while trying to cross the barrier which divided Berlin and Germany in two while the Stasi squelched all protest in the German Democratic Republic, as communist East Germany was called. Ziehm says that, with attention focused on reunification, many from the former East are revisiting the past in a much more personal fashion. In the last year, tens of thousands of people have headed to the Birthler Authority to finally take a look at what their Stasi files contain. Interest has been so high, in fact, the waiting list is now two years long.
The files -- which occupy over 100 kilometers of shelf space (not including the 16,000 sacks of shredded documents the Birthler Authority is currently trying to reassemble with the aid of computers) -- are testament to a darker side of humanity. And Ziehm says that films like "The Lives of Others," which indicate that many were coerced into spying on friends and neighbors, don't come close to plumbing the depths that some ultimately fall to. Friends informed voluntarily on friends and spouses even tattled on each other.

Defining national identities

I would like to say amen to these words from Jim Wolfreys on the debate on the definition of Francité (Frenchness) that is occurring in France, but a part of me is resisting it:

At one extreme those who find themselves concentrated in the poorest areas of France do so not out of choice, but through ethnicity and income. Neither Islam nor "ethnic communitarianism" are responsible for such divisions: they are the product of social deprivation and racism. At the other extreme, however, is a section of society that wilfully separates itself from the rest of France. The top 10% of earners choose to live in the most segregated areas of the country, well-heeled districts like Neuilly and St-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. It is they who have created what Maurin calls "the bourgeois ghetto".
If the present debate is to reassert the historic republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity then government priorities will need to be overturned. The targeting of "illegal" immigrants – Besson aims to deport 27,000 people this year, more than double 2002 levels – focuses attention on a tiny proportion of the population. Likewise, high-profile campaigns to impose a republican dress code on Muslims are a distraction from more fundamental divisions shaping French society, divisions determined less by religion than by poverty, racism and inequality. In France, as in Britain, if debates on citizenship are to involve denouncing the extreme right while pandering to its bugbears, they will only obscure the real issues – and in so doing become part of the problem.

I believe that the trap of any debate on national identity, whether it be French, British, Moroccan, or Nigerian, is to cast it in the terms  Wolfreys is choosing to frame by emphasizing the risks as if nationals of a country should be afraid to define/decide who they are or who they would to be.There is this morbid and unhealthy connection between patriotism, any attempt to show national price and fascism and there is one between any admission that national identity can grow, change or even be redefined drastically with self-hatred, deculturation, Arabization, de-europeanization, and dewesternization.

Moving past Blair

I agree with Agnès Poirier on her conclusion that Blair wouldn't make a good president for Europe:

There is a stronger argument still against Mr Blair’s candidature: he’s not the intellectual heavyweight and above-all-parties moral figurehead that we Europeans need to represent our old and proud continent. (...)What Europe needs is a figure that can incarnate the very idea of Europe, not a schemer who can pull his weight in the negotiations of banana exports. What Europe needs is a wise leader whose personal experience of the ordeals and triumphs of the 20th century makes for a commanding figure in the world, somebody who makes people stop and listen. Who would a busy Barack Obama take immediately on the phone? An Einstein or a Blair?(...) Tony Blair may be a talented and savvy political figure, but he shouldn’t be Europe’s first choice. Let’s aim higher. Europe deserves it.

I don't think that Blair is lightweight. I just thinks that he represents the past and that Europe needs somebody who doesn't have all of his political baggage to help it move forward and not to go back to some of the gray zones of Blairism. When I think of Blair, the first thing to my mind is the Yo blair incident in which he accepted to be treated with too much nonchalance by Bush (At least Angela Merkel was repulsed when Bush rubbed her shoulders in an inappropriate manner ). That episode and his actions in the later years of his time at Britain's prime minister force one to question his ability to question wrong actions motivated by good intentions and to not be religiously ideological.

Sarkozy and the expensive shower

This excerpt from the Guardian  on Sarkozy's expenses during his presidency of the EU is perplexing because it shows that he has lost touch with reality since it is a mistake that he wouldn't have made before becoming president when he was very much aware of how the French perceived their politicians :

French financial watchdogs slammed Nicolas Sarkozy for spending £160m during his country's six-month stint in charge of the EU – including £250,000 on a personal presidential shower that he never used.
The vast expense is set out in a report blaming poor management and a lack of transparency by the president's staff.
Costs soared because so many of the EU-related events were organised at the last minute, said the report.
On one occasion Sarkozy triggered the cancellation of an entire EU event he was due to host in Evian, because he wanted to sleep in his own bed at the Élysée palace. By then, hundreds of journalists, EU officials and national delegations had either already arrived in Evian or were on their way.

We knew that Sarkozy had expensive taste and that he liked bling, but having a shower build in times of crisis is outrageous, but I don't think any of this will affect greatly Sarkozy's political fortunes as long as he doesn't have a credible opposition. In other words, there is no audible alternative to Sarkozysm.

PS: The shower didn't cost 250, 000 euros to be fair since the price includes offices and other stuff which had to be build just for the occasion (is France a developing country to need to build infrastructure when it receives heads of state?). I'm wondering how it is possible to spend more over 5000 euros per person for a reception and almost a million euro a day just because France is presiding the EU.

Obama and the Europeans

This sugary excerpt form Timothy Garton Ash on Obama and Europe because I have no idea what Ash's point is since he is trying to have it both ways by asserting one thing and its opposite:

Barack Obama is the most European president of the United States that there has ever been. Barack Obama is the least European president of the United States that there has ever been.
(...) the approach of the Obama administration to "the Europeans" is quite pragmatic, unsentimental and realistic. It might be summarised as: what can you do for us today? On Afghanistan. On Pakistan. On Iran.
(...)Pragmatically, they take Europe as they find it. Where it acts as a single unit – on trade and competition policy – they deal with it as a single unit. Where it doesn't – on the deployment of soldiers to Afghanistan, for example, or even on tighter sanctions against Iran – they deal with 27 individual governments. That's tiresome, but it's just the way it is.
This attitude to Europe combines, in equal parts, respect and contempt. Respect inasmuch as they treat Europe as a bunch of grown-up, sovereign countries, no longer needing or wanting American tutelage. Contempt insofar as they recognise how far reality lags behind the rhetoric of European unity.
Officials in Washington know better than anyone how European leaders compete for an audience with the president or secretary of state; how they go behind each other's backs to win that contract, offer this special service, and generally preen themselves to be favourite poodle. Whether it's Nicolas Sarkozy insisting on being on stage with Obama to make his own agitated remarks about the discovery of Iran's hidden nuclear facility; or an importunate David Cameron, desperate to get his photo-op with Obama before the British election; or the Moldovan foreign minister needing his five minutes with Hillary – the silly game is the same. As for these promises of Europe finally getting its act together in foreign policy, if the Polish and Czech presidents now sign the Lisbon treaty, even the oldest friends of Europe in Washington sigh: we'll believe it when we see it.

