When the International Refugee Organization sent him to faraway Australia in 1948, it probably sounded like an adventure. But the nineteen-year-old found himself doing back-breaking work in an isolated mine surrounded by dense Tasmanian forest. He would later tell government officials that it was “200 years behind European working conditions.”

After a year, Jakob decided he was finished with capitalist Australia and would return to the Soviet Union. Many of his peers were unimpressed by his decision — it even sparked a brawl during which he was stabbed. But his pro-Soviet migrant friends considered him a true patriot. Celebrating with them and a little drunk, the young refugee boasted that he would give the Soviets intelligence on Australia and go to Korea to fight the Western capitalists.

Unbeknown to Jakob, his audience of friends and acquaintances that night included two spies: a Soviet MVD colonel and an undercover agent for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO. Concerned by their informant’s report, Australian security officers began keeping an eye on Jakob. They followed him all the way to the docks when he sailed for the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with the West and full of praise for his Soviet homeland, he was considered a threat to Western security.

This is not the familiar refugee story told in countries like Australia: a story of desperate, hard-working migrants who gratefully become loyal contributors to their new homeland. Jakob had certainly been desperate — he became a forced labourer at just fourteen — and, for the most part, he had worked hard in Australia. But the war and displacement produced complex, shifting identities that didn’t simply disappear when the shooting stopped. And life in the West didn’t always live up to its promises.

The second world war had left forty million or more people displaced in Europe. Some wanted nothing more than to return to their homes, but for others, particularly those from now Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, the home they had left no longer existed. As the International Refugee Organization worked to solve this “refugee problem,” thousands of Russians who had lived through the war in East Asia were being displaced by China’s communist revolution.

Most of these refugees, whether in Europe or China, were stridently anti-communist. Many had good reason to be, having lived as exiles after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution or through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The views of “White Russians” and Eastern Europeans who considered their homelands “captive nations” would fit neatly into the West as the fresh storm clouds of the cold war built on the horizon. Increasingly, each Soviet refugee was a propaganda victory for the West: these were individuals choosing freedom, expressing hatred of communism by voting with their feet.

Some, however, harboured more ambivalent views. A few could even be called “Red”: communists, socialists, trade unionists or, most commonly, pro-Soviet patriots who were proud of the victorious Red Army and their homeland’s achievements since the communist revolution. “Displaced persons,” known as DPs, were resettled primarily in countries that now defined themselves as the anti-communist West, with the largest contingents going to the United States, Australia, Canada and Israel.

The lives and experiences of anti-communist DPs — the refugees who became model migrants in the West — have been chronicled in the rich scholarship on postwar migration that has proliferated since the 1990s. Yet Soviet refugees with left-wing views, DPs like Jakob who did not fit the model, have remained essentially invisible.

Surveillance and the persistent shadow of espionage were central parts of their lives in the West. Former or current Soviet citizens who were Russian speakers and left-wing sympathisers threw up multiple red flags for Western intelligence organisations, which often struggled to understand their traumas, experiences and intra-community politics. Many had been socialised in the Soviet Union, their political views shaped by complex lives in Europe and China.

In the cold war West, their ideas took root in new ways. Ideological convictions — that the world could be better and fairer, or that the worker’s lot was difficult — mingled with personal ones, shaped by memories of lost homes, murdered family members or forced labour. These ideas made them potential threats, forcing them to negotiate the incursions of state security into their everyday lives.

In many ways, it is because these refugees loomed so large in the eyes of intelligence agencies that we struggle to catch sight of them. The lives of “ordinary” people are often difficult to locate in official records, but that marginalisation was compounded by cold war anti-communism and surveillance.

Left-wing Soviet DPs had particular cause to recede from view by lying about their politics and backgrounds or simply keeping their own counsel. They knew they were being watched; most were aware that both the state and other migrants regarded them with suspicion; very few recorded their experiences. History maintains a sense of irony, though: the very surveillance dossiers that marginalised these migrants can now provide the historian with a window into their worlds.

Intelligence agencies are notorious for their secrecy and reluctance to reveal the details of even decades-old operations. When they do reveal information, it is typically on their own terms and in the service of their public image — take, for example, the declassification of the CIA’s Canadian Caper operation, which formed the basis of the film Argo.

In some cases, researchers can appeal to legislation. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act provides a well-trodden path to accessing FBI and CIA files. A similar provision in Canada allows requests for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s files. But both have, to differing degrees, proven limited in recent years. Britain’s MI5 is subject to very few access measures, releasing files only as it chooses. Further, its release policy targets higher-profile individuals, leaving the files of more ordinary subjects unknown and unknowable for historians.

By comparison, access procedures in Australia are quite liberal. A dedicated application process via the National Archives of Australia provides greater access to security files if one is sufficiently patient. These dossiers are still redacted, equivocal and frustrating, but they provide unique glimpses of a left-wing presence among the DPs. Presumably, similar migrants ended up elsewhere in the West.

Though they had chosen life in the West rather than the East, and in some cases had experienced the worst that Soviet communism had to offer, these migrants continued to align themselves with the political left. For the most part, they were not activists. They tended not to join Australian political parties and their ideas did not often fit neatly under labels like “communist,” “Marxist” or “Trotskyite.”

Their views were idiosyncratic patchworks rather than refined political doctrines, reflecting lives lived across East and West in turbulent times. Their experiences of Soviet terror and state support, Nazi and Japanese occupation, concentration camps and forced labour often informed their understanding of the twentieth century’s prevailing political philosophies more than books or manifestos. Their politics played out at street-level: in living rooms, church halls, night clubs, theatre groups, factory floors and discussions over glasses of wine (or vodka) at parties.

Though some refugees chose Australia specifically for its distance — the furthest they thought they could get from the Soviets — the cold war arrived there, too. By 1948, as the revolution in China compounded still-heightened fears of invasion by neighbouring Asian countries, anti-communism gained a firm foothold in Australia.

As the historian David Lowe has written, the cold war was “Australianised” with settler-colonial anxieties about maintaining white racial homogeneity and preventing territory loss. Australia saw itself as part of the English-speaking world but was surrounded by a decolonising Asia-Pacific region with a growing socialist and communist presence, and so sought the security of close ties with Britain and the United States.

One result was the formation of ASIO in response to American concerns about Australia’s lax security and a Soviet spy ring in Canberra. Domestically, the cold war flared in 1950–51 as Australian troops were shipped to Korea and prime minister Robert Menzies attempted to ban the Communist Party. A referendum on the ban saw the public drawn into an increasingly heated debate about communism, national security and civil liberties.

Similar tensions were sparked in 1954 by the defections of Soviet officials (and spies) Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov — an incident soon christened the Petrov affair. Vladimir Petrov had socialised extensively among Soviet migrants in Sydney and many of them waited with trepidation as ASIO investigated and a royal commission enquired.

Both moments were cold war watersheds for Australians, a time when debates about communism and espionage hit close to home. But they hit even closer for Soviet refugees as their homelands and the ideologies they had lived under and knew intimately were discussed in daily newspapers and nightly news broadcasts. Many of the refugees knew Petrov personally; the affair played out in their lives in distinctive ways, providing new, rich layers to our history of this event.

The Petrov affair’s most iconic and enduring moment — Evdokia Petrov, her husband having already defected alone, being escorted across Sydney’s airport tarmac by two Soviet couriers — was heightened by thousands of anti-communist Eastern European migrants. They turned out to protest what they saw as the forcible return of a terrified Russian woman to a dire fate in the Soviet Union. Many had themselves felt at risk of a similar fate, in Europe’s DP camps, and arrived with placards and raised voices to warn Australians and their government of the Soviet Union’s cruelty.

These anti-communist exile groups existed alongside and often in conflict with smaller communities of left-wing migrants. For some, joining a left-wing group related more to opposing diaspora norms — their vitriolic anti-Soviet rhetoric and strong attachment to the church — than cold war politics. Less conservative social mores and better entertainment often helped too, especially for young refugees. But whether they intended it or not, many were then cast into cold war conflicts.

Sydney’s left-leaning Russian Social Club brought DPs into the orbit of the broader Australian left and the Petrov affair. A corresponding Social Club was also set up in Melbourne, in 1952, though it seems to have been short-lived. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet embassy officials stationed in Australia, who were often working covertly as spies. A host of left-wing Jewish organisations were also established by, or drew in, postwar migrants, such as the Jewish Councils to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism in Sydney and Melbourne, the Volkscentre in Darlinghurst and Kadimah in Carlton.

Left-wing migrants often participated across multiple groups and sometimes became involved with Australian-run organisations as a result. The typical “communist front” groups which proliferated across the West — Australia–Russia societies (later renamed Australian–Soviet friendship societies) and peace councils — were also hubs for left-wing Soviet refugees. The Melbourne friendship society even had, for a time, a DP as chairman. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet officials but also attracted Australian surveillance, and thus, interactions with spies on both sides.

Most put down roots in Australia, establishing themselves in new communities and becoming neighbours, friends, fellow churchgoers and colleagues of both other migrants and those born in Australia. Some shifted between communities, burying their earlier years, and some became more conservative with age. Most were naturalised, giving up Soviet passports or statelessness in favour of Australian citizenship — though, again, they pursued this in order to access specific benefits, rights or stability just as often as a desire to become Australians.

With naturalisation, they became Australian voters. Soviet refugees’ voting patterns are near impossible to ascertain, but both Labor and Liberal parties tried to some extent to cultivate migrant votes. Few of the left-wing group (even if pro-communist) appear to have associated directly with the Communist Party of Australia, but some refugees joined or maintained connections to the Labor Party.

But not everyone settled down. Australia was not typically a refugee’s first choice, and some moved on to other countries, such as Canada or the United States. Some never made it past the two-year work contract, deported for absconding from their assigned employment. Others did their best to get themselves deported: one way to obtain a cheap ticket back to Europe.

The other way, for Soviets, was voluntary repatriation. The Soviet Union wanted its “stolen” DPs back and Soviet citizens who wanted to return could often do so at Soviet expense. Repatriation figures were only ever a tiny fraction of the tide of Westward migration during the early cold war — between 1947 and 1952, some twenty-eight Soviet DPs returned from Venezuela, twenty-two from Argentina, sixteen from Canada, nine from South Africa and only two from the United States. Nevertheless, they reflected the fact that life in the capitalist world could also be harsh, especially if you were a refugee.

In Australia, the two-year work contract was often a catalyst and some, like young Jakob, left soon after completing it, homesick and dissatisfied. Others remained longer, even decades, before making the decision to repatriate. China Russians could also return if they secured the appropriate paperwork, though the Soviets likely would not foot the bill. Nevertheless, some did repatriate.

But whether they chose to stay in Australia or not, many Soviet refugees lived through the early years of the cold war in the West. As these battle lines were drawn, they had to pick a stance: leave politics behind and remain quiet, become anti-communist “cold warriors,” or accept the surveillance and suspicion that came with life as a pro-Soviet “enemy alien.” •

This article is adapted from Ebony Nilsson’s new book Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

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It’s been like that for more than three weeks since investigative journalists from the independent newsroom Correctiv revealed a “secret plan” hatched at a “secret meeting” in November last year. According to the report, twenty-two far-right politicians and businesspeople met in a hotel outside Berlin to talk about expelling millions of people living in Germany, among them “non-assimilated” German citizens. The attendees included office holders of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and members of the Werteunion, an organisation set up in 2017 by ultraconservative Christian Democrats unhappy about the refugee policies of then chancellor Angela Merkel.

A few hours after news of the meeting broke, eighty people protested in front of Hamburg’s local AfD headquarters. Two days later, 2000 took to the city’s streets. All over the country, the protests quickly gathered momentum. When a Turkish-born member of the Hamburg state parliament called for another protest on 19 January, he expected 4000 to join him. According to the police, 50,000 turned up, and the rally had to be cut short because the riverside venue was so overcrowded it was a miracle nobody ended up in the icy water. The following weekend around 100,000 people rallied in Hamburg.

Protests have continued every day in all parts of the country. Many of those taking part haven’t been to a demonstration in many years or are protesting for the first time in their lives. Altogether, millions have taken to the streets. The protests give no sign of fizzling out.

What exactly has prompted such outrage? The proposal to deport asylum seekers, other non-citizens and “non-assimilated” Germans to North Africa came as part of a master plan presented by Martin Sellner, a prominent far-right activist from Austria, at the November meeting. Sellner is known for propagating French writer Renaud Camus’s Great Replacement myth, which claims that Western elites are trying to replace white European populations using mass immigration, particularly from Africa and the Middle East.

The term “great replacement,” first used in Camus’s 2010 book L’Abécédaire de l’in-nocence, is a reference to an ironic poem by Bertolt Brecht. After the 1953 popular uprising in East Germany, Brecht asked in his poem “The Solution” whether, as the people had seemingly forfeited the confidence of their government, it might not be easier “for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?”

It was the proposed deportation of German citizens that may have startled many Germans most. But Camus and others from the European and North American far right have long advocated a Great Repatriation, or “remigration,” as a response to the Great Replacement. The concept of “remigration” shouldn’t have been news in Germany: Dresden’s Pegida movement and other far-right activists have long called for a cleansing of the nation by means of “remigration.” Nor was it a surprise that prominent members of the AfD want to turn Germany into a country only for ethnic Germans. Björn Höcke, the most influential AfD politician — a leader of its Thuringia state branch and occasional speaker at Pegida rallies — has made no secret of his intention to rid Germany of many of its current residents should he ever be in a position to do so.

The idea of Höcke as Thuringia’s state premier, let alone in power in Berlin, has long seemed fanciful. No more. It seems almost certain that the AfD will emerge as the strongest party in three forthcoming state elections in East Germany. In Saxony, it’s possible that only the Christian Democrats and the AfD will reach the 5 per cent threshold required to enter parliament. Provided the latter polled more votes than the former, the far right would command an absolute majority in parliament and form government. In Thuringia, where the left-wing Die Linke is particularly strong, the Christian Democrats could be tempted to strike a deal with the AfD rather than allow Die Linke’s Bodo Ramelow to remain as state premier.

The AfD’s performance is particularly alarming in East Germany, where the pollsters have the party at between 28 per cent (in Brandenburg) and 35 per cent (in Saxony). News of November’s “secret meeting” was just the trigger needed to prompt millions of people to protest.

At the Hamburg rallies I attended, the main focus was squarely on the AfD. “Ganz Hamburg hasst die AfD” (All of Hamburg hates the AfD) was the most popular battle cry, “FCK AFD” the most common slogan on placards. Judging by their hand-painted signs, many of the demonstrators equate the current mood with that of the early 1930s, before the Nazi party’s electoral success prompted the German president to appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor. “It’s five to ’33,” some demonstrators claimed. Although many explicitly rejected “remigration,” other elements of the AfD’s program attracted comparatively little critical attention.

Besides, the focus on the AfD is not entirely justified. In Saxony, a party even more extremist than the AfD, the Freie Sachsen (Free Saxonians), is gaining ground. It may well win seats at the local elections in June. At the other end of the spectrum, the left-wing Die Linke, the successor of the East German communists, split last year. A group led by the charismatic Sahra Wagenknecht has since established their own party, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, or BSW. It is as populist as the AfD and its migration and asylum policies hardly differ from those of the far-right party. The Werteunion too has decided to form a party ahead of the three state elections in East Germany in September. Some of its policies are likely to mirror those of the AfD.

Germany’s intake of refugees has been the number one political issue for the past six months or so, with most public commentators and politicians claiming that the country’s capacity to take in refugees has been exhausted. They say the number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany needs to be drastically reduced, despite the fact that the overall number of refugees arriving in Germany was much lower in 2023 than the year before. The authorities in Hamburg, for instance, registered 23,000 new arrivals in 2023, compared with 54,000 in 2022, the year Germany accommodated approximately one million Ukrainian refugees.

In response to Russia’s attack, the European Union invoked the European Council’s 2001 mass influx directive “to establish minimum standards for giving temporary protection in the event of a mass influx of displaced persons from third countries who are unable to return to their country of origin.” More than 4.2 million Ukrainians currently benefit from the EU’s temporary protection mechanism. On a per capita basis, most have been taken in by the three Baltic states and by Poland, Czechia, Slovakia und Bulgaria.

About 1.2 million of those Ukrainians are living in Germany. They are not required to apply for asylum, have immediate access to the labour market and receive the same social benefits available to Germans. Overall, their arrival has been surprisingly uncontroversial, not just in Germany but also in the other EU member states.

It’s not the Ukrainians who have prompted the current panic about new arrivals but refugees from elsewhere, who must go through the standard asylum process. Last year, about 330,000 new protection claims were lodged in Germany, compared with about 218,000 in 2022. Ordinarily, Germany should be able to cope with such numbers. But federal funding hasn’t kept pace with the rise, giving local authorities good reason to complain. Of course, capacities would be freed up if Syrian and Afghan refugees, who still make up almost half of all asylum seekers, were treated like the Ukrainians: if they too were granted temporary protection with immediate work rights and access to social benefits.

The AfD, whose success is linked to its vilification of asylum seekers, has tried hard to create a moral panic about the number of new arrivals. That it was successful has been due in no small part to the fact that other parties jumped on the bandwagon in the hope that they too would benefit from scare-mongering.

Michael Kretschmer, the Christian Democrat premier of Saxony, was among them. He demanded that Germany establish stationary controls at its borders with Poland and the Czech Republic, abolish the last remnants of the constitutionally guaranteed individual right to asylum, transfer asylum seekers to third countries, set an upper limit on the annual number of asylum applications, and cut benefits paid to refugees. His proposals were either unfeasible or would have little effect, but they added to the sense of a situation spiralling out of control. The much-evoked “firewall” against the AfD may still work when it comes to forming coalitions, but it’s permeable as far as political rhetoric is concerned.

