BBC4 Analysis: Magic Weapons

 There used to be a romantic notion of globalisation that all countries would simply have to get along as we were all so interconnected. Why fight when your interests are aligned? It’s an idea that has made direct military engagement less likely. But something very different has emerged in its place.

We live in a new era of conflict, where states try to achieve their aims through aggressive measures that stay below the threshold of war. This is a strategy of statecraft with a long history, but which has a new inflection in our technologically charged, globalised world.

Now a mix of cyber, corruption and disinformation is employed to mess with adversaries. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has referred to political influence activities as being one of the Chinese Communist Party's 'magic weapons'.

In this edition of Analysis, Peter Pomerantsev looks at how political warfare works in a world where we’re all economically entangled - and what Britain could and should do to adapt.

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Politico: Weak support for liberal democracy in EU’s east, poll says

The study published by the Globsec think tank found that in four out of 10 countries surveyed — Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia and Bulgaria — less than 50 percent of respondents backed "liberal democracy with regular elections and multiparty system" as the best form of government. [...]

In Austria, the preference was reversed, with the equivalent figures 7 percent and 92 percent. Meanwhile, in Hungary and Poland, 81 percent and 66 percent, respectively, voiced support for the system of liberal democracy. Twelve percent and 26 percent respectively want a strong leader. [...]

Majorities in Slovakia (72 percent), Estonia (56 percent), Hungary (52 percent) and the Czech Republic (72 percent) said migrants threaten their identity and values. [...]

In Hungary, 64 percent of respondents said they believe the government influences the media, while 62 percent said the same in Poland. Meanwhile 57 percent of Austrians said "oligarchs and strong financial groups" have such an influence.

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The Huffington Post: Here’s What Happens When Public Transit Is Free

The communities testing or considering free transit are diverse, ranging from major metropolises to small towns and from blue-collar to affluent. Just an hour’s drive from Worcester is Lawrence, Massachusetts, a post-industrial city with a large immigrant population. It used a municipal budget surplus to make some bus service free on a trial basis last fall, and the city has seen ridership go up 20%. [...]

The equity impact of a free ride is obvious: Beyond a few big cities, it’s the most marginalized people who are least likely to own cars and thus rely most on transit. And for those who count on it, transit is at least as vital as other services that cities are expected to fund entirely through tax revenue, from parks and libraries to schools and police forces. [...]

Climate change, however, may finally tip that political calculation. In the United States, according to federal government data, transportation is responsible for 29% of greenhouse gas emissions, with passenger cars and light trucks emitting 59% of that. Putting a dent in those figures will require public transit to become more attractive than driving, and given the cost of fueling, parking and maintaining an automobile, the word “free” could have a certain appeal. [...]

Fares sometimes amount to only a small fraction of a system’s funding — 14%, or about $3 million, in Worcester — which means lost revenues can often be made up for with federal and state grants, budget reallocations or special taxes. France uses a payroll tax on businesses to support urban and regional transit systems, allowing some of them to offer free rides. In the U.S., free transit in some college towns is made possible by a subsidy from the local university.

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The Guardian: Life in the 'hairy underground': the lost history of Soviet hippies

Lampmann is one of the stars of Soviet Hippies, a film by the Estonian writer and director Terje Toomistu about a lost period in Soviet history. The documentary explores a subculture that was inspired by the west yet distinctly homegrown – existing in a society shaped by communism and watched over by the KGB.

“In the west, nobody was arrested simply for having long hair or wearing strange clothes,” Toomistu explains. The USSR, by contrast, wanted complete control of its citizens’ lives: how people worked, dressed, or even danced. Anyone who rejected the Homo sovieticus model could be in “big trouble”, including having their hair forcibly cut. [...]

By the late 70s, the hippies had developed a counterculture, with Russian slang and a music scene. There was what Toomistu calls “analogue Facebook” – notebooks listing names and numbers of contacts across the USSR, used by travellers seeking somewhere to crash for the night. This network is gloriously animated in the film, which features psychedelic drawings and cartoons.