First, Ash needs to explain  what it means for an American to be European? Does it mean to be well-read, cultured, refined, and aware that America isn't the center of the world? Second, I think that Barack Obama has no sentimental ties to Europe at the moment simply because Europe doesn't matter to his political future. This will undoubtedly change, but right now, he is more preoccupied with South America and Asia. This is about real politik. To make an  approximative comparison, I would say that Europe is to Obama what Africa is to Sarkozy, a foreign continent that he would love not to have to deal with, but that he cannot ignore  mostly because of history and because an American vacuum might led to gigantic catastrophes

Poland, France, and Anti-Semitism

Interesting comparison between Poland and France and the way their society deals with anti-Semitism from Konstanty Gebert;  he seems to imply that France deals well with Anti-semitism I disagree strongly with him because I don't think that laws can eradicate bigotry, on the contrary they tend to victimize the bigots thus giving them  too much of the spotlight, which enable them in turn to become larger than the hate they spread:

Because Polish anti-Semitism is as widespread as it is skin-deep. Let me explain. Take France. In France they had very strong laws against public expressions of anti-Semitism. If you express anti-Semitism in public you can be seriously penalised. This doesn't necessarily affect what Monsieur Dupont says at his dinner table (and I've sat at some of those dinner tables – I know) but in public if somebody makes an anti-Semitic statement you'd better believe he or she is serious, because they are willing to take the rap.
In Poland, anti-Semitism is not penalised, period. Just recently, the public prosecutor in the town of Krakow closed the investigation into soccer fans yelling "Gas them!" to the fans of another club which is labelled as Jewish because, historically, like 70 years ago, it had been Jewish. So they yelled "Gas them," and they yelled, "We'll always triumph over you, you fucking Jews," and the public prosecutor decided such contents do not constitute a crime and dropped the case. And this comes in the wake of similar statements by different public prosecutors. So anti-Semitism isn't penalised, therefore it becomes a convenient venue for the expression of frustration. So if somebody says in public it's all the fault of the Jews and they should be kicked out of the country, this does not necessarily mean, as it probably does in France, that he is a dyed-in-the-wool and dangerous anti- Semite. It might mean that he had a bad day at work, full stop. This is no less excusable morally...

Competition of victimhoods

Interesting, disconcerting, but I'm afraid true analysis from Brendan O'Neill (I promise to get over my Polanski's obsession soon):

But perhaps the worst aspect of the Polanski affair is the competition of victimhoods. It is testimony to the domination of the victim culture in contemporary society that both Polanski haters and Polanski defenders, both sides in this bizarre re-enactment of the Culture War of the 1960s and its aftermath, have used the language of victimology to make their case. For many American and British commentators this is all about Samantha Gailey, whom they have transformed into the archetypal and eternally symbolic victim of the alleged great evil of our time, Child Abuse. ‘Remember: Polanski raped a child’, says a headline in Salon, in an article that provides sordid, misery-memoir-style details of what Polanski did with his penis to Gailey’s vagina and anus. For European observers, by contrast, Polanski’s actions can be explained by his own victimised past, especially during the Holocaust. We have to understand his ‘life tragedies’ and how they moulded him, says one filmmaker . Anne Applebaum, the American commentator who spends much of her time in Europe, says Polanski fled America in 1978 because of his ‘understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived in Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto.’ (Applebaum fails to disclose that she is married to the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who is actively campaigning against Polanski’s extradition.)
This spat in victimology confirms that the politics of victimhood, the pursuit of law, politics and morality in the name of respecting and helping victims, dominates debate on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the Anglo-American sphere it is the victim of child abuse that is most sacrosanct, while in Europe it is the victims of the Holocaust who enjoy the greatest, most unquestioned moral authority – to the extent that Polanski’s pretty cowardly fleeing of America in 1978 can be excused as a latent reaction by a tortured man to the emotional horrors of Auschwitz

Redefining assimilation

I don't fully agree with this, but it just shows that too many feel that integration isn't working, I'm wondering if that perception isn't just based on the sense that there isn't enough pie left to share:

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the "agony and splendour" of assimilation has come to an end in Europe, both for Jews and other groups. The life and death pressures to homogenise are no longer there. The means of reshaping our identities – through cosmetic surgery, dress, internet personas, photoshop – are accessible to millions. At the same time, as Gabriel Sheffer's work shows, such processes can also be used to maintain the distinctiveness of Diaspora groups, which are not disappearing as many have predicted, again reducing the need to fear cultural oblivion.
We would all be far better off if we took a more relaxed attitude to assimilation. A strong society can accommodate fundamentalist religious groups that want to keep themselves apart from society, as long as they accept the fundamental principle that "the law of the land is the law". And if, for example, Muslim or Jewish groups wish to mitigate the effect of assimilation on the identities of their youth in non-coercive, voluntary ways which are compatible with common values, this too poses no danger to society and can be of mutual positive benefit.

The Outsider

It's always interesting and alas too predictable to see Tariq Ramadan skillfully portray as a victim:

The rector places me outside the Western world. But I was born in Switzerland. I grew up and I was educated in Europe. I am a part of this continent. And I would not understand the West? It is ironic that the way I am being treated in the West is a lot like people are treated in Eastern, non-democratic countries. What has happened here is not Western. It is only by casting me as an outsider who just doesn't get it that the rector can justify his decision.

Culture of fear or fear of culture and humanity

Pankaj Mishra on what he considers to be a culture of fear that is created in too many countries by the increasing popular sentiment that foreigners are assailing their land, their culture, and their national identity as seen in Christopher Caldwell's latest book on the threat of Islam and of Muslims to Europe, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West :

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai claims in Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger that "minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties".
This at least partly explains why a few hundred women in headscarves incited such fierce passions in a nation-state whose geopolitical and cultural insignificance in recent years has only been partly obscured by its hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy. In The Politics of the Veil, the distinguished scholar of gender studies Joan Wallach Scott explains how the banning of a small piece of cloth that covers the head and neck affirmed an "imagined France", one that was "secular, individualist and culturally homogenous" and "whose reality was secured by excluding dangerous others from the nation". Scott demonstrates that French Muslim girls, who were directly affected by the law on the foulard, were "strikingly absent from the debates" in France, which were dominated by intellectuals and politicians frantically defining the dangerous "other" (typically by describing the veil as, in Jacques Attali's words, a "successor to the Berlin wall").
The veil has now been turned into, Scott writes, a highly charged "sign of the irreducible difference between Islam and France". Elsewhere, too, politicians and journalists - self-proclaimed "liberals" as well as unabashed rightwingers - rhetorically ask whether "Islam", which allegedly enforces a harsh divine law on all Muslims, is compatible with "European" values of reason and tolerance, which are supposedly derived from the Enlightenment (or Christianity, as Sarkozy blurted out in 2007, in a revealing breach of republican protocol).

I have always thought that the debate about culture, assimilation, and identity masks what I believed to be the essential debate of our time, which is how free are we allowed to be when choosing who we are as people, citizens or whatever else? Because if one really thinks about the subject, one has to come to the realization that only people who believed in the totalitarianism of the Good./traditions/God are really obsessed with culture and with the idea that civilized people/nations can become barbarians or barbaric. The idea that if there is no God, no moralistic state or culture then everything is permissible is laughable and obscurantist because it dooms humanity since it asserts that people are incapable of making good decisions and that there is nothing that they won't forbid themselves to do if something or someone doesn't forbid them to do bad things or rather things that are for them. I may be stupidly or charmingly naïve but I don't think that banning the veil in France solves any problem with Islamism and I don't even think that it is the goal because otherwise, Sarkozy would have had the wildly imaginative idea to just ban Islamism and to therefore put the State at the center of deciding what kind of Islams are compatible with French Society.

Collective identity

Sugary excerpt of the morning:

It is the rule today to see collective identity as a construction, created within the framework of what Edward Said calls an "imaginary geography", in which all those involved belong to what Benedict Anderson terms an "imagined community". The object of much of today's humanities research and cultural criticism is to demonstrate how an imaginary geography or an imagined community develops permanence and boundaries and ultimately replaces reality itself, and how this happens through identification processes in which some elements are discarded in order for that community's identity to come into being, be it Swedish, Nordic, European or global.

