The New York Review of Books: The Lure of Western Europe

The memory of Hitler, and of the recent war, haunted Adenauer and his compatriots too. The chancellor was afraid that West Germany’s new democracy might prove fragile, especially if it were put under direct pressure from the USSR. He thought that its survival required it to be bound tightly to the other nations of the West. And so Adenauer rejected the Soviet offer of unification. This decision, writes Ian Kershaw, was “highly controversial since it had a direct corollary: accepting that for the indefinite future there could be no expectation of East and West Germany uniting.” Adenauer not only accepted the division of his country, he also agreed to a permanent US military presence and to the deep integration of his country with the rest of Europe, especially Germany’s old enemy France. [...]

Although, as Kershaw writes, the political systems varied from country to country, they were “built everywhere on principles of law, human rights and personal freedom,” along with “restructured capitalist economies” that created the basis for growth as well as the welfare state. These systems were also remarkably stable, thanks not least to a “widespread desire for ‘normality,’ for peace and quiet, for settled conditions after the immense upheaval, enormous dislocation and huge suffering during the war and its immediate aftermath.” Indeed, “stability was paramount for most people. As the ice formed on the Cold War, every country in Western Europe set a premium on internal stability.”[...]

This is not to say that Western Europe, in the postwar era, was any kind of utopia. The economic model did eventually stumble during the oil crisis of the 1970s. The political model hit multiple rough patches. There were challenges from terrorism in Italy and Germany, student strikes in France, workers’ strikes in Britain. There were constitutional crises, separatist movements, and bitter disputes between European leaders. Nevertheless, the lure of Western Europe, its prosperity, its culture, and the continental and transatlantic institutions built by Adenauer, Churchill, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and a handful of Dutch, Belgian, and Italian statesmen, did become extraordinarily powerful. By the 1970s, the myth of “Europe” was strong enough to lure Spain, Portugal, and Greece away from dictatorship, toward democracy, and into European institutions—and even to persuade a reluctant Great Britain to join the European Economic Community. And, of course, it was powerful enough to send the iron curtain crashing down for good in 1989. [...]

Central to those assumptions was the belief in Western economic superiority. That was shattered by the financial crisis of 2008–2009, which had an outsized impact on Europe, destroying jobs, savings, and companies across the continent and particularly in the weaker economies of the south. Its psychological impact was just as significant: the widespread faith in Washington and Frankfurt—the belief that the bankers and the finance ministers must know what they are doing—was lost forever. Still, Europe survived it. As Kershaw writes, “The worst recession in eighty years had wrecked economies, toppled governments and brought turmoil to the European continent,” and yet “there had been no collapse of democracy, no lurch into fascism and authoritarianism…. Civil society, despite the traumas, had proved resilient.”

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Foreign Affairs: Why Venezuela’s Regime Hasn’t Collapsed

To succeed in ousting Maduro, however, Guaidó will need to get the Venezuelan armed forces on his side. Maduro does not have the charisma of Hugo Chávez, who was the country’s president from 1999 until his death, in 2013, nor has he been able to benefit from the same oil windfall as his predecessor. Since coming to power, Maduro has overseen a country in crisis. Inflation is expected to reach ten million percent this year, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have fled the country, and the ones staying behind lack food and medicines. Unsurprisingly, Maduro is deeply unpopular, and he has relied on the military for his government’s survival. In exchange for suppressing popular discontent, the military has gotten control of PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, and used the government’s mantle of impunity to run and profit from drug trafficking and black-market trading. High-ranking members in the armed forces continue siding with Maduro because they do not want to lose this revenue stream or face prosecution for corruption, drug trafficking, and human rights abuses such as the death of protesters, unjust imprisonment, and torture. [...]

The opposition has also made it costlier for the military to keep supporting the regime by organizing peaceful demonstrations. The number of such protests has gone up dramatically in recent months, from around 700 from October to December 2018 to more than 6,000 in the first three months of 2019. The government, unwilling to respond to the protesters’ concerns, has resorted to repression, imprisoning activists and opposition leaders and at times even firing on protesters. This strategy can easily fail, since it might encourage the defections of officers who are reluctant to use violence against fellow citizens or who worry about facing human rights trials in the future.