Kretschmer was backed by his party leader Friedrich Merz, who last September said of asylum seekers: “They go to the doctor and have their teeth done, while Germans can’t even get an appointment.” Members of Germany’s hapless Ampel coalition — the Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens — have also talked of emergencies and crises rather than trying to steer the public conversation towards a rational debate about Germany’s responsibilities and its record of meeting them.

Ampel politicians have endorsed the idea that all those whose asylum claims were rejected need to leave Germany. In October, the cover of the news magazine Spiegel depicted a serious-looking Olaf Scholz demanding ramped-up deportations. It is true that about 300,000 people living in Germany are technically supposed to leave the country, mainly because their protection claims were rejected. But four out of five are not — indeed must not be — deported, because (for example) the country they hail from is not safe.

New legislative measures in Germany aim to reduce asylum seeker numbers, as do new EU-wide changes to the Common European Asylum System, or CEAS. The EU wants to set up Australian-style centres at Europe’s external borders to detain applicants while they’re being screened. Unsuccessful applicants would be swiftly removed. Several EU governments — and some prominent German Christian Democrats — want to go further by transferring protection claimants to third countries such as Rwanda.

Germany last experienced a comparable momentum — albeit with far fewer street protesters — in 2018 and 2019, when many cities and towns hosted demonstrations in support of search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean. Since then, relatively few protests have been held in support of migrant and refugee rights. When the European Commission and the European Council agreed on the CEAS reforms last year, dozens rather than hundreds of protesters rallied in Hamburg.

For the last movement of a similar size we need to go back to the early 1990s. Between 1990 and 1993, Germany experienced a wave of racist violence. Asylum seeker hostels were torched, and many “foreigners” assaulted. According to an investigation by journalists, fourteen people died as a result of racist violence in the first two years after German reunification on 3 October 1990 alone. On 23 November 1992, two men associated with the far right firebombed a house in the small town of Mölln in northern Germany. A woman and two children of Turkish descent died. The murders startled Germans as much as the revelations about the “secret” deportation plans startled them more than three decades later. Large spontaneous demonstrations took place all over the country. In Munich alone, 400,000 people attended a candlelight protest.

Then, as now, the protests were triggered by an attack on long-term residents of Germany. Then, previous murders of asylum seekers had not prompted similar demonstrations of solidarity. Now, too, calls for the deportation of everybody whose asylum claim has been rejected have prompted little opposition. Then, the protests followed the opposition Social Democrats’ agreement to restrict the constitutionally guaranteed right to asylum. Now, the protests followed the Scholz government’s introduction of a harsh new law to expedite deportations and backing for the far-reaching CEAS reforms.

There are also key differences between the events of late 1992 and early 2024. When the Social Democrats met for an extraordinary party congress to decide whether to change the constitution and restrict the right to asylum, hundreds of thousands of people protested against the proposed reform; when parliament voted on the change in May 1993 large numbers of people once more descended on the German capital. And some Social Democrats and Free Democrats did actually vote against the changes.

This year’s protests against the CEAS reforms have been insignificant by comparison. And while some Greens and Social Democrats have publicly grumbled, their opposition is not as principled as that on display in 1993.

Millions of people have rallied over the past few weeks and railed against the AfD. But have they also expressed solidarity with asylum seekers threatened with deportation under the Scholz government’s new regime? Have they spared a thought for the refugees pushed back at the Polish and Croatian borders or in the Aegean? For those who drowned in the Mediterranean? Or have the demonstrations rather been an exercise in self-reassurance?

The postwar architects of the Federal Republic’s constitution were convinced that the Weimar Republic failed because it gave its enemies too much leeway. They thought that those out to undermine or destroy democracy must not abuse democratic rights and freedoms to achieve their aims.

Thus, the constitution makes this provision: “Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.” The High Court has twice deemed a party to be unconstitutional: in 1952 a party of the far right, and in 1956 the Communist Party. More recently, in 2017, the High Court ruled that the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany aimed to abolish democracy but that its influence was not substantial enough to warrant its prohibition.

The AfD has been monitored by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency to gauge whether it is seeking “to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order.” In three East German states, including Saxony, the state intelligence agencies have already ruled the AfD’s respective state branches to be “without doubt extremist.”

Since the revelations about the “secret meeting” in November, calls for the government to make use of the constitutional provisions and initiate a High Court ruling about the AfD’s unconstitutionality have become louder. A petition signed by 1.69 million people is requesting that the government make use of another constitutional provision. According to Article 18, a person who abuses civil and political rights (such as the freedom of expression) “to combat the free democratic basic order shall forfeit these basic rights.” In this instance, too, only the High Court can order such a forfeiture and the proceeding needs to be initiated by the federal government, a state government or federal parliament.

It’s tricky, to say the least, to declare a party unconstitutional when it’s supported by a third of the electorate, or to target one of its most influential leaders. As the attempt to ban the National Democratic Party demonstrated, the High Court case would take a very long time and its outcome would not be a foregone conclusion. Using the constitution to restrict Höcke’s democratic rights and outlaw the AfD would also allow him and his party to portray themselves as victims of “the system” and “the elites.”

The constitution is, however, an asset in the fight against the AfD. Thus far, its opponents have tended to focus on the alleged similarities between the AfD and Hitler’s Nazi party and to suggest the AfD’s leaders aim for a return to the dark days of the Third Reich. But politicians like Höcke aren’t unreconstituted Nazis. They even claim that the German army officer who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944 is their role model.

Their critics’ focus ought instead to be on how they deny the constitution’s most important principle, expressed in the first sentence of Article 1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” But that may get some of those currently applauding the demonstrators into trouble, because AfD politicians aren’t the only ones who disregard that line or pretend it applies only to German citizens.

Will the demonstrations against the AfD have any impact on its electoral performance at the local and European elections in June and the three state elections in September? Italian researchers have shown that Italy’s anti-far-right Sardines movement in late 2019 and early 2020 muted the electoral showing of Matteo Salvini’s Lega. But if such an effect resulted only in a better-than-expected performance of politicians such as Michael Kretschmer, who have tried to deprive the AfD of oxygen by endorsing key concerns of the party’s followers, then little would have been gained.

“Nie wieder Faschismus, nie wieder Zweite Liga!” proclaimed a speaker at the rally in St Pauli on Saturday. It was a double-headed hope: never again should Germany experience fascism, and never again would the St Pauli Football Club play in the second division. For many St Pauli supporters the club has returned to Germany’s first division in all but fact, but in reality, more often than not, the Zweite Liga has been where St Pauli has played its football.

While “Never again second division!” gives the impression that the St Pauli Football Club has already left its past behind, “Never again fascism!” suggests that fascism was buried on 8 May 1945 and must not be resurrected now. But the break with the past was never complete. Elements of Nazi Germany survived well beyond the end of the second world war. The AfD would not have thrived in the past ten years if it hadn’t been able to exploit the widespread acceptance of — or even longing for — authoritarian structures. Racism was not only alive in the early 1990s when asylum seeker hostels burned, but has been an enduring feature of postwar German society.

From Lörrach to Kappeln, the admonition “Never again!” defines the current protests. Often the protesters don’t name the past that must not reappear, because to them it is obvious they are referring to the twelve years from 1933 to 1945. It’s highly unlikely that Germany will experience a repeat of that time. But an unholy alliance of the AfD on the one hand and Christian Democrats and Ampel politicians on the other could pave the way for a re-run not of Nazi Germany but of the early 1990s, when fear-mongering engendered racist violence.

For the current movement to have a lasting impact, the protesters will need to identify what exactly they do not want. There is more to the AfD’s wishlist than “remigration.” A close reading of the party’s program could prompt more startlement.

I also wish the protesters were less preoccupied with the past. Germany is in crisis not because it is moving backwards but because it lacks a positive, widely shared vision for the future. Surely the St Pauli supporters won’t be content with avoiding relegation once the club has been promoted to the Bundesliga. What comes after “Nie wieder Faschismus!”? It’s easy to understand what those millions who rallied in recent weeks do not want. But it’s unclear what they are hoping for. •

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Here’s how the press conferences would work. The summit would break in the early hours of the morning and hundreds of journalists would rush to their home country’s briefing room to receive their quotable quotes. Interpreters would scramble; the basement’s unflappable audiovisual team would swoop into action. As twenty-eight heads of government or state took to their podiums, the biggest show in Brussels would reach its climax amid a frenzy of mostly upbeat activity.

Twenty-seven press conferences would follow a similar script. The leader would tell journalists that, yes, negotiations had been tough but middle ground had been found (the passive voice was perfect for EU leaders not wanting to lay blame or take responsibility). If a deal had ultimately been struck it had been in the name of European solidarity. The message was reliably similar: you don’t always get what you want, but it was worth the compromise.

The British press conferences were very different. It was as though Cameron had attended a meeting in a parallel universe. The unelected bureaucrats had tried to put one over on Great Britain, the prime minister would tell us. But fear not — the ever-vigilant British government had seen through the ruse and stepped in to stop another case of continental thieving. And before you had time to take it in, Cameron would move on to domestic affairs, making a point of only taking questions from British journalists and speaking straight down the camera into the houses of the British public. Then he’d skedaddle — no conciliatory statement, no acknowledgement that this political union had brought years of peace, prosperity and a sense of democratic purpose that would have been unthinkable in the Europe of the early postwar era.

As an Australian in Brussels, I didn’t have a horse in this race. You could be objective about the European Union’s achievements without believing that Britain needed to be part of the project. But you could be under no misapprehension that the over-the-top Euroscepticism of British politicians was inflicting real damage. The repeated assertion that the EU was inherently undemocratic — ignoring its directly elected parliament and a European Council made up of twenty-eight democratically elected heads of state or government — was simply untrue. Why would he say that? Britain could have argued that it didn’t agree with the political direction of the EU without suggesting that it was unrepresentative and illegitimate.

Cameron’s decision to take a baseball bat to the EU at every opportunity may have made good political sense and no doubt played well with the popular press that brought the narrative of thieving continentals to the masses. But when it came time to back-pedal and tell voters that, all things considered, Britain was better off as part of the EU, Cameron lacked the credibility to pull it off. The narrative he had built couldn’t be demolished overnight.

I may not have had a stake in this fight, but I was intrigued to observe the Cameron narrative as it weaved its way into Australian reporting on this issue. It wasn’t so much the Euroscepticism that was percolating into the writing of Australia’s London-based European correspondents, but a broader misunderstanding of where to place the EU on the political spectrum.

The British conservatives’ political spin was that the EU was supported by urban, progressive, not-quite-British types — what Theresa May later referred to contemptuously as “citizens of nowhere.” It was a political narrative that put the EU on the left and, by implication, all opposition to the EU on the right in the political firmament. This was a preposterous reimagining of the political reality of continental Europe and one that any observer on the Brussels side of the English Channel would have seen through. Yet conservatives in Australia appeared to lap it up. The fake narrative was there for all to see in the recent Spectator article by Tony Abbott, in which the former prime minister supported not just Brexit, but a no-deal Brexit.

Of all the misunderstandings our European correspondents could have assimilated from their London vantage point, the notion that the EU is something “of the left” is possibly the most pernicious. On the continent, where most of the bloc’s 512 million people lived, the political atmospherics were quite different.

Both European liberals and conservatives — in fact, any centre-right party outside the populist or neo-fascist mould — tend to be pro-European. On the mainland, big business loves a single market, while free marketeers applaud the EU’s largely successful attempt to break down the anticompetitive residues of an old Europe dominated by guilds and vested interests. The EU itself, through its consistently pro-market executive, has pushed member states towards free-trade agreements, including a deal with Canada, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and a range of regional groupings — not to mention the now almost-abandoned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the United States. When France’s gilets jaunes protesters take to the streets they are fighting president Emmanuel Macron’s pro-European liberalism, in the sense of classical liberalism.

In fact, strands of the European left have often expressed ambivalence about the liberalism that underpins the European project. The EU hostility expressed by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which harkens back to before the 1980s, is arguably more recognisable to a continental European. The school of thought that suggests the EU is merely a construct of the forces of global capital — a view popular among supporters of Italy’s Five Star Movement, say, or Greece’s Syriza — doesn’t take long to bubble up to the surface.

Europe’s competition commissioner, the Danish liberal Margrethe Vestager, may be applauded when she takes on American tech giants, but she’s viewed with disdain by many for her role in fighting national governments as they pick industry winners, meddle with the economy and attempt to violate the EU’s tough rules banning state aid. Northern European states — in particular the Netherlands and Britain — are reliably blamed for promoting economic liberalism within the bloc, and old-school European lefties either despise the EU outright or regard it with extreme scepticism. Europe’s left was Eurosceptic from way back, before Cameron was born.

So, how did we fall for it? Why would Abbott and others on the right of Australian politics take sides against the pro-market, liberal EU?

Australian journalists need to take some responsibility for this state of affairs. Covering European news from London by repurposing Reuters copy without spending time in Frankfurt, Strasburg, Brussels or Paris was never a good look. But now, with Britain heading for the door, covering European affairs from London is even harder to justify. With the French–German relationship central to the power play at the heart of the bloc, eastern European EU members and Baltic states at the centre of geopolitical struggle with Russia, the Nordics providing increasingly attractive models of governance, and Italy and Spain still reeling from the implications of corruption scandals, you can’t afford to get your news through the filter of the London press.

A post-Brexit world requires a better, more nuanced understanding of EU affairs. It’s time for Australian journalists to go continental. •

The post The enemy within appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet the decade as we know it started much earlier than 1930. As Tara Zahra argues in her new book Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars, the retreat from liberalism and international cooperation in Europe and the United States began during the first world war and then intensified when postwar hunger and deprivation drove combatant populations away from the ideals of internationalism and cooperation that had once appeared unstoppable.

From the late nineteenth century, global flows of people, money, goods and ideas crossed borders faster than ever before, as new technologies transformed transportation, communication and refrigeration. Tens of millions of Europeans were on the move, a vast majority of them emigrating to North and South America.

But the war suddenly shut down these globalising forces. As Zahra writes, “European countries devoted all of their destructive energies to damming international flows of people, supplies and intelligence.” The results were catastrophic and far-reaching. Hundreds of thousands of Central Europeans starved to death. In Germany, which relied on imports for about a third of its food supply, imports declined by 60 per cent. Poor seasons and the loss of men to the front killed domestic harvests. In Berlin, food prices rose to 800 times their prewar level.

The crisis was similar in the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although less dependent than Germany on food imports, Austria’s agricultural output fell by almost half. Hungary lost a third of its harvest, and officials stopped sending food to nearby Viennese workers who depended on it. Food rationing exacerbated people’s hunger, and queuing at food depots became a full-time occupation.

Manès Sperber, a ten-year-old in Vienna, recalled long wartime nights of queueing in the cold and wet only to find that “the ‘Sold-out’ sign would be put up just as you finally managed to reach the threshold of the shop.” By the end of the war, Viennese were surviving on just 830 calories a day. “To obey the food laws is equivalent to suicide,” one middle-class Viennese woman wrote in her diary in 1918. Indeed, it was women who led the protests against the food shortages — protests that often turned violent — across Europe. Police sent to quell the protesters often joined in instead.

Zahra uses her exceptional skills as a historian to show how globalisation (not a term in use at the time, though certainly a phenomenon traceable to the nineteenth century) and its demise divided and politicised millions. She shows how the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, long a focus of her scholarship, left Austria adrift. The Paris Peace Treaty cemented the collapse of the imperial order and its fragmentation into warring economic units. Once the largest free-trade zone in Europe, Austria lost much of its food supply and raw materials to the economic nationalist policies implemented by its new neighbours, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

“Of the fragments into which the old empire was divided, Austria was by far the most miserable,” League of Nations official Arthur Salter wrote in 1924. In his memoir The World of Yesterday Stefan Zweig lamented the disappearance of Austria as a centre of cultural and intellectual cosmopolitanism, represented by its multinational, multilingual and geographic diversity. The empire had stood in for the whole world not only because of its diversity of population and languages, but also because of its economic self-sufficiency. Now, it had become a head without a body.

Across Europe, back-to-the-land movements emerged as one of the more popular solutions to the food crisis. Supporters from both sides of politics were keen to develop economic self-sufficiency among local populations as a bulwark against future threats and to boost national economies. Autarky became a unifying goal for populations who had experienced hunger and humiliation.

As Zahra writes, “The importance of food security was seared into the bodies of hungry citizens.” In Italy, land was occupied by returning veterans and women, angry they had not received acreages promised in return for their wartime sacrifice. In Austria, calls for the “inner colonisation” of rural land by unemployed men and women appeared to offer the promise of food, jobs, houses and dignity; in reality, unwanted minorities (Slavs and Jews) were expelled from borderlands to free up space. Later, the same ideas were incorporated by the Nazis into the imperial concept of Großraumwirtschaft (greater area economy), which they used to justify their annexation of lands to Germany’s east and the expulsion of millions.

The settlement movement gained even more followers after the Great Depression, as disillusionment with capitalism spread. Faced with bad soil, bad weather, insufficient skills and an almost complete lack of infrastructure, these efforts weren’t always successful.

Women fared the worst. One of Zahra’s most significant contributions is her focus on the experience of women, who often faced the greatest of anti-globalism’s excesses. The back-to-the-land movement was about not only a return to the land but also a return to traditional gender values. Women were expected to work for up to fourteen hours a day doing backbreaking farm labour and unpaid domestic tasks alongside their children to free men up for paid work.

Mass politics on both sides blamed globalism for the drastic decline in living standards, and governments colluded in deflecting blame for the crisis in civilian mortality onto outside forces. Many European countries seemed on the brink of a socialist revolution, a threat that became a reality for a short time in Hungary and Germany, generating counter-revolutionary violence on the right, as fascists and socialists clashed openly in city streets.