Summer is always hot for dreamers

I have to admit that it is becoming increasingly difficult to read and to understand André Glucksman because both his obsession with Putin's Russia and his mariage de raison to Sarkozy (who has never confronted Putin) have made him not so much inaudible but incoherent. In short, one can always guess what he will assert, but one cannot see how he reconcile the dichotomies between his idealism views on Russia, Chechnya and his realism on French issues. I read Kenneth Anderson's post on Idealism and Realism  in international relations (which is a great read) and still I don't get Glucksmann because reading him now is as odd as it would be to listen to Hitch explaining that God spoke to him and that the experience convinced him that s/he/it is great. Sugary excerpt:

Is there such a thing as the European Union? In Washington, the State Department has been seeking the phone number for such an entity since the days of Henry Kissinger. In Moscow, the EU is nothing but a television prop. Since the days of Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, regimes have come and gone, but the conviction endures that only classical powers matter: the United Kingdom, France, and above all Germany, long a political dwarf but always an economic giant. As for the historians, they’re uncertain: the De Gaulle–Adenauer and Mitterrand-Kohl relationships did not work for long, and London’s tiffs with Paris and Bonn (and then Berlin) were all the talk for decades. In the face of a global crisis, European disunity is evident.
The original, six-nation European Economic Community was able to overcome atavistic and ideological divergences only by focusing on limited but crucial stakes, of which two were most important: resistance to Stalinist expansion, and the will to have done with the economic warfare that led to global conflicts. Have such ventures now come to an end? Europe’s cherished “common values” are seriously damaged when a former Social-Democratic German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is named to head the Russian natural-gas company Gazprom hardly a month after leaving office.

The sacredness of Dimanche

The Wall Street Journal on the possible enactment of a law making possible for some French businesses to open on Sunday especially those, which attract the majority of tourists in cities such as Paris:

For many French citizens, being able to shop and work on Sunday would improve the quality of their lives. Some workers, such as students, even prefer to work on weekends. Opening on Sunday is good for the job market too. Legislative backers say the measure could save 15,000 jobs.
France being France, the bill will not make it universally legal to trade on Sundays -- that would be too simple. It will merely allow more stores to open in tourist areas and cities of more than one million people. Businesses will need the regional prefect's authorization, and the measure makes it illegal to discriminate against employees who refuse to work on Sunday. Workers will be paid double for Sunday duty. Even so, the proposal is proving controversial. The Socialist Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, said recently: "Sunday is a day of rest respected by most citizens and it must not be sacrificed by this vision of a de-regulated economy that does not take into account the family and personal lives of workers."
Au contraire. If France is going to emerge from the economic slowdown as quickly as possible, businesses need to be free to adapt to changing times -- including the ability to serve customers when the customers want.

I have to admit that I would love it if almost everything wasn't closed in France on Sundays, but I'm wondering if it is still possible for some countries to refuse Americanization (which I love) while hanging on to what make them unique. My guess is that once that law is passed, it is the beginning of the end for in a couple of years, everything will be open on Sundays in Paris and elsewhere because the thing about Americanization is that you can just taste bit of it especially when you like perpetual movement and speed.

Change, bling, and fitness to lead

The Guardian Editorial on Berlusconi, Bling, Italy, and the G8 Summit:

Mr Berlusconi is the symptom but not necessarily the entire cause of his country's drift. Italians are not scandalised by him. They are dismayed about being criticised in the foreign press as a result of his antics, but they are not calling for the man himself to go.
Other European countries have coped with charismatic populists. France had a heavy dose of Nicolas Sarkozy in his bling phase, until the French said "ça suffit" and the president changed tack. But that is not happening in an Italy which secretly admires the agility of its leaders in escaping from the tightest of political corners. Until Italians start demanding serious standards from their leaders, the country is perhaps not the best venue for serious world summits.

I'm not buying it and I'm puzzled that all that the Guardian finds wrong with Berlusconi is his bling and clownesque behavior when his different times as the prime minister of Italy has shown that they are just a side show designed to distract attention away from his politics and policies. It is ridiculous to focus on Berlusconi the clown because such a distraction enables him to flirt shamelessly with Neo-Fascism groups and to concentrate his power while entertaining Italy and the world.

As manly and as Italian as Berlusconi

Gideon Rachman on Berlusconi, his love of young women, and Italian Culture:

Whatever the truth about these strongly-denied stories, Berlusconi - now in his seventies - has never made a secret of his liking for young women. I once went to a dinner he gave in Rome for European journalists. He ensured that all the prettiest women were seated at his table. One young Turkish woman, who had evidently missed the journalism-school lecture about “not getting too close to your sources”, ended up sitting on Berlusconi’s lap.
Many Italians find their prime minister’s behaviour acutely embarrassing. One commentator on the BBC this morning groaned that it is like “having Benny Hill as prime minister”.
I sympathise. But I also think that Berlusconi is representative of something broader in Italian culture. If you watch Italian television it seems to be absolutely stuffed with game shows, full of giggling scantily-clad models who are being leched over by much older (and often shorter) men.

I've heard this before. It seems to me that every time a man acts like a pig, he will always find an excuse by talking about his genes, his manliness, his culture, his upbringing or just the fact that all the women he had/took/seduced were either willing or just bitches who haunted him until he game them what they wanted.

The same eternal struggle

Another one of Bruce Bawer's alarmist and ridiculous assertion on Europe, Islamofascism, Muslim Immigration, and Pim Fortuyn's heirs who are  battling courageously for its soul:

Who will win the war for the soul of Western Europe? The Islamofascists and their multiculturalist appeasers, many of whom seem to believe that their job is not to defend democracy but to help make the transition to sharia as smooth as possible? The nativist cryptofascists? Or Pim Fortuyn’s freedom-loving heirs? Interestingly, while Western Europeans have been heading in one direction, Americans have chosen to go the other way, replacing a president more loathed by the European elite than any in history with a man whom the same elite has celebrated to an unprecedented degree, often depicting his election as a mystical act of atonement for all of America’s past sins, real or imagined. The final question, then, is whether the Western European Left’s condescension toward America, and the American Left’s habit of holding Western Europe up as a socialist paradise, can survive the combination of Europe’s right turn and the elevation of Barack Obama.

Le net

David Post has an excellent post on France, the EU and Internet Speech, which is a must-read. My only criticism is that it asks more questions than it answers. The reason for that is that we are at a time where nobody quite knows where the law will go if the two options concerning Internet Speech remains between total freedom and censorship.

Secularization, Christianity, and Europe

Terry Sanderson on Secularization, Christianity, and the future of Europe:

A Eurobarometer poll (pdf) reveals that when asked about what they value most, only 7% of Europeans nominated religion. That same poll tells us that about half of Europeans think that religion is afforded too much importance. When asked about what values the European Union represents, the ranking starts with human rights (37%), then peace (35%), democracy (34%) and way down last again is religion with only 3%.
So, if Christianity is not the future of Europe, will the continent become Islamic?
The answer is again, no. The capitulation of western governments to the violence of Islamic jihadists and the subsequent channelling of all discourse about Muslims through religious representatives has created the impression that all Muslims are deeply pious and inimical to western values. They are not.
We have been bamboozled by the term "Islamophobia", which suggests that Islam is under systematic persecution in the west. But new research by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (pdf) shows clearly that while people who identify themselves as Muslims are, indeed, victims of much discrimination, by their own account hardly any of it is because of their religion. Another poll showed that young Muslims have a strong desire for westernisation, which again contradicts those who have been appointed to speak for them from the pulpits.

Shifting principles

Oliver Kamm on Liberalism, its ideals, and their degeneration:

Liberalism, in its broadest sense, has become suspicious of its own ideals.
Notions once considered reactionary, even extreme, have insinuated themselves into the mainstream of right-thinking (that is, left-thinking) social idealism.
The degeneration of progressive idealism has many roots. But among the most important is the instinct that the ideas of Western liberty are specific to time and place — that they are Eurocentric. Almost coincident with the revolutions of 1989, which testified to the power of the human instinct for liberty, was a far more atavistic political movement. (...) there is a type of left-wing thinking that regards militant Islam almost as idiosyncratic liberation theology. Verso, the left-wing publishing house, has produced a volume of the thoughts of Osama bin Laden entitled Messages to the World. To read the editor’s annotations is to gain the impression of a revolutionary figure who daringly challenges Western oppression. The mass murder of American and other civilians on 9/11 was the expression of a nihilistic, millenarian doctrine of religious absolutism. Yet for a certain type of critic the greatest war criminal of our age is Tony Blair.