Part of the problem is a lack of trust on both sides. There is ample evidence suggesting that low- and high-ranking members of the armed forces are ready to withdraw their support from Maduro. The alleged backdoor deal between opposition and government officials ahead of the April 30 uprising indicates that opposition leaders and individuals close to the president could indeed come to an agreement. How to guarantee and enforce the terms of the deal, however, is a more complicated story. The opposition has a hard time trusting powerful regime insiders, since the latter have often just used negotiations with the opposition to buy time. Guaidó also needs to balance different factions inside the opposition, some of which are more willing to compromise with the regime than others.

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Jacobin Magazine: Power Has Returned to Power

On April 29, as Spaniards woke up the day after the general election, it was the Right that was left wondering what might have been. The right-wing Partido Popular (PP) had achieved its worst ever score, and the far-right Vox’s breakthrough was less than expected. For the conservative FAES — the country’s most influential think tank — the blame for the right-wing parties’ poor results lay with the division of their forces combined with voters’ “reckless ignorance.” Federico Jiménez Losantos, a hard-right radio host, declared Spain “lost, stupefied, and idiotic.” [...]

We should not underestimate the scale of this defeat. Five years after its triumphal breakthrough in the 2014 EU elections, Podemos has suffered a resounding defeat, losing almost all of the key municipalities it won with grassroots coalitions in 2015. The exceptions are Cádiz — whose anticapitalist mayor, Kichi, won an impressive absolute majority — and Valencia, still governed by a leftist coalition, but where Podemos has failed to secure a municipal foothold. [...]

More broadly, we can today characterize the current situation in Spain as governed by a stabilization of the center after years of popular revolt. Indeed, for all its threatening appearance, even the emergence of the radical right Vox has facilitated this process. Failing to make a breakthrough in this weekend’s election, it appears to have hardened as a small party that appeals only to wealthy Spaniards and members of the armed forces. It is enough to propel the conservative PP to regional and local power, but also serves PSOE prime minister Pedro Sánchez as a convenient boogeyman. As he forms a national-level government may now be tempted to draw the liberal Ciudadanos away from a right-wing coalition and toward a large, centrist alliance. [...]

Sánchez, however, is under no hurry to invite Podemos into the government — even less so after Sunday’s results. In previous televised debates, he refused to clarify, when pressured by Iglesias, whether he would seek Ciudadanos’s support. It fell upon Rivera to insist that his party would rather join forces with the radical right. But Rivera has broken his word before, and he has a proved talent for overnight ideological conversion. In four different regions, Ciudadanos’s support could prove instrumental for PSOE to hold power. One of them is Madrid, without which the PP would lose its last remaining stronghold.

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The New York Review of Books: ‘Nostalgia Serves No Purpose’: An Interview with Michel Barnier

Born in 1951, Michel Barnier joined the French Gaullist party, the RPR, at fifteen. Unlike most high-level French administrators and politicians, Barnier is not a product of the École Nationale d’Administration; in fact, he graduated from the École Supérieure de Commerce in Paris. He first won public recognition in France for coordinating preparations for the 1992 Winter Olympics in the Alpine town of Albertville. He went on to serve as a minister for the environment, and then for European affairs. Later, he became minister for foreign affairs, until losing his job when French voters rejected the European Union’s new Constitutional Treaty in a 2005 referendum. The shock of that result, and a similar one in the Netherlands, might have served as a cautionary tale for Prime Minister David Cameron’s government. (France later accepted a new version of the treaty agreement, after the election of President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, by parliamentary assent.) [...]

This is the reason that the EU is so complex. It’s clearly possible to work here in Brussels with more democracy, less bureaucracy, but it will still remain complex—as it [the EU] wants to be united rather than uniform. This [compromise and negotiation] is the price we have to pay. We don’t want to become one nation or one people. There is no ambition to build a distinct and homogeneous federal state. We are twenty-eight, in a few months probably twenty-seven, with twenty-four languages. [...]

