Foreign Policy: Rex Tillerson Is Underrated

The reasons for these lamentations aren’t hard to discern. Top positions around the department remain unfilled, morale is at rock bottom, and experienced senior diplomats are resigning in droves. Tillerson has yet to offer a clear vision of what U.S. foreign policy ought to be, has made little or no progress on the major diplomatic challenges the United States currently faces, and is sometimes at odds with President Donald Trump himself. He openly supports cutting his own department’s budget and has brought in an outside consulting firm to propose major reforms that have veteran officials up in arms. Given all that, no wonder so many observers find little to praise and much to condemn. [...]

Second, Tillerson is serving a president who is genuinely clueless about foreign policy yet seems to think he’s some sort of a strategic genius. Trump is good at selling himself and positively world-class at conning gullible people, but there’s a great deal he simply doesn’t know about foreign affairs, and some of the things he thinks he knows are wrong. He won’t stop tweeting twaddle, and smarter leaders than he is have taken his measure and figured out that flattering his ego and pandering to his business interests will get him to do what they want. Given the president he serves, how effective could Tillerson possibly be? [...]

Finally, let’s not forget that the State Department’s role was declining long before Tillerson showed up. The last secretary of state who had a lot of genuine foreign-policy clout was James Baker, who was both an extremely talented negotiator and also enjoyed an unusually close working relationship with President George H.W. Bush and national security advisor Brent Scowcroft. But that was more than a quarter-century ago. Since then, successive presidents have increasingly marginalized the department and concentrated more and more power in the White House itself, where the National Security Council staff has ballooned. The power of the Pentagon has been growing too, with regional combatant commanders controlling vastly greater resources and wielding a lot more influence than local ambassadors or even the secretary of state. This was true under Bill Clinton, true under George W. Bush (where Vice President Dick Cheney’s office also had considerable power), and true under Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton was a loyal team player and energetic salesperson during Obama’s first term, but she was given little independent authority and had little impact on policy. John Kerry was more influential — especially on the Iran nuclear deal — but that was mostly because Obama was happy to let him handle impossible tasks like Israeli-Palestinian peace and willing to let him take the fall if these initiatives failed.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Values That ‘Values Voters’ Care About Most Are Policies, Not Character Traits

“Values voters” — a label that emerged to describe conservative Christians during the 2004 election — are sometimes held up as prioritizing candidate character, meaning whether a candidate personally embodies Christian values such as kindness, honesty and forgiveness. But although personal character is important, evangelicals’ first priority is to elect politicians who will fight for them and advance their agenda on the issues they care about. [...]

According to a 2015 survey conducted by the Barna Group, a research organization that focuses on Christian trends, 58 percent of evangelicals said that candidates’ stances on the issues were a key factor for their presidential vote, while less than half said the same of a candidate’s character (46 percent) or religious faith (45 percent). Robert Jeffress, a prominent Christian conservative supporter of Donald Trump, told The Washington Post that for evangelicals, character matters, but “leadership, experience, morality and faith are all important, and the rank of those changes according to circumstances.” [...]

The policy goals that fall under the umbrella of “family values” or “moral values” are largely social and cultural, and they remain high political priorities for evangelicals. When asked in the same Barna survey which issues will have “a lot” of impact on candidate selection, evangelicals were about as likely to cite abortion (64 percent) and religious liberty (67 percent) as the economy (69 percent). [...]

On the campaign trail, Moore has denied the existence of evolution (57 percent of evangelicals do as well). He has said that Ronald Reagan’s famous statement about the Soviet Union being “the focus of evil in the modern world” could apply to the U.S. — when asked for an example, he pointed to the legalization of same-sex marriage. Moore has suggested that the 9/11 attacks may have been a punishment from God because abortion and sodomy are legal. He called the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage “even worse” than the 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case, which found that African-Americans were property and not citizens. The idea of electing a senator who does not oppose abortion appears to be particularly troubling for some Alabama evangelicals. “I don’t want to vote for a creep, but I also don’t vote for Democrats,” Charlene Buttram, who is married to a pastor in a town southeast of Birmingham, told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t believe in abortion.”