I'm tempted, really tempted to agree totally with Kamm, but I can't because he doesn't present the whole picture. He sees a lot of the trees, but rearranges them to depict the forest that he wants to see.

The dangers of mediocrity

Tim Rutten reviews Bruce Bawer's new book on his favorite topic of the West, Immigration, Islam, Dechristianization, De-westernization, and terrorism, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom:

A mediocre book on an important topic always is disappointing.
When the treatment also is shallow and vulgarly argued -- as is the case with Bruce Bawer's "Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom" -- this reader is inclined to get up with a sour sense of resentment over time wasted, the sort of feeling that comes from being seated next to a garrulous bore at a dinner party.
A literary critic and writer for various neoconservative cultural and political journals, Bawer is also openly homosexual and has written extensively for a number of gay publications. He and his partner have lived in Europe for some time, and since moving there, Bawer has become one of those writers alarmed by what he sees as a cultural fifth column of Islamic immigrants gnawing at Europe's traditions of tolerance and democracy.
There certainly are dangerous, intolerant Islamists among Europe's immigrants, and their allies, he argues (not always inaccurately), are the dogmatic multiculturalists who find cultural equivalency between Magna Carta and sharia. The problem is that Bawer spins glancingly off that interesting, rather important point into descriptions of a vast, interlocking conspiracy of cultural, literary, journalistic and even entertainment elites he believes want to appease fundamentalist Islam and sell out the West's tradition of individual and civil liberties.
Why they're engaged in this betrayal is anybody's guess. That doesn't stop Bawer from enveloping one alleged case in point after another, rather like the rhetorical equivalent of a kudzu vine -- and with about the same logical structure.
Too often Bawer simply gets things wrong, both factually and by degree. For all his academic prominence, the late Edward Said never enjoyed anything close to the influence Bawer imagines for him; the notion that his debated book "Orientalism" changed the way the majority of Western writers and intellectuals perceived Islam simply is preposterous.

Extremism and European Elections

The Telegraph on the rise of Nationalist and Eurosceptic parties during the elections for European Parliament:

From Stockholm to Sardinia, Waterford to Warsaw, a noisy and eclectic band of nationalists and eurosceptics are on the campaign trail hoping to unseat their mainstream rivals in the European Parliament.
Dutch anti-Islamists, Hungarian nationalists, Italian separatists and an Irish-backed anti-Lisbon Treaty party are all clamouring for seats when Europe goes to the polls between 4 and 7 June. And a combination of dismally low voter turnout and the economic downturn looks set to play into their hands in the vote. Job losses and the grimmest economic forecasts in decades have created the ideal conditions for single-issue candidates and marginal groups hostile to the EU to win seats in the Strasbourg assembly.
"It's a worrying trend" says Urszula Gacek, a centre-right Polish MEP whose country is itself home to several arch-conservative Catholic parties and headed by a eurosceptic President, Lech Kaczynski. "The extremists are better at mobilising their voters, by playing on citizens' fears and talking up the need for protectionism and the closing of borders."

The real issue is that European elections are the best election for those groups because it offers them a forum to vent and to have a chance to gain power because their countries's political system, more often than not, marginalize them by making difficult for them to have a voice in their own domestic parliament or to be something other than a minority group, which has to lend its support to a majority group. The point is that European elections are the only elections where the most extreme groups can have their voice heard because they express concerns, which voters have because Europe still feels foreign to them and that none of the regular political parties have a marketable and coherent vision of Europe, which palliates the fears and anger within their countries.

Beef and fluff

The Guardian on the fall from grace of Rachida Dati, France Sarkozy's justice minister who, no so long ago, was celebrated as a successful example of integration à la française only to be dismissed from the Sun king's court for her exuberance and luxurious taste:

Rachida Dati, the beleaguered French justice minister, may have been lampooned for her devotion to wearing ostentatious catwalk fashion at inappropriate moments, but having been forced by Nicolas Sarkozy to run in the European elections as a way of sacking her from government, she remains defiant in her choice of footwear.
Once she was Sarkozy's handpicked symbol of change, hugely popular with the public as the first Muslim woman to hold a major government post. Now, after a spectacular fall from grace, Dati is using the European election campaign to fight back.
Despite trying to prove her commitment by returning to work five days after giving birth by caesarian section, Sarkozy ordered her to run in order to sack her after the 7 June vote. She felt "humiliated", according to the former prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin.(....) Dati wants to repair her own personal standing in order to be able to pursue her ambitions to become Paris mayor at a later date.
But even her symbolism as a hero of France's new ethnic minorities has taken a dent. "With her tenacity, she's a total inspiration," said Madad Zineb, 25, a student at the meeting. "But I think after Dati it now might be even harder for the young generation of ethnic minorities to break through in politics. There is now so much focus on personal history and all the tiny details of your private life. France has gained new ­hunger for that."

The problem for Dati is that she is no longer useful to Sarkozy precisely because she was solely a symbol. In politics, as anywhere else in life, it is always possible to replace symbols where they are no able to become gain some substance and gravitas by proving that they are about more than their gender, their beauty, their race or their religion . In Dati's case, she remained the glamorous and ambitious woman of Algerian and Moroccan origin, with a admirable life story, but never became fully a political woman with ideas and indispensable skills. In other words, she is just a celebrity and people don't take her seriously because she is perceived as one of Sarkozy's creatures who needs to accept her bannishment because she didn't seize the chance of a lifetime. Most people want her, especially her peers who are competing with her for the king's attention,  to fade in the background or to just die of boredom in Strasbourg. The saddest thing about Dati is that she is worth more than her caricature even though she was content with being fluffy because she thought probably that her status as a symbol would protect her from political and public attacks and would stop the French from viewing her as a cold calculating woman who did everything to succeed except studying her craft to become competent. Rachida Dati suffers from the same ill that plagues Sarah Palin, the airhead syndrome except that in her case her minority status and the fact that she does have a compelling rise from poverty to riches immigrant story makes her more sympathetic  and less contemptible because some fills that she had/has no control over her political fate and that she had/had few choices in life.

The case for enlargement

Borut Grgic makes the case for further enlargement of the European Union, which both Sarkozy and Merkel oppose:

The EU is a project in the making, which is why we have an enlargement policy, which has been the single best tool for reuniting the Continent. It has turned Europe into the biggest market in the world, and it has injected dynamism into the European economy. Now, it seems, someone wants to reverse this progress and halt enlargement.
The story of Europe, the dreams of Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman, later embraced and championed by Helmut Kohl, was a united, free and prosperous Europe. When the Berlin Wall fell, tyranny cracked. Millions of oppressed were free to speak, to act and to create. The splash of creativity that was reborn in the East is still surging and radiating energy across all of Europe. This is what the European dream is all about -- hope. Enlargement is the policy that gives our European brothers and sisters stuck on the margins of Europe the hope to be brave, to continue with reforms and political transformation despite the risks.
Enlargement is not about the political elites, but about the European citizens. It was always about improving the lives of the citizens across Europe. It is easy to dismiss our eastern neighbors on account of their leaders. Eurocrats with big egos dismiss the prospect that Ukraine, Georgia or Azerbaijan may one day become full members of our EU family. They criticize their leaders and their systems: there's too much corruption, too little political pluralism, and they are too slow at embracing economic change.
This all may be true today, but enlargement is about tomorrow. Having a strategy is having a vision, and the EU has no strategy for the East, which suggests there is no vision of what Europe ought to look like in 2030.

