Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Europe Page 5 of 14

France’s Macron Wants a Technocratic Presidential State

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On July 6, 2017

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Rizal Park Tricolor

So, Macron has a huge majority, won on an historically low turnout. He has spent the summer fighting France’s Labor unions, his first priority being to overhaul France’s labor laws. For example, right now, workers can’t be made to answer emails outside of work hours. Macron will end that.

Of course, the changes are far more wide-ranging than that. The long argument has been that France’s economy isn’t all that it could be because it is not flexible: It’s hard to fire people, and you can’t make them do anything you want them to when you manage them. Arguably, you can make them do very little.

Macron, who ran the vastly unpopular economic policy of the last government (something people seem to have forgotten) is a dedicated technocrat.

In his recent speech, Macron said he wanted to shrink the legislature by one third, from over 900. And he thinks that the legislature should legislate less, and just judge what the executive does. This amounts, of course, to passing only bills suggested by him. Additionally, and of course, his party controls both houses of parliament right now, but this goes beyond normal French politics, where bills are not just suggested by the President and Prime Minister.

(The President appoints the Prime Minister, and the PM is then generally seen as following the President in most things.)

So this isn’t a small thing, it’s Macron saying he wants the power of a Westminister-style Prime Minister with a solid majority. Generally and theoretically, in this type of country, parliament can not simply do what the President orders. But in these days of tight party discipline, a PM with a majority is, in practice, close to being an elected dictator.

Such strong executives have their advantages, no doubt, but Macron does want a change that gives him more power, and he’s willing to go to a plebiscite to get it.

Then he will use it to remove French workers’ rights and reduce their wages and benefits. Because that is what he wants; it is the core neoliberal project, in which Macron is a true believer.

Macron is “young” but he’s not that young; he’s of the generation in which if you wanted to be taken seriously, and have any power, you had to sign on to neoliberal verities.

The French are going to get what they voted for, good and hard.

But little to none of what Macron does cannot be undone, and his making the executive more powerful may turn out to be a mistake in five or ten years, when someone like LaPen or Melenchon becomes president and wields those powers for which Macron fought.

Simply put, neoliberal policies never actually work. They can produce brief sugar highs of frothy economies, and France may get some of that, as money boils away from the middle and up to the top and housing bubbles and others stupidity are engaged. But this is late neoliberalism, the French middle class and poor are already suffering, and I don’t think enough bribes will be given to them to keep them onboard. They gave Macron a huge majority, yes, but on low turnout. This is neoliberalism’s last big chance in France.

When it fails, and it will, the French will turn either to the right or to the left. Within a decade, most likely.

And the boy prince, riding so high now, will be left spluttering like Tony Blair, wondering why all his wonderful plans didn’t work out, and assuming that those who reject his brilliance are buffoons.

So it shall be.

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You Can’t Stay in the EU or Single Market And Be For Labour’s Manifesto

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On June 21, 2017

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So, 30 Labour MPs have signed a letter calling for Corbyn to stay in the EU’s single market as a member.

This is not possible IF Labour’s manifesto is meant seriously. EU single market law is explicitly neoliberal, it does not allow for things that Labour wants to do, like nationization.

Access to the single market is one thing, being a member is another. Corbyn cannot do it and keep his promises, it is that simple.

The EU is a barrier against horrible things the Tories want to do, but it is a roadblock against basic social-democratic policies that Corbyn wants.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Real Threat To Europe Is Neither America Nor Russia

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On May 29, 2017

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So, much hysteria over Donald Trump’s disdain for NATO and his dislike of Germany.

Angela Merkel said that Germany no longer has a reliable US partner.

Oh dear. Oh dear.

Let us lay out the simple facts:

..the EU’s population is 508 million. When the UK leaves, it will be 447 million.

Russia’s population is 143 million.

Minus Britain, the EU has a GDP of 18.1 trillion (purchasing power parity), Russia has an economy of 3.5 trillion (ppp). Germany alone has a GDP (ppp) of four trillion.

So, if NATO dissolves, Europe should be perfectly capable of defending itself. It it cannot, it is because it refuses to actually allocate resources for defense against an opponent it outweighs.

Europe does not need NATO to defend itself from Russia.

Now, let us be even more brutally frank: Since WWII, Europe has been an American protectorate. It is that simple. Some commenters will probably disagree, but I’m not going to waste time proving the obvious. Indeed, “protectorate” is a kind way of putting it.

The truth is that the US withdrawing is no danger to Europe. Europe has all the resources it needs to defend itself and care for its own affairs: people, a large economy, and technology. What specific technologies it does not have, it is completely capable of developing or buying.