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The Calvert Journal: Holidays in Soviet Sanatoriums

Soviet-era sanatoriums are among the most innovative, and sometimes most ornamental, buildings of their time – from Kyrgyzstan’s Aurora, designed in the shape of a ship, to Druzhba, a Constructivist masterpiece on the Crimean shore that sparked rumours that a flying saucer had landed. Such buildings challenge the standard notion that architecture under communism was unsightly and drab. Sprinkled across the post-Soviet landscape, they survive in varying states of decay, with relatively few still in operation. But at their peak, these sanatoriums were visited by millions of citizens across the USSR each year, courtesy of the state.

The issue of free time greatly engaged Soviet leaders as they set out to define and shape the New Soviet Man. Unlike western vacations, which Soviets perceived as vulgar pursuits characterised by conspicuous consumption and idleness, holidays in the USSR were decidedly purposeful. Their function was to provide rest and recuperation, so citizens could return to work with renewed diligence and productivity. The 1922 Labour Code prescribed two weeks’ holiday a year for many workers and under Joseph Stalin the “right to rest” was enshrined in the 1936 constitution for all citizens of the USSR. In line with Stalin’s First and Second Five-Year Plans, writes Johanna Geisler in The Soviet Sanatorium: Medicine, Nature and Mass Culture in Sochi, 1917–1991, rapid development of the industry meant that by 1939, 1,828 new sanatoriums with 239,000 beds had been built. [...]

Alongside the rise of sanatoriums, “kurortology” – a medical science studying the effects of nature and the elements on humans – was born. Like the Romantic poets before them, Soviet kurortologists viewed reconnection with the natural environment, previously seen as hostile and inhospitable, as having the potential both to heal illness and to end social alienation. Institutes devoted entirely to the study of kurortology were established. Investigating the efficacy of natural cures, they explored the success of treatments ranging from mud baths to light therapy. Not only did kurortology underpin medical culture in sanatoriums, but it also influenced their architecture.

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Vox: How job surveillance is transforming trucking in America

The promise of self-driving trucks will radically reshape one of America's most common jobs. There are 3.5 million professional drivers in the US, all of whom may face job displacement in the autonomous future being developed by companies like Otto, Daimler, and Tesla. But before robots take the wheel entirely, there will be a long period where truckers and artificial technology split the responsibilities of the work. The first big step toward that future comes in the form of the electronic logging device, a dashboard monitor that tracks speed, location, and a driver's schedule, and reports it to an employer or a third-party monitoring service. It has a lot of truckers worried. 

The Calvert Journal: The Jewish Revolution: how Soviet Jews pursued artistic modernity and political freedom after 1917

Russian Revolution: A Contested Legacy, on display at the International Print Center New York until December 16, attempts this by framing the centenary in terms of “a century in pursuit of individual freedoms”. Curator Masha Chlenova presents the revolution through three such “freedoms” sought by the fledgling socialist society: the emancipation of women; racial equality and the rights of ethnic minorities in Russia, especially Jews; and sexual and gay liberation. The exhibition combines material from the 1920s and 30s with contemporary works by Yevgeniy Fiks and Anton Ginzburg — both Russian-born and now based in New York — to bring the liberation struggles of the past and present into dialogue. [...]

The extent to which 1917 was tied up with questions of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity in the former tsarist Empire is rarely discussed in the West. But this was one of the revolution’s most urgent and vibrant battlegrounds, politically and culturally. Since the late 18th century, Jews in the Russian Empire had been confined to the Pale of Settlement; the February Revolution that preceded October 1917 granted them the freedom to live and work throughout the country. Violent reprisals and full-blown pogroms became commonplace, particularly across the western borderlands of the collapsing Empire. The integration of Jews into the building of a socialist society was a vital part of the Bolshevik policy to afford equal rights to ethnic minorities. [...]