The problem for those who favor further enlargement of the EU and the reunification of Europe is that it is still dealing with the 2004 enlargement . Moreover,  without the support of France and Germany, which is unlikely to come any time soon, it is impossible for more countries to join the union because those are the two largest and most powerful of the union and that their support is essential. Enlargement of the EU is a romantic notion on paper, but it has started to be viewed by the most powerful countries, which favor a deepening of ties, as a hindrance to the growth of the EU as a rival to both China and the US especially in the times of economic crisis.
The elephant in the room is Turkey and the fact that the EU has started enlargement talks with that country even though many countries don't it to become a member makes it more difficult for the EU to open up to new countries while it hasn't found a solution to its Turkish problem.

The power of received ideas

Peter Baldwin on Europe, America, the perceived and real differences between the two continents:

(...) the European press wants the juicy, titillating lowdown. And America certainly dishes that up. Is there any other nation that washes its dirty laundry so publicly? Hence that genre of such fascination to the European chattering classes: the tedious travelogue by the sophisticated European, whether BHL, Baudrillard or Borat, observing American yokels and reporting back with the smug assurance of superiority to other sophisticated Europeans.
Moreover, Europe’s various cultures are ones still steeped in the lore of national stereotypes and quite happy to wring whatever elixir can be had from them. Who can forget Edith Cresson, Mitterrand’s prime minister, convinced that no Frenchman was gay, while the English were all limp-wristed poofs? Or consider the extent to which no Europeans, however otherwise politically correct, can be shaken in their conviction that the Roma really are shifty and thieving. (...) Here, we come to the grain of truth to the Atlantic divide. If there is anything that most separates American society from Europe, it is the continuing presence of an ethnically distinct underclass. Even as other outsiders have successfully assimilated, the tragic resonances of slavery in the black urban ghettos of America continue to prevail. (...) And if it is this distinct urban underclass that most distinguishes the US from Europe, Europeans should take notice. Europe’s birthrates have plummeted and immigration continues unabated. It is a demographic certainty that an ethnically and religiously distinct lower class in Europe will grow in the decades to come. Perhaps Europe will turn out to have been lucky. Having instituted universalist social policy, highly regulated labour markets and redistributive fiscal policy in the belief that it was all, so to speak, being kept “in the family,” Europe may weather the expansion of its social community. On the other hand, the social fabric may fray.

European cowardice

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on what she believes to be an identity crisis in Europe, which makes Europeans unwilling to die for their values such as free speech and willing to tolerate the intolerable from Muslims :

Europe has become a place for new religions, new creeds, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. Everything is thus relative. This is an uncertainty that the Muslim does not share. The Muslim ethic and tribal spirit are far more resilient and fierce in war than the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.
(...)Take the debate on freedom of expression. In 1989 and afterwards, the provocations in the name of Islam were greeted with a confident, "No way! This is Europe, and you can say what you like, write what you like," and so on.
Two decades later, Europeans are not so sure about the values of freedom of expression. Most members of the media engage in self-censorship. Textbooks in schools and universities have been adapted in such a way as not to offend Muslim sentiment. And legislation to punish 'blasphemy', if not passed, has been considered in most countries - or old laws that were never used are being revived.
(...) Muslims try to abolish freedom of expression using the vocabulary of freedom
The terrifying paradox about these developments is that Muslim immigrants were admitted into European borders on the basis of universal rights and freedoms that a large number of them now trample on, while others perhaps watch passively, or seek to defend only the image of Islam.
(...)In reality, if Europe falls, it's not because of Islam. It is because the Europeans of today - unlike their forbears in the Second World War - will not die to defend the values or the future of Europe. Even if they were asked to make the final sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Islam has to do is walk into the vacuum.

I don't know, but there is something is this Ali's arguments that seems artificial and even insincere. I think that Glenn Greenwald is right to assert that people such Ayaan Hirsi Ali go out of their way to clash with Islam because they believe in global clashes and that there is indeed a clash of civilizations, which must be won by the West by taking the fight to the barbarians. However,  it is difficult to deny that there is a malaise within Europe caused not solely by Muslim immigration, but also by the critical debate, which has yet to happen or to least lead to some decisive political action about what it means to be European and whether nationality and citizenship can be about something other than culture especially when the later clashes with the present social compact.

Sarkozy and the objectification of Europe

Charles Bremner has a good post on Sarkozy's latest new remixed ideas about Europe as he launched the European elections in France. Sugary excerpt:

Sarkozy sees the economic slump as a chance to assert France-friendly regulation in the Union after two decades in which, in French eyes, Europe has worshipped at the "liberal" -- meaning free market --  altar. He wants an end to competition among states on tax rates and an end to market rules that block mergers between big European companies, he said. A "European preference" must also be applied to favour the goods and services of the Union over those from outside. That was a Sarkozy campaign promise in 2007, but we had not heard about it since then. 
Looking to the outside, Sarkozy said Europe "must cease diluting itself in an endless enlargement. Europe must have frontiers." Turkey could never become a member but should have a special partnership. Russia should have the same, he said. That goes down well in France and Germany but not with Britain -- nor the United States, as we saw when Barack Obama called last month for Turkish EU entry.  Sarkozy has not been so tough in practice as in his rhetoric. He has not attempted to stop Ankara's accession negotiations, which began in 2005. 
(...) Sarkozy is of course telling voters what they want to hear ahead of an election which will serve as a referendum on his two years in power. He is echoing the public mood. The Socialist opposition wants roughly the same though it disagrees with Sarko's hostility to the Commission and Parliament. Northern Europeans do not generally realise it, but Europe has been widely seen in France for the past 15 years as a British-backed plot to undermine the French welfare state and way of life. Sarkozy is posing as its saviour. Or, in the gushing words of Luc Chatel, the Government spokesman, today: Sarkozy's vigorous leadership has revived in Europe "la pensée universelle française". 

The sad truth is that Sarkozy is not really an European in the sense that he has solely an ideological view of Europe, which explains why Europe is an object in his political campaigns, which he uses to talk about France, its fears, its aspirations and the sense that the many French have that Europe to be acceptable must be French or rather France with bigger frontiers. I will start taking Sarkozy's ideas about Europe seriously when they are about something other than grandstanding and winning elections or rather showing that his political party is more patriotic and nationalistic than the French Left. The saddest thing is that the French Left cannot counter successfully Sarkozy's grand European ambitions or at least bash them for their insincerity because it too has objectified Europe by making it about Sarkozy and Neoliberalism. Europe is a subject which divides the French Left's electorate and upon which its leaders do not want to have to take a definite stand, which means that sadly elections, which are supposed to be about Europe are about nothing else than France.

Social unrest and révolution theory

When the Guardian writes an editorial about the risk of revolution of France, you know that we are in for more stories about the French, their childish belief in revolutions and their stubborn resistance to adapting to the world as it is not as it should be. What is funny or rather sad about the Guardian, editorial is that it gives the same old impression that France is paralyzed and that something is undeniably wrong within its society , which in my opinion leads automatically to the question whether the problem with most foreign analysts of French politics and society especially when they are Anglo-Saxons is that they start with the assumption that the French don't have the right to be French and that there is just one way for a society to prosper, meaning that we are back at TINA and the current economic crisis shows that such a mindset destroy economies and can make human life be about nothing more than their monetary value. This reminds of Madiha Tahir's article on Pakistan, the media and chaos theory; in the French case, the media's narrow focus, its obsession is on France, and social unrest and revolution theory. When I think that they were telling us that Sarkozy was to unfrench the French. Sugary excerpt:

Popular outrage at the banking bailout may be similiar around the world, but it finds different forms of expression. Barack Obama may have told AIG bosses that the White House was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. But in France the feeling is that the pitchforks are not just metaphorical.
International comparisons are deceptive, but on paper there is no glaring reason why the outrage in France should be so much more acute. The public deficit is high, but little more than half of Britain's. Nor is unemployment so much higher, although it is climbing faster. France entered the global turndown later than Britain, and fewer banks were in trouble. Social protection, although under attack, is still substantially more generous than in Britain.
The big picture, however, masks structural problems. France has one of the highest rates of youth unemployment in the developed world, with about one quarter of its 2.5 million unemployed under the age of 25. The truth is that no government in Europe has the luxury of treating French, German or Greek social unrest as a spectator sport. The breakdown in the social compact, the gulf between promise and delivery, should concern everyone.