As Zahra shows throughout Against the World, the search for scapegoats often led to Jews, who were perceived as “emblems of globalisation par excellence.” Forced by discrimination and persecution into jobs that demanded mobility — as pedlars and traders, for example — they were seen as perennial outsiders, facilitators of global networks of commerce, finance and trade, rootless and without loyalty to the state.

“Jews were targeted as symbols of international finance, unchecked migration, cosmopolitanism, and national disloyalty,” Zahra writes, with alarming echoes of today. German leaders disseminated a “stab in the back” legend that attributed the German and Austrian defeat to internal traitors, namely Jews and communists (the two were often conflated) working for foreign interests.

After Russia’s Bolshevik revolution, the twin “global” threats of Judaism and Bolshevism led to vicious attacks on the Jewish Hungarian population. These pogroms were even more violent in Poland and the Ukraine. Between 1918 and 1921, between 40,000 and 100,000 Jews were killed, around 600,000 displaced and millions of properties looted or destroyed.

Jews were the group most affected by the “epidemic of statelessness” that followed the postwar collapse of empires and the creation of nation-states. These emerging states engaged in a violent new form of political engineering designed to create nationally homogeneous populations. Minorities were persecuted, murdered, expelled or, at the very least, actively encouraged to emigrate; “reliable” citizens were called home or prevented from leaving.

These efforts to purify national populations helped to invent a new kind of migrant: the refugee. In response, a new League of Nations Refugee Commission was created, one of the myriad international commissions and organisations that descended on Europe after 1918 to help those worst affected by the war and its aftermath. The International Save the Children Fund, the Near East Relief Committee and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee were just some of the agencies on hand to assist the vast number of stateless people and refugees created by new and closed borders.

Adding to the chaos from 1919 was the Spanish influenza pandemic, which killed as many as thirty-nine million people worldwide, reinforcing political elites’ desire to tighten borders against “diseased” foreigners. In the United States those foreigners were often imagined as Eastern European and Jewish. The 1924 Johnson–Reed Act introduced “national origins” quotas, effectively reducing immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to America to a trickle.

While it had once been relatively easy for European (though not Asian) individuals fleeing poverty, war or persecution to find refuge in the United States, the closed borders of this new era of anti-globalism left millions in limbo. Ellis Island, repurposed as a detention centre, was emblematic of this shift. The Austrian writer Joseph Roth imagined a Jewish migrant’s fate in 1927: “A high fence protects America from him. Through the bars of his prison, he sees the Statue of Liberty and he doesn’t know whether it’s himself or Liberty that has been incarcerated.”

One of the strengths of Against the World is Zahra’s interest in how the people of the period — the activists, visionaries, nationalists and industrialists invested in globalism, and its discontents — saw the world and themselves in it.

Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian Jewish feminist, is one of the more fascinating characters to accompany us throughout this history. We meet her at the beginning of the book as she oversees the annual meeting of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Budapest. For the delegates, internationalism was crucial to the project of enlightening and emboldening (white) women across the globe.

An early pacifist, Schwimmer spent her life attempting to find ways towards world peace. She appears initially as somewhat naive and opinionated, yet also hopeful. By 1919, a victim of anti-Semitism and sexism, refused a passport to leave Hungary, she is forced to smuggle herself first to safety in Austria and then to the United States, where her application for citizenship is denied. Her transformation from “citizen of the world” to “stateless refugee,” writes Zahra, “was emblematic of the fate of internationalism in interwar Europe.”

In one of the more bizarre encounters Zahra describes, Schwimmer convinced the industrialist and anti-Semite Henry Ford to charter a peace ship to end the war, an expedition that failed amid the derision of American journalists. Ford’s politics were self-serving and contradictory: an anti-globalist who relied on migrant labour, he made his workers perform their assimilation in an eccentric ceremony that involved climbing into a giant papier-mâché “melting pot” in national dress and, moments later, “graduating” in American clothing singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Ford also enforced his own back-to-the-land lifestyle for his company employees, demanding his workers move out of the cities and plant gardens to grow food. Yet he was global in his business aspirations, exporting millions of his cars overseas, including to the Soviet Union, and building plants across the globe. His virulent anti-Semitism also found an international supporter: Hitler praised him in Mein Kampf.

Others who make an appearance include Gandhi, whose own program of self-reliance, or swadeshi, Zahra includes within her anti-globalism frame. Gandhi’s determination to free India from Britain’s imperial chains and its subordination in the global economy resonated around the British empire, including in Ireland, where boycotts of British food caused an economic tariff war between the two countries.

“In a world of falling prices, no stock has dropped more catastrophically than International Cooperation,” the journalist Dorothy Thompson lamented in 1931. When Zahra sat down to write this book in 2016, Donald Trump had just been elected president and Britain had voted for Brexit: “There was a refugee crisis, and populist, right-wing parties were winning elections across Europe with anti-migrant platforms.” Covid and the war in Ukraine followed. (Zahra doesn’t mention here the tensions with China or the wars in the Middle East, equally destabilising.) Globalisation’s future, she writes, appeared uncertain.

Zahra’s neat binary of globalism and anti-globalism might bother some, but I found Against the World a refreshing and intelligent account of a period studied perhaps more than any other. This is a book about the fragility of democracy in the face of economic breakdown. Millions across the political spectrum faced hunger, homelessness, financial ruin and family separation in the wake of the first world war. Both the left and the right offered alternatives to the havoc wreaked by reliance on the global economy.

There are clear differences between the anti-globalisation movements of the interwar years that empowered fascism and those of our own times. But there are clear echoes in today’s widespread disenchantment with democracy’s ability to combat the inequalities associated with lost jobs, farms and homes; with the capacity of our international institutions to mediate conflicts; and with foreign competition and free trade. The other frightening echo is in the easy politics of fear, which sees the world’s most vulnerable cast out by demagogues seeking easy targets.

It’s hard to imagine how a world turned inwards will be able to tackle the biggest global challenges of our time. “The earth heaves,” warned a pessimistic John Maynard Keynes in 1919, “and no one is aware of the rumblings.” •

Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars
By Tara Zahra | W.W. Norton & Company | $57.99 | 400 pages

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Similar scenes were repeated across the peninsula on that Kara Gun (black day), as units of the Soviet internal security forces surrounded Crimean Tatar towns and villages. From there, the captives were sent by rail 3000 kilometres to Central Asia, and mostly unloaded in eastern Uzbekistan. Soon, the entire Crimean Tatar population of nearly 200,000 people had been removed from their homeland.

Nearly 8000 Crimean Tatars died on the weeks-long train journey. The rest were forced to live in abysmal conditions in “special settlements” for the next decade. Tens of thousands — almost half of them, according to the Crimean Tatars — died of hunger, cold or disease during the first few years of exile.

To justify this collective punishment, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin falsely accused the Crimean Tatars of mass collaboration with the Nazi occupation, which had just ended. It’s true that some Tatars did collaborate — as others had in many places during the war — but many more fought bravely in the Red Army and partisan units. Six received Hero of the Soviet Union medals, equivalent to a Victoria Cross.

Shevkiye’s father Dzhemil was one of the men still with the Red Army at the front, fighting the same Nazis his people were accused of aiding.

A more likely explanation for the Soviet move is that the paranoid Stalin wanted to clear his country’s borderlands of Turkic or Islamic peoples in advance of a possible war with Turkey (which never happened). The Crimean Tatars were one of many peoples from the country’s periphery considered suspect and transported en masse to Central Asia or Siberia: others included Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, Balkars and Karachai, as well as ethnic Koreans, Volga Germans and Finns.

The Crimean Tatars’ forced exile was but the latest chapter in a poorly known story that is as bleak and tragic as those experienced by many indigenous peoples following conquest and colonisation. It has rightly been described as genocide, not least by the Russian parliament in the heady, democratic days of 1991. The Tatars’ tale forms a crucial backdrop to understanding the current war in Ukraine, and its possible resolution.

That war really began when Russia invaded Crimea in February 2014. Troops in unmarked uniforms, dubbed “little green men,” fanned out from Russia’s Black Sea Naval Base in Sevastopol (leased from Ukraine) and seized key government buildings and installations. A few weeks later, after a sham referendum, Russia annexed the peninsula. It has been under occupation ever since.

Since Ukraine blunted Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, a big question hangs over whether Ukraine can mount a successful counteroffensive and go as far as retaking Crimea. And if it can’t, will it have to give up Crimea as part of a peace deal? The Tatars’ fate, as an indigenous people recognised by Ukraine and internationally, must be considered in such calculations.

Vladimir Putin portrayed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as the long-awaited and rightful “return” of the peninsula to its proper home. “In the minds of people,” he said, “Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.” But that was pure fantasy, akin to saying that Australia — or the Irish Republic — always was and will be British.

In fact, Putin’s was the second Russian annexation of Crimea. The first was in 1783, not long before Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet landed on Gadigal country in Sydney Cove. The first Russian annexation followed a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire, whose overlordship was acknowledged by the Tatars’ Crimean Khanate, a state with a rich culture dating back to 1441.

The Crimean Khan’s palace, at Bakhchysarai, circa 1840, as painted by the Swiss-born Italian artist Carlo Bossoli. Wikimedia

Tsar Catherine’s 1783 annexation breached a treaty with the Ottomans that had left Crimea independent, just as the 2014 annexation violated treaties that pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and recognised Crimea as part of Ukraine.

Before the 1783 takeover, the Crimean Tatars formed the vast majority of the peninsula’s population, with hardly a Russian in sight. The core group was made up of Turkic-speaking Kipchaks, who had settled before the Mongol-Tatar conquest in the thirteenth century, which gave them their name. (Crimea comes from a Turkic word Qirim, meaning moat or fortification.) But many descendants of invaders and settlers over nearly two millennia — Scythians, ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Byzantines, Genoese, Venetians and others — had merged to form the Tatar ethnicity.

After the takeover, the new Russian masters turned Tatar peasants into serfs, confiscated communal lands, and destroyed centuries-old mosques and bazaars. Almost half the Tatar population left after Tsar Alexander II blamed them for Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war and called for their removal from the peninsula in 1857. Their share of the population fell from nearly 80 per cent in 1850 to around a third by 1900, then to less than 20 per cent by the outbreak of the second world war.

A sense of Tatar nationhood nevertheless put down strong roots. Soon after the 1917 October Revolution in Petrograd, an elected Tatar assembly  proclaimed a Crimean People’s Republic with a vision of a multiethnic “Switzerland” for the region. Its national congress, the Qurultay, was elected by universal suffrage, with women able to vote — a first in the Muslim world and ahead of many Western countries. But the Crimean Republic was suppressed by Bolsheviks, who had emerged as the victors after Russia’s three years of bitter civil war.

Soviet Russia’s first leader, Vladimir Lenin, saw the need to gain the loyalty of the diverse nations of the vast Soviet Union by encouraging their cultures and inclusion in government. Under this “indigenisation” policy, Crimea became an autonomous republic subordinate to the Russian Republic, with Tatars taking leading roles. The communists promoted Crimean Tatar schools, theatres and publishing. Stalin’s purges and forced collectivisation of farms took their toll in Crimea as elsewhere, but Tatars’ sense of nationhood was further cemented.

Following the 1944 deportation, however, evidence of the Crimean Tatars’ presence was largely wiped out. Authorities changed upwards of 2000 Tatar names for towns and villages to Russian names. Shevkiye Dzhemileva’s village of Ayserez was renamed Mezhdurechye (“between the rivers”). The influx of Russian and Ukrainian migrants means that more than 90 per cent of all the current Slavic residents of Crimea now come from families who arrived after the Tatars’ expulsion. Stalinist officials explicitly sought to make “a new Crimea with its own Russian form.”

Deported Crimean Tatars working in a logging camp in Siberia in 1952. Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance/Wikimedia

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Crimean Tatars were banned from returning to their homelands, unlike most of the other Soviet “punished peoples,” such as the Chechens and other Tatar populations, who were fully rehabilitated. The Crimean Tatars embarked on a thirty-five-year campaign for the right to return, the most concerted movement of dissent in the history of the Soviet Union.

The Tatars defied the regime’s efforts to make them assimilate with other Turkic and Muslim peoples in Central Asia. Although it was a thoroughly nonviolent movement, jail sentences were handed out to hundreds of activists. Its foremost leader was Shevkiye’s baby brother, Mustafa Dzhemilev, six months old at the time of the deportation. Dzhemilev was a veritable Nelson Mandela of the movement, imprisoned six times and undertaking a 303-day hunger strike.

This struggle forged an even stronger national identity centred on the trauma of the Sürgünlik (exile) and a yearning for the lost homeland. Other displaced peoples have trod a similar path, including the Jews after the Shoah and the Palestinians following the Nakba (Catastrophe).

The Tatars finally won the right to return in 1989, just as the democratic reforms unleashed by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev were taking off. Crimea had long before become part of Ukraine, transferred from the Russian republic to Kyiv by Stalin’s heirs under Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.

When Ukraine became independent in 1991 many Crimean Tatars fulfilled their dream of returning to the peninsula. The 2001 Ukrainian census (the most recent) recorded some 240,000 Tatars, or 12 per cent of its population. Many faced numerous obstacles, however, and ended up in poverty, living in shantytowns and unable to reclaim their families’ former houses.

Yet the Crimean Tatars made progress. In 2001 the Ukrainian parliament enacted a consultative role for their representative body, the Mejlis, giving it a status similar to that proposed for Australia’s Voice to Parliament. They became ardent supporters of the newly independent Ukrainian state.

Fifty-six per cent of Crimean residents had supported leaving the Soviet Union in the 1991 independence referendum. Opinion polls over several years leading up to the 2014 annexation showed well under half in favour of leaving Ukraine and joining Russia.

Russia’s sham referendum just eighteen days before the 2014 annexation claimed that a wildly implausible 96 per cent of voters wanted to join Russia.  But even if there were now a majority preferring Moscow over Kyiv, the real history of Crimea undermines any Russian claims to the peninsula based on population. The Russian majority was created on the blood, bones and tears of the Crimean Tatars.

For the Tatars, Russia’s occupation has brought back the bad old days. The United Nations and other organisations have documented arbitrary detentions, torture, expulsions and harassment of Crimean Tatar (and ethnic Ukrainian) activists and protesters. Many have fled Crimea, and Tatar leaders claim that hundreds of thousands of Russians have moved in, contrary to international law on occupied territories.

Muslim communities have been attacked and religious literature burned. Members of the remaining Crimean Tatar population have been pressured to renounce their Ukrainian citizenship. Tatar-language media outlets have been denied re-registration. Tatars have also been subject to forced mobilisation into the Russian army, a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Russian authorities outlawed the Tatar Mejlis as an “extremist” organisation in 2016. The International Court of Justice upheld a challenge to this ban in 2017, but Russia has ignored the verdict.

Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive during the northern summer will be crucial to its chances of pushing Russian forces out of all or most of its territory. Even if Ukraine succeeds in the east and south, though, Crimea could be a much harder nut to crack. Some fear that Putin’s prestige is so tied up with his seizure of Crimea that he might resort to nuclear weapons rather than lose it.

With such concerns in mind, some pundits argue that Ukraine should or will be forced to make a deal in which Crimea is handed to Russia. But the permanent cession of Crimea would simply be a reward for aggression, an outcome that 141 countries in the UN have already rejected, affirming that “no territorial acquisition resulting from the use of force can be recognised as legal.”

Were Crimea to stay under Russian occupation, either permanently or in a Cyprus-like frozen conflict, it would be a dagger pointed at Ukraine. Its protected position makes it an ideal launchpad for renewed invasions and threatens Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.

Practical geography also explains why Crimea’s future outside Ukraine would be difficult, as Khrushchev recognised in 1954. The largely arid peninsula relies on water pumped by North Crimea Canal, 100 kilometres from the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, which supplied 85 per cent of its fresh water before 2014.

The canal’s flow was cut after the annexation, causing severe shortages, but then restored after the 2022 invasion of southern Ukraine launched from Crimea; along with creating a “land bridge” to Russia, the canal was undoubtedly an objective of the invasion. That link was highlighted again by the recent destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which controls the flow to the canal.

An equally strong argument against Russian control is the fate of the Crimean Tatars. After overcoming dispossession, deportation and genocide to slowly re-establish themselves in their homeland, they fear being left once again under the thumb of a Moscow regime they view as a longstanding oppressor.

Are they to be cast aside again in the interests of realpolitik? Should not indigenous people have a casting vote on the fate of their homeland? In the words of Shevkiye’s granddaughter, Elmaz Asan, “Crimea is no bargaining chip in a geopolitical game; it is my homeland and I will not give it up, just like my ancestors did not.” •

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Acivé is a baba, or healer, arguably the most esteemed of an army of healers operating in the heavily forested area near Clear Water River, one of the Mesta’s many mountainous offshoots. All sorts make the pilgrimage to her, she tells Kapka Kassabova: “Some that can’t walk. Some that can’t talk. Some that can’t see and some that can’t hear. Some with tumours and fright. Some come for babies. Some with sick children.”

Kassabova is a poet, novelist and memoirist whose work is a beguiling mix of history, geography, family history and travel. Born in Bulgaria in 1973 when that country was still within the Soviet bloc, she has lived in various places since its break-up in 1991. She now lives in a remote part of Scotland, but the Balkans, the scene of her birth and childhood, have had an enduring pull for her.

In two earlier books, Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria and To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, she interwove the vicissitudes of her family with the tumultuous history of a mountainous region that has formed the southern crossroad between Europe and Asia down the centuries. Her new book, Elixir, is also dense with information but relieved by the stories of the people she encounters on her travels.

