How influencers are trying - and succeeding - in changing our world views. Peter Pomerantsev investigates.
31 January 2019
The New York Review of Books: Imperial Exceptionalism
It is hard to give up something you claim you never had. That is the difficulty Americans face with respect to their country’s empire. Since the era of Theodore Roosevelt, politicians, journalists, and even some historians have deployed euphemisms—“expansionism,” “the large policy,” “internationalism,” “global leadership”—to disguise America’s imperial ambitions. According to the exceptionalist creed embraced by both political parties and most of the press, imperialism was a European venture that involved seizing territories, extracting their resources, and dominating their (invariably dark-skinned) populations. Americans, we have been told, do things differently: they bestow self-determination on backward peoples who yearn for it. The refusal to acknowledge that Americans have pursued their own version of empire—with the same self-deceiving hubris as Europeans—makes it hard to see that the US empire might (like the others) have a limited lifespan. All empires eventually end, but maybe an exceptional force for global good could last forever—or so its champions seem to believe. [...]
Most textbooks date the beginning of America’s overseas expansion to 1898, when it acquired sovereignty over Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the conclusion of its war with Spain. Yet as Bulmer-Thomas shows, the US empire went offshore much earlier. During the 1810s and 1820s, Americans carved out the state of Liberia in West Africa, allegedly as a refuge for free American blacks; the country in fact functioned as an American colony and later as a protectorate of the Firestone Rubber Company. The US established an imperial presence in East Asia as early as 1844, when the Treaty of Wanghia gave it the same privileged access to Chinese ports as the British Empire, and went on to acquire dozens of “guano islands” in the Pacific, where abundant bird droppings provided a rich source of fertilizer.[...]
Statehood was never considered during the debate over the Philippines: the only question was whether to establish a naval base at Manila and give the islands back to the Spanish or to annex the entire archipelago. The imperialists won the argument, and after the insurgents were finally suppressed the Philippines became a colony, from which investors in sugar, hemp, tobacco, and coconut oil could gain privileged access to US markets and Filipinos could emigrate to America in search of jobs. By the 1930s, congressional opposition to cheap exports as well as to cheap (and nonwhite) labor created support for Philippine independence, which was finally achieved in 1946. But it came with so many restrictions on trade and so much preferential treatment for American investors—not to mention continued maintenance of US military bases—that “it would be more accurate to describe the Philippines as becoming a US protectorate,” Bulmer-Thomas writes. “Thus, the end of colonialism in the Philippines did not mean the end of US imperial control.”[...]
The Point Four Program, drawn from Harry Truman’s inaugural address in 1949, linked the World Bank to the struggle with the Soviet Union for influence in the developing world, where the bank would make loans, with many political conditions attached, to governments and state-owned enterprises (later privately owned ones as well). The requirement that Congress approve these loans ensured that they would reflect what the US government considered its national interest. The United Nations, too, began as an American-dominated institution, though as its membership grew it became progressively harder for the US to control. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and bilateral treaties worldwide also served American policy under the guise of “collective security” against the Soviet threat. [...]
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon provided a new enemy, international terrorism, that was even more shadowy and elusive than international communism had been. Widespread panic among Americans and their allies was taken (especially in the US) to justify a permanent state of emergency, with damaging consequences for civil liberties and public debate at home, as well as for the many thousands of civilians who would become “collateral damage” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The New York Review of Books: Rome: Where Migrants Face Eviction as Fascists Find a Home
Across Italy, some 10,000 migrants and refugees are living in squats. In search of shelter, many have joined vulnerable Italians in occupying empty buildings. The housing crisis is not an accident. It is part of a deliberate strategy by the government to make Italy as inhospitable to migrants and refugees as possible.
