Political Critique: Can cities become the space for a new idea of transnational solidarity?

Gesine Schwan: I think this trend for renationalisation is one type of fragmentation, and it’s due to several causes. One cause is the whole tendency of cultural neoliberalism, which we saw at work in the Treaty of Maastricht, in the form of competition between states as places for capitalist investment. This means that in addition to traditional conflict, which characterizes European history, there is now economic conflict, caused by competition for capital investment. This is certainly one tendency, in line with the idea that, in general, the market is the main actor, not the state or common goods policies, and I see this idea as the basis for fragmentation. But another source of this fragmentation is the tendency of the market to ignore people’s needs for self-determination and participation, and this was underestimated and negated. So I think that part of this need for autonomy, which leads to fragmentation, is actually part of this people’s will to participate and control their environment. The third point is also related to the main economic thinking, which increasingly underestimates solidarity. In the German discussion, very often in the context of neoliberalism, solidarity was understood as ‘self-responsibility’, which is undermining. The term ‘self-responsibility’ by definition undermines the concept of solidarity, because responsibility normally means that I’m responsible for myself, but ‘self-responsibility’ means that one should no longer expect solidarity from the state or from others, that one should act in one’s own name, and this means undermining solidarity. So there are several cultural points that come together. But indeed, I think that preaching the moral of solidarity is certainly necessary but not really effective. I think solidarity is possible if you know these ‘others’ and have this proximity with others that allows to understand their situation. And this, I believe, is behind the trend for smaller entities of political life and also of daily life and of self determination. [...]

Gesine Schwan:  It was very frightening to see the lack of solidarity in the welcoming of refugees. Not only solidarity with the refugees, but also solidarity between nation states; caused by mechanism and dynamics which distracted politicians from finding solutions. So my proposal was to create a European fund that municipalities could benefit from, in order to welcome refugees, a way to finance integration, but also a way to access additional funding for their own development. Today we are witnessing a bad kind of competition between the poor living in cities who don’t have houses etc., and the poor who arrive to the city. So, because we need investment without corruption, I see the possibility of strengthening municipalities, by creating multistakeholder groups organizing civil society, which is already much more organised and committed at the city level, in order to plan strategies for the development of the city combined  with strategies for the integration of refugees. These groups would apply for European funding. This model would also mean more participation on the part of citizens taking part in such committees, and at the same time a more direct involvement in the European Union, that already gives a lot of money to cohesion funds, although people don’t perceive this because they are not involved in the decision making processes. If this money were to be given directly to the municipalities, people could actually see that they have the opportunity to develop their cities and do this in a participatory way. What is also evident today is that we have no networks connecting cities and towns, which could, on the contrary, help each other and share experiences of integration of refugees. During this process of integration, in fact, municipalities gain a firsthand experience of – for example – the African community fleeing from war: in this sense such initiatives are able to combine the local and the global level, providing experiences and knowledge, and this would be very helpful. [...]

Gesine Schwan: Yes exactly, and when you say ‘creative’ it is exactly what I expect from cities, to be creative. Today, from the legal point of view, it is the national  government that has to decide whether refugees are allowed to enter the nation state or not. We have to put political pressure on the nation state to give some of this legal competences also to municipal bodies, or at least allow them to take in refugees voluntarily. This would also help the national governments, because at present they are not willing to welcome refugees, they are afraid of doing so, but if they allowed  municipalities to decide voluntarily, this would create a form of support that would work in the long term, at a national level. The fact is, governments have problems with this “long term thinking”, something that is absolutely necessary and is also expressed by the very common term ‘sustainability’, used in all fields today – think of the sustainability goals the UN have agreed to in 2015. This line of reasoning points in the right direction, and we need to put political public pressure on national governments, so they may understand that it is in their own interest.  

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: Sadr, Sectarianism, and a Popular Alternative

The victory of Sadr’s “March for Reforms” alliance should be read in two ways. First, Iraqis have expressed their disgust at the country’s sectarian political system, social inequalities, and decrepit public services. According to the Iraqi government, absolute poverty levels reached 22.5 percent of the total population in 2014. Other estimates put the number even higher: some claim that nearly 10 million Iraqis, or well over a quarter of the country, live in abject poverty.

The second major reason for Sairoun’s first-place finish is discontent with the sectarian ruling class, an outgrowth of the US and British-led invasion. The sectarian ruling class is composed of all the various heads of ethnic or sectarian-based political movements in the country. The Shi’a fraction of the political and economic elite has been by far the dominating actor since 2003, gaining nearly absolute control over the state’s institutions and resources. This isn’t to say that Iraqi Shi’a are a privileged community — the vast majority have not benefited economically from their leaders’ political dominance and have suffered from the corruption and dysfunction of the state public services. [...]

Still, an electoral alliance between the various protest camps wasn’t a forgone conclusion. Iraqi Communist Party secretary-general Raid Jahid Fahmi said that in preparation for the elections, his party and the Sadrists agreed to focus on the issues that unite them — fighting unemployment and corruption, opposing foreign influences in Iraq — rather than those that don’t: namely, women’s rights and secularism. The Sadrists, for example, have not mobilized against the “Jaafari law,” which would have allowed women as young as nine to marry. [...]