Acivé’s healing power, we’re told, resides in her connection with a megalithic rock with a hole big enough for a person to clamber through. She travels there by bus with her supplicants, who are instructed to bring flour, salt and a length of red thread as long as they are tall. The thread is left on the railing by the ladder they climb to get to the stone; the flour and salt are for its invisible keeper. Acivé approaches the stone with an eclectic assortment of prayers, mainly from the Qur’an, but also from the Bible.

With its narrow hole symbolising rebirth, the rock is unsurprisingly called The Passage. People come from all over Europe hoping to benefit from its curative powers, or simply out of curiosity. It forms part of the tourism that has supplanted the industries that sustained this corner of the world for centuries.

Is Baba Acivé a wise woman or a charlatan? In essence, this is what Elixir is about.

Because of its mountainous inaccessibility, the Mesta basin retains old ways of healing overtaken elsewhere in Europe. From ancient times the area was rich in the medicinal herbs that formed the basis of its economy. The communist regime’s effort to capitalise on the local industry put paid to that. Attempting to transform the herbs into a cash crop, it disrupted the plant ecology and wiped out myriad useful medicinal plants.

Locals began recultivating the herbs after 1989, but large-scale farming brought a repeat of the communist-era disaster. Today, medicinal plant cultivation is a boutique enterprise, often undertaken by newcomers who have responded to the beauty and peacefulness of the region while locals take on seasonal work elsewhere in the European Union.

But plants don’t explain Baba Acivé’s allure. For that, Kassabova turns to psychology. Acivé’s powers, and those of The Passage seem to cure a sufficient number of her supplicants to substantiate her renown. Kassabova is sympathetic: in her view, we moderns suffer from what she calls our “injured instinct,” a general condition in which the mind is so separated from the body that we’ve lost the capacity to trust our own feelings. If the mind can make us sick, she writes, then it also has the power to heal: “The psyche performs its own alchemy.”

Kassabova’s argument here is nothing new, even in pill-popping societies like ours, where an array of medicinal alternatives are popular. Even conventional medical practitioners will encourage meditation alongside modern, allopathic methods.

I’m thankful to live within walking distance of a doctor: needless suffering too often occurs when access to life-saving modern medicine isn’t available. But I’m not about to dismiss Kassabova’s views out of hand, particularly when she draws on the wisdom of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell about the ubiquitous power of myth, or of Nicolas Culpeper and Hildegard of Bingen about the medicinal properties of plants. Nor can I discount the beauty of her prose. And if the political analysis that distinguished To the Lake takes a back seat here, it isn’t missing altogether.

The Pomaks, a people of Bulgarian Slav origin and Muslim persuasion, are prominent among the peoples of the Mesta. Elders like Baba Acivé, maintain lives similar to those of their ancestors, with distinctive customs, clothes and dialect. The communists persecuted them, suppressing their language and their religion.

Just as they introduced cash crops, destroying the native forests and the plants that thrived in them, the Soviets cut traditional Pomak apparel to make it more like that of collective farm-workers. Kassabova contrasts this with how they were treated for centuries under the “laxer” Ottomans. Their empire’s collapse ushered in a wave of homogeneous nationalism that swept away many of its mixed villages. In Kassabova’s reckoning, here was another instance of monoculture; with people as with plants, multiculturalism is ever the better option.

Kassabova marshals a wealth of evidence to support her contentions, incorporating history, botany, folk wisdom, psychoanalytic and ancient philosophical insights, and ecology, each of which has the capacity to enrich our understanding of the world, not to mention ourselves. It’s been perplexing to me, then, that I found this book somewhat disappointing.

Perhaps I am less engaged because the family history that anchored her narrative in Street Without a Name and To the Lake is missing here — though, in their way, her travels up and down the Mesta are more deeply personal, powered by a search for psychic health and connection so many of us humans share. The problem might also stem from this new book’s expanse of sources and material. There’s so much to take in, and if ever a book needed an index it’s this one.

That said, I’m glad to have it sitting on my shelf. Elixir is a book to dip into whenever I want to find out something about a plant or, overcome by bouts of debilitating weltschmerz, need the inspiration and the balm for my soul that Kassabova sought in the wild mysterious mountains of the Mesta. I’m never going to make it there myself, and that in the end is what books like hers are for. •

Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time
By Kapka Kassabova | Jonathan Cape | $45 | 380 pages

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That attitude was by no means universal. Others in Germany had no interest in smooth management of the influx. Some even took to the streets to demand Germany’s borders be closed and asylum seekers already in the country expelled. When it comes to accommodating people seeking Germany’s protection, we in Germany have remained bitterly divided.

Politicians, particularly those on the right, frequently decry a division that extends well beyond attitudes towards refugees and call for policies to reunite Germany. Often, they simply mean that the government ought to give in to their demands: by closing Germany’s borders to migrants (at least to those who hail from outside Europe or are Muslims), for example, or by indefinitely allowing Germans to drive petrol-fuelled cars and rely on oil and gas heaters, or by discontinuing the official use of gender-neutral language, or by appeasing Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The Scholz government has been sufficiently concerned about the electoral impact of the little that’s left of its reformist agenda that it too has vowed to heal the rift bemoaned by the naysayers, whose mantra seems to be: “Wir schaffen das nicht.”

Much less attention has been paid to another fault line that is both imagined and very real: between residents who consider themselves genuine Germans, on the one hand, and those who are, or descend from, migrants, on the other. Even those who said “Wir schaffen das” with Merkel rarely imagined an inclusive “we” that encompassed migrants and non-migrants. The “we” Merkel conjured in her famous line would have included the Germans flocking to railway stations to hand out teddy bears to Syrian children, but not those children and their parents.

In fact, “we” often doesn’t even include migrants who settled in Germany many years ago. They supposedly don’t belong, because they aren’t German citizens, don’t speak “proper” German, are of the wrong faith or don’t look the part.

Or because they don’t share “our” history. At least that perceived shortcoming can be easily remedied. Whether migrants are an integral part of Germany’s history and have played a crucial role in shaping today’s society is a matter of interpretation. All that’s required for a shared history is a persuasive narrative.

Jan Plamper, who previously wrote mainly about twentieth-century Russia — his doctoral dissertation examined Stalin’s personality cult — and the history of emotions, has offered such a narrative. Four years ago he published a book about postwar Germany as a country of immigration, and he has now translated that book into English.

The German edition was titled Das neue Wir: Warum Migration dazugehört — Eine andere Geschichte der Deutschen (“The New We: Why Migration Is Part of It — An Alternative History of the Germans”). His English publisher opted for a very different title, which is no less provocative but in my view misses the point of the book: We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany.

No, we in Germany are not all migrants, although many of us emigrated, particularly in the nineteenth century, and although close to one in four of us has at least one parent who wasn’t born a German citizen. Plamper opens with a prologue of sorts about German emigration, but other than that his book begins at the end of the second world war. Was Germany already a multicultural nation in the 1950s? Hardly. Even today, large swathes of rural and regional East Germany are arguably not part of “multicultural Germany.”

We Are All Migrants is not a history of postwar Germany with a particular focus on its migration history. Nor is it a comprehensive chronological account of immigration and of migrants in Germany. Plamper decided to focus on some aspects: the resettlement of ethnic Germans fleeing or expelled from Eastern Europe, including Germany’s former eastern provinces, in the aftermath of the war; labour migration to West Germany; labour migrants in East Germany; the so-called Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler, ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and Central Asia (in the last two decades of the twentieth century alone, more than three million Aussiedler and their families settled in the Federal Republic); Jewish migrants from the Soviet Union and its successor states; and the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–16. Two additional chapters provide snapshots of Germany in 1945 and 1989 respectively.

Other possible chapters could have featured the Romanians and Bulgarians who accounted for one out of five new immigrants before the intensification of Russia’s war against Ukraine in February 2022, or the 3.8 million citizens of the German Democratic Republic who settled in the Federal Republic between 1949 and 1990, or the Indochinese “boat people” resettled in Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s, or the Bosnian nurses who helped to keep the German hospitals afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But I’m not taking issue with Plamper’s selection of cases. That it partly reflects his earlier specialisation as a historian of the Soviet Union is appropriate, because We Are All Migrants is also a highly personal book. It mentions Plamper’s father, an ethnic German who was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1946 and later, after he retired in 2011, taught German to refugees. Plamper’s daughter Olga, who grew up speaking Russian and moved to Germany when she was eleven, features too. When once, while the family was living in Berlin, asked by her father what nationality she identifies with, she replied “Ausländerin natürlich,” meaning “of course” she considered herself a foreigner living in Germany.

We Are All Migrants is also a personal book in the sense that it features the lives of individual migrants. Among them are Hassan Ali Djan, who fled Afghanistan aged sixteen, Ibraimo Alberto, a Mozambique-born former labour migrant in East Germany, and the Spanish “guest worker” Carlos Pérez. Their stories, as well as the author’s own, contribute to the book’s readability. So does its prose.

Often non-fiction suffers when it is rendered into English because long sentences that read well in German can appear convoluted. Not in this case, because Plamper’s German is that of somebody who for many years has worked in an English-speaking environment. His writing is economical and engaging. Both the German original and the English translation are a pleasure to read.

Plamper is optimistic about the viability of what he calls a “New We” made up of both migrants (“PlusGermans”) and non-migrants. I suspect two factors contribute to his optimism: the impression left by the Willkommenskultur, Germany’s welcoming culture of 2015, was still fresh when he completed Das neue Wir, and he wrote as an outsider who hadn’t lived in Germany for many years and was teaching in Britain. I found his optimism endearing and the vision of a new Germany informed by it appealing.

In the English edition, too, Plamper lets his history end in 2018. I suppose the past five years would have provided him with more grounds for optimism. Since February 2022, Germany has accommodated more than a million refugees from Ukraine without much fuss. Optimism helps us to envision alternative futures, and that may be reason enough to focus on success stories. Yet I don’t entirely share Plamper’s optimism — for four reasons.

First, he may underestimate the disillusionment of “PlusGermans” about the willingness of non-migrant Germans and government institutions to respect and protect migrants. True, hundreds of thousands of people attended the candle-lit demonstrations against xenophobia held in 1992 and 1993 after migrants had died in arson attacks, but these rallies weren’t able to stop the racist violence. Nor were they accompanied by legislation to allow all long-term residents to vote and make it easier for migrants to become citizens.

When the terrorist group National Socialist Underground, or NSU, murdered a policewoman and nine migrants between 2000 and 2006, the police focused their suspicions on associates and family rather than far-right terrorists. Only after two of the perpetrators committed suicide did the police conclude that the murders were related and had all been motivated by racist hatred.

Only last month, in the city-state of Hamburg, the ruling Social Democrats and Greens once again decided against setting up a parliamentary inquiry into the handling of the investigation into the murder of the Hamburg greengrocer Süleyman Taşköprü by members of the NSU in 2001. The response to the NSU murders, by the state but also by society at large, has disabused many migrants of the idea that it’s easy to become part of Germany.

Second, Merkel’s departure paved the way for the return of conservative ideologues who argue that migrants need to adapt to German values. Her Christian Democrats are now led by Friedrich Merz, who in 2000 had initiated a debate about the need for migrants to adhere to a Leitkultur, a set of allegedly essential German values and principles. Merz’s resurrection marks not only a shift to the right by Germany’s largest party but also a validation of an ethno-nationalism that pretends to be culturally determined, and a return to debates about parallel societies and migrants as welfare bludgers.

Third, the demand for more rights and the discourse against racism are now too often couched in the terms of identity politics — which, incidentally, also inform far-right discourses about Germanness. Calls for social justice seem to have gone out of fashion. And the focus is too often on symbolic gestures. What’s the point of avoiding terms with racist connotations when the historical injustice they represent is not dealt with?

Fourth, migrants remain disadvantaged. It’s true that it is now easier for them to take out German citizenship than it was, say, thirty years ago. It also true that the immigration of large numbers of Syrians since 2014 and Ukrainians since 2022 has not met with the same hysterical response as the arrival of refugees from former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. And yes, migrants do play an increasingly prominent role in Germany, even in German politics. But Plamper’s “PlusGermans” tend to be poorer than non-migrant Germans and, even more concerning, second-generation migrants still typically lag behind their non-migrant peers.

In their 2015 book Strangers No More, Richard Alba and Nancy Foner compared the long-term disadvantages of people with a migrant history in Canada, the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany. Germany’s report card was particularly poor, even when compared with the three other European countries. Alba and Foner found that “the chance of a German native obtaining some level of post-secondary education was about three times that of a youth from a Turkish immigrant family.” That’s not least because the highly stratified German school system favours children from native German-speaking families.

This is where another recent book, Betiel Berhe’s Nie mehr leise: Die neue migrantische Mittelschicht (“No Longer Quiet: The New Migrant Middle Class”), comes in. Berhe, the daughter of Eritrean refugees, grew up in West Germany. Her book is concerned with class prejudices and class-based structural inequalities as well as with racism. She knows from first-hand experience how rarely migrant children are promoted to the Gymnasium, the German high school, and how the school system reproduces inequality.

Berhe is impatient and angry. She has little time for a well-meaning white middle class unwilling to give up its privileges, and she mounts a spirited defence of identity politics. But she also concedes that the issue is not whether identity politics divides society, but what kind of identity politics produces a more just society in which everybody has the chance to participate meaningfully. Such a society, she says, would eventually make identity politics redundant.

She is sick and tired of being invited to “sit at the table,” for that table no longer fits. “True change will only happen,” she writes, “if we smash the old table that’s much too small, to make room for a new large table that can accommodate everyone.”

Nie Mehr Leise is a reality check for Plamper’s “success story.” But Berhe too is an optimist. And, like Plamper, she imagines a new “we.” Her starting point is not an imagined community of non-migrants and “PlusGermans”; it is those “who feel how I feel.” And that’s not where the story ought to end, she says: “We: that’s all those who demand that all forms of structural discrimination, repression and exploitation are abolished.”

Berhe’s book is trying to lay the groundwork for the formation of a new “we” by enabling Germans other than women of colour to empathise and extend their solidarity — and not to stop there: “True solidarity would mean that we demand a distinctly different society for everybody, us included.”

Plamper and Berhe occupy privileged positions in the knowledge economy. He holds the chair of history at the University of Limerick; she is an economist who, according to the bio in her book, “gives talks, runs workshops and provides advice about issues of migration, (anti-)racism, diversity and education.” The author of a third recent book has never attended high school, is a poet and trained mechanic, and owns a small publishing company that he subsidises by working occasionally as a forklift driver.

Dinçer Güçyeter’s book Unser Deutschlandmärchen (which means “Our Fairytale about Germany” more than “Our German Fairytale”) has just won the Leipzig Book Fair’s prize for fiction, one of Germany’s most highly regarded literary awards. And while some observers were surprised by the shortlisting of a book from a publisher hardly anybody knew about, and written by an author who thus far had only published poetry, those who have read the book have expressed nothing but praise.

“The novel… lets the words soar into the sky, but is also attentive to the humiliations on the ground,” the judges of the Leipzig award wrote. “Dinçer Güçyeter catches stories with a net that’s more finely woven than a butterfly net… and has gifted us a polyphonic novel whose poetic chorus will reverberate.“

Please note the first person plural pronoun in the title of Güçyeter’s book, too. It refers to just two people: the author and his mother Fatma, a Turkish-born woman who in 1965 joined her husband, a Turkish labour migrant, in Germany, where their son Dinçer was born fourteen years later. The book is the story of Fatma’s and Dinçer’s lives, told by an author impersonating both of his characters.

“You have always shrouded your longing in silence. You thought that way nobody could see through you, nobody could hurt you,” Dinçer tells Fatma. “You see, years later your son tries to turn your silence into literature, ponders, rages, searches, loses…” Güçyeter is generous enough to share with his readers not just the result of his searches but also the searching. And we also learn about his anger — an anger that at times appears even more deep-seated than Berhe’s.

But Unser Deutschlandmärchen is not an angry book. It is often heartbreakingly sad but told in a way that makes sometimes make the reader laugh, albeit uneasily. This contradiction is in the nature of fairytales, which often hide unspeakable violence inside an enchanted world where all live happily ever after.

Güçyeter’s novel is a story of coming to terms: with living in a strange country (in the case of Fatma); with growing up and not conforming to society’s expectations of masculinity (in the case of Dinçer). Neither the author nor his mother always copes well with the challenges thrown in their paths. But then, it’s just a fairy tale, where bad things happen and all ends well.

The book is unusual because of Güçyeter’s mastery of poetic language. It’s also unusual because of its format: a novel that’s not fiction, illustrated by — unfortunately poorly reproduced — photographs that make it resemble a family album, with the author writing in the first person, with that person being at times a guy named Dinçer and sometimes a woman named Fatma.

In his conclusion to We Are All Migrants, Jan Plamper writes that he used to assume, as “an internationalist of the Left,” that a collective national identity was unnecessary. He has since changed his mind. His book is a “plea for a collective identity.” He advocates a “national New We” because he believes it’s important to have an “effective emotional glue” and thereby meet the demand for a national German identity from non-migrants and migrants alike.

I still cringe when either of my nations’ national anthem (the German “Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit” or “Advance Australia Fair”) is played, and I am uncomfortable when I see others deeply moved by the display of national symbols. Mind you, I happily barrack for the German football team — for the women’s, not the men’s — though not because they are Germans but because they play such an attractive brand of football. And yes, I did cheer on the men’s team once, but that was when Mesut Özil and Miroslav Klose were its stars — not because they were PlusGermans but because I was seduced by their artistry, their ability to read the game and their skill in befuddling their opponents.

