Politico: Macedonia name deal is only end of beginning

Broadly speaking, there are two camps in the EU debate. One, led by France and the Netherlands, argues the bloc should focus on reforming itself after Brexit before considering new members. These countries also worry that inviting in countries from the Balkans, with its legacy of war and deep-seated problems of organized crime and corruption, would be a gift to populist opponents of the EU in next year’s European Parliament election. [...]

The pro-enlargement camp includes top European Commission officials, senior German politicians, and governments from Central and Eastern Europe. They argue the EU must keep Balkan countries in its orbit to counter increased influence in its southern backyard from rival powers. [...]

The deal is meant to finally resolve a 27-year-old dispute, which began when Macedonia seceded from the disintegrating communist Yugoslavia. Greece asserted that the new country’s name implied a claim on a region of northern Greece of the same name and also falsely laid claim to ancient Greek culture. Athens vowed to block Skopje from joining the EU and NATO until the dispute was settled. [...]

Macedonian President Ivanov could block the deal if it gets through parliament. Although he would in theory be compelled to approve it if lawmakers backed it for a second time, he could nevertheless still withhold his signature.

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Social Europe: The Production Of Fear. European Democracies In The Age Of Populisms And Technocracies

The nature of populisms and technocracies differs in many aspects. Populist movements build their success substantially upon what we may define as “input legitimacy”, or popular legitimacy, while technocratic elites are supported by “output legitimacy”, in other words legitimacy derived from the implementation of efficient policies. This dualism is particularly visible in the EU and its peculiar typology of multi-level governance, with Institutions such as the European Commission acting at the supra-national level, often in contrast with EU Member States’ politics at the domestic level.

The difference between populist movements and technocratic elites is reflected in the strategies adopted by the two: the nature of the arguments, the uses made of them, the languages and the strategies of timing adopted, are utterly far apart. However, on closer analysis, populist movements and technocratic elites in Europe share one key element: mastering the art of influencing the political debate by producing and evoking fear and anxiety through an effective use of communication tools. [...]

The result of the strategy of building up fear, implemented by populist movements and technocratic elites in Europe alike, is a dialectical relationship between the two that paradoxically brings mutual reinforcement. For instance, the irrational nature of populist economic policies triggers crisis and turmoil, favouring indirectly the recourse to top-down approaches by national and supra-national elites, based upon their recognised competences and expertise. However, their action is often unsupported by transparent democratic legitimacy, especially when the tasks at hand consist of implementing severe cuts in spending upon social policies. This, in turn, fosters a reinforcement of populist movements, with the process following that pattern, as can be seen by the recent history of Italy: the action of a technical government (PM Monti), born from the inadequacy of the policies implemented by the previous executive (PM Berlusconi), lead after some years of centre-left governments, to one of the most populist governments of the EU (the Five Stars and Lega “yellow-green” coalition government).

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The New York Review of Books: How Ulster Unionists Block Brexit

The DUP is, strictly speaking, not a British party at all: it organizes and contests elections only in Northern Ireland, where it has become the largest party on the Protestant and Unionist side of the divide. But its raison d’être is the preservation of the “British” identity and political allegiance among those in Northern Ireland—and therefore the maintenance of Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom. Yet the DUP’s Britishness is increasingly out of kilter with Britain itself. This is a decidedly unbalanced love affair in which most of the ardor is on one side. What the DUP thinks of as an indissoluble bond is, for British Conservatives, a marriage of convenience.

There are two underlying problems. One is religion. Historically speaking, there is no doubt that English and, later, British identity pivoted on Protestantism. The collective “us” was defined in opposition to a “them” that was primarily Catholic: Catholic Spain, Catholic France, Catholic rebels in Ireland and Scotland. The DUP’s own mindset is completely in accord with this Protestant formation. Its history is militantly anti-Catholic, and though it tries to play this down nowadays, the reality of Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide is that Democratic Unionists still see themselves facing off against a growing and increasingly assertive Catholic minority. [...]

The other problem for the DUP is the rise of a specifically English nationalism. English conservatism has long seen the preservation of the Union, including Northern Ireland, as a definitive goal: May’s party, after all, is officially still called the Conservative and Unionist Party. But the Brexit project has shown this commitment to be much stronger in rhetoric than in reality. Both Scotland and Northern Ireland voted decisively against leaving the EU. The Brexiteers are willing to go much further than just ignoring the wishes of those populations; it is clear that if Brexit were to lead to an independent Scotland and a United Ireland, its proponents would see these outcomes as prices worth paying. This makes sense: Brexit is, above all, an English national revolution—and its imagined act of liberation would be all the purer if it resulted in an independent English state.

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The Atlantic: Has Trump Irreversibly Altered the GOP's Foreign Policy?

Trump is reprising the conflict between the Republican Party’s internationalist and isolationist wings, which raged between the end of World War I and the early Cold War. That extended scuffle crystallized in the battle for the party’s 1952 presidential nomination, when Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of the internationalist forces, beat Senate Republican Leader Robert Taft, who championed an earlier generation of “America First” nationalism and isolationism.  [...]

But cracks appeared in that Republican consensus under George W. Bush, both because of disillusion with the Iraq War and because of the party’s growing reliance on working-class whites, who are often dubious of any foreign entanglement. Now, President Trump is moving to virtually raze the structure of the U.S-led international order, with his open disdain for the alliances and economic relationships built after World War II. [...]

Data provided to me by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs from its most recent annual national survey of American foreign-policy attitudes tracks these patterns. College-educated Republicans, the survey found, were more likely than their counterparts without degrees to view globalization and trade in general and the North American Free Trade Agreement in particular as good for the U.S. But the share of college-educated Republicans expressing such favorable views has declined in recent years, and today it’s far lower than the proportion of college-educated Democrats who view trade positively. [...]