In its election program, Sairoun emphasized anti-terrorism, anti-corruption, national reconciliation and unity, a new electoral law, improved governance, and guaranteed access to human and social rights (education, social security, decent living standards, and housing). The program was short on specifics, remaining vague about how to fight corruption or political sectarianism, the militarization of society, or regressive economic policies.

read the article

BBC4 Analysis: Death Is a Bore

Most of us are resigned to the fact that we won't escape death in the end. But there are people who have dedicated their entire lives to conquering death. This relatively new movement of 'transhumanists' believes that science is close to finding a cure for aging and that immortality may be just around the corner. Chloe Hadjimatheou asks whether it's really possible to live forever and whether it's actually desirable.

listen to the podcast

The New York Review of Books: Roman Holidays

Alto and Lauro were hardly the first to profit from selling mass-produced prints to tourists: in the 1530s, a Rome-based Spanish publisher and bookseller, Antonio Salamanca, had already begun to publish folio engravings of Roman monuments, both ancient and modern. Copyright as we know it was still an unknown luxury, so when a French publisher, Antoine Lafréry, moved to Rome and started to produce pirate versions of Salamanca’s prints in the 1540s, the Spaniard responded not with a lawsuit but an offer of collaboration. The two men officially joined forces in 1553. Salamanca would not regret his decision; Lafréry may have been a pirate, but he was also an excellent businessman. [...]

The Norwegian art historian Victor Plahte Tschudi began investigating Giacomo Lauro’s devious career when he was a graduate student on a fellowship in Rome. He discovered how cleverly the printmaker had pirated engravings of Roman monuments, altering a few details to avoid breaking the letter, not to mention the spirit, of emerging copyright laws. Strictly speaking, Lauro could argue that his slightly and deliberately altered copies were not really copies—never mind that the alterations he made to his images also turned them into less accurate, or flat-out inaccurate, representations of the monuments they depicted. Most of Lauro’s customers would never have noticed in any case, nor, for that matter, would most Romans; what counted above all to the collectors of these engravings was the suggestive idea, or the memory, of sights like the Colosseum or the temples of the Roman Forum. Lauro was no Piranesi, tormented by magnificent visions. He scratched out his engravings to make a living, not to court immortality. [...]

The earliest surviving guidebooks to Rome—twelfth-century pilgrim handbooks like Record of the Golden City of Rome (Graphia Aureae Urbis Romae, circa 1130) and the best-selling Wonders of the City of Rome (Mirabilia Urbis Romae, circa 1143)—served up generous doses of fiction to compensate for their lack of concrete information about the ruins of the ancient city. Noah had settled in Rome just after the Flood, long before a pair of baby boys named Romulus and Remus were ever suckled by a kindly she-wolf in a swamp that would one day become the Circus Maximus. A dragon lived in the Forum, not far from the place called “Inferno” because there the fires of Hell had once burst forth from the center of the earth. [...]

Tschudi suggests that, in addition to these time-honored sources of information about Rome—the literary legacy of ancient authors and the physical legacy of the monuments—sixteenth-century printmakers relied to an even greater extent on a third source: other prints. By examining (or simply copying) the work of his predecessors, Giacomo Lauro could concoct his own reconstruction of an ancient building without ever having to step outside his studio. In effect, he and his colleagues created what Baroque Antiquity terms an “archaeology of prints,” and indeed the word “archaeology,” with a meaning roughly equivalent to “ancient history,” appears for the first time in 1607, precisely when Giacomo Lauro was perfecting his Splendor of the Ancient City.

read the article

Vox: Hungary just passed a “Stop Soros” law that makes it illegal to help undocumented migrants

This week, Hungary passed what the government dubbed the “Stop Soros” law, named after Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. The new law, drafted by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, creates a new category of crime, called “promoting and supporting illegal migration” — essentially, banning individuals and organizations from providing any kind of assistance to undocumented immigrants. This is so broadly worded that, in theory, the government could arrest someone who provides food to an undocumented migrant on the street or attends a political rally in favor of their rights. [...]

“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world,” Orban said in a characteristic anti-Soros tirade in March.  [...]

There’s still a lot of opposition to Orbán’s policies in Hungary, particularly in the capital city of Budapest. But Orbán is popular with a pretty significant chunk of Hungarian society. In the April 2018 parliamentary elections, the Fidesz party won a little under 50 percent of the vote. The next-closest party, the even-more right-wing Jobbik, won 19 percent. [...]

Soros’s aim, according to Orbán, is to undermine the soul of European Christian society — to hollow out the West from the inside out. Soros’s humanitarian activity is supposedly secretly indoctrinating Hungarians in a bid to let them acquiesce to mass migration. Once Soros and his allies succeed in opening the borders, Orbán warns, Muslim refugees will flood into Hungary and the rest of Europe — and soon the continent will become unrecognizable.

read the article

The Guardian: Hungary is making a mockery of ‘EU values’. It’s time to kick it out

Consider the latest act in Hungary’s slide towards what its prime minister Viktor Orbán boasts is an “illiberal democracy”. The country’s parliament has not just passed a law making claims for asylum almost impossible: the very act of helping migrants and refugees has been criminalised. Furthermore, a 25% tax has been slapped on funding for NGOs that “support immigration”: in practice, that means having anything positive to say about immigration.