“What it means to be German remains a blank, is still missing something elementary — new terms, concepts, and stories,” Plamper claims. Not only do I think that shouldn’t alarm us. I’m also not sure that Plamper’s diagnosis is correct — unless of course the sense of being German is necessarily tied up with a territorially bounded nation-state.

I am emotionally attached to certain German landscapes, to some German music and, particularly, to some writing in German, including Unser Deutschlandmärchen. I was moved by Güçyeter’s book. I loved the rhythm and timbre of its language. It took me to places I had never visited. The book is part of a distinctly German universe I admire and cherish, a universe so much larger than the German nation. And wouldn’t an emotional attachment to a German nation inevitably entail an attachment to the German nation-state?

Plamper embraces what he calls the “open border position.” As a historian he also knows that there is nothing natural about what the anthropologist Liisa Malkki once referred to as the “national order of things. “One day national borders will seem like a remnant from a bygone epoch, much like slavery or the exclusion of women from general elections do in the Western world,” Plamper writes. “There will be a truly universal right, a human right, of freedom of movement.”

In the meantime, for strategic reasons, ought we nurture an emotional attachment to a German nation? To offer an alternative for the Turkish Germans who, come 14 May, may save Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s bacon because they are emotionally attached to the nationalism he offers? Or to offer a less fraught option for those following PEGIDA, the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, to stop them from shouting “Absaufen! Absaufen! Absaufen!” (“Drown! Drown! Drown!”), as happened when a speaker at one of their demonstrations in 2018 referred to the German NGO Mission Lifeline, which has operated a search-and-rescue ship in the Mediterranean?

The PEGIDA followers are hardly going to be attracted by a “New We” that includes PlusGermans like Berhe and Güçyeter. They have shown little interest in defining and periodically redefining national collective identity through democratic processes — unless of course, they are promised that these processes will reflect their idea of an ethnically, if not racially, defined, homogenous nation. But let them pontificate about “we Germans” — and let us assure the targets of their racist vitriol that we in Germany do not wish to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, nor between native and non-native speakers of the language of Goethe and Güçyeter.

I am not so worried about the rift between those who demand that Germany close its borders and those who believe we ought to respond to new arrivals with hospitality and solidarity. I can’t think of a compromise position that would allow Germany to uphold the human rights of migrants and at the same time exclude people seeking its protection.

I expect that “we Germans” are deeply concerned about the nation’s apparent lack of a unity of purpose. “We in Germany,” I would like to think, are more concerned about the fact that migrants are left to drown in the Mediterranean.

Unlike Jan Plamper, I fail when trying to envisage a day when “national borders will seem like a remnant from a bygone epoch.” But after having read his book, and Berhe’s and Güçyeter’s, I too am cautiously optimistic.

Over to Dinçer Güçyeter for the last word: “We will combine the past with what’s still to come and write our own fairy tale, mother.” •

We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany
By Jan Plamper | Cambridge University Press | $43.95 | 274 pages

Nie mehr leise: Die neue migrantische Mittelschicht
By Betiel Berhe | Aufbau | €22.00 | 205 pages

Unser Deutschlandmärchen
By Dinçer Güçyeter | mikrotext | €25.00 | 213 pages

The post We in Germany appeared first on Inside Story.

Wasserstein has poured an extraordinary amount of research into this book. The bibliography lists thirty-four archives in seven countries (Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Israel, Britain and the United States) alongside oral history interviews, written testimonies, websites, unpublished doctoral dissertations, official publications from Austria, Britain, the United States and the Vatican, and a long list of published books and articles. These materials were assembled, read and digested over three decades of “digging ever deeper into what turned out to be an immense historical quarry.”

During his research, the historian built up “vast data banks of official records, newspaper dispatches, census materials, registers of births, marriages and deaths, electoral results, medical reports, maps and photographs, as well as meteorological, geological, ecological, ornithological, architectural, judicial, military, ecclesiastical and every other category of information I could find.”

Wasserstein’s biographical database alone includes information about “over seventeen thousand persons” who once lived in the small Galician town of Krakowiec (pronounced Krah-KOV-yets), the place where his grandparents were born and where, together with their daughter, they were shot at the end of the second world war.

With all this material, he could have produced a turgid multi-volume history of the town of his ancestors. At the very least, he could have written one of those doorstoppers commercial publishers somehow believe “the general public” has time to read. Thankfully, however, he has instead written a short and eminently readable account.

Wasserstein’s readers might recently have encountered Krakowiec — or Krakovets, as it is called today in Ukrainian — just across the border from Poland, in reporting about the refugee crisis created by Russia’s aggression. Founded sometime in the early fourteenth century, the town started life as a frontier settlement of the Kingdom of Poland. When Poland was partitioned in 1772, it became part of the Austrian-ruled Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. As it grew and became more prosperous, it turned from a Polish settlement into an increasingly Jewish town — a shtetl.

The Jewishness of the town was typical. In Galicia, landowners tended to be Polish aristocrats, the peasants were mostly Ruthenians (some of whom, by the nineteenth century, began to call themselves “Ukrainians”), and the town dwellers — tradesmen, tavern keepers, money lenders, and shop owners — were Jews. The division of labour was both functional and conflictual: its violent potential would be enhanced in the age of nationalism, racism and total war.

Wasserstein uses the history of this interaction between Poles, Ruthenians and Jews — and eventually a variety of invading military forces — to situate his own family’s history. He is not the first historian of East European Jewish heritage to embark on such a project. Shimon Redlich, in Together and Apart in Brzezany (2002), was among the earliest; most recently, that celebrated historian of the Holocaust, Omer Bartov, did something similar for another Galician town, Buczacz, in Anatomy of a Genocide (2019).

These accounts belong to a broader but relatively new genre of history writing: the transnational history of Eastern Europe. In books like Sketches from a Secret War (2005) and The Red Prince (2010), Timothy Snyder used the fate of individuals to chart new historical grounds between established national narratives. In A Biography of No Place (2005), Kate Brown presented an intimate portrait of how the borderland between Poland and Russia became a “Soviet heartland.”

At times of war, when national narratives are hardening, such books provide important correctives between and beyond national and nationalist history-telling. In each of them, the first world war plays a pivotal role.

As happened elsewhere in the region, that war came to Krakowiec as “a sudden, direct, and shattering blow.” The “unrelieved terror and carnage” it unleashed lasted not just four but seven years: it prompted the dissolution of both the Austro-Hungarian and the Romanov empires, and transformed seamlessly into a civil war and wars between successor states over real estate and the peoples of the fallen empires.

These years left “a residue of vicious collective suspicions and hatreds,” writes Wasserstein. “Ordinary human relationships collapsed into dog-eat-dog ruthlessness. The people of Krakowiec were plunged overnight into a dark realm. Their world would never be the same again.”

In this maelstrom, all sides distrusted the Jews: the Austrians no less than the Poles (who were soon in charge of their own state); the Russians of the Tsar no less than the Red Cavalry that came later from Soviet Russia to “liberate” the region from the “Polish lords” and the “capitalists” (the Jewish shopkeepers, mill owners and money lenders). Although the revolutionary Ukrainian state, formed in 1917 and declared independent in 1918, was originally committed to multi-ethnicity, the troops of the Ukrainian republic were soon engaged in pogroms just like everybody else.

Only the Germans, despite the harshness of their occupation in 1918, were not known for anti-Jewish excesses — a perverse legacy that convinced some locals two decades later that the stories of Nazi atrocities were Soviet propaganda and there was no reason to flee.

Eventually, the newly established Polish republic won out over its Ukrainian and Soviet Russian competitors. The Treaty of Riga of 1921 divided the Ukrainian state between victorious Poland and defeated Russia, and made Krakowiec Polish yet again. It would remain so until 1939, when Poland was invaded, first (on 1 September) by the Germans from the west and then (on 17 September) by the Soviets from the east. Krakowiec ended up on the Soviet side of the border and was integrated into Soviet Ukraine.

What followed would change the face of Krakowiec even more dramatically than had the first world war and the ensuing civil and inter-state wars. Stalin’s police went after political enemies of the Soviets as well as “class enemies.” Many of them were Polish, of course, but also Jewish: a shopkeeper, a factory owner, even the operator of an export business for Galician eggs (which were shipped to Germany and as far as England) were “capitalists” in Soviet eyes, particularly if they “exploited” (employed) others to do some of the work.

Many Jewish entrepreneurs were arrested and their families deported to the Soviet hinterland. Perversely, this saved many of them: life in Stalin’s concentration camp state was less lethal than being Jewish under the Nazis.

When the Germans invaded in the summer of 1941 they brought with them the genocidal Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that systematically murdered Jews. They had help from Ukrainian nationalists who had become inspired by fascism, like the radical right everywhere. An increasingly bitter four-way struggle developed between these radical Ukrainians, the Polish underground Home Army, German counterinsurgency troops and Soviet partisans, with Jews caught between all fronts. When the Red Army liberated Krakowiec in May 1944, only one Jew emerged from his hiding place. Of the 104,700 Jews who had lived in Krakowiec before the war, only 1689 survived.

Wasserstein’s grandparents, Berl and Czarna, and his aunt Lotte had originally escaped deportation to a ghetto and then the ghetto’s “liquidation.” But the Ukrainian neighbour who had sheltered them for a year eventually gave them up. The Nazis shot them in April 1944, just three months before the Red Army arrived.

Why and how the Wassersteins found themselves in Krakowiec when the war broke out, and why Wasserstein’s father Abraham (“Addi”) escaped their fate, is a history in itself.

A Small Town in Ukraine begins with the deportation of Berl and Addi from Berlin in October 1938, part of a mass expulsion of Ostjuden (“eastern Jews”) from Nazi Germany. Berl had been sixteen when the first world war came to his native Krakowiec. Like many Galician Jews, he and his family fled the advancing Russian army in 1914, eventually moving to Vienna, capital of the Habsburg empire, of which they were loyal subjects.

Perhaps trying to evade military service, Berl kept moving, first to Holland, then to Germany, where he married Czarna Laub, who also hailed from Krakowiec. The couple settled first in Frankfurt and then in Berlin, where Berl built a business producing raincoats. Neither he nor his wife ever became German citizens, but their children grew up speaking German rather than Polish or Yiddish. Nevertheless, for the Nazis after 1933, they were aliens in two senses: Polish refugees and Jews. The deportation of this group in 1938 marked one step in the radicalisation of anti-Jewish policies that would culminate in genocide.

Thus, the Wassersteins were forced back to the provincial Krakowiec they had worked so hard to escape. Berl was allowed a short visit to Berlin to collect the women of the family and liquidate his assets under rules that effectively meant confiscation. Addi, equipped with false papers, managed to travel through Germany, ostensibly en route to Latin America. He arrived in time to say farewell to his sister and parents at the Eastern Railway Station in Berlin. He would never see them again.

Like the family of historian Richard Pipes, who would do so a little later and under somewhat more adventurous conditions, he then moved on to Italy. When Germany went to war with Poland shortly after Addi arrived in Rome, Mussolini’s government suspended tourist visas. Eventually he managed to reach Palestine via Turkey. His survival — the result of quick decisions and chance encounters — was little short of a miracle.

Wasserstein’s book ends with an account of his own travels to Krakowiec after the fall of the Soviet Union and his deeply ambiguous encounter with contemporary Ukraine. The once multi-ethnic Krakowiec, now Krakovets, has been transformed beyond recognition. The Nazis destroyed the Jews, and a postwar, state-led campaign of ethnic cleansing in the border regions moved Ukrainians from Poland to the Soviet Union, and Poles and the few surviving Jews in the other direction. Today, the town is a thoroughly Ukrainian settlement.

Popular memories there diverge sharply from those Wasserstein reconstructs in his book. The town was the birthplace not only of Wasserstein’s grandfather but also of Roman Shukhevych, a controversial Ukrainian national hero. He served under the Germans during the second world war before deserting to fight his own war once it became clear the Nazis would lose. Among other deeds, he commanded a German-controlled unit that “shot all the Jews we encountered” in at least two villages, according to one of his subordinates. In the postwar years he fought a guerilla war against the Soviet occupiers until his death in battle in 1950.

Today’s Krakovets not only has a monument to its questionable hero; the school Berl Wasserstein attended is named after Shukhevych as well, as is a street.

Wasserstein completed A Small Town in Ukraine just as Russia attacked the country early last year. At a time when shades of grey seem to have vanished, when intellectuals are called on to unequivocally condemn “NATO expansion” as the source of the war or throw their lot in behind Ukraine, defender of freedom and democracy, he carves out a third position.

His feelings, he writes, are “mixed.” He shares “the general abhorrence at Russian aggression and brutality” and notes that “Russian claims about ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine are outrageous black propaganda.” Ukraine today, he notes correctly, “is a democracy, albeit a fragile one.” At the same time, he is filled with “unease” at the prospect of a Ukrainian victory parade “past the garlanded statue of Roman Shukhevych” on the square in which the town’s Jews were assembled for deportation.

The glorification of Shukhevych and his comrades from the second world war, Wasserstein warns, is not “harmless exuberance.” Collective identities based on false history “are inherently contaminated and potentially dangerous.” His book is the very opposite of such mythologies: a thoughtful exploration of a painful past that lives on in the present. •

A Small Town in Ukraine: The Place We Came From, the Place We Went Back To
By Bernard Wasserstein | Allen Lane | $35 | 320 pages

The post Eastern Europe’s faultline appeared first on Inside Story.

By daylight, the city can feel like its near neighbours, Warsaw and Budapest. Stalinist buildings line the Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main boulevard, and the skyline is punctuated by the golden spires of churches. Dogs wrapped in winter jackets are out for walks, couples stroll hand in hand. But at night, once you realise the street’s illumination comes from the bobbing headlamps of pedestrians and dogs wearing glow-in-the-dark collars, it is impossible to forget the war and how it has transformed this city.

Some of the most visible changes have been to names. Russian places and heroes have been expunged from streets and squares, which have been rebaptised with Ukrainian names that better reflect the national mood. Moskovska Street, named for the Russian capital, has become Kniaziv Ostrozkykh Street, after a branch of Ukrainian medieval nobility; Piterskaya (St Petersburg) Street is now London Street. In their failed attempt to conquer Kyiv, Russia has accelerated the derussification of the city. Globally, news outlets now refer to the Ukrainian-derived “Kyiv” rather than the previously common Russian-language “Kiev.”

While the Russian advance on the capital from the north was repulsed early in the war and the front lines of battle now lie in the east and south of Ukraine, the country remains under indiscriminate attack from the sky. Civilians are at constant risk: reports come in frequently of people killed in their own homes or on streets they have known for decades. Despite a morale-lifting visit this week by US president Joe Biden, residents are tensely awaiting the anticipated anniversary bombardment.

The near-daily alarms have forced mental acrobatics of a variety that I could not previously have envisaged. Each siren that goes off — and activates a flurry of notifications on my phone, this being a truly twenty-first century war — triggers decision-making that feels life-and-death and black-and-white, and yet also very mundane.

When a siren first sounds, it typically indicates that the launch of an offensive airborne attack has been detected. Because Kyiv is in Ukraine’s central heartland, we have a window of opportunity; a heavy pause during which we track the attack’s progress through Twitter feeds and Telegram chats.

There’s usually time for me to finish my shower or brew a thermos of coffee, recognising that these attacks can trigger emergency utility shut-offs. Based on the stream of real-time updates, I decide if I will shelter in my bathroom (the safest place in my apartment, away from external walls) or in the basement shelter across the road.

Some days the attack doesn’t materialise; on others, explosions echo across the city. Later, when our mobile phones buzz to tell us the alert is over, the catch in my throat releases, and everyone moves along with their day.

Resilience is a point of collective pride. The national ballet performs to a full theatre even as the corps is thinned by displacement and enlistment. Weekends see Kyiv’s bars and restaurants packed with patrons toasting to victory (“za peremoga”) before returning home ahead of the curfew. Refusing to be cowed by cuts to electricity, venues are illuminated by candles and fairy lights, and the city hums with generators. People distribute powerbanks among their friends as though sharing cigarettes.

The city’s citizens have fashioned a new normal. Patriotism is in vogue, and Pantone’s freedom blue and energising yellow are the colours of the season. Alongside more conventional military heroes, people honour train conductors and energy workers. One of my favourite cocktail bars shakes a “Ukrainian dream” (rum, baked-apple infused vermouth and bitters) and a “return to the sun” (rum, amaretto, cardamom bitters, vanilla syrup and lemon). They taste of hope, and of supply chains from the West that have not been cut.

No blueprint exists for how best to respond to war; no guidance manual spells out which parts of life one should pause and which continue. I’ve had my hair cut by headtorch swaddled in a blanket in a dark and unheated salon, and attended candlelit concerts with packed audiences. Adaptation is the byword, and a determination that life must go on.

Ukrainians have long known war: their country’s territory has been contested for centuries, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for breakaway republics in the east have made military offensives and civilian displacement part of the everyday national narrative. But it was the launch of the full-scale invasion on 24 February last year that brought war home. Everyone remembers where they were that day, and in the terrifying weeks afterwards.

Today, Ukrainian colleagues can name the weaponry the country is requesting from its allies as though rattling off a weekly shopping list. They recite casualty statistics and updates on movement in the frontline. They give friendly advice on the nearest bomb shelter when an air-raid siren goes off.

Absorbed in conflict of a scale few imagined, the darkness of Kyiv’s night-time streets goes nearly unmentioned. Between air strikes, the bartenders keep pouring and the musicians keep playing. •

The post Kyiv, one year on appeared first on Inside Story.