On December 10, 2018, Matteo Salvini, the deputy prime minister and interior minister belonging to the far-right party the League, stood outside the factory as police entered and cleared it of residents. CasaPound, which had led a public campaign for the eviction, celebrated. But the paradox is that they themselves are squatters. CasaPound took over an empty office building in the center of Rome in 2003 and has housed people there ever since. This incongruence, between the penicillin factory eviction and inaction against CasaPound, is another example of how Italy’s far right is increasingly driving public opinion and policy on immigration. In late November, Salvini’s government passed a new law called the Security and Immigration Decree, but referred to by almost everyone in Italy as the “Salvini Decree.” It radically changed the Italian asylum system; eliminating the category of “humanitarian protection,” a form of protection given to people who are deemed to have “serious reasons” to flee their home country and cannot be deported. Since 2008, some 120,000 asylum-seekers in Italy have received this status. [...]
Before the election, the Five Star Movement said it would never form a coalition with the League because it was too far to the right. (Italy essentially has a proportional representation system, whereby parties need to form a coalition after the election if one party does not have a substantial majority of votes.) However, after an attempt to form a government with the center-left Democratic Party failed, the Five Star Movement proceeded to do exactly that. Although Five Star initially had more public support, with 32 percent of the vote compared to the League’s 17 percent, it has proved inept at governing, and over the past few months has lost many of its left-leaning voters. Meanwhile, the more experienced League has overtaken Five Star in popularity, as its base responds to Salvini’s anti-immigration stunts. By November 2018, support for his party had jumped to 34 percent. [...]
Salvini and his party stoke fears around migration by portraying migrants as criminals. Over the past ten years, overall crime has decreased in Italy by 8.3 percent, and crimes committed by foreigners have also fallen, with convictions at an all-time low. But each time a crime occurs in an immigrant neighborhood or when non-Italian citizens stand accused, Salvini exploits it. Such was the case with the brutal rape and murder of a sixteen-year-old girl, Desirée Mariottini, in a squat in San Lorenzo, an immigrant neighborhood in Rome. Two Senagalese men, one Nigerian man, and one Ghanaian man were arrested in connection with her assault and death. Salvini visited San Lorenzo and laid a rose at her memorial, then said he would come back with a bulldozer.
Political Critique: Democratizing Europe’s Economy
Italy’s right-wing government has earned popular support for deliberately questioning the European Commission’s budget guidelines in the name of addressing poverty. This shows how skeptical many Europeans are about the EU’s commitment to social welfare and democracy, and it is precisely this skepticism the Italian right-wing is using to provoke a conflict and further undermine the commission’s popular legitimacy. Such an approach has support beyond Southern Europe, and if the commission does not reconsider, it will find itself increasingly vulnerable to popular backlash.[...]
This renewed emphasis on the social dimension is supposed to be connected to the European Semester, which is the commission’s attempt to bring order to European economic governance. Thus the commission ranks the member states according to unemployment rates (especially youth unemployment), reduction in poverty, lifelong learning, access to childcare, and other social indicators. Yet it does not measure the meaningfulness of work. It also fails to assess whether workers have a say over the nature of their work, their relationships at work, their work’s relationship to the greater economy, or their working conditions. In an age when more and more people classify their work as “bullshit jobs,” to use the provocative phrase from the anthropologist David Graeber, something important is being missed.1 [...]
The studies of Herbert Kitschelt and Philippe Rehm using the European Social Survey show that in post-industrial economies, people involved in administrative-organizational occupations tend to have more authoritarian views, independent of their income status (although those at the top may be less inclined toward redistribution, and those at the bottom more inclined). Those involved in more interpersonal occupations, which involve communication and agreement on norms and objectives, tend to have more liberal views independent of their income status. [...]
It is no surprise that the European Commission has not managed to fully connect economic, social, and democratic concerns. Doing so would require the commission to challenge the dogma that economic growth is the basic answer to all social problems, to face up to its own role in undermining social cohesion and democracy simultaneously in the many parts of Europe that have been exposed to austerity programs, and to acknowledge that a technocratic approach exacerbates anti-democratic tendencies and sentiments. With the upcoming European summit in May 2019, the European Parliament elections, and the new European Commission, the union needs a much deeper and more nuanced appreciation of the changing dynamics of the global economy and its implications for political preferences. In so doing, it should follow the lead set by some of its most politically active working citizens.