In the same week, the musical Billy Elliot was cancelled in Budapest after a vicious homophobic campaign by the pro-government press, including the claim in one government-linked newspaper that it could “transform Hungarian boys into homosexuals”. [...]

But Hungary, along with increasingly authoritarian Poland, is making an utter mockery of the EU’s stated commitment to democracy and human rights. In 2016 Luxembourg’s foreign minister called for Hungary to be expelled from the EU because of its treatment of refugees. He was right. Yes, the EU is buffeted by multiple crises, from Brexit to the assumption of power of a Eurosceptic Italian government. But its acceptance of its own member states succumbing to authoritarianism may prove its greatest existential threat of all.

read the article

Social Europe: Germany’s Minimum Wage Has Reduced Wage Inequality

Average real wages increased in more than two-thirds of EU countries in 2015 but there were substantial differences across the region (see first column in table below). Wages grew in most eastern European countries and, indeed, to a much greater extent than in most western European countries, where wage growth was rather subdued or even negative, especially in Mediterranean countries; exceptions to this trend were Denmark, Germany, Ireland and France. Similarly, wage inequality declined in around two-thirds of EU countries (see final column in table), although there is no significant association between the changes in average wage levels and in wage inequality levels. [...]

Some groups within the workforce benefited more from this development than others. As the figure below illustrates, wage gains were significantly higher among the youngest and oldest age groups; employees with lower educational attainment; female employees; part-time employees; employees working in smaller companies; and employees in low-skilled occupational categories (blue-collar especially but also white-collar to a lesser extent). In terms of economic sector, employees working in services benefited greatly. For instance, those working in arts, entertainment and recreation saw the highest wage boost, although employees in other service sectors – including information and communication, and real estate, professional and administrative activities – also saw substantial gains. Increases among employees in construction and retail, though lower, were still higher than average. [...]

Moreover, the beneficial effects of the minimum wage policy on real wage growth and the wage cohesion of the German workforce seem to have come at no significant price. Employment data show the employment prospects of those employees who have benefited more from the introduction of the minimum wage have not deteriorated, proving that fears about the potential dis-employment effects of the policy were exaggerated. The German unemployment rate has indeed gradually declined from above 5% in 2014 to less than 4% in 2017, the lowest rate among EU-28 countries after that of the Czech Republic.

read the article

Quartz: In India, gay dating apps are both a safe haven and a target

With internet and smartphone penetration on the rise in India, the LGBTQ community is increasingly taking to online dating sites to mingle. Already, around 1.4% or 69,000 of the five million users of US gay dating app Grindr and nearly 3% or 92,000 users of German app Planet Romeo’s three million users are in India. [...]

In July 2015, a gay maritime engineer was reportedly lured into a trap through an online dating service. He was attacked and extorted by two men while he was in a hotel room in Mumbai with a man he had met on a dating app. The attackers stole his possessions and emptied his bank account, and threatened to press criminal charges for having sex with a man if he went to the police. [...]

However, app-makers say they have put checks and balances such as verifying user identities and limiting app permissions online. Grindr, for instance, now has discreet icons that let users camouflage the app on their phones. But since homosexuality largely remains a taboo in India, it can still be hard to convince someone you meet online to take the next logical step offline. Some new apps are now finding a fix for just that. [...]

Twenty-seven-year-old Ishaan Sethi launched an app called Delta this April. The platform brings together like-minded individuals who can establish any relationship—friends, romantic partners, mentor-mentee—with its “Connect” feature.

read the article

Al Jazeera: Who will Kurds vote for in key Turkey elections?

For the first time, voters in Turkey will cast ballots on Sunday in simultaneous presidential and parliamentary polls. The process is in line with last year's constitutional changes that will transform the country's parliamentary system to an executive presidential one by granting the top office increased powers. [...]

Demirtas, along with several other former HDP members of parliament, has been in jail since November 2016, accused of having links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). His trial began in December last year and, if convicted, he faces up to 142 years in prison. Demirtas denies the charges. [...]

Opinion polls have suggested that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party might not achieve a parliamentary majority if the HDP manages to gain more than 10 percent of votes on Sunday, which is the unusually high threshold required for a party to enter the 600-seat assembly. [...]

Etyen Mahcupyan, a columnist and former adviser to the AK Party leader, said that secular voters might back the HDP at the ballot box to make sure that AK Party loses its majority in parliament - as it did in June 2015. [...]

"There is an increasingly widespread view that the HDP will surpass 10 percent of the votes. And this might decrease the number of the CHP voters changing their votes for the HDP," added Mahcupyan, who added that Kurds represent about 15 percent of the electorate in Turkey.

read the article