For NATO, therefore, policy has become risk management. On the one hand, it wants to prevent Ukraine from losing, force Russia to end the attack and deter future aggression in, for instance, the Baltic states. Besides hobbling Moscow with sanctions, this means giving Kyiv the intelligence information and weapons to kill thousands of invading troops and gut the Russian army. On the other hand, it doesn’t want to provoke a catastrophic reaction.

While US, French and British nuclear weapons add to the inherent danger of the crisis, only Russia has been flaunting its arsenal. Its thousands of nuclear warheads, divided between intercontinental range and shorter-range “tactical” weapons, are enough to reduce Europe to ruins, slaughter several million people and shatter civilisation. Even if the Kremlin had remained silent about them, these weapons are an existential menace.

But it has not stayed silent. President Putin, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and the Russian security council’s Dmitry Medvedev allude to the potentially dire nuclear consequences of Western support of Kyiv. Further down the food chain, the state media continues its blood-curdling commentary, in some cases insanely calling for the obliteration of NATO countries.

We don’t know if the Kremlin is bluffing. But three factors seem to give substance to its threats: Putin’s character; the high stakes involved; and Russian military doctrine.

Many say the key to understanding the nuclear risk lies inside Putin’s head. Before he invaded Ukraine a year ago, observers considered him a ruthless but shrewd player of geopolitics; since then, though, he’s simply appeared reckless. And rather than Putin being the leader who has mastered the global chessboard, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US president Joe Biden seem to have Moscow’s measure.

So, we have a frustrated control freak with no conscience and a finger on the nuclear button. Perhaps he’s deploying the “mad man” card, carefully playing his hand to limit Western intervention? Or has he become a rash gambler?

Without a proper psychological assessment and a fly on the wall inside the Kremlin, it’s unclear how far a character assessment can take us. We don’t know how much authority Putin has over Russia’s nuclear forces, with reports saying he shares it with senior officials. And although he licensed the current spate of rabid nationalism, we don’t know how much he now controls it. Still, as far as we can tell, he continues to call the shots.

Another reason the nuclear threat appears credible is the high stakes involved. Russia’s status as a great power and Putin’s survival is said to hinge on victory, or at least avoiding defeat. There’s also an ideological aspect to this, with Putin and nationalist zealots arguing that the war represents a civilisational struggle between righteous Russianness and degenerate Western Satanism. This is just the sort of binary or absolutist framing suited to prepping for an apocalyptic conflict.

Finally, some experts argue Russian military doctrine adds weight to the nuclear threat. In particular, they say the idea of “escalate to de-escalate” gears Russian forces to respond to an imminent decisive defeat of its army, or to conventional air attacks on the Russian homeland, with a limited nuclear strike to compel enemies to back off. (This echoes Washington’s refusal to rule out nuclear first use, and NATO’s cold war strategy of flexible response, which encompassed the concept of nuclear warning shots.)

In other words, the Russian general staff has institutionalised a crossover between large-scale conventional war and scenarios for nuclear strikes. While this doesn’t make it automatic, the potential for escalation is baked into strategy. An extra twist is Moscow’s annexation of about one-fifth of Ukraine, suggesting the conquered regions are now considered part of the homeland and so covered by its nuclear deterrent.

Whatever its end point, the Kremlin’s nuclear threat has so far worked, at least to a degree. Fear of precipitating world war three is the main reason NATO ruled out imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and it helps explain NATO’s initial reluctance to supply long-range artillery and tanks. Today, Western fear of escalation shows in the refusal to supply Kyiv with even longer-range artillery and combat aircraft.

In each case the West has been sensitive to Russia’s supposed “red lines.” NATO has even internalised them as an essential tool for crisis management. The principal red line here separates measures intended to aid Ukraine’s defence from those threatening Russian territory.

As conceptual tools go, red lines appear objective and clear. In practice, though, they have been more subjective and elastic. While there’s still a prohibition on direct NATO combat with Russian forces, everything else has become blurred. This is partly because the distinction between defensive and offensive weapons is largely artificial, depending as much on context as on technical attributes. Even the distinction between defensive and offensive operations can be problematic when the issue is reclaiming lost land.

This matter surfaced in the debate over the supply of tanks. Were the German-manufactured Leopards intended to prevent a Ukraine defeat while the country continued to bleed out, or to aid Ukraine’s victory and put an end to the war? And what would a victory look like?

Eleven months ago, many would have judged fighting the supposedly mighty Russian army to a draw along the current front line as equivalent to a Ukraine win. Today, most Western commentators say victory requires further embarrassing the humbled Russian army and recapturing the territory occupied since February 2022. Kyiv has set the bar higher: pushing the Russian army out of the land seized in 2014.

Hanging over all of this is the future of Crimea. Controversy over the peninsula is set to reshape the debate over red lines, not least in Washington. Kyiv and Moscow are both convinced of their historical and moral right to the place, but Ukraine’s legal claim is far stronger and would provide the basis for Western support of an offensive to expel Russian forces.

A solid legal case is not the same as sensible policy, however. Assuming it could be done, would retaking Crimea be worth a (say) one-in-ten chance of triggering a nuclear holocaust?

The answer is a matter of opinion. It’s interesting that the country most vulnerable to Russian nuclear forces — Ukraine — appears the least concerned. Kyiv is the most hawkish player in the debate about reclaiming Crimea and other lost territories; it seems, on the surface, prepared to pay any price and run any risk.

This is important because, while NATO and Ukrainian interests overlap, they’re not identical. Western commentators often forget to factor in autonomous Ukrainian decision-making, and assume that Kyiv will keep its strategy within guardrails established by outsiders. But while Kyiv has good reasons not to cross its international backers, the war is about Ukraine’s independence, not its subordination to Western interests.

Ukrainians don’t picture the conflict in geopolitical terms. They see what’s right in front of them: Putin’s trashing of their country’s sovereignty and dismissal of its national identity, his willingness to seize as much of their land as he can get away with, the millions of refugees, and the savagery of the Russian army and its mercenary associates. The resulting hatred is not conducive to a restrained response from Kyiv if it identifies an opening for an offensive that sends the occupying force into ignominious retreat. Throwing the Kremlin off balance could well become Kyiv’s aim, even if that disrupts Western ideas of escalation control.

Some people don’t see this as a problem. Social media is full of keyboard warriors wanting to pour weapons into Ukraine as though Russian nuclear weapons don’t exist. Even respected commentators advocate NATO going all-in, paying little regard to the potential nuclear consequences. Some experts advise facing down Putin’s nuclear blustering like we would a schoolyard bully. For these people, Russian huffing and puffing has run into diminishing returns, becoming little more than background noise.

NATO can’t afford to be so cavalier. The consequences of being wrong are too dreadful. So it’s intensely interested in scenarios showing how and when the nuclear threshold might be crossed. Start with a projected Ukrainian counteroffensive that overruns a large part of the Russian army on the border or employs air attacks to strike deep into Russia. This would lift the stakes and speed the pace of events. The resulting strategic adjustments could be hasty and prone to miscalculation, perhaps setting the scene for a limited Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine.

NATO might then respond with direct conventional military intervention. And, almost certainly, once the Kremlin had broken the nuclear taboo, America’s preparations for nuclear war would be ramped up. A different type of escalatory dynamic would pit Moscow against Washington in a starker form of brinkmanship.

Strategists on both sides think deterrence requires convincing the opponent that they won’t back down, that they’re prepared to climb the escalation ladder all the way to large-scale global nuclear war. Adding substance to the idea are elaborate plans matching individual warheads against specific targets. This is a surreal space in which potential casualties are counted in the millions and military officers are drilled in worst-case analysis.

Increased alert levels for Russian and American forces could thus become mutually reinforcing, intensifying fears of surprise attack and inadvertently creating pressure for massive pre-emptive strikes. Misunderstandings and accidents would become more dangerous, perhaps confronting decision-makers in Moscow and Washington with a kill-or-be-killed moment.

This is the apocalyptic picture Putin tries to leverage. But apart from some loose talk, there’s no evidence he actually wants to blow up the world. He probably has serious doubts about “escalate to de-escalate,” not least in terms of cost–benefit calculations. But even if he is, in his private moments, set against radical escalation, the conflict could take on a life of its own. The stresses of responding to pressing events on the ground or in the air above Russia might crowd out yesterday’s assessments. Whatever was in his mind could be altered by unfolding events that can be neither reliably predicted nor easily controlled. He might, at last, have to put up or shut up.

The recognition that the war could turn into a bigger catastrophe has obviously not paralysed the West. Apart from the domestic political price of abandoning Ukraine, NATO is concerned about the harm to global security if it fails to resist territorial expansion underpinned by nuclear threats — harm that includes exposing more countries to Russian, Chinese and North Korean aggression, a rush to proliferation, and the nightmare of normalising nuclear warfare.

During the cold war, Washington refused to intervene in Moscow’s sphere of influence when the Soviet army crushed anti-Russian movements in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The reason for caution was fear of events spiralling into nuclear annihilation. Today, however, Washington is pushing the envelope by orchestrating military intervention inside the borders of the former Soviet Union, aiming to defeat Russia on its doorstep without tipping it over the edge. Only time will tell if it can master this necessary balancing act. •

The post Pushing the nuclear envelope appeared first on Inside Story.

Up to mid 2021 this looked about right. Although enthusiasm for Brexit had gently declined since 2016, sentiment had not shifted dramatically. But since then, support has fallen much faster and, fuelled by Britain’s economic malaise, debate has intensified. In August 2021, 46 per cent of people told YouGov Britain was wrong to leave the European Union and 42 per cent said it was right. Those figures are now 54 per cent and 34 per cent. Just 18 per cent think the government has handled Brexit well.

Both the government and the opposition are studiously, and understandably, ignoring this shift in opinion. Within the Tory membership and the parliamentary party, support for Brexit remains strong. Prime minister Rishi Sunak is in a weak position, doing poorly in the polls and under attack from the most aggressively anti-European faction in his party, supported by his predecessor Boris Johnson. The government can do little beyond quietly trying to improve relations with European partners, as we are seeing with its attempt to resolve vexed issues over Northern Ireland.

Labour’s base strongly opposes Brexit but, given Remainers have nowhere else to go, the opposition’s focus is on winning over socially conversative but economically left-wing voters in marginal seats. Attacking Brexit would be actively unhelpful with this group. Labour leader Keir Starmer and his team are also clearly terrified about being attacked as soft on immigration — hence his repeated emphasis that free movement of people would be off the table under a Labour government.

But if opinion continues to shift against Brexit, this can only be a temporary strategy for both parties, and will eventually become unsustainable.

Support for Brexit was always likely to decline over time because of the age profile of the groups that voted Yes and No in the 2016 referendum. A majority of under-fifty-year-olds voted Remain; pensioners were always the biggest backers of Leave. Given very few Remain voters have changed their minds over the past six and a half years, and people who were too young to vote in 2016 overwhelmingly oppose Brexit, natural voter replacement is generating an inevitable shift.

Professor Simon Hix and colleagues estimate around 35 per cent of the drop in support for Brexit since 2016 is due to this replacement effect. It’s likely that if the initial referendum took place next year Remain would now win — even if everyone who could vote in 2016 voted the same way.

Brexit enthusiasts always ran a risk in depending so greatly on older voters, which makes it all the more strange that they doubled down on appealing to their existing supporters rather than attempting to make a case that might appeal to younger, more liberal voters. As a result, alongside the replacement effect, the age gap has got even bigger. An analysis of YouGov data shows people born between 1985 and 1994 have shifted hardest against Brexit, whereas those born before 1944 are even more supportive than they were in 2016. This will exacerbate the impact of replacement over the next five to ten years.

This powerful effect means that Brexit will continue to get less and less popular even if no one else changes their mind. So those who want to stay well clear of the EU need to convince younger voters that it was a good idea. At the moment, that clearly isn’t happening — the proportion of Remain voters who’ve changed their minds is tiny. Nor is there are any reason to believe this will change in the next few years, given that no obvious benefits are about to become apparent.

The only factors that might push opinion in the other direction would be a strong economic recovery for which at least some credit was given to Brexit, deserved or not, or, more possible though still unlikely, a major crisis within the EU that makes Britain look like a safe haven. Tensions certainly exist that could turn into something more existential. For instance, in late 2022 we saw Hungary blocking a bailout to Ukraine as part of an ongoing argument over Viktor Orbán’s undemocratic rule. And many EU states, including France, are still unhappy with Germany’s behaviour over the energy crisis.

But at the moment nothing seems likely to give Remain voters pause. That puts the focus on Leave voters. If they stay supportive of Brexit then it will take longer for a major shift in policy to become a political necessity for the main parties. At the moment 18 per cent of those Leavers are telling YouGov they now think leaving was the wrong decision — higher than a year ago — but 74 per cent are sticking with their initial decision.

Yet when you dig into how people feel about Brexit, that support looks like it could drop a fair bit more, especially among younger Leave supporters. JL Partners’ polling in October showed that just 24 per cent of Leave voters think Brexit has helped the economy compared with 34 per cent who think it’s made it worse. Across every area JL Partners tested — from better public services to the cost of holidays — Leave voters were more likely to say Brexit has made their lives worse than better. A Public First poll in December for the charity More in Common found that, of Leave voters who had changed their minds, 69 per cent cited damage to the economy as a reason.

Why then do 74 per cent still say it was right to leave? Mainly, it seems, because they are still hopeful there will be benefits in the coming years. While JL Partners found little hope among Remainers that any benefits might be forthcoming, a majority of Leavers felt trade deals with the rest of the world and “better UK laws” would bring future improvements. Critically, though, most expected to see those benefits in the next five years. My sense is that if they don’t, and there’s no reason at the moment to think they will, then support among Leavers will continue to drop, on top of the age effects.

If it seems fairly clear that people are unhappy with Brexit so far, even if some are still hopeful, what people want instead is harder to read. This is partly because, as ever, most people don’t spend much time thinking about politics, let alone policy detail, and so don’t have formed views on the benefits of joining the single market versus a bespoke trade deal. It’s also down to the complexity of the issue.

Thanks to the kind people at focaldata I’ve been able to ask some of my own polling questions to test how well people understand one of the key concepts that comes up in discussions of how Britain might deal with the post-Brexit malaise. To do that, I gave four short (and by necessity simplistic) descriptions of the single market to see if people knew what it actually means. Thirty-eight per cent correctly chose “Agreeing to participate in the free movement of goods, people, services and capital with European Union states” and 35 per cent nominated another option I’d phrased to be almost right. But another 27 per cent chose options — “a bespoke deal with the EU” or “rejoining the EU” — that were completely wrong.

There’s also the matter of how you frame the questions. As ever, small changes in wording can make a huge difference. When I asked if people thought Britain should join the single market but stay out of the European Union, I found 55 per cent in favour and 26 per cent opposed. Opinium Research asked if people supported “gaining access to the European single market” and found 63 per cent supporting and 14 per cent opposed. Both JL Partners and Public First asked (different) multi-option questions that gave quite different results for how many people would prefer joining the single market versus some other type of closer relationship.

Given all this, we have to be careful about overreading the data. But I think we can say the following: not many people want to keep the status quo and only a very small minority want to move even further away from the EU. A substantial majority, including most Leavers, want some kind of better relationship, though short of rejoining. They are particularly concerned about the economy but are also bothered by the inconvenience of travelling abroad, and they support closer security relationships and sharing of police information.

What is really hard to judge is which trade-offs people are prepared to accept. Things can be done to develop a closer economic and security relationship with the EU, short of single-market membership or rejoining, but they are limited. Both single-market membership and rejoining would certainly help the economy, but both would have costs, including payments to the EU, accepting free movement (though most people don’t want higher immigration) and, if Britain were not a full member, having to follow rules that it had no say in forming.

In my poll I tried to get at this issue by asking people what would worry them most about rejoining the EU — with a list of options. My hypothesis was that free movement would be way out in front as the biggest concern. But it wasn’t at all. Just 12 per cent said it was their main concern, and only 19 per cent of Leavers. The greater worry, at 21 per cent (24 per cent of Leavers), was paying money to the EU, which I guess shouldn’t have been a surprise given the arguments about that damn bus advert. The other concerns that registered double figures were loss of sovereignty (15 per cent); going back to political arguments about membership (12 per cent); and concern about overturning the referendum (10 per cent).

Of all the public’s views at the moment, how strongly people feel about immigration is one of the hardest to get a grip on. But I can’t help thinking that politicians are overly worried about it compared with other factors, particularly the state of public services and the economy.

When YouGov and Public First explicitly cite free movement as a consequence of joining the single market or striking a “Swiss-style” deal, they seem to get similar responses to when they don’t, and in each case they register clear majority support for these options. LSE researchers explicitly tested a “free movement” deal with the EU and found majority support among Leavers.

But that doesn’t mean the real-world argument for these options, or rejoining, would be easy to win. Only 19 per cent of voters, and only 30 per cent of Remainers, had no concerns at all about rejoining. While the concerns are more diffuse than I expected, they are there, and would, of course, come more to the forefront of the debate if the government pushed for a more dramatic change in the EU relationship.

Given the shift in opinion against Brexit, and given that, barring a dramatic economic recovery or the implosion of the EU, the trend is very likely to continue, what does that mean for the current Tory/Labour positions?

Neither party faces any immediate pressure to change policy. Sunak has no room to shift even if he wanted to. The Tories will go into the election citing “Get Brexit Done” as a success, though they won’t make it a centrepiece given how little benefit voters have seen.

Labour will stick to its current position too — “Make Brexit Work” — and stay out of anything that would require the return of free movement. What making Brexit work means in practice is harder to define, but it will include closer regulatory alignment on a number of areas, trying to reduce trade barriers, and closer security arrangements. This is extremely safe ground, backed by most Leave voters and an overwhelming majority of Remainers.