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TLDR Explains: Why Don't We Vote Online in Elections?

Voting can be complicated a time consuming, and having your say in an election can take its toll. That's why many have discussed taking voting online to make engaging in democracy quicker and easier. However, Estonia is the only country to take it super seriously, using online i-voting in every election for the last 14 years. We discuss why Estonia uses it, and why other countries have been so cautious to follow in their footsteps.

UnHerd: The five elections to watch in 2019

Bremen’s election this year, scheduled on May 26, the day of the EU elections, will test the SPD’s resilience – the party has received the most votes there in every state election since 1946. No polls have been taken since the recent Green spurt, but in August the SPD were level with the CSU and only 6% ahead of the Greens. If the national poll trends since then – which show the SPD falling and the Greens rising – are occurring in Bremen too, the SPD is currently running behind the CDU in Bremen and running neck and neck with the Greens.[...]

The other state elections occur in three former East German states, and the key question there is whether the AfD will take first place in any – or even all – contests. The most recent polls in Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia all show the AfD in second place, but only a few points behind the front runner. Moreover, each state’s poll shows the combined vote share for the AfD and the descendants of the former East German Communist party, Die Linke (“The Left”), at between 39% and 44%.[...]

All three trends are apparent in the Madrid region. Vox’s staunch opposition to Catalonian separatism and migration has seen it skyrocket in the polls, where it currently receives 12-18%. Much of this support, seemingly, comes from the traditional party of the centre-Right, Partido Popular (PP). But support also seems to be coming from former Podemos voters too. Podemos and the United Left had received over 23% in 2015, but the new grouping Unidos Podemos was polling at only 18% in early January. Just as is the case with support for similar parties around the world, like the Sweden Democrats and Germany’s AfD, Vox’s support thus seems to come from both the Left and Right.[...]

EKRE emphasises Estonian nationality above all else – arguing that Estonia has become a “vassal state” of the EU. It strongly opposes immigration and Russian involvement in the Ukraine and Georgia, and challenges the market forces it says have made Estonia a home of cheap labour for foreign capital. Inclusion of the EKRE in government would undoubtedly sound alarm bells among the European establishment, but their participation may be unavoidable if there is to be stable government.

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Politico: Countries reject plan to scrap clock change in 2019

Ministers are poised to call for the EU to postpone the plan to scrap daylight saving time to 2021, according to a draft text prepared by the Austrian presidency and obtained by POLITICO.

The shift follows pressure from countries including Portugal, Greece and the Netherlands to maintain the clock change or provide more information to justify scrapping the twice-yearly shift. [...]

Countries that support keeping the current system do so “mainly due to the lack of plausible available evidence regarding the possible benefits that the abolition of time changes could bring about,” it added.[...]

An EU consultation saw a majority of the 4.6 million respondents back the move to scrap the clock change, an EU standard since 1996. Countries including Finland and Estonia remain strongly in favor of the Commission’s plan.

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openDemocracy: Mimetic power: how Russia pretends to be a normal member of the international community

While explaining the concept to Russian diplomats, Putin viewed Russia’s soft power as either diplomacy, or most likely, propaganda that can be made available, or even enhanced or intensified, at will. Soft power, however, according to Joseph Nye’s discussion of the concept, is the pre-existing ability to influence other countries through attraction, with resources of soft power being a nation’s political values, culture and foreign policy. Being a pre-existing ability, soft power differs from an immediate action that, for example, can be a diplomatic action, propaganda effort or humanitarian gesture.[...]

What happened when Moscow realised that it was dramatically failing to use “soft power” to influence Western nations through attraction? Not only after 2014 but even before, they must have realised that the Kremlin’s political values did not match prevailing Western values and that its peculiar international behaviour – no matter how assured they were of its legitimacy and credibility – was one of the reasons for the deterioration of the relations with the West. Russian official diplomacy and public diplomacy can still draw upon what they believe to be Russian high culture as an important resource of soft power, but it has limited value considering the failures that overshadow Russia’s cultural achievements.[...]