Looking at the causes of Brexit, we also find typically British reasons: the hope for a return to a powerful global Britain, nostalgia for the past—nostalgia serves no purpose in politics. In my country, too, some politicians still prefer to live in the past. But there were, also, people voting for Brexit who simply don’t want to accept rules. Some based in the City of London voted to leave, as they don’t want to accept the Union’s regulations on their trading; they want to speculate freely and the Union doesn’t allow them to do so. [...]

t’s a question of the fundamental reality of the single market, which is not a supermarket. Freedom of movement for goods, services, capital and, most importantly, freedom of movement for people are fundamental to the single market. The EU is not only an economic project; it’s also a political project. It’s also much more than a free-trade zone. The single market is a social, economic, and legal ecosystem, where, between twenty-eight countries, we have decided to live together, adopt the same standards and protection for consumers. Therefore, we cannot agree to cherry-picking.

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Foreign Policy: It’s Modi’s India Now

Between 1984 and 2014, no single political party could win enough seats to form a national government on its own. There were simply too many, it seemed, and new ones kept emerging. In 2014, 464 political parties competed in the national elections—up from 215 in 2004—with most representing narrow regional, religious, or ideological constituencies. The system gave meaning to the famous catchphrase: “Indians don’t cast their vote; they vote their caste.” [...]

The BJP’s 2019 campaign had to be different—after all, Modi was no longer the candidate representing change. Unemployment had hit a 45-year high under the BJP, and economic growth began to slow down. And so instead of Modi the reformer, Indians got to see Modi the performer this election season: He branded himself a chowkidar, or security guard, to emphasize his ability to keep India, and especially Hindus, safe. Across hundreds of campaign speeches, he carefully shifted the focus of his message to national security and identity politics. And it worked. The question now is what lesson the BJP will derive from its latest victory, and how those insights will guide it in the years to come. [...]

Meanwhile, as press freedom declines in India—Reporters Without Borders ranks India 140th out of 180 countries, and Modi declined to hold a single press conference in his first five years as prime minister—the media will struggle to challenge government reports of military action. For example, New Delhi has claimed that in a Feb. 27 aerial dogfight with Pakistan, it shot down a Pakistani F-16 fighter jet. As Foreign Policy reported at the time, a U.S. count of F-16s sold to Pakistan found no missing jets, calling into question New Delhi’s account of what happened. But an increasingly jingoistic mainstream Indian media didn’t follow up. Future Indian governments now have a template for appearing strong in public—irrespective of what they actually do. [...]

And the lines in that fight were drawn clearly in 2019. The BJP’s party president Amit Shah—the chief architect of Modi’s reelection campaign—referred to Muslim immigrants living in India illegally as “termites” on the campaign trail last September, and he repeated the phrase this year. In the eastern state of Assam, the BJP has created a National Register of Citizens, a database that excludes 4 million people in that state, most of them Muslims. Shah has promised that the BJP would implement a similar database across the whole country, ostensibly to force a mass purge of Muslims deemed to have immigrated illegally from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

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openDemocracy: The war on Europe’s women and LGBTIQ people has only just begun

Salvini held a rosary and kissed a small crucifix, thanking the “Immaculate Heart of Mary” (as he did during campaign rallies). Announcing it is time to “save Europe” and “its Judeo-Christian roots”, he pointed to the victories of Marine Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in the UK, saying: “It is a sign of a Europe that has changed”.

Across the European Union, 50.5% of registered voters participated in the 26 May elections – the highest rate in 20 years, and the first significant increase since 1979. Many commentators responded to the results with a measure of optimism: the populist far-right did not conquer the European Parliament, as they had campaigned to. [...]

Take the issue of immigration, Salvini’s favourite: after almost one year of his so-called “closed ports” policy, and a decree on asylum and humanitarian protection rules that left thousands of people in precarious status, there is now a draft of a new harsh security decree against migrants and solidarity, ready to be discussed by the government. [...]