Games and Ahmadinejad

Adrian Hamilton calls the walkout of the EU at Durban II during Ahmadinejad's speech childish and he even compares him to Sarkzoy:

Isn't it time western diplomats just grew up and stopped these infantile games over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? All that this play-acting over boycotting of conferences because of his presence and walking out because of his words achieves is to flatter his ego, boost his poll ratings at home and play into the hands of an Israel that is desperate to prove Iran the gravest threat to its existence.
True, Iran's President is not the world's most endearing character. Some of the things he says are certainly contentious. But he is far from the most offensive leader on the block at the moment. With Silvio Berlusconi sounding off about women and sex, and Nicolas Sarkozy sounding off about everything from the quality of his fellow leaders to the unsuitability of Muslims to join the civilised nations, and a Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, giving his views on gays, Europe could claim its fair share of premiers who should not be allowed out in public.

I agree that the walkout was childish but because it was predictable that Ahmadinejad was going to do what he did and that the most adult act would have been not to invite him or not to participate to the masquerade, which was Durban II. As to the comparison between Sarko and Ahmadinejad, it is laughable because there is still  an important distinction between clownesque behavior and despicable beliefs.

History, myths, victims, and the politics of commemoration

Sugary excerpt of the day from Isolde Charim's great article on the role that the memory of the Holocaust, victimhood play in Europe's view of its own history and on its attempt to unify itself:

(...) we are experiencing the formation of a new myth, one woven precisely from these narratives: national legends and tales of heroism are being replaced by those of one's own suffering and victimization. In this sense, texts such as the ones mentioned are performative: they contribute to the construction of the new myth. The moral equation of all victims of World War II has long since moved on from revisionism to common discourse that calls for the general recognition of suffering – be it that of the Germans as a result of the Allied bombing, or that of displaced persons. (...) In the days of the former Federal Republic of Germany, it was a matter of complete empathy with foreign victims. (...)Today, this "impossible empathy", this "unacceptable identification" (Diederich Diederichson), has shifted vehemently from foreign victims to the discovery of one's own victimhood. If today there is a "clash" of memories, then it is one of competing victim counts. It is fundamental that the new narrative, one supposed to bring about European unity and include the recognition of all victims, can only be attained through the dilution of the concept of victim to a general human concept overlooking a differentiation between victim and perpetrator.
In the West, this is being realized through the privatization of commemoration. Emotional history is rapidly taking up the entire space of memory. .

Mean boy

Catherine Philip on Sarkozy and his need to gossip about other world leaders:

Nicolas Sarkozy has no such excuse. He's not some backroom operative, he's a head of state. He's meant to run a country. That has not stopped the arrival of a new - taller, more handsome and popular - president on the scene from turning him into the kind of bitchy little princess that would make Graham Norton gasp.
Barack Obama? “Not up to standard on decision-making and efficiency,” President Sarkozy whispers. “Never even ran a ministry.” It would be funny if it weren't so pathetically obvious. Mr Sarkozy is out to strip the new boy of his shine.
Or anyone else in the vicinity, apparently. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain? “Not very clever.” José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission? “Totally absent.” Even political loyalty counts for little. Angela Merkel, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Mr Sarkozy at the G20 on greater global financial regulation, was derided as jumping on the French bandwagon only after she realised how parlous was the state of German industry. Sarkozy is the original betrayer, smiling and simpering to your face with a concealed dagger ready to plunge into you when your back is turned.
There is one leader whom the “hyper-president” claims to admire: Silvio Berlusconi, despite his constant stream of gaffes. But Mr Berlusconi is a buffoon, not a bitch. Well might Mr Sarkozy aspire to his heights. If he had an ounce of Mr Berlusconi's boundless self-confidence, he would not need to sneak around like some pint-sized Iago dripping bile into ready ears.

I don't get it. Sarkozy is just being himself and the people who were singing his praise a year ago are now telling us that he is not up to the job. The sad truth in a world in love with Obama there can be no place and, more importantly, no love for Sarkozy. The good news for him is that adoration of political leaders especially when it is based on vacuity never lasts so in a couple of years, Obama will stop to be in vogue and Sarkozy will have the chance to amaze the same fools who rush in to fall in love.

Europeanizing America

When I read this sugary excerpt from Irwin Stelzer, I had to laugh: 

Obama’s critics have allowed themselves to be distracted by their distaste for his outsize budget deficits and massive interventions in the auto and financial services industries. Socialism, they say. Not a bit of it. Barack Obama did not tramp through the snows of Iowa and eat ethnic food to please the television cameras in order to end up personally guaranteeing Americans that he will have their tail pipes replaced if necessary. Or to fight with bankers about their compensation, or pick the hotels in which they would be permitted to entertain clients.
He did it to convert America into a social democracy on European lines. Smaller cars; more modest homes; faster trains; healthcare for all, managed by the government; an electric-supply system engineered according to government specifications; guaranteed college tuition with associated control over universities. And, necessarily, higher taxes — at first on ‘the rich’, then on the middle class, in a massive effort to transfer control of the nation’s income from those who earned it to government bureaucrats.
In short, Obama is taking very seriously his self-description as a ‘transformative’ president. Lincolnesque. Rooseveltian. His stimulus programme is important to him only because he must get the economy moving if he is to retain his political clout and win another term, by the end of which the government will be controlling an increasing portion of the nation’s output and wealth. After two terms, that will be a permanent change.

Although  I'm not a fan of Obama, I know that he doesn't want to Europeanize America, he doesn't know enough about Europe (which is regrettable) to have such a grand aspiration and to even have the conviction that there are things in Europe, which could be good for America. My problem with Obama is that he has decided to be great, without deciding his policies, what is negotiable and non-negotiable, but that still, he symbolizes change and an improvement over Clintonism when he is Clintonism with a multiracial face. This explains his pragmatism, and why he doesn't have a backbone. Obama's truest and most unshakable conviction may be the one that he has that he was born to be a great president of the United states. But what does it mean to be a great president of the United  States nowadays and most especially can you become great without beef but with solely glitz and symbolism?

Mutual disdain and distrut

I agree with this:

Just as anti-Americanism serves a particular indispensable political purpose in Europe (and in Britain) as a bonding measure for the Left, so anti-Europeanism will come to have a valuable function for the Left in America. It will be Europe's fault if the dreams of the Obama administration cannot be fulfilled: if universal healthcare is not deliverable, it will be because the US has had to foot the entire bill of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan. If poverty and social deprivation cannot be cured, it will be because Europe left the Obama administration to go it alone on fiscal stimulus. On the other hand, if the White House strategies succeed in Afghanistan and on the economy, then Europe will have been proved wrong as well as useless. If he fails, it can be blamed on the Europeans. If he succeeds, he will have done so without their help. So what will be the point of talking to them as equals ever again?

At the root of the issue is the fact that neither America nor Europe have a deep knowledge of each other. or at leas that this knowledge is corrupted by either a superiority or an inferiority complex. Europe to America is an old continent made of countries, which it feels more or less distant to. To Europeans, America is a spoiled country, which still needs to grown up in spite of its power.