Russia’s mimetic power is the ability to influence Western nations by creating the impression that Russia is a normal member of the international community and emulating what pro-Kremlin actors perceive as Western soft power techniques. By presenting Russia as a credible and responsible international partner, Moscow is trying to convince the West – especially following the Ukraine-related escalation of the conflict between the West and Russia – to lift the sanctions, go back to “business as usual”, and ultimately stop any attempts to democratise Russia (Moscow sees the latter as Western attempts to bring about a regime change in Russia). The emulation of perceived Western soft power techniques serves two objectives: first, to contribute to the creation of the image of Russia adapted to the Western normalcy, and, second, to undermine Western resolve to stand up to Moscow’s subversive activities.[...]

For example, Russian officials would regularly slam Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for allegedly infringing on the rights of Russian-speaking minorities, while Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs would publish a series of “white books” discussing “violations of human rights and the rule of law in Ukraine” at the same time as other Russian agencies send military forces to invade Ukraine. Yet when human rights “go too far”, implying that Moscow fails to wriggle out of particular criticisms, Russian officials have a readymade excuse: Western human rights contradict “the fundamentals of our culture based on Orthodox Christianity”.

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Wired: Estonia may actually have a use for the blockchain: green energy

The company began to use blockchain to link business buyers of energy – companies that buy electricity – directly with the producer, after striking a deal with Elering, one of Estonia‘s independent electricity and gas system operators. The idea was to use energy ‘tokenisation’ – by linking energy consumption and production data to the blockchain, in an attempt to digitise the country’s energy sector. Now the pilot project is yielding its first results.[...]

The bulk of energy in the Baltic country is produced by fossil fuels – only 18 per cent come from renewables. The main aim is to test the limits of what’s possible with blockchain technology, says WePower’s CEO Nick Martyniuk. At the same time it is trying to increase the percentage of eletricity generated from renewables. “Even though the cost of renewables has dropped significantly, small to medium size companies don't have a good way to start buying green energy.[...]

It's not clear, though, that scaling up will actually work, as it would mean using blockchain technology for data that is flowing at high speed and in huge volume. One concern is transaction capacity: WePower mainly uses the public ethereum blockchain that applies the so-called proof-of-work (PoW) approach that requires a lot of energy and computing power that only professional ethereum miners can provide (although ethereum may at some point switch to the environmentally-friendlier and easier “proof-of-stake” approach). So PoW means the transaction capacity might be limited, says Fei Wang, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, energy research and consultancy firm. “This may not be an issue during the pilot phase, but this would be a hurdle if the project were to expand to a full commercial deployment.”

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Politico: Macron gives EU tech tax a political push

The French-led push fits into broader European efforts to rein in Silicon Valley companies, ranging from a $5 billion antitrust fine against Google to ongoing investigations into Facebook’s data practices. The large tech firms have so far responded by ramping up their lobbying efforts in the European capital, while U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has warned the Europeans against jeopardizing tech investment — although so far Washington has stopped short of bringing the digital tax issue into its argument with Brussels over trade. [...]

While Paris claims to have the backing of 19 countries including the United Kingdom — whose chancellor, Philip Hammond, has pledged to “go it alone” on such a tax — it’s far from garnering the unanimous support needed for the measure to pass. A group of countries led by Ireland and including Estonia, Sweden and the Czech Republic remains strongly opposed.[...]

Tech firms’ opposition to the tax plan is due mainly to its long-term implications rather than any immediate financial impact. Under the current proposal, which was put forward by the European Commission for consideration by EU states by year-end, companies with substantial digital operations in the EU — those generating more than €750 million in annual revenue — would be subject to the new tax. The Commission has suggested a tax of 3 percent on revenues would raise some €5 billion a year. [...]

The problem for tech companies has more to do with the fact that France, and many EU allies, want to enshrine the idea of taxing value added from the collection and deployment of personal data for advertising — in other words, the engine at the core of Facebook, Google, Twitter and, increasingly, Amazon’s wildly successful business models. A European tax on data could prompt other countries to impose similar measures — just as Japan, South Korea, South Africa and a slew of other countries have imposed their own variations of Europe’s far-reaching data privacy rules.