Furthermore, NATO expansion is one of the major causes for enmity between Europe and Russia; Russians note that NATO is far, far more powerful than they are, and they see its expansion (especially as George Bush Sr. promised NATO wouldn’t expand) as offensive. (I agree with them. You may be foolish, and disagree, but US foreign policy bobbleheads and “thinkers” have been quite clear about their intent.)

The real threat to Europe is not Russia, nor US disengagement, but, as it has been since German unification under Bismarck, Germany.

Germany is already integrating the units of smaller European countries into its own military.

Germany (and, yes, Germany WAS the prime mover) already destroyed an entire European country, Greece, to bail out its own bankers.

Germany’s industrial policy and clout has impoverished the European “South” through enforced austerity and the imposition of the Euro, which makes German exports cheaper than they should be and the exports of Southern European more expensive than they should be.

Germany essentially runs the EU’s monetary policy at this point, a policy which has been in the self-perceived interests of Germany, and only in any other country’s interest by coincidence. (Something the French should get around to noticing, and stop kneepadding for the next German annexation of France, even it is in name only.)

Germany is the actual threat to other European countries’ sovereignty. This might be acceptable if a German hegemony had a record of caring about what happens to non-German countries, but the record is clear and visible that it is not, and this is on the ground in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece and even France.

It is entirely true that the entire Eurocrat class is implicated, and that every European country has collaborators, including France (Macron is merely the latest to take the throne, and there is no question of his complicity, as he ran Hollande’s austerity program).

Nonetheless, and weirdly, the policies they promote are the ones that rebound to the benefit of Germany, and it is Germany who is widely understood, as in the case of Greece, to have the deciding vote.

Europeans should decide if a further federalized European Union, run by the Germans, for the Germans, is what they want, because that is what is on offer.

Trump should be a sideshow issue for Europeans. He is not a significant danger to them, except in the sense that he may be unleashing the Germans even further.

As is often the case, the politicians Europeans should be most scared of are their own: the collaborators who run their governments, and the German politicans who are sure that what is best for other Europeans countries is, coincidentally, identical with what they are sure is best for Germany.

(And anyone who thinks that Merkel is not essentially malign simply has not paid attention. If an evil person opposes a more evil person they do not become “good.” This is not to deny, that like many evil people, she has not done some good things.)

Look to your own house for the person who will beat, abuse, and likely kill you. This is true at every level.

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Macron vs. Le Pen in France

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On April 23, 2017

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This is the final showdown. A reminder, Macron ran Hollande’s economic policy, and wants to do even more “liberalizing” of the French economy. A.K.A., more gutting of worker’s rights, wages, and so on.

The polls show Macron winning, but given the reliability of polls lately, who knows?

What I do know is this: Macron will swiftly be as popular as Hollande (meaning, in the doghouse), and the next election, if LePen doesn’t win this one, will be LePen’s to lose (and if she loses, it will be to someone like Melanchon—a left wing populist).

Britain needs LaPen to win. LePen is willing to take the pain to Frexit. She won’t be slowed down by the EU’s promises of pain–instead, she’ll pile it on.

This is what 37 years of international neoliberalism has brought, and bought, us.

(Oh, and Corbyn is Britain’s only chance to do Brexit in a way that isn’t an enema with a sledgehammer, but it looks like that’s what Brits want.)

Should be interesting, anyway.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Realpolitik of Britain’s Interest in a LePen Victory

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On February 24, 2017

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Marine LePen continues to close the margins on a final round run-off. She’s still likely to lose, but it’s getting closer.

The odd thing here is that if Britain intends to Brexit, which it does, it would be very helpful to Britain if LePen won, because right now Brussels is determined to punish Britain severely for Brexit, so as to dissuade other possible rebels.

But LePen has said she wants Frexit, and if both France and England are leaving, it becomes quite hard to “punish” them, so long as they work together even slightly. That’s just too much of Europe, and especially Europe’s economy.

As I said in the past, I’d favor Brexit under a left-wing government, even minus the Euro, the binding agreements that are part of the EU make running a real left-wing government impossible, but under the Conservatives, it’s likely be a fiasco.

However the case for France is a lot stronger, because France isn’t winning under the Euro and hasn’t been for some time. France would be better out of the Euro. Again, it would be better that it be done by someone other than LePen, but the left has emasculated itself in these debates by refusing to be for nationalism, and thus ceding the anti-EU argument mostly to the right. (There are some exceptions.)

Frankly, the entire south of Europe should leave the Euro (though not necessarily the EU), and so should France. It just is not in their interest to stay, at least not if “interest” means “the interests of most of the population.”

It is a pity that people like LaPen and Farrage are the people filled with passionate conviction, while most of the left swings in the wind pathetically, and the only major left-wing leader of conviction, Corbyn, has polls leaving him far, far behind the Conservative party. (Though I consider that more an indictment of Britons than Corbyn.)