Yevgeniy Fiks agrees that this is a “point of moral clarity” downplayed in much reflection on 1917. “Liberals and leftists for decades tended to try and downplay the embrace of the Revolution by the Jewish masses,” he says. “What I think our exhibition does differently is present the representative of the mostly poor, Yiddish-speaking masses of the former Russian Empire unapologetically. Because there is no shame in being free.” As Chlenova points out, “in the spirit of Soviet internationalism, Jews who actively supported the Revolution were not singled out as an ethnos but were rather seen as international, radically minded figures [with] broader goals than [just the military] struggle against pogromist forces.” [...]

By the 1930s, of course, Stalinism was fully operational, and many of the emancipatory gains of the early revolutionary years were abandoned. In 1934, the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan was founded in Russia’s harsh and undeveloped Far East, a sign of Stalin’s signature approach to ethnic minorities: herding them en masse to out of the way regions. A Contested Legacy features posters and lottery tickets by Epstein and Mikhail Dlugach for lotteries held to raise funds for the Birobidzhan “project”. This is another strand of the Soviet Jewish story deserving of wider attention. One of the USSR’s most lamentable anti-Semitic backlashes, coming so soon after the Soviet Union had proven decisive in beating back Nazism, was the so-called Doctors’ Plot of 1952-3 — a purge of (mainly Jewish) high-ranking medical professionals on phoney charges, which had the clear intention of fostering mass anti-Semitism and might have had serious repercussions were it not for Stalin’s death in 1953. For the rest of the Soviet period, Jewish culture was largely neglected by the state, and since the fall of the USSR the vast majority of its Jewish citizens have emigrated to Israel and the US. Less than one per cent of Birobidzhan’s population now identifies as Jewish.

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The Calvert Journal: Kiev or Kyiv?

The Ukrainian government adopted Kyiv as its standard Latinisation in 1995, making Kyiv mandatory for use in legislative and official acts. To equate a government request with popular will, however, seems misguided; an unquestioning equation of the whim of the country’s ruling politicians to the desire of its population appears especially fraught with danger, and frankly inappropriate, when we consider the changes and upheavals that have occurred in Ukraine over the last 20 years. 

This is not to say that there is no popular will for a change of spelling. As we sit around the table, one of our editors brings up her decision to move to the Kyiv spelling in personal correspondence. It is difficult to ignore, she points out, passionate comments from some of our Ukrainian readers and contributors and her Ukrainian friends about the “incorrect” spelling of their capital city in our articles. If it is making some kind of statement to switch to Kyiv on our website, how much more of a statement is it to receive pitches about “Kyiv” and reply with reference to “Kiev”, our email chain a back-and-forth between the two versions of the city? Many people will be angry, she predicts, when we place their work within the context of a project bearing a title that they deem not only to be incorrect, but offensive.  [...]

However, English-speakers are by and large still more familiar with Kiev. This is due, in part, to almost every major news organisation sticking with the conventional spelling. The BBC, Reuters, The New York Times and The Associated Press are just some of the big names that continue to use Kiev. Presumably in part because they fear that their readers are unfamiliar with the Ukrainian spelling. As our marketing manager points out, people simply aren't searching for Kyiv like they are for Kiev. Kyiv could cost us dearly if our stats take a hit.

“Why shouldn’t the media use Kiev?” we ponder. We do, after all, say Munich, not München, and Rome, not Roma. While it may be erroneous to insist that Kiev is “the Russian spelling”, which sets up a false dichotomy between “Ukrainian” and “Russian” spellings, insisting on the other hand that it is simply the international or English spelling (with an implied “end of story”), is an equally flawed approach. Such an argument is often put forward by those who wish to cast the whole question as irrelevant and brush aside any aversion to the spelling as unfounded or even petty. While their line of thinking is logical enough, this one-size-fits-all argument seems insufficient in its over-simplicity and reluctance to engage with the particularities of the situation. Nobody is talking, for example, about a conflict (of words or otherwise) between Italian and English speakers, as they are about tensions between Ukrainian and Russian speakers.