I suspect Starmer could go a bit further, without talking about any specific mechanism, in his warmth towards future relationships without doing any harm electorally. And he certainly doesn’t need to pretend, as he did the other day, that joining the single market wouldn’t bring economic benefits.

But, of course, I can understand the caution. Proposing to rejoin now would undoubtedly be a mistake. As Luke Tryl notes, his More in Common polling shows that “swing voters — those who have either switched to Labour since 2019 or who voted Tory and now are undecided — say by a margin of 47 to 16 per cent that if Labour pledged to rejoin they would be less, rather than more likely to vote for the party.”

I suspect things will start to move a bit faster after the election. Labour will have to engage with the issue within its first year because Britain’s 2020 trade agreement with Europe is automatically reviewed every five years. The party base will urge the new government to maximise alignment.

My view is that Labour should, on taking office, immediately commission an analysis of the costs and benefits of Brexit to inform the review, and should try to bring in sensible Leave backers to make the conclusions as widely accepted as possible.

If a new deal, following the review, has some limited benefits, and goes down okay with key voter groups, pressure will grow for something more comprehensive. The timeline here will depend on a number of things:

• Will Leave voters start to shift in greater numbers, or will ongoing drift in opinion depend entirely on replacement?

• Will anything happen that might push against that drift (economic recovery/EU crisis)?

• Will a disgruntled Labour faction — perhaps built around ministers fired in an early reshuffle — make getting back into the EU a loudly popular cause among the base?

• Will EU states be keen to bring the UK back into the fold, given that its politics would further complicate existing dynamics and there are some advantages of keeping it outside as an example of why holding the EU together matters?

• What will the Tories do?

This last question is a hard one to anticipate. On the one hand, parties that lose elections tend to retreat into their comfort zone quickly and for some time. It’s easy to imagine someone like business and trade minister Kemi Badenoch — a figure popular with the party base and the current favourite to take over the Tories after an election loss — doubling down on Brexit and choosing to fight Labour on immigration and culture wars. But if the result is really bad it may force an earlier acknowledgement of reality than happened after 1997.

Yes, a complete reversal on Brexit among Conservative MPs seems implausible given how committed so many in the party are to it, but a gentle back-pedalling is possible if they have a leader who sees how precarious their position is among younger voters. If they choose to downplay it, and not make it a big part of their pitch, that makes it easier for Labour to change position too.

One way or another, though, things will feel very different as we approach 2030. Britain is likely to be moving towards a closer relationship with the EU rather than the intransigence that has marked the past six years. Voter opinion will very likely be overwhelmingly in favour of this and substantially in favour of a more formal relationship of some kind. It will, by then, be fourteen years since the referendum. There will be thirty-two-year-olds who weren’t old enough to vote in 2016.

I don’t know if Britain will ever formally rejoin the EU, but I would be very surprised if it doesn’t have a dramatically different relationship within a decade, and that may well include de facto, if not de jure, membership of the single market. •

The post Getting Brexit undone appeared first on Inside Story.

What attracted less attention was the fact that many of the flag-wavers were members of the Australian chapter of the Night Wolves, a Russian biker gang that combines radical nationalism with paramilitary activities.

In a video of the incident posted by a pro-Putin activist, a prominent member of the Australian Night Wolves wears the gang’s t-shirt emblazoned with a flaming red wolf, a large white “Z” and its motto, “Where We Are, There Is Russia.” He addresses the gang’s leadership in Moscow, shouting “Brother Aleksandr Zaldostanov — greetings from Melbourne!” in Serbian. His next, muffled words, echoed by Srdjan Djokovic, have variously been interpreted as “Long live Russia!” or “Cheers, people!”

It was another small win for the Kremlin’s information warriors. Within a week, the video of this strange performance had notched up 187,000 views on the YouTube channel of the pro-Putin activist, “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov. The content has been widely circulated on the Putin regime’s propaganda platforms, which hailed Srdjan Djokovic as a hero and denounced the Western media for persecuting him for his pro-Russian sympathies.

I have followed the enablers of this incident, the Night Wolves, for many years. My interest was sharpened by my research for a book about the place of a Russian neo-Nazi movement, Russkii Obraz, in the Kremlin’s manipulation of Russian nationalism. For the leader of Russkii Obraz, the Night Wolves were an object lesson in how an extremist movement could win the approval of the regime and carve out a niche in public life.

The Night Wolves represent a minuscule fringe of Australia’s Russian and Serbian communities. But there are sound reasons to be concerned about their activities.

The most obvious is their connection to the Russian state. From their first demonstration alongside neo-Nazi groups outside Sydney’s Russian consulate in 2016, Australia’s Night Wolves have acted as conduits of influence for the Putin regime. They joined Kremlin propagandists in a social media campaign against Aleksei Navalny. They organised screenings of Russian nationalist propaganda at cinemas around the country. And they tried to intimidate an anti-Putin protester outside a Russian consulate.

No less disturbing is the gang’s relationship to their Russian mother organisation, which is connected to the Putin regime on multiple levels. As well as their close links to the security apparatus, the Russian Night Wolves are beneficiaries of extensive state support, ranging from presidential grants to real estate and free advertising. In return for this largesse, they play a major role in the ecosystem of radical nationalist groups that sustains Putin’s regime and its war against Ukraine.

Uniquely among pro-Kremlin nationalists, the Night Wolves have a mass appeal. Their motorbike shows attract large crowds and television audiences with expensively choreographed spectacles combining fireworks, motorcycle stunts and patriotic rock bands. Behind the theatrics, each show presents a narrative about the eternal struggle between Russia’s pure traditions and a demonic monster representing the West.

These warped morality tales reflect the political vision of the gang’s leader, Aleksandr Zaldostanov (“Surgeon”), who makes no secret of his imperialist convictions. He is obsessed with the idea of a “Fifth Empire,” the blueprint for a new totalitarianism proposed by the novelist and neo-Stalinist ideologue Aleksandr Prokhanov. According to Zaldostanov, the Fifth Empire will unite the legacies of four historical Russian empires — from Kievan Rus to Stalin’s USSR — into a new global power under Vladimir Putin.

Underlying this project is the classic fascist dream of a violent, regenerative nationalist revolution. The aim is to save humanity from the moral decadence brought by Western democracy, which Zaldostanov defines as “global Satanism.”

What magnifies the danger of this ideology is the paramilitary force at Zaldostanov’s disposal. The Night Wolves’ business interests include a network of private security companies that employ ex-military and security personnel. The most important is Wolf Holdings of Security Structures, which was sanctioned by the US government in June 2017 for its involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.

These veterans played a conspicuous role in Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, when they operated roadblocks, kidnapped a Ukrainian general, and stormed a naval headquarters.

Later they participated in Putin’s onslaught on southeast Ukraine. They are particularly close to the leadership of the Russian puppet state in Lugansk. A monument to Zaldostanov’s Fifth Empire, titled “A Symbol of the New Russia in the Eyes of the Night Wolves,” stands in front of the Lugansk government headquarters.

The Night Wolves have also helped to project Russian power in Europe and the Balkans. They stage regular “club runs,” long-distance motorcycle rides that serve as rallying points for local nationalists and fuel for Russian propaganda. Their security structures are the backbone of a network of “Volk Systema” martial arts clubs that claim to provide training in special forces combat techniques to police and the armed forces. Investigative reporting in Hungary, a NATO member state, suggested that this poses a real security risk.

One of the Night Wolves’ most audacious interventions was the failed coup in Montenegro on the eve of elections in 2016. A co-founder of the Serbian chapter of the gang testified that Russian intelligence agents arranged for him to visit Moscow, where he was given encrypted telephones and more than US$200,000 for weapons and recruitment.

Today the Night Wolves are deeply implicated in Putin’s war against Ukraine. In April last year, Zaldostanov hailed the invasion as yet another “battle against Satan.” The combatants include the Night Wolves’ own paramilitary unit, Night Wolves Pyatnashka. “These lads came to the Donbass with a clear motivation and an understanding of what is happening here,” writes pro-Kremlin military journalist Pavel Kukushkin. “They didn’t come to take pictures. The boys are fighting like everyone else.”

The Night Wolves’ complicity in Putin’s aggression has not gone unnoticed in the West. As early as December 2014, the US government sanctioned the gang for actions that “threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.” Canada blacklisted Zaldostanov a few months later. An EU-wide ban was imposed in July last year. It may be time for Australia to open its eyes to the Putinists in our midst. •

The post Putin’s Wolves appeared first on Inside Story.

A couple of days later, a nineteen-year-old from Afghanistan was reported to have badly hurt himself when he tried to climb out of a fifth-floor window of a reception centre for asylum seekers. He had panicked at around 3am when police came to his room to deport him to Croatia, where he had first entered the European Union. His fear may well have originated in experiences he had while passing through that country on the so-called Balkan route from Greece to Germany.

All three people — the two young women from Ukraine and the young man from Afghanistan — have sought refuge in Germany from countries ravaged by war. But while the women are allowed to remain in Germany until at least the end of 2023 without applying for asylum, the nineteen-year-old is prohibited even from seeking protection here. The women are employed and live in private accommodation; the young man was put up, with some 370 others, in a hostel run on behalf of the city of Hamburg.

In both cases, the European Union uses the same term, “solidarity,” to frame its response. Solidarity means that millions of Ukrainians have been allowed to settle temporarily in the twenty-seven EU member countries, and it is also the key concept underlying the EU’s common policy on asylum. But solidarity isn’t the exclusive preserve of the EU: activists campaigning against the deportation of asylum seekers have also assured the young man from Afghanistan of their solidarity.

Over the two centuries since it was first used, the English term solidarity has been “endlessly pliant,” in the words of the Swedish historian of ideas Sven-Eric Liedman. Are we perhaps talking about different kinds of solidarity here that have nothing to do with each other? Not quite. Bear with me, while I take you on a tour of European solidarity.

Solidarity is a buzzword in and around the EU’s headquarters in Brussels. A search of the European Commission’s official website, for instance, yields more than 40,000 hits for the term, and almost 4000 for the more specific “European solidarity.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise, for solidarity has long been deemed a distinguishing attribute of the European project.

The term features more than a dozen times in the Treaty on European Union, which underwrites EU law. In Article 2, the treaty refers to the EU’s foundational values of “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.” “These values,” adds the article, “are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.”

Another key document, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, goes further. In its preamble it lists solidarity as one of four “indivisible, universal values” on which the EU has been founded (the others being human dignity, freedom and equality). The charter helps illuminate the kind of solidarity the drafters of the Treaty on European Union had in mind: the twelve articles in its “Title IV: Solidarity” deal with things like healthcare, workers’ entitlements and social security — that is, with social and economic rather than civil and political rights.

The EU also prides itself on extending its solidarity to other, less fortunate nations. In recent months, Ukraine has been a prominent recipient of European solidarity, and so too have the countries most affected by climate change. At the conclusion of COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declared the conference to have “opened a new chapter on financing loss and damage” — a reference to Europe’s support for a fund to mitigate the impact of climate change — “and laid the foundations for a new method for solidarity between those in need and those in a position to help.”

Von der Leyen’s rhetoric was echoed by governments that strongly identify with the European project. German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said that “Team Germany” had travelled to Egypt to campaign “for more solidarity with the most vulnerable states.” The EU would like to be seen internationally as a “normative superpower,” a major player whose actions are informed by ethical considerations. Affording solidarity to the weak and poor is as much the result of these considerations as are criticism, censorship and punishment of nation-states whose performance runs counter to the norms and values embraced by the EU.

More important for the EU’s identity than solidarity of, among or for its residents — or solidarity with climate-affected nations or war-torn Ukraine — is the solidarity EU member states extend towards each other. Here the EU’s rhetoric has been more innovative, applying to nation-states a concept that has been more commonly used, as it is in Title V of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, to characterise relationships involving individuals.

References to such intra-EU solidarity appear in foundational texts from the 1950s. One of them — the May 1950 Schuman Declaration, incidentally published on the EU’s website under the heading “70 Years of Solidarity” — is French foreign minister Robert Schuman’s proposal for the EU’s earliest forerunner, a coal and steel community comprising France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Europe, Schumann said, would be “built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.”

Schuman’s idea was picked up the following year in the preamble of the treaty establishing that community, which recognises that “Europe can be built only through practical achievements which will first of all create real solidarity.”

One apparent expression of the solidarity principle is the EU’s system of transfer payments from affluent to poor members. Croatia and Lithuania receive payments amounting to more than 4 per cent of their respective gross domestic products, and Hungary, Greece and Latvia each receive the equivalent of around 3.5 per cent of GDP. Political figures in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and elsewhere might complain that tens of billions of euros are lavished each year on poor cousins in eastern and southeastern Europe — conveniently ignoring the fact that the payments amount to less than half a per cent of the GDP of wealthy member countries — but the system is nevertheless working well.

But those payments don’t prove that the solidarity principle governs relations between member states. To understand how much heed is paid to the principle, we need to look beyond the EU’s routine budget negotiations to what happens in times of crisis.

When Greece was facing national bankruptcy during the eurozone crisis, it expected countries like Germany to cancel its debts (in much the same way as German debts had been cancelled in 1953). But the Tsipras government’s understanding of solidarity couldn’t easily be reconciled with the kind of solidarity promoted by the governments in Berlin, Paris or The Hague. Where the Greeks saw European solidarity as tantamount to debt reduction, the governments of affluent European countries insisted that solidarity involved a corresponding duty — namely, substantial cuts to the Greek budget. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble famously declared that solidarity was not a one-way street.

When Schäuble’s views eventually prevailed, I wrote in Inside Story that the outcome was “appallingly bad” not just for Greece but also for Europe. I stand by that assessment, not least because the eurozone crisis demonstrated that any aspiration the EU’s leaders may have had for the “real solidarity” envisaged by its founders remained just that: an aspiration. It did not translate into action. Schuman had a valid point when he suggested that inter-state solidarity doesn’t miraculously materialise but rather is created by means of “concrete achievements.”

Solidarity among member states is not just about money. It is also about sharing other resources — medicines and intensive care beds during the Covid pandemic, for example. Here, too, member states’ performance has rarely matched their lofty rhetoric. During the early days of the pandemic, Germany and France were roundly and for good reason condemned for imposing export bans rather than sharing their (admittedly meagre) supplies of masks and ventilators.

Sharing electricity or fossil fuels during the current energy crisis could also be evidence of solidarity among member states. But will they really be prepared to help each other out during winter rather than reserve resources for their own use? In Germany, the Scholz government recently created a national €200 billion rescue shield to protect businesses and households from rising energy costs. It could have pushed instead for a European emergency fund that would have extended benefits much more widely (though not as generously as the German subsidies). Its decision indicates how national governments will react if freezing temperatures stretch Europe’s capacity to avoid power cuts, keep industries running, and heat residential and public buildings.

The most controversial aspect of European solidarity comes in Title V of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, headed “Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.” Article 67(2) stipulates that the EU “shall ensure the absence of internal border controls for persons and shall frame a common policy on asylum, immigration and external border control, based on solidarity between Member States, which is fair towards third-country nationals.” The role of solidarity is further emphasised in Article 80: “The policies of the Union… and their implementation shall be governed by the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility, including its financial implications, between the Member States.”

Burden-sharing of this kind is not a new idea. Back in 1950 France suggested that the UN Refugee Convention should include the following provision: “In a spirit of international solidarity, the High Contracting Parties shall take into consideration the burden assumed by the countries having first admitted or granted temporary asylum to refugees, and facilitate the permanent settlement of the latter, more especially by relaxation of the procedure for admission.” The proposal was rejected not so much because other delegations objected to burden-sharing but because they weren’t convinced that a reference to the spirit of international solidarity was necessary. One delegate argued that the convention’s effectiveness would obviously “depend on the good will and the spirit of solidarity of the signatory States.”

Solidarity eventually appeared in the 1967 UN Declaration on Territorial Asylum (which unfortunately is barely remembered today). Article 2(2) reads: “Where a State finds difficulty in granting or continuing to grant asylum, States… shall consider, in a spirit of international solidarity, appropriate measures to lighten the burden on that State.” Subsequent references to solidarity appear in statements issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as well as in the 2018 Global Compacts on Refugees and for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.

UN-level attempts to lighten the burden of countries that host a disproportionately high number of asylum seekers have largely failed, at least in the past forty years. Despite its continuing emphasis on the principle of solidarity, the EU hasn’t done any better. In fact, it could be argued that its common policy on asylum has flown in the face of its rhetorical commitment to that principle.

The cornerstone of the EU’s asylum policy from 2003 to 2013 was the Dublin II Regulation. It provided for protection claims to be assessed in the first EU member state an asylum seeker entered. When the EU adopted the regulation, asylum numbers not only appeared manageable but were also on a downward trajectory. When irregular arrivals picked up again in 2008, EU members that served as entry points for asylum seekers — particularly if they bordered the Mediterranean — began complaining about a system that made them responsible for the majority of new arrivals. The criticism intensified as the number of protection claims skyrocketed in the early 2010s.

The EU tinkered with its asylum policy in 2013, replacing the existing legal framework with the Dublin III Regulation. The principle underlying its predecessor remained untouched. But the regulation became increasingly dysfunctional. Italy and Greece, for example, routinely allowed asylum seekers to pass through without registering their identities. Countries in the north of Europe were compelled to stop transferring asylum seekers back to Greece, even if it could be proven that they had entered the EU via that country, because refugees, particularly children, were not afforded adequate protection there.

During the influx of refugees in 2015–16, some central and northern European members — particularly Germany, Austria, Sweden and Finland — relieved the pressure on Greece and Italy by welcoming asylum seekers who had entered the EU from the Turkish mainland (via Greek islands in the northern Aegean) or from North Africa. Germany probably did so because Angela Merkel’s government naively expected that other countries, impressed by its example, would extend their solidarity in turn to Germany.