Yet in recent days, the GOP’s internationalist voices have been stifled at every turn. Beyond Arizona Senator John McCain, stunningly few criticized Trump’s outbursts around the G-7 meeting, when he questioned the cost of nato, urged Russia’s reinstatement to the group, and lashed the trading practices of Canada and the European Union. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a vote on bipartisan legislation to limit Trump’s power to unilaterally impose tariffs. And House Speaker Paul Ryan stymied a moderate rebellion to demand a vote on legalizing young people brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents.  

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Vox: Argentina’s historic vote to decriminalize abortion, explained

Across Latin America, 97 percent of women live in countries with restrictive abortion laws. Argentina’s lower legislative house voted to pass a bill on Thursday that would decriminalize abortion in the country up to the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.

The vote was close, 129-125, and the bill is unlikely to get through the Argentine Senate. Still, activists see the fact that the issue is being voted on at all as a major step for women’s rights in the country and throughout the region.  [...]

Abortion is illegal in Argentina except in cases of rape or when the life or health of the woman is at risk. But even in such circumstances, abortions are difficult to obtain, especially in provinces where there are no guidelines for how providers should proceed or what they’re legally required to do, said Shena Cavallo, a program officer at the International Women’s Health Coalition. [...]

Argentine President Mauricio Macri called for Congress to debate the abortion issue earlier this year, over the opposition of the Catholic Church, which is still a major force in Argentina and throughout Latin America. Macri has not come out in favor of the bill and has tried to keep a distance from the discussion, encouraging those within his party to keep the discussion civil. He has said he won’t veto a bill if it passes.  

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The Guardian: Hanger-on May is no more than a bit player at the G7 summit

To make things even more confusing, the G6 +1 further subdivided into the G5 + 1 + 1 when Trump chose to disassociate himself from everything that had been agreed and to abuse those leaders he could remember having met. So it was wholly understandable that the British prime minister was a little shaky on the details of what had taken place at the G5 +1 +1 when she came to hand in her Canadian mini-break homework to the Commons in the form of a statement. [...]

Even this assessment was too much for Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour leader declared the entire summit to have been a failure. And the responsibility for its failure rested solely with one person. Normally he likes to blame May for everything but as she hadn’t really been there, Corbyn directed all his anger at the American president. The White House policy of putting America First was a menace to the international rules based order. Steel tariffs, Iran, climate change. [...]

The prime minister stumbled on, putting her hands over her ears whenever MPs suggested that what the summit had really shown was that Britain was better off remaining in a customs union with the EU than hoping for a trade deal with the US. Not at all, she insisted. The intensity of the disagreement between the UK and the US was a sign of how strong the relationship really was: the time to worry with Trump was when everything appeared to be running smoothly.

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The Guardian: Trump really has achieved a historic breakthrough – for the Kim dynasty

What’s more, Trump lauded Kim as “a very talented man … who loves his country very much,” a man the US president admired for his ability to take over North Korea at such a young age and to “run it tough”, as he put it in a later press conference. There was not so much as even a rote condemnation of the brutality of the Kim regime – indeed Trump reserved the word “regime” for the Clinton administration of the 1990s. And when asked if he had even mentioned human rights in their talks, he said it had only been discussed “briefly”. The harshest words he had for a country that starved its own people in a famine that cost up to three million lives, were: “It’s a rough situation there … it’s rough in a lot of places by the way.”

So Kim leaves Singapore having gained much of the international legitimacy the dynastic dictatorship has sought for decades. But the gifts from Trump did not end there. He also announced an end to US military exercises in the Korean peninsula – the “war games” which he said were costly and, deploying language Pyongyang itself might have used, “very provocative”. Trump also hinted at an eventual withdrawal of the 28,000 US troops stationed in the Korean peninsula. [...]

Again, think of what candidate Trump would have said about that. The Iran deal, which he regularly denounced as “horrible” and from which he withdrew last month, consisted of 110 pages of detailed arrangements – including the deployment of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, cameras, seals and the like – to verify Tehran’s fulfilment of its nuclear promises. The Singapore text, which barely runs to a page and a half, does not so much as breathe the word “verifiable”. Indeed, Trump could not even get a commitment from Kim to basic transparency, to disclose the scope of North Korea’s current nuclear capacity, both the weapons it has and its manufacturing capability. How can the world know what Pyongyang has got rid of if it doesn’t know what it has?  

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Quartz: Africa’s quiet LGBT revolution

It is routine. And sometimes borders on the absurd. As Kingsford Sumana Bagbin, the deputy speaker of the Ghanaian parliament did when he recently claimed homosexuality is worse than an atomic bomb. [...]

In South Africa, they may have laws protecting all—and legalizing same-sex marriage—citizens but still some want to silence anything perceived as gay. Earlier this year when the acclaimed South African film Inxeba (The Wound) was released, local censors fought to keep it out of movie theaters. The film tackles Xhosa manhood rites and is a tender love story that depicts wonderfully complex African men on screen.

It was controversial because it displays homosexual love in a heterosexual, hyper-masculine rural mountainside setting. I beamed with pride when this film—shortlisted for an Academy Award, and the first South African film to stream on Netflix—was allowed back in regular theaters, after the courts sided with the filmmakers’ legal challenge. [...]

In Tanzania, the brutal onslaught by the government continues as they bully prominent activist—even as it impacts their own society’s health needs, particularly around HIV/AIDS.

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