If the good people won’t do the right thing, it falls to the bad people to do the right thing in so much the wrong way that it may turn out to be the wrong thing.

This, by the way, is true as much of the EU as of leaving the EU. The EU and the Euro in particular were set up to force people into neoliberal policy. This was a betrayal of the spirit of the EU, which was about preventing war, not about impoverishing people. The technocrats are so convinced they are right that no amount of real world evidence of failure can convince them otherwise.

And so the right-wing rises. And Europeans are embracing them more and more.

Create an intolerable present with a clearly intolerable future and people will take a winger on very unpleasant people for even a slight chance to change things.

So it is, and so it shall be–if our elites don’t start changing, or we don’t change our elites.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Fools Russians Where Angels Fear to Tread

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On February 18, 2017

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD5phTXGN_0

(NB: post by Mandos.)

Recent events suggest that, whatever they may have originally thought, the Trump administration is in the process of being pulled back into the overall historical attractor of US policy regarding Russia. The Russian establishment had made no secret of its preference for Trump and its belief that Trump was a person with which they could deal on a more even footing, a politician in a mold they understood, etc.

I’m not here to argue whether or not Trump (or Flynn) is some kind of Russian plant, an issue that seems to be occupying many others.  I gather that conclusive evidence on this matter has yet to be produced and that it so far lies in the realm of (negative) wishful thinking.  However, Russian policy-makers are already voicing disappointment that Russia-favorable entities in the Trump administration are increasingly weakened. The US state, particularly its intelligence community, are deeply set up for conflict with Russia, for better or for worse, and it turns out that the White House is only part of a large infrastructure, and any fantasies of an election resulting in a vast purge and house-cleaning were just that: fantasies. The intelligence community still believes to its core in the necessity of containing Russia.

However, one thing that is different now is the position of Western social liberals. Unfortunately, Russia had decided to back in spirit, if not always materially, movements that are identified with various strains of nationalist conservatism that are hostile to the goals and beliefs of social liberals. This is not only in the USA, but especially so in Europe, with the on-going rise of the Le Pens, the Wilders, and other groups in the world. Once upon a time, social liberal groups were principally parochial movements which were relatively indifferent on foreign policy questions regarding Russia, and to a very large extent also overlapped with anti-war movements — and so were once at odds with the intelligence community.

However, the apparent desire of Russia to return to a world of ordinary nation-state politics, and therefore its willing appearance (at minimum) of siding with conservative nationalist movements, have led to many social liberals now viewing Russia as mortal threat to their projects, and therefore, having a plausible motive to try to subvert political movements like that of Trumpism to their aims.  In this situation, social liberals (or “identity politics” movements, or whatever you want to call them) will quite rationally stake out a position that the devil you know (American intelligence forces) are better than the devil you don’t (Vladimir Putin). This is not helped by the appearance of things like Russia loosening its laws on domestic violence.

While social liberals have not lately been winning elections on their platforms (most notably, in the USA due to the Electoral College structure), it would be a mistake to assume that these groups have no power whatsoever. In fact, they have broad and deep bases of popular support (merely electorally inefficient), and those bases are being pushed into the arms of forces hostile to Russian interests. The combination of Cold War-style intelligence community conservatism with popular social liberalism is one that is likely to lead to an even more hostile neo-Cold War posture on the part of the Western establishment in the medium-term, unless in the short term Trumpism can generate the political competence required to coerce the establishment in the other direction.

For its part, Russia has been attempting to play, in the “further abroad”, a soft power role given that its other options are not effective. It is attempting to play the part of a rival global hegemon without actually being a hegemon. It does not currently have the cultural or technological reach to do so.  While it operates a technologically advanced, developed economy, it is still highly dependent on natural resource development and export. That means that the risks accruing from a strategy of using cultural divisions in the currently hegemonic Western social order are high: should social liberals gain the upper hand due to the inability of nationalist populism to operate the levers of state effectively, they will be confirmed in a resolve for further containment and suppression of a Russia that took sides against them.

2016 In Retrospect

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On January 3, 2017

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There seems to be a general belief that 2016 was a particularly bad year. Part of that is the twin political events of Brexit and Trump, and part of it seems to be that a number of particularly beloved celebrities died.

But unless you were in a few specific places, like parts of Syria, and certainly if you were in most of the developed world, your odds of having something bad happen to you were about the same as they had been in 2015.

Certainly Brexit and Trump are both, potentially, earthquakes, though their severity remains to be seen, and I regard both as consequences of decisions that were made over a period of decades.