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CityLab: Universal Basic Mobility Is Coming. And It’s Long Overdue

Universal Basic Mobility would be a system of partnerships and/or policies that provide a minimum level of mobility to all members of society. An isolated, static population is unhealthy, unproductive and unhappy. A mobile population is economically, culturally, and socially dynamic. UBM can harness automation and new mobility platforms to accelerate economic growth, providing everyone with access to employment and the means to improve their quality of life. [...]

For a basic user, MaaS plan pricing resembles smartphone plan pricing. The most fully realized MaaS plan is Whim in Helsinki, Finland, that charges approximately $50 per month for limited service including public transit, bikeshare, and limited ridesharing; and $500 per month for full ridesharing service that replaces personal car ownership. MaaS could significantly drive down the amount people—especially urban residents—pay to travel over the course of a year, because while personal cars sit idle 95 percent of the time, shared cars and bikes get much higher utilization—creating efficiencies and cost savings. [...]

A right to mobility doesn’t mean free mobility for everyone, but there are strong incentives to make at least some services free, like public transit. Estonia has implemented free public transit nationally, and Paris is studying it. In cities with free public transit, a common theme is that the collective benefits of encouraging its use by everyone—enabling cities to reduce traffic, pollution, and parking in central areas—outweigh the relatively low cost of providing it to everyone.

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Business Insider: NATO allies are talking about breaking away from the US, but Trump isn't their only problem

Trump's approach to the summit is unlikely to change the minds of European leaders who have called on their governments and alliance partners to adapt to a changing world order — in large part by augmenting their domestic defense industries.

In June, Jorge Domecq, the Spanish head of the European Defense Agency, said countries on the continent needed to work toward greater "strategic autonomy" by weaning itself off US-made weaponry. [...]

In mid-June, the parliament in Estonia — which plans a defense-spending increase amid high concern about its eastern neighbor, Russia — changed legislation to provide "a legal framework for Estonian companies to begin to manufacture, maintain, import, and export military weapons, ammunition, munitions and combat vehicles." [...]

A survey by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that members of the European Union — which does not totally overlap with NATO membership — viewed Russia as the second-biggest threat to Europe.

But within the EU, perspectives on Russia varied greatly. Seven countries viewed it as their biggest threat, and five members, mostly from southern Europe, saw it as almost no threat at all.  

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CityLab: Paris Ponders an Audacious Idea: Free Transit for All

Of course, all this hinges on the results of the study, which will be delivered at the end of the year. Liberating all transit would cost the Paris region an extra €6 billion annually, according to one estimate. But the potential upsides are equally enormous: cleaner air, reduced healthcare costs, plummeting carbon emissions. There’s also the possibility that free-transit-for-all would make Paris so pleasant and easy to live in that it becomes irresistible to investors. [...]

One possibility: congestion fees. The city could raise funds by charging tolls on all motor vehicles to enter Paris Proper, the 2.2 million-resident historic heart of the metro area. Congestion charges of this type aren’t new—London has had one since 2003—but one that covered the entirety of Paris Proper would be five times the size of that in the U.K. capital. And such a plan would certainly not be an easy sell, given that Paris will have to contend with pressure from municipalities in the wider metro area where many residents still depend on their cars. [...]

There’s a more fundamental question here, too: Are free public transit zones on this kind of scale feasible or desirable? France is something of a leader on this front, with more than 30 cities that enjoy free public transit zones. As Henry Grabar reported for CityLab back in 2012, they’ve been largely successful in boosting ridership without bankrupting town coffers. But most towns that attempted the fare-free model are relatively small—the largest is the 120,000-citizen city of Niort. Germany’s caretaker government has also been toying with the idea, but its plan to trial such a scheme in five medium-sized cities, (including Bonn and Essen) has been shot down by local municipalities, leaving the 87,000-resident city of Tübingen as the only major German town seriously looking into a free bus ride scheme.