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Jakub Marian: Percentage of forest area by region in Europe

The LUCAS survey by Eurostat provided a lot of insight into land cover in the EU. As someone who likes to stroll in a forest, one of the statistics I found particularly interesting is the percentage of area covered by forests, which is what the following map shows:  [...]

If you really like forests, the direction you want to go is north. 68% of Finland and 64% of Sweden is covered by forests. However, Slovenia does not lag far behind with 61%.

The least forested country in Europe is Malta, with just 5% of forest area, followed by United Kingdom and Ireland (both 12%) and the Netherlands with 13%.

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LSE Blog: Four graphs about Catalonia and citizens’ attitudes towards the EU

Nevertheless, and in spite of the continuous demands coming from the independentists, the EU has firmly backed the Spanish government, not showing any of support to the secessionist cause. In such context, we could ask ourselves whether this situation is affecting the attitudes of Catalan citizens on the EU. In other words: could this lack of European support undermine citizens’ perceptions of the EU? In this article, I will try to find a preliminary answer to this question, by analysing survey data coming from the last Public Opinion Barometer from the Catalan Opinion Studies Centre (CEO). [...]

The trend shown in the chart suggests that the response coming from the EU has significantly affected all population groups. On the one hand, trust in the EU strongly increases among those who believe that Catalonia should be part of Spain, something that is probably triggered by the perception of the EU backing their position. On the other hand, independentists go through a reverse process, where the lack of EU support for their aspirations may be driving the decline in trust shown in the data. [...]

Once again, we see a similar divergence. The starting point varies little among voting groups, with the exception of CUP voters (which is not surprising, the CUP being a leftist antisystem party), while the difference after the 1st of October is almost 5 points. The voters of constitutionalist parties feel more attached to the EU now than they did a year ago, while secessionists feel less attached. The most striking case is that of PDeCAT voters, who were the most attached to the EU in 2016, and whose decrease in attachment is the most pronounced. [...]

A complementary interpretation could build on Sanchez Cuenca’s explanation of the support of European integration. This is based on the idea that citizens tend to be more supportive of integration when they hold negative opinions of their national leaders in comparison to European ones. Following this line, we could say that Catalan nationalists supported the EU because they perceived the quality of the policies made in Brussels to be somehow superior to those made in Madrid. But this mechanism would break down at the moment when Brussels policies are no longer perceived as distinctly better than those coming out of Madrid.

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Deutsche Welle: My Europe: 'Foreigners can be racists too'

I can well imagine this homeless man standing with the 60,000 far-right extremists in Warsaw on Polish independence day, bellowing, "All Poland sings with us: Piss off, refugees,” or calling for a "white Europe of brother nations”. And as he stood there, demonstrating against Muslims and refugees – of whom there are hardly any in Poland – the far-right demonstrators would be looking at him with contempt because he's homeless. Simply being the object of discrimination doesn't make someone a better person. [...]

Things start getting particularly complicated when xenophobes flee abroad and meet other xenophobes. Is that too abstract? I can offer you a concrete example as an explanation: At a demonstration by the right-wing extremist Identitarian Movement of Austria in Vienna, I heard the language spoken by my parents. Many Serbs and Croats were there to demonstrate against "Umvolkung” ("ethnicity inversion,” a term historically used by the far right to describe demographic change through immigration), "Islamification,” or whatever else it is they fantasize about. [...]

Serbs, Croats, Poles and other people from Central and Eastern Europe are now marching in Germany and Austria alongside the people who not long ago wanted them thrown out of the country. Ever since the war in Syria, we Balkan refugees suddenly find ourselves a little further up the pecking order. We're now deemed good enough to join in demonstrations against refugees. If that's what you call integration, it's worked beautifully. European nationalists have a very efficient cross-border network. The bogeymen they all have in common are refugees and Muslims – regardless of whether or not there actually are any in their respective countries.

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