Aeon: Against type
Both these philosophers argue that ideas and values instilled in us through childhood shape our adult lives, often in ways that we are unaware of. They agree that these aspects of our outlook can remain quietly influential on our thought and behaviour, even after we have rejected them. Both consider the tension between our own ideas and values and those inherited from our society to be a source of difficulty and distress.
De Beauvoir identifies this social conditioning as the origin of gender. Society enforces different expectations of boys and girls, presented as reflecting natural differences between them. Boys are encouraged to explore and dominate their environments. Girls are required to be helpful and pleasing. Different values are thereby instilled in boys and girls, along with a shared belief in the supposedly natural differences between the sexes. Even a woman who has rejected these ideas in adult life cannot easily escape their influence on her thought and behaviour.[...]
One kind of implicit-bias research has focused on the associations that make up stereotypes. Experiments show these associations influencing people’s behaviour, even when they explicitly deny that the association is true. When asked to identify objects very quickly, for example, people’s responses can indicate an association between black men and handguns, even when they deny that there is any such association. [...]
A different area of social psychology – one related to but distinct from implicit-bias research – might seem closer to this existential concern. Research into what has become known as ‘stereotype threat’ is concerned with the effect of internalised stereotypes on the behaviour of the people they stereotype. Experiments have concluded that, for example, the stereotype of women as less good than men at mathematics can influence women’s mathematical performance. In one experiment from 1999, two groups of women took the same test, with only one group being told that the test is likely to show a gender difference. That group performed less well than the women who had not been told this.
Foreign Policy: India and the Global Fight for LGBT Rights
The most remarkable part of the Indian court’s decision is that it didn’t just use a universal standard of human rights to decriminalize homosexuality; it also acknowledged the responsibility of the state to help end the stigma attached to being LGBT. The court could have gone even further and emphasized that the Indian government should put in place mechanisms that would allow the reconciliation of shunned LGBT children and their parents. Doing so would help end the practice of parents forcing arranged marriages on those children—something that can lead to trauma and other mental health problems. It would also help end the shocking practice of “corrective rape,” in which families subject their LGBT children to nonconsensual sex.[...]
India also needs to help reconcile LGBT Indians with their various religious communities; following the court’s decision, many conservative Christian, Muslim, and Hindu leaders, who are often at loggerheads, blasted the ruling as shameful and promised to contest it. Such a reconciliation would right a historic wrong. It was not local religious leaders but British colonialists who introduced these barbaric laws to India. Hinduism, which is the dominant religion in India, was quite accepting of LGBT people before the British introduced Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in the 1860s, imposing harsh penalties on whoever has “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” That provision was then extended from India out across the British Empire. It is the reason why most former British colonies are still, to this day, not only hostile to same-sex love but also actively opposed to it.
Politico: EU’s Iran fight is not about Iran (or Trump)
Infuriated by Italy's induction into an expanded version of the so-called E3 club — the trio of France, Germany and the United Kingdom that helped negotiate the nuclear deal along with the European External Action Service — Spain has blocked proposed language on Iran intended for approval by EU governments. [...]
The Council conclusions aim to walk a diplomatic tightrope, by not raising any doubts about the EU's commitment to the nuclear deal despite the withdrawal of the U.S., but also holding Iran to account for a continuing pattern of military meddling in the Middle East and at least two recent assassination plots in Denmark and the Netherlands. [...]
The spat stems from an effort by the EU last year to address other concerns about Iran, including its role in wars in Yemen and Syria, without creating the perception that the discussions were taking place in the same format that led to development of the nuclear accord. The nuclear deal was brokered by the E3+3 — the EU, France, Germany and the U.K. plus Russia, China and the United States.
For the new framework, the EU established the E4 — adding Italy. But that move was seen by some EU countries, including Spain, as a bit of home-country favoritism by Mogherini, a former Italian foreign minister. Others saw it as an effort to appease Rome, which was annoyed at being excluded from the E3 while Berlin was included.
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