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Politico: Emmanuel Macron’s coalition of the willing

Defense ministers of France, the U.K., Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Denmark and Estonia will sign a letter of intent in Paris in June, officials told me, pledging to develop a common strategic culture, share analysis and foresight on trouble spots that may require intervention and work to coordinate their forces for future operations.

Macron outlined the idea in his keynote Sorbonne speech on European integration last September, calling for a common European intervention force, defense budget and doctrine for action in contingencies where the United States and NATO may not get involved. France wants to recruit allies that could help share its military burden especially in Africa, where it intervened alone in Mali in 2012 to prevent Islamist militants seizing control of a weak state. [...]

British Prime Minister Theresa May quietly endorsed the initiative at a Franco-British summit at the Sandhurst Military Academy in January but did not publicize the step to avoid antagonizing hard-line Brexiteers in her Conservative Party, to whom any idea of an “EU army” is anathema. She did announce a practical move to help the French in the Sahel region, making available three heavy-lift Chinook helicopters to support operations in Mali.  [...]

Paris also approached non-NATO Sweden and Finland and non-EU Norway about the initiative but they chose to stay out at least initially, diplomats said. Under other circumstances, the French would have liked to include Poland, the most serious military player in former communist Central Europe, but that seems impossible as long as Jarosław Kaczyński’s ruling Law and Justice party stays on its authoritarian nationalist course.

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Bloomberg: Europe’s Depopulation Time Bomb Is Ticking in the Baltics

The trend is hitting especially hard in the Baltics. Latvia, with a current population of 1.96 million, has lost about 25 percent of its residents since throwing off Soviet control in 1991. The UN predicts that by 2050, it will have lost an additional 22 percent of its current population—second only to Bulgaria—and by 2100, 41 percent. [...]

As bad as those numbers look, the trend looks even worse for Ukraine and Moldova. The UN predicts 36 percent and 51 percent declines in those nations by the end of the century, respectively. Russia, meanwhile, is expected to lose 13 percent by 2100.

Several factors are contributing to the depopulation of Eastern Europe, and Latvia has all of them: low income, compared with more developed EU nations; insufficient growth; and strong anti-immigrant sentiment. The average annual take-home pay among all EU nations was 24,183 euros ($29,834) in 2015, according to Eurostat, while in Latvia it was only 6,814 euros ($8,406).  [...]

Nine out of 10 countries with the lowest acceptance rate of immigrants are former members of the Eastern bloc. Of these, the three Baltic nations had been previously forced to accept Russian-speaking migrants. In Latvia, the issue is so controversial that in 2015, when the EU insisted it accept just a few hundred Syrian refugees, nationalists initially threatened to withdraw from the government. That same year, Latvia came in second to last in the Migrant Integration Policy Index, which ranks 38 democracies according to the quality of immigration policies. Only Turkey did worse. Latvia was fourth from the bottom in Gallup’s 2017 Migrant Acceptance Score list, which ranks countries in order of their populations’ attitudes to immigrants. 

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The Guardian: 'Christianity as default is gone': the rise of a non-Christian Europe

The survey of 16- to 29-year-olds found the Czech Republic is the least religious country in Europe, with 91% of that age group saying they have no religious affiliation. Between 70% and 80% of young adults in Estonia, Sweden and the Netherlands also categorise themselves as non-religious.

The most religious country is Poland, where 17% of young adults define themselves as non-religious, followed by Lithuania with 25%. [...]

But there were significant variations, he said. “Countries that are next door to one another, with similar cultural backgrounds and histories, have wildly different religious profiles.”  [...]

In the Czech Republic, 70% said they never went to church or any other place of worship, and 80% said they never pray. In the UK, France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, between 56% and 60% said they never go to church, and between 63% and 66% said they never pray.  

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VoxEurop: Immigration: Europeans favour intra-EU mobility

The 88th Eurobarometer survey, published in December 2017, finds that most Europeans (64 percent) have a positive opinion about immigration coming from other EU countries. In May 2015, as recently noted by the think-tank Bruegel, "51% of persons asked had a 'very' or 'somewhat' positive view of intra-EU immigration. 40 percent expressed a 'very' or 'somewhat' negative view, while 9 percent had no opinion. Since then, support for intra-EU immigration has continued to climb".

