Social Europe: SPD: Snatching Revival From The Jaws Of Defeat

A minority government is inherently unstable but also in a Jamaica coalition Merkel will be caught between a rock and a hard place. The AfD had an unexpectedly good result in Bavaria, where the CSU (Merkel’s sister party in Bavaria) has lost substantial ground. The party chairman Horst Seehofer has already announced that he thinks that ‘leaving the right flank open’ was the main reason for this poor showing. Given that Bavarian elections are looming next year, it is predictable that he will try to pull the next German government to the right. And having a shrill extremist party like the AfD in the federal parliament will also push Merkel in the same direction. [...]

The SPD in contrast will have the opportunity to regroup in opposition facing a rather weak government. It will have the breathing space to develop an alternative politics for Germany with which it can contest the next election in 2021 (or earlier). The AfD is unlikely to be an effective opposition party as it freely admits to having no policy at all in many key areas. It is also likely to fall back into internal tribalism and conflicts between its populist and even more extreme wings. The final party in parliament, Die Linke, did not do very well in opposition against the Grand Coalition and is unlikely to play a more dominant role this time around. These dynamics could work well for the SPD. [...]

The Grand Coalition was never intended to be a permanent model and it is beyond its shelf-date now. It is time to broaden political competition within the democratic camp. If the SPD is successful in developing an alternative politics in opposition, not only might it regain a strong position soon but it might also make an important contribution to bringing AfD voters back into the mainstream fold. Yesterday’s election was a political earthquake and not every crisis provides an opportunity. This one, however, truly does.

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CityLab: Is Beige the New Black in Architecture?

Why are cafeteria walls set up in the ornate, Tiffany-domed Chicago Cultural Center, home to the biennial’s main exhibit? It turns out that Preissner and Andersen are in good company. Many of the projects here are similarly interested in elements of architecture that are boring, banal, or ugly. In various acts of image rehabilitation or re-contextualization, this festival makes a home for outcasts and weirdoes, often stigmatized in design because they just aren’t weird enough.[...]

“Visions of Another America” is one of an entire category of projects at the biennial that use collage and aggregation to tear down hierarchies and widen the circle of serious architectural consideration. This idea, of transparently re-appropriating architecture for use in other architecture, is itself outside the canon, as architects have historically dreaded admitting their ideas aren’t only peerless products of singular genius. [...]

There is a populist advantage to not explaining history from an assumed position of authority (in architecture, usually a bespectacled and suited white man). But that risks the loss of a sense of coherent narrative the broader public needs to understand. The biggest danger with exhibits on the color beige and glazed tile is that visitors will see elements of their own lives on stage, but might not know how to connect it to a larger story. The question of whether there is a larger story to tell will be, explicitly or implicitly, on the mind of many biennial curators and visitors to come.

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The Atlantic: Why Was Chad Included in the New Travel Ban?

Chad’s inclusion on the list of countries deemed security risks to the U.S. is additionally difficult to explain given its role over the past 15 years as a key counterterrorism ally. In April, U.S. forces participated in annual counterterrorism exercises with their counterparts from around the world in Chad. Chad’s inclusion in the list was met with astonishment in the country, and not only because this close counterterrorism partnership: The country has mostly managed to avoid the kinds of terrorist attacks that have afflicted its immediate neighbors like Nigeria and Mali.

“Chad sits in a very tough neighborhood,” Lauren P. Blanchard, a specialist in African affairs at the Congressional Research Service, told me. The country is a relative oasis of stability. It hosts French and U.S. forces, is engaged in fighting al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali, was critical in pushing back Boko Haram in Nigeria, and plays host to the Multinational Joint Task Force, the regional military effort to fight Boko Haram. [...]

The U.S. State Department, in its most recent country terrorism report from 2016, acknowledged Chad’s financial challenges in providing “external counterterrorism assistance in Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria,” but noted that Chad “engaged in major external military operations in … neighboring countries,” as part of the Lake Chad Basin Multinational Joint Task Force, which includes Benin, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria. Chad, the State Department reported added, was also contributing to the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali. Additionally, the report pointed out that terrorist incidents in the country had fallen due both to “proactive security force presence” and a split within Boko Haram. [...]

Terrorism aside, Chad certainly has its problems. These include an authoritarian government under President Idris Déby, politicization of the armed forces, and widespread poverty despite the country’s oil wealth. But the country—and the wider region—remains a key focus of Western counterterrorism efforts. Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who until recently was commander of American Special Operations Forces in Africa, called the Lake Chad Basin, which encompasses Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria, “ground zero” of the war on extremism in Africa. Blanchard told me “Chad is very important in figuring out movement between ISIS elements in Libya and Nigeria—they have to go through Chad or Niger.”

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The New York Review of Books: Germany’s Election: Choosing the Unspeakable

The apparent calm of the election belied the real concerns of the German public, concerns evident in the election results. Merkel began her campaign late and then barely campaigned; she gave plain speeches that rarely mentioned her opponents. To the eyes of the public, the two major parties seemed nearly identical. This provided the AfD with an opening to be the opposition. If people turned to a party that said the unspeakable, it was partly because very speakable things weren’t being said at all. [...]

“Merkel and Schulz: they agree,” read a headline after the one TV debate of the election season, in which the two candidates seemed to bat canned answers back and forth. The four other parties that will enter the Bundestag, or Parliament—in addition to the AfD, the economically liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Greens, and the far-left Die Linke—were relegated to a follow-up show the next evening. Merkel and Schulz barely discussed the eurozone. Education and NATO spending did not come up. [...]

The central issue of the campaign, migration, barely came up at all in most of the speeches by Merkel and Schulz. Merkel herself hardly mentioned the subject in her campaign, as if hoping the issue would simply go away. The CDU’s “strategy was to not talk about it, hoping in vain that voters wouldn’t realize it,” Dr. Timo Lochocki of the German Marshall Fund told me. 

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The Atlantic: The Misunderstood Roots of Burma's Rohingya Crisis

Tensions between the Bengali-speaking Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine state have existed for decades—some would say centuries—but the most significant inflection point came in 1982 when Burma’s junta passed a law that identified 135 ethnicities entitled to citizenship. The Rohingya were not among them, though they had enjoyed equal rights since Burma became independent from British rule in 1948. Almost overnight, they were stripped of their citizenship.

In the years since then, the Rohingya were persecuted, steadily lost their rights, and were the victims of violence. The worst of this violence erupted in 2012 following the rape of a Buddhist woman allegedly by Muslim men. That prompted massive religious violence against the Rohingya, forcing 140,000 of them into camps for internally displaced people. International pressure resulted in the military government agreeing to grant the Rohingya a reduced form of citizenship if they registered themselves as Bengali—not Rohingya. Although many Muslims in Rakhine state were previously indifferent to how they were labeled, the years of oppression, combined with the type of citizenship they were being offered, made the offer unpalatable. [...]

For the Burmese government, the word Rohingya is particularly fraught. This is because if the government acknowledges Rakhine’s Muslims as members of the Rohingya ethnic group, then under the 1982 citizenship law—ironically, the same measure that stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship—the Muslims would be allowed an autonomous area within the country. And therein lies the crux of the problem: The Burmese fear a Rohingya autonomous area along the border with Bangladesh would come at the expense of Rakhine territory. The Burmese military, which has cracked down on Rohingya civilians, views this as a possible staging area for terrorism by groups like ARSA.

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