The trouble with inflated and great expectations

I have to say that I can't wait to see what will happen when Obama and Sarkozy have a real conflict instead of just having these little tit for tat , which just show that they neither trust nor really like each other. In any case, I agree with the Economist that one of the cause of the problem is inflated expectations, but the main cause is great expectations, which is due to the fact that both Obama and Sarkozy promised the people who elected them that they were going to change not only their countries, but the world and that they believe that the other is an obstacle for such a change or rather for them, becoming the great one. In simple terms, Obama and Sarkozy are both trying to become the leader of Change and to avoid being seen as an ordinary leader. Sugary excerpt:

Mr Obama has agreed to return to France to commemorate the 65th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. But there is some disappointment that it took such effort to secure this trip. Britain’s Gordon Brown not only hosted the Obamas during the G20 summit in London but has visited them in Washington. The French find this unfair. Mr Sarkozy undertook a prolonged charm campaign to position himself as America’s new best friend, rewriting the Gaullist rules and closing a chapter of bitter Franco-America relations. (...) The cause of the frustration may be inflated expectations. Neither the Germans nor the Italians have been favoured by Mr Obama more than the French. It may have been unrealistic of Mr Sarkozy to imagine he could rival the special relationship between Britain and America. Nor does his theatrical style help. Mr Sarkozy’s joint effort with the Germans to turn the G20 summit into a showdown between continental Europeans and “Anglo-Saxons” may have boosted his standing at home, but it will not have endeared him to Mr Obama. Mr Sarkozy brings formidable energy and creative ideas to the diplomatic dinner table. Yet, even under Mr Obama, it may take longer than he hoped to rebuild real trust between America and France.

Context, History, and Art

Interesting point from Michèle Cone on France's changing history and the role played by its intellectuals in rewriting or rather refocusing history by limiting or ignoring  the relevance of context:

While the Gaullists had supported the myth of a unified France against Vichy and the Nazi enemy, the Socialists now in power saw the Ophuls film as sympathetic to a new myth embodied by the opportunistic political past of their president, who first supported the Vichy regime and then shifted allegiance to the Resistance. The shattering of the Resistancialist myth did not, it seems to me, get us any closer to how the French, including the intellectuals among them, behaved during the Occupation years.
The emergence of Ionesco, Cioran, and Eliade—the latter two overtly pro-Nazi—dates back to 1949–51 and has a different context, which Daniel Lindenberg points to in Les années souterraines 1937–1947 ("Résistance: une culture mort-née"). He sorts out not two but three major intellectual networks emerging from World War II: (1) the Resistance-inspired literature, which, he says, was put down as inferior in formal qualities; (2) the existentialist philosophy of left-wing intellectuals who had not been actively involved in the Resistance but who had not collaborated; and (3) an old right-wing intellectual elite that emerged under the scrutiny of liberation tribunals for pro-Vichy or pro-Nazi attitudes. Thanks to their value to France as big names, members of this last grouping were quickly forgiven and resumed their role as mentors to the likes of Eliade and Cioran, among others. Was Jean Paulhan, the moral conscience of intellectual France after the war, an early case of "Resistancialist" denial when he turned against the verdicts of purge tribunals, or was he implying that context is irrelevant to the criticism of literary works?

Every time that a country has trouble with its history, it is mostly because it also has trouble with its identity. I think that Paulhan's view of the context wasn't that it was irrelevant, but rather that it couldn't  be a criteria to judge the value of a literary work. That distinction may be amoral or even immoral, but it takes us back to the identity question and to the fact that good and particularly great French artists could be forgiven or at least not despised for not having resisted Nazism because their art gave France some ouph, grandeur and because that fact in turn elevated their country from the evils of the context. Louis Ferdinand Céline didn't have to be good ,not anti-semitic or rather to say things with more complexity, his views and his politics could be ignored given the spectacular nature of his art. This same reasoning explains why Irène Némirovsky was convinced that she would be saved and that France would recognized that her writings had erased her Jewish ancestry to make her invaluable and thus worthy to be spared no matter what the context was. France doesn't have the same view of morality, of culture and of literature as Americans. It is in part for this reason that its history evolves, that its culture is at the center of its identity and that its literature stagnates when its culture, its history,and its identity are not synchronized.

The best for the worst

Well, Gideon Rachman says it all, I don't agree, but his is a legitimate point of view:

When Mr Obama won office, The Onion, a satirical magazine, greeted his victory with the headline “Black man given nation’s worst job”. Watching Mr Obama’s progress around Europe this week, this seemed a reasonable summary of the situation.

The new American president faces an economic disaster at home, a stalemated war in Afghanistan, unpredictable adversaries in places such as North Korea, and largely unhelpful allies in Europe. This week Mr Obama cemented the impression that he is an unusually gifted and intelligent politician. But that does not mean he will succeed. It could just be that he is the right man at the wrong time.

I have to say that I find the suggestion that Obama is too good for America, to be president of the United States disturbing.

NATO and Nation-building

A good point from Judah Grunstein on NATO and nation-building:

After an initial urge to justify the Afghanistan mission with the Article 5 security guarantee was rebuffed by the U.S., the transnational terrorist threat was grafted onto the previous nation-building vision. The result is the emerging consensus among Western strategic planners that stabilizing failed states is the best way to address the terrorist threat.
I would argue that this hybrid vision of nation-building as national security is misguided on a strictly national level. But it is wildly misguided on a NATO-wide level, if for no other reason than that the alliance's failure to implement it effectively in Afghanistan demonstrates that it is not a realistic objective. That, in turn, is compounded by the context of obligation that the alliance structure places around such an ambitious and ultimately unaccomplishable mission.
Instead of basing the alliance's future on what it has historically done worst, we should base it on what it has historically done best, namely deterring attacks on European member states. In the current context in Europe, that would allow for a significantly scaled-down alliance, thereby freeing up capacity for individual states to engage in multilateral nation-building missions as they see fit.

I've always found the term Nation-building appalling, naive, condescending, misleading, and western-centric. I have never understood what other than a misguided and prejudicial complex of superiority or a Forrest Gump like belief in the power of generosity can make policymakers and politicians believe that they can build a nation from the ground up when they are doing so in territories where they are not only not welcomed, but considered as agents of evil. It is dangerous for powerful and formal colonial countries to believe that they can build nations especially when it is obvious they have never been particularly good at it and more importantly when they will never be able to gain the trust and the good will necessary to even attempt this mad and impossible enterprise.

Europe is weak

I have a lot of respect for Joschka Fischer  so when when he talks, I listen. I'm forced to wonder what are the implications of his assessment of the ability of Europe to have a strong and effective partnership with the United States:

As regards the transatlantic relationship, what we will see is that Obama will confront all of us. He wants a reliable partner on the global stage in Europe. France and Britain – oh, I have to apologise, Britain and France – are the most powerful European nations. Germany has the biggest economy and the biggest population. Italy is in a very, I will use the diplomatic word, complicated situation. Don't laugh, it's the fourth biggest economy, still. And then there is Spain and Poland, not to mention Romania. This is the European reality. If the United States comes to us and asks for a partnership, if we would be honest we would say 'Yes, that's what we need, but unfortunately we are not ready'. And this, in turn, will encourage the US to act on a more unilateral level. The US is by far the most powerful nation, around the globe, and I think it's a big achievement and a definite break with the unilateralism of Bush, that the Obama administration is asking us to contribute not only in discussions, but also in real terms by the implementation of a multilateral approach: 'Let's do it together, let's decide it together, let's implement it together.' But if we can't deliver we will push the US back into a more unilateral approach. We shouldn't fool ourselves.
This has nothing to do with whether I am a pro-European or a 'Euro-Sceptic'. It's about capabilities: 'Can we deliver?' This will be the real question. This is not just about security policy – it's also about the fight against climate change, terrorism, poverty. In all these issues, the question will be, 'Can you deliver?' From my point of view, we can't deliver as we should. I am not saying we can't do anything, but for a real partnership in the twenty first century between both sides of the Atlantic our capability might be too weak.

I'm wondering if Fischer's assessment doesn't have everything to do with the fact that France and Germany don't have the same goals and the same vision for Europe and therefore cannot serve as its leading force. What we saw in London between Merkel and Sarkozy show how much things have changed and that the one thing that seem to force the Germans and the French to act together is to be visible in front of America and not to be ignored by its leader. 