According to Bruegel this means that "more than two-thirds of European citizens have a positive view of the free movement of people within the EU". This feeling is shared across almost all European countries – even the UK, committed to leaving the EU – with the only exception being Cyprus, where 50 percent of residents think the opposite. [...]

"Luxemburgers, Irish and Swedes are the most favorable to intra-EU migrations, and they also remain relatively supportive of extra-EU immigration. More than half of Spanish, Portuguese and British citizens also support extra-EU immigration. [...] Conversely, support is very weak in certain countries of central and eastern Europe (Czechia, Slovakia, Latvia, Hungary and Estonia)", notes the Brussels research institute. It adds that this perception of extra-EU immigration did not deteriorate during the refugee crisis, remaining more or less stable.

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Politico: Bratislava is for losers

It’s been a rough few weeks for Slovakia. First, its capital is passed up as the new host of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) after Brexit in favor of Amsterdam. Then its finance minister, Peter Kažimír, resigns from the race for the Eurogroup leadership — a position that would have given the country a real seat at the table, for once.

Slovaks reacted to the bad news from Brussels with overblown self-flagellation. Bratislava, much of Slovakia’s commentariat agreed, was a terrible place to live — who would want to move there from London? And Kažimír was an awful candidate who is not doing enough to stabilize public finances at home (notwithstanding this year’s deficit, expected at around 1.29 percent of GDP) and has not been able to eradicate tax fraud in the country. [...]

There are grounds for optimism. Neither outcome — no matter how disappointing — sparked the outrage at “traitors” or out-of-touch cosmopolitan elites that usually follows controversial decisions out of Brussels. Not even Slovak politicians who harbor very little affection for the EU used the occasion to criticize the bloc. [...]

Slovakia will never be a large country and wield a voice comparable to that of Poland, let alone Germany or France. But it can be an influential country if it matches a commitment to EU integration with effective domestic reforms to update its public administration, health care and education systems. And if Slovak leaders also have a clear vision and strategy of what they are trying to accomplish in Europe.

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BBC4 Analysis: Europe Unbound

Edward Stourton asks how the European Union might change after Britain leaves. "The wind is back in Europe's sails", according to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. In September, in his annual address to the European Parliament, he set out a bold dream for the future. Soon afterwards it was echoed by another, this time from French President Emmanuel Macron who declared that "the only path that assures our future is the rebuilding of a Europe that is sovereign, united and democratic". Amongst the proposals that the two leaders put forward were a European budget run by a European finance minister, an enlargement of the Schengen passport-free travel zone, and much closer collaboration on tax, defence, and a host of other issues.

But at present, the European project faces huge challenges. Britain is about to leave the EU, whilst Catalonia's bid for independence is causing turmoil in Spain. In the face of such developments, how realistic are the grand visions that Europe's leaders have for the future of the continent?

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The Washington Post: Europe has been working to expose Russian meddling for years

In the recent French elections, the Kremlin-friendly presidential candidate lost to newcomer Emmanuel Macron, who was subjected to Russian hacking and false allegations in Russian-sponsored news outlets during the campaign. In Germany, all political parties have agreed not to employ automated bots in their social media campaigns because such hard-to-detect cybertools are frequently used by Russia to circulate bogus news accounts. [...]

Methods vary. Sweden has launched a nationwide school program to teach students to identify Russian propaganda. The Defense Ministry has created new units to seek out and counter Russian attempts to undermine Swedish society.

In Lithuania, 100 citizen cyber-sleuths dubbed “elves” link up digitally to identify and beat back the people employed on social media to spread Russian disinformation. They call the daily skirmishes “Elves vs. Trolls.” [...]

Russia has not hidden its liking for information warfare. The chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, wrote in 2013 that “informational conflict” is a key part of war. Actual military strength is only the final tool of a much subtler war-fighting strategy, he said. This year, the Defense Ministry announced the creation of a new cyberwarrior unit.

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