What made them seem so severe, I think, is that they were, to the liberal classes, surprises. In both cases, polls indicated they wouldn’t happen; and it was conventional wisdom among certain groups that both events were absurd.  Trump, in particular, was treated as a grotesque joke when he announced his candidacy, and right up to the last moment, almost literally, icons such as 538 and the New York Times insisted he was almost certain not to win.

When he did, an entire world view went away.

Because they thought it had been impossible for Trump to win. He was a joke, according to that world view, and those who held it have seized, in particular, on “Russia did it!” It was a deus-ex-machina, because their world model simply cannot accept that it happened.

And, in both cases (Brexit and Trump), there is a great deal of shaming and othering of those who voted the “wrong” way. They are castigated as stupid and immoral, people who are too dumb to vote in their self interests, to understand how the world works, motivated almost entirely by racism.

Bad people.

So many liberals in America and Britain now believe they live in countries where half the voting population are evil, stupid racists and that those people are now in charge.

Oh, and the big, bad Russians are also responsible.

While some are willing to admit that perhaps, just perhaps, the policies that even they voted for and/or supported (under Blair, Clinton, Obama, and the EU) might have something to do with all of this, the metaphysics of most essentially boils down to the notion that bad people (Russia, racists) combined with stupid people, are destroying our world.

Because they can see little responsibility for themselves (either in past policy or in the specifics of the campaigns (Clinton’s was notably incompetent)), they have eviscerated their sense of their own power, and thus their ability to create change.

Responsibility and power are exactly equal to each other. You have exactly as much power as you have responsibility, any mismatch is a denial of reality, and if society abets you in denying that reality, as it often does, by giving you more credit or less blame than you deserve, it does not change either your responsibility or power.

It is also true that an accurate perception of blame enables correct action. When Clinton and her team completely fumbled their campaign, not removing them from all positions of power indicates a willingness to tolerate failure again and again. Indeed, after Clinton, the presumptive front-runner, was defeated by Obama in 2008, perhaps the realization should have dawned on us/her that she and hers were incompetent and that she should not be the presumptive candidate. She started with a vast advantage and lost it.

Meanwhile, in the eight years Obama has led the Democratic party, vast losses have occurred in State Houses and Congress.

As for policies which have lead to vast numbers of Britons and Americans being willing to vote for Brexit and Trump; well, I have written on those subjects more than enough.

Liberals and centrists, as a group, deny responsibility, and thus deny agency. They refuse to put the locus of responsibility in those areas over which they have control. Instead, they blame forces over which they have no control (Russia) or over which they have less control (the current racism that is ex-nihilo, completely unrelated to the policies they have championed for decades).

It is not the crisis, as such, that predicts the future, it is the response. I was able to accurately predict the shape of America and Europe’s economy because I saw the response to the crisis in ’09. The day the outlines of Obama’s stimulus were announced (he’d already fumbled the bailouts, by bailing out the rich rather than ordinary people), I wrote that American jobs and wages would not recover for 20 years. Eight years later, that’s still looking accurate. (The unemployment rate is not what matters here, the jobs/population ratio is.)

So, seeing the liberal response to 2016’s political crises, it is clear that, at least so far, liberals have not learned the necessary lessons. Thus, trends will continue in the wrong direction. Locating the problems as beyond their control, liberals have self-emasculated.

There is still time for that to change, and perhaps it will. So far, however…well…

Happy 2017.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Italy’s Constitutional Referendum Fails, Europe Shudders

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On December 5, 2016

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The changes were meant to make pushing through austerity and bank rescue measures simpler.* Italy’s constitution almost certainly needs changes, but it probably didn’t need these changes.

This is another rebuke to the Eurocrats and the European Union project. The populist right is rejoicing.

Jeremy Corbyn recently noted that the right is taking real grievances and offering solutions which will, at best, only paper over wounds. The left has superior solutions, but has bound itself to a dying world order because of love for internationalism. (By the left, I don’t mean most left-wing parties, like France’s socialists or England’s Labour ex-Corbyn).

Because neo-liberalism has failed, and is finally seen, clearly, to have failed, there are now only three options:

  1. Right-Wing Populism
  2. Left-Wing Populism
  3. Police State Extension of the Current Order

That’s it. Choose your sides. Neoliberalism will only be viable if you’re willing to go full surveillance and police state.

If Trump goes in the direction Bannon desires, and which Trump has been talking up recently when he trashed China, then the neoliberal world order will be over within a year or two.

It should have ended quite some time ago, but it didn’t, and now its dismantling is going to be handled by some very unpleasant people, who, while not incompetent, do not have an ideology and policy set which can actually be expected to work out well for most people in anything more than the short run.

It is as it is.

(*As usual, the best solution would be to let the banks go under and let various people take their losses, bailing out ordinary Italians to some limited extent. Dead banks are dead banks. Let their shareholders and bondholders eat the losses.)

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