While Salvini has said that the 1978 law that legalised abortion in Italy isn’t up for discussion, his positions against sexual and reproductive rights are quite clear. On Mother’s Day, he sent wishes “to all mothers, but not to parent 1 or 2” (a jab at same-sex parents). He’s also issued a decree replacing the gender-neutral term “parents” with “father” and “mother” on the forms required to fill out for minors’ ID cards.

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Commonweal Magazine: What Benedict’s Letter on Abuse Gets Wrong

Or should clergy sex abuse be understood most basically as a grave act of sacrilege? If so, clergy sex abuse should be grouped with other acts of sacrilege, such as desecration of the Host, blasphemy against the Blessed Mother, and the commission of any serious moral wrong inside a holy place. From this perspective, the fact that the perpetrator is a priest does not merely exacerbate the wrongful act; it constitutes the core of it. The priest is befouling his holy vows. The fact that he does so by abusing a child adds to the wrong, but does not change its core moral description—it is an act of sacrilege, akin to celebrating a Black Mass.

Benedict’s letter seems to put clergy sex abuse in the category of sacrilege, not injustice. He does not use the term “sacrilege.” But it is the category that best fits his account of why the act is wrong, especially when sacrilege is understood broadly as a violation or misuse of the sacred. He presents the major victim as the Faith itself—not the children whose integrity was violated. According to Benedict, the “alarming situation” is that “the Faith no longer appears to have the rank of a good requiring protection.” What bothers him most about one of the human victims he encountered is that she can no longer hear the words of consecration without distress, because her priest-attacker used them in the course of the abuse. He says nothing about how the abuse would have affected the entire course of her life. He does not issue a forceful call to protect children, but rather implores us to “do all we can to protect the gift of the Holy Eucharist from abuse.”

Benedict’s approach has dangerous consequences. If the real victim is the Faith, then the overriding task is to protect the institution of the church, which instantiates the mystical Body of Christ in time. If the worst consequence of the crisis is the widespread loss of faith in the church’s credibility, then it is better to handle specific instances quietly—so as not to scandalize the faithful. Offending priests should be quickly laicized, so that they do not continue to befoul the Body of Christ. Once they are no longer part of the hierarchy, they are no longer the church’s problem. Victims should be encouraged to remain quiet, perhaps with a legally binding confidentiality agreement, so they don’t erode the church’s ability to pass on the faith. They should be discouraged from seeking monetary damages from the church, since it is the original and primary victim of the priest’s transgression. Finally, secular law enforcement should not be involved in most cases, since their involvement occludes the mystical and transcendent nature of the problem.

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The Atlantic: The Gandhi Dynasty Helped Found India. It Is Now in Demise.

As the great-grandson, grandson, and son of Indian prime ministers, Gandhi’s political pedigree is not in question. Nor does his loss in Amethi mean that dynastic politics are over in India, where a new generation of politicians can trace their positions directly to their parents and grandparents. (Indeed, both his mother and his sister easily won their seats.) But the electoral humiliation of a scion of the Gandhi family, indeed the leader of the party that led India to independence from Britain, is striking in a region where dynastic politics have dominated the landscape for decades: The Gandhis in India, the Bhuttos and the Sharifs in Pakistan, the Bandarnaikes in Sri Lanka, and the descendants of Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman in Bangladesh have all been integral parts of their countries’ modern history. This parliamentary election, and Gandhi’s loss in a constituency whose past is closely intertwined with his family’s, is the most compelling sign yet that India has moved into a new era. [...]

One possible reason for this is that while the Congress Party has inexorably linked itself to the Gandhi family, Indian voters have moved on. This is a young country where half the 1.3 billion people are under the age of 27. The overwhelming majority of them are from modest backgrounds. In such circumstances, the story of Modi, the son of a tea vendor who, with no political godfather, became the most powerful Indian prime minister in decades, is a far more compelling narrative than that of Rahul Gandhi, a man who has seemingly had success hand-delivered to him.

Another possible reason is that Indian voters prioritize performance, rather than the lineage of a candidate—in fact, several regional political families won resounding victories in these elections. For whatever reason, the Congress Party, which has ruled India for 51 out of 71 years of independence, and the Gandhis, who have ruled for 36 of those years, no longer seem to fit the bill.

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