Social safety nets

According to this, unemployment is higher in the US than in France since the beginning of the economic crisis in part because there is no social safeguards against massive job losses in the US:

(...) the U.S. recession has gone on for longer and is deeper than in Europe, and therefore has sapped three times as many jobs.  The unemployment rate in the U.S. is higher than in the U.K., and close to France's. (The U.K. and French numbers above are estimates.) And the job-losses are accelerating faster in the U.S. than in other countries.

Hum, does this fact mean that there are good things about the so-called European way of life and capitalism after all?

Creating a new world

Two contradictory views of the G20 summit and the idea that it has created something. Doug Sanders believes that something happened, that the Washington consensus has been altered  and that the US is less powerful as it was yesterday:

The Bretton Woods institutions, and the U.S. government's financial arms, have overseen the expanding world economy for six decades and they were at the centre of yesterday's proposals to rescue that economy from its debt-driven collapse.
But their role, and the shape of the world, is permanently altered. Until 2009, the fundamental goal of the IMF and its sister organizations was to deregulate the world economy, to remove restrictions from finance capital.
Under yesterday's agreement, those organizations will serve as regulators: As well as keeping the financial system working and rescuing nations from bankruptcy, the IMF and new organizations will aggressively police the worldwide credit, finance and banking systems to prevent a recurrence of the bad-credit spiral that led to the current crisis.
In exchange, they will become far less U.S.-dominated: In exchange for substantial contributions to the fund, formerly developing countries such as China, India and Brazil will play a larger role controlling them.

Simon Heffer shares my view that the summit was pointless:

The piece of theatre that concluded in London on Thursday was one of the great confidence tricks of our lifetimes. Just getting the 20 most important heads of government on the planet together in one place and not being unpleasant about each other was, we must concede, something of an achievement. But it won't make a blind bit of difference to the world's economy. [...] this international act of posturing was pointless; because despite having caused the problem, the political class had none of the requisite skills to sort it out. It also seems that some great issues have been fudged. Is the New World Order in favour of a new fiscal stimulus or not? It pains me to say so, but I have been impressed by the Germans (with the French hanging on to their coat-tails) holding out against recklessly pumping money into the economy as Mr Obama and, to a lesser extent, our own Government have done. Perhaps it is as well for them that this summit was not held a couple of months later, for when the rioting starts on mainland Europe with the advent of warm weather, and no devaluation of the euro is possible to stop the haemorrhage of jobs, such firm principles might be harder to maintain.

The fact that people over whether something was accomplished at the G20 Summit shows that it is not the way to formulate earth-shattering policies because the grandstanding, the gimmicks, and the schemes make it difficult/impossible to see through the smokes, the spin, and the syrupy expressions of noble sentiments.

Europe vs. America

Quote of the day via the New Criterion :

The choice facing us is between the soporific egalitarianism and nihilism of Europe and a return to the robust individualism and self-reliance that made America, in Lincoln’s famous phrase, the “last best hope of earth.”

The winners and the losers of the London Summit

Philip Stevens on the G20 summit:

The summit’s deeper significance, though, lay in its unspoken recognition of the remaking of the geopolitical landscape. Not so long ago, this would have been a gathering of the Group of Eight rich nations, perhaps with cameo roles for China, India and a few others. Now, Hu Jintao, Manmohan Singh and the rest take their places as of right. The world, in other words, is at last catching a true reflection of itself.
Mr Obama has been more alert than most to this shift. Europe speaks the language of inclusiveness but is genuinely fearful of giving ground to the rising powers. Mr Sarkozy’s petulance is more a cry of pain than a measure of confidence.
By contrast, the US president has grasped that if America is to hold on to its pre-eminent role in the world it will be within a system in which others have a stake. Mr Obama shows wisdom beyond his years in realising that to understand the extent of US power – and it is still unrivalled – a president must also map its limits.

I think that it was a tie because everybody especially Obama had no interest in seeing the summit failed, but instead wanted to give the appearance that they did achieve something. Obama won by showing up with his 500 advisers and for looking the part without showing obvious signs of incompetence. Sarkozy won for grabbing some of the light by threatening to walk out and by associating with Merkel not to lose. Brown won because the communiqué sounded good. Finally, everybody else won by smiling at the photo-ops and by saying the right thing on the crisis and the need to work together to find solutions. In other words, all of this was much ado about nothing, but it pleases the press because it gives them something to talk about besides economics and finance, which they don't really understand.

Silly games

I find the G20 London to be a silly affair especially because it shows that the leaders (I'm using the term loosely) of our world are not, yet, up to the challenges that are crippling the lives of less privileged. They are obsessed with their political future and paralyzed by the fear of being the losers of what they view as the game to remake the economic system. A good example is this French-German ploy during the summit to matter so not to let Obama and Brown take the lead. I believe that Merkel's partnership with Sarkozy is temporary; it is mostly about showing the new king of the world that Germany is as, if not more, important than Britain to the United States. Sugary excerpt from an article in the Independent on the situation

The Franco-German intervention throws down the gauntlet to Mr Brown and Britain's chairmanship. At best, it will have precipitated much nocturnal redrafting; at worst, it risks a final communiqué even more diluted than the drafts already in circulation, or even – a prospect almost unthinkable – no significant agreement at all, either on fiscal stimulus or on regulation.
The outcome today could yet surprise. Nothing at such gatherings can be excluded, especially when the summit brings together as many divergent interests as this one and has been prepared against so fast-moving a backdrop. Yet it looks very much as though Gordon Brown's great hopes of laying the foundations of a new world order are destined to be cut down to size – and with it, his own political legacy.
But the last minute, and very public, démarche from the leaders of Europe's two biggest economies also casts the whole project for global economic management in a different light. The combination of a new and untried President in the White House, a rising China, a friendlier Russia and a more vocal Franco-German alliance marks a signal change. Yesterday, the United States and Britain seemed suddenly a little smaller, China a little bigger, and Continental Europe a force to be reckoned with.
By tonight, an agreed international plan of action along US-British lines might have shown this incipient redistribution of power to be illusory. Anything else, however, and we may be looking at the outlines of a very different future.

Obama will soon realize that he has to break Sarkozy and Merkel up if he wants to avoid these types of power-grabbing schemes, which will hurt him the most because he is supposed to change things and that he can't afford to be outplayed and outfoxed for the risk is to have his title as the leader of the free world to be undermined

Defending Anglo-Saxon capitalism

It's hard job, but somebody has to defend religiously the Anglo-Saxon economic model and way of life. I'm not sure that John Ibbitson does a good job doing it. I'm not even sure that there is such a thing as an Anglo-Saxon economic model anymore:

Anglo-Saxon capitalism – investment-friendly, export-oriented, low-taxed and minimally regulated – has been competing with its continental alternative – highly regulated, wealth-distributing and state-controlled – since the late 18th century. The Anglo-Saxon version is better. Britain launched, led and sustained the Industrial Revolution, and the United States launched, leads and sustains the Knowledge Revolution. There've been downturns, but we are wealthier and healthier than we'd have been with, say, France in charge.(...) We all want to live in a society where every child gets a good education, the poor have food and housing, and medical care is available for all. But we should also want to live in a society that encourages good ideas by making capital easily available and rewarding risk. Henry Ford and Bill Gates had good ideas. Because they were born in America, we live in their world. (...)  Anglo-Saxon isn't a race, it's an idea, which is why Mr. Sarkozy will berate Mr. Obama's Anglo-Saxon economics without irony. The recession will end, growth will resume and emerging economies will move closer to the Anglo-American model, because history has proved it works. This truth should be beyond debate, although it's a heck of a job getting some people to see it.

I wish Ibbitson's confidence was about more than a superiority complex and a blinding ideology. That said, I think Ibbitson misses the real issues because he wants to take some shots at the so-called European/French capitalism and way of life without addressing the center question of the direction and the sustainability of the current framework of globalization.