At the same time, some countries that had benefited from the Dublin regulations acknowledged that Italy, Malta and Greece were barely able — and couldn’t be expected — to cope with the large number of arrivals from across the sea. They advocated a new mechanism whereby asylum seekers would be distributed across the EU. But the so-called Visegrád group — Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic — supported at times by other EU members in eastern and southeastern Europe, demanded “flexible solidarity” and successfully objected to mandatory relocation.

Even the equitable distribution of relatively small numbers of people from Italy and Greece largely failed. Some member states simply refused to accommodate any asylum seekers who had first entered the EU elsewhere.

Since then the two EU heavyweights, France and Germany, have led a push for a mechanism to share the burden of processing and caring for asylum seekers equitably. This would involve either allocating each country a share of irregular arrivals depending on its capacity and size, or directing compensatory payments from countries unwilling to accommodate asylum seekers to those that are. Schemes that would have enabled relocations from countries of first asylum were welcomed, naturally enough, by the “Med 5” (Italy, Malta, Cyprus, Greece and Spain).

Because the Visegrád 4, among others, wouldn’t budge, France and Germany resorted to promoting voluntary arrangements. Finland brokered an agreement between Malta, Italy, France and Germany in 2019 covering migrants rescued by private search-and-rescue missions in the central Mediterranean. In their joint declaration of intent, the four countries pledged to set up a “more predictable and efficient temporary solidarity mechanism.” But that mechanism has not functioned well: each time migrants are rescued in the Mediterranean, the EU member states still argue over who will take responsibility for them.

In 2020, the European Commission proposed a new Pact on Migration and Asylum designed to effect a “fair sharing of responsibility and solidarity.” Rather than replacing the Dublin Regulation with a bold new scheme, the pact envisages a series of incremental steps. Implementation once again relied on the goodwill of all member states, and when Poland and Hungary, in particular, strongly resisted any moves towards enforced solidarity the French government once more proposed a voluntary mechanism.

In June this year, the end of its presidency approaching, France brokered an agreement signed by eighteen of the twenty-three EU member states, as well as Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, which committed signatories to a “voluntary, simple and predictable solidarity mechanism” that would provide the Med 5 “with needs-based assistance” from other member countries “complementary to European support, by offering relocations (the preferred method of solidarity) and financial contributions.” While some of the signatories accepted asylum seekers who landed in Italy, others simply ignored the pledge they made.

The latest move by the European Commission has been a twenty-point Action Plan for the Central Mediterranean. It is largely the result of lobbying, if not blackmail, by the new Italian government, which would like to prevent any irregularised migrants from making landfall in Italy (and deport many of those already living in Italy). This plan is unlikely, though, to lead to a new common policy on asylum to replace the Dublin Regulation.

In the meantime, irregularised migrants keep breaching the EU’s external borders, with more than 90,000 having arrived in Italy alone so far this year. National immigration authorities keep trying to deport asylum seekers like the nineteen-year-old from Afghanistan to where they first set foot in the EU. According to the Hamburg state government, twenty-nine people were deported from Hamburg to other EU countries in the third quarter of this year, in line with the Dublin Regulation. These deportations tie up scarce resources and cause much anguish.

As more asylum seekers have breached Europe’s southern maritime borders it has become all too obvious that the Dublin Regulation is not “based on solidarity between Member States” but privileges the interests of some EU members over those of others. In other words, it shields central and northern European member states from irregularised migration. Because the likes of Poland and Hungary rejected a mandatory distribution mechanism — advocated by the European Commission, the Med 5 and some EU members in central and northern Europe — the EU’s response has been to try to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe in the first place.

In the course of making its external borders increasingly impenetrable, the EU has disregarded the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’s stipulation that a common asylum policy must be fair towards third-country nationals. Not only has the much-evoked principle of solidarity among member states proven to be little more than a rhetorical gesture, but the violence of its border regime has made a mockery of the EU’s self-declared ambition to stand up for human rights worldwide. There is no greater hypocrite than the winner of the 2012 Nobel peace prize.

In some cases, the EU is paying third parties to keep irregularised migrants away from Europe. Thus Italy and the EU have funded Libyan militias to operate a “coastguard” charged with intercepting migrants and confining them to Libya’s notorious detention centres, which German diplomats once likened to concentration camps.

In other cases, the EU turns a blind eye when its members flout national and EU laws by pushing migrants back across the border, as has been happening in at least half a dozen EU countries. In June, for example, when hundreds of migrants tried to climb over the border fortifications separating the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco, at least twenty-seven died and many of those who had managed to enter Spanish territory were returned to Morocco without being allowed to lodge a protection claim.

Or, to give another example, Latvia declared a state of emergency at its border with Belarus in August, allowing the government to restrict the movement of journalists and NGO representatives. Erik Marquardt, a Greens member of the European parliament, explains why the Latvian authorities don’t welcome monitors:

A typical horror trip in the limbo of the border region looks like this: The asylum seekers try to cross the green border through the forest to Latvian territory to apply for asylum. On Latvian territory they are picked up by border guards and taken to unregistered tent camps somewhere in the forest, far away from civil society, press and NGOs. Here… commandos harass, beat and abuse the detainees. They use batons and stun guns — sometimes even on their genitals. Their cell phones and valuables are taken from them. The shelter seekers have to sleep overnight in a tent in the middle of the forest, sometimes outdoors, at up to –20 degrees. The commandos also take away their lighters, the only way to make a fire to warm themselves against the cold temperatures and to protect themselves against wolves and bears. Often in the early morning hours, the refugees are bussed back to the border with Belarus and have to walk the rest of the way back through the forest.

Similar incidents have taken place at the borders between Croatia and Bosnia, and between Poland and Belarus. In the Turkish–Bulgarian borderlands — the setting of Haider Rashid’s haunting feature film Europa, which premiered to much acclaim last year at Cannes — migrants have to contend not only with zealous border guards but also with vigilantes.

But the Greek coastguard is probably most notorious for violating the rights of irregularised migrants. Over a two-year period from February 2020 until February 2022, a Forensic Architecture research team documented 1018 “drift-backs” in the Aegean Sea involving 27,464 people. Migrants were prevented from landing in Greece and then towed out to sea to a spot from where currents, waves and winds are likely to take them back to Turkish territorial waters. According to the researchers, this sometimes-lethal method is designed to “provide a measure of deniability for those perpetrators, shielding them from accountability.”

The EU has regularly condoned practices that are illegal under international human rights and refugee law. In its defence, it often maintains that it is merely protecting itself against acts of hybrid warfare perpetrated by the likes of the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Try telling that to migrants who are drowning or freezing to death at the European border.

But intra-EU solidarity on asylum is working in one sense: member states cover for each other when they violate the Charter of Fundamental Rights in their “defence” of the EU’s external border. The European Commission, while supposedly still committed to its 2020 Pact on Migration and Asylum, has in some instances been turning a blind eye and in others actively encouraging violators — as happened in March 2020, when von der Leyen praised Greece for “being our European ασπίδα,” or shield.

It should be some consolation that the securitisation of the EU’s external borders, and the violence this entails, is contested by other European institutions. The European parliament — and particularly the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, led by the indomitable Juan Fernando López Aguilar — has frequently spoken out against human rights violations at the borders and often put itself on a collision course with the European Commission and Frontex, the European border agency. But the parliament’s powers are limited.

The European courts have also ruled against the likes of Hungary on many occasions and upheld the rights of asylum seekers. Yet, as a recent study by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee has shown, EU member states often fail to implement judgements by the European Court of Human Rights and other bodies.

In one respect, European solidarity has functioned reasonably well. Since the Russian invasion on 24 February, the EU has provided substantial financial and material assistance to Ukraine. Its response to the war hasn’t been entirely united — Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s support for the government in Kyiv is lukewarm at best — but that hasn’t stopped it from also unanimously imposing sanctions on Russia, Belarus and Iran (which supplies drones to Russia), and on numerous individuals and entities in those countries.

The EU has also welcomed people fleeing Ukraine (though citizens of Ukraine more happily than others caught up in the war). In early March it invoked its Temporary Protection Directive, adopted in 2001 but never used, which gives refugees from Ukraine a residence permit for up to three years without the need to apply for asylum. The permit provides the right to work, gives access to social security payments and healthcare, and allows its holders to move freely between countries.

Because of that free movement, and because citizens of Ukraine can enter the EU for ninety days without a visa, the exact number of refugees in EU countries is anyone’s guess. The figure is probably around 4.5 million, with Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic between them accounting for well over half.

The length of residence permits and other benefits for Ukrainian refugees vary greatly. As of June, Germany paid each Ukrainian refugee living in government-provided accommodation €449 (A$690) per month, France less than half that amount, and Poland, the country that has accommodated by far the most refugees, just over €15. In some countries, Ukrainian refugees have access to free language courses, in others they don’t. Their chances of finding employment and the extent to which Ukrainian qualifications are recognised also vary greatly.

In the early weeks of the war, EU leaders demanded that refugees be spread across the twenty-three member countries. They argued that Portugal and Ireland, for example, although a long way from Ukraine, ought to help relieve the burden placed on Ukraine’s immediate neighbours. Some refugees were indeed relocated — but only from Moldova, which had received more Ukrainian refugees on a per capita basis than any other country.

In practice, relative proximity to Ukraine and existing diasporic networks have proved more important than local assistance in Ukrainians’ decisions about where to stay. Calls for a redistribution of refugees have become much less frequent, not least because countries hosting a large number of refugees receive additional EU funding. Besides, a compulsory mechanism to distribute Ukrainians across the EU would probably be unworkable under the Temporary Protection Directive. It has also proved unnecessary, and is in fact undesirable because it might prevent refugees from living in places where they can rely on diasporic support networks.

What is true for the EU is also true for individual member states. Germany ordinarily places asylum seekers across its sixteen states according to the so-called Königstein formula, which takes account of a state’s economic strength and population. Within states, asylum seekers are then allocated to districts, usually according to a similar formula.

An informed estimate puts the number of Ukrainian refugees in Germany at between 630,000 and 750,000, of which approximately 100,000 are in Berlin, a city of 3.8 million people. If Ukrainian refugees had been distributed according to the Königstein formula, Berlin would have received around a third of that number. Berlin authorities have certainly been complaining loudly about the challenges posed by large numbers, but only about 3000 Ukrainian refugees actually live in government-provided accommodation.

In parts of the country where the Ukrainian diaspora is smaller and Germans are less willing to share their apartments, most refugees allocated according to the Königstein formula would have needed accommodation in hostels, sports halls and container villages. Conflicts with the locals might have ensued, much like during 2015–16.

The situation may change, of course, not just in Germany but also elsewhere in Europe, if Russia succeeds in forcing more Ukrainians to flee. So far, predictions that the bombing of Ukrainian power stations would lead to a mass exodus have proven as wrong as the assumption that Poland would quickly buckle under the influx of refugees.

The reception of Ukrainian refugees suggests that efforts to distribute asylum seekers equitably across EU member states may not be what’s needed. On the contrary: rather than deporting asylum seekers back to the European country where their fingerprints were first taken, the EU may prefer to let them move to wherever they are supported by diasporic communities or civil society networks. The Ukrainian case suggests that one aspect of Article 67(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union is achievable, namely “a common policy on asylum… which is fair towards third-country nationals.”

The Ukrainian case doesn’t prove or disprove the idea that a common system could be “based on solidarity between Member States.” It doesn’t allow any inferences to be drawn about the validity of the claim that nation-states can behave as if they were individuals extending solidarity towards each other.

But the EU’s undeclared war on irregular migrants, including those seeking its protection, has had the unintended consequence of encouraging individual acts of solidarity of the kind referred to in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. They are not directed towards fellow EU residents, however, as envisaged in that article, but towards people the EU wants to keep out or expel.

As a consequence, activists have repeatedly intervened when authorities across Europe have tried to deport asylum seekers to places of danger or to where they had entered the EU. Even more significant than the anti-deportation campaigns, though, is the work of activists who assist refugees as they cross borders and who document unlawful attempts by the EU and national governments to prevent them from doing so.

In the central Mediterranean, where at least 25,000 irregularised migrants have died over the past eight years, private search-and-rescue operations have saved the lives of thousands of migrants. They enjoy considerable support not just in northern and western Europe but also in Italy and Spain.

In Poland, Grupa Granica has provided life-saving humanitarian assistance to migrants stranded in the forests at the Polish–Belarusian border, and monitored the human rights situation there. In Greece, volunteers have been assisting irregularised migrants who have made it to the islands of the northern Aegean, as well as refugees who have been left to fend for themselves in Athens. Much like the search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, these volunteers have also tried to hold Frontex and the Greek coastguard accountable.

In all these cases, activism is not just the result of an affective response to suffering, and the sufferers are not regarded only as suppliants. We are indeed seeing solidarity in action.

With member states using the EU’s Facilitation Directive of 2002 to criminalise such acts of solidarity, activists have often paid a high price. Since 2016, according to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands and Spain have between them initiated sixty administrative or criminal proceedings against private organisations involved in search-and-rescue operations.

To make matters worse, the twenty-point action plan recently announced by the European Commission includes the following: “17. Promote discussions in the International Maritime Organization on the need for a specific framework and guidelines for vessels having a particular focus on search and rescue activities, particularly in view of developments in the European context.” These ominous lines suggest the European Commission, goaded by Italy’s racist Meloni government, is intent on further hindering the work of Sea-Watch, SOS Mediterranée and other private search-and-rescue organisations.

Prosecutions of this kind are worrying, and the prospects of further criminalisations dire. But if Robert Schuman was right in observing that solidarity is created by a process of practical achievements, then the solidarity targeted by governments such as Meloni’s and Orbán’s, as well as by the European Commission, has become a force to reckon with. Activists have thwarted attempts to turn Europe into an impenetrable fortress. Compare their efficacy with that of the inter-state solidarity of EU member states, which often exists only in the increasingly hollow appeals of the European Commission.

Acts by the likes of French farmer Cédric Herrou and seafarer Carola Rackete have captured the imagination of Europeans and inspired others to act in solidarity. Herrou was convicted of a délit de solidarité, a “solidarity offence,” for ferrying migrants from Italy to France and inviting them to camp at his property; Rackete, who captained the Sea-Watch 3, defied the Italian government’s order not to disembark irregularised migrants rescued in the Mediterranean.

Such acts have also inspired municipal governments to take action. Some of them have challenged the national authorities to allocate more asylum seekers to them than they are required to accommodate according to the official quota.

There is another reason why I am optimistic regarding the prospects for solidarity à la Herrou — as opposed to the European shield advocated by Ursula von der Leyen and others — and that’s to do with motivation. The intra-EU solidarity so frequently conjured by the European Commission is perhaps too easy a target. Because it isn’t practised (and may in fact not be necessary, at least in the context of a common policy of asylum), the solidarity of Articles 67 and 80 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union remains a weasel word.

The solidarity offered by the EU to others needs to be taken more seriously, not least because climate change will require countries of the global north to reposition themselves in relation to the global south. In her statement at COP27, von der Leyen said that solidarity means those in a position to help should assist those in need. She didn’t say why Tuvalu islanders or Bangladeshi farmers were in dire straits, or why the EU is in a position to help, but talked as if the EU were a charitable organisation that happened to be able to do good. Solidarity, to be successful and sustainable, needs to be grounded in notions of justice. That is something Herrou and Rackete know but von der Leyen, if she knows it, prefers not to acknowledge. •

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All of us on this mission, working to help Ukraine for many years, knew just how precarious the country’s situation was. And then, in February this year, all hell broke loose with Russia’s full-scale invasion.

I’ve spent a lot of time working in Ukraine, which is the only reason I wrote Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires. My book is the outcome of an eighteen-year relationship with travelling, living and working in Ukraine at different times.

Which is why it was galling to see Mark Edele, reviewing my book in this publication, egregiously misrepresenting my motivations and credentials for writing the book, and misrepresenting my overall argument. I have no idea why he chose to do these two things, but I can put the record straight here.

Professor Edele characterises me as an “international relations academic” and suggests I rely on a theorising approach in my book. This is simply untrue: I rely on my personal observations, and my judgement as a former diplomat, to explain the slow decline in contemporary Russia–Ukraine relations. I also look honestly at the inadvertent consequences of some of Ukraine’s foreign policy choices.

Professor Edele inaccurately summarises my argument as attributing the 2022 Russian invasion to a response to NATO expansion. I do nothing of the sort: I clearly argue that Russia’s elites, headed by Putin, have unhealthy dreams of empire. Hence the subtitle of my book, arguing that this is a war of imperial expansion. Another driver is that Putin sits atop a dysfunctional autocratic system that has afforded him a jaundiced view of Ukraine’s independent path.

Yes, NATO expansion — and Ukraine’s enthusiasm to join the alliance — is a third driver of the war. But it is one Russian motivator among several, which is precisely why Professor Edele and the headline of the review article mischaracterise my work. Professor Edele in effect claims that I am arguing that a complex war arises from a single cause. I do not argue for mono-causality, and I make this abundantly clear in my book.

To Professor Edele, I remark, “It’s the empire, stupid!” Russian dreams of Soviet and Tsarist empires have collided with what Putin, Lavrov and the rest of them see as a US-led neo-imperial project.

My book examines precisely why our benign view of NATO expansion, common in my country, Britain, and probably also common in some Australian circles, is not universally held. Any honest accounting of Russian motivations to go to war in 2022 in Ukraine must factor in differing interpretations of NATO. Let’s not bury our heads in the sand over these complexities.

Over many years, I have seen with my own eyes the oscillation in Ukraine’s political identity, and the consequent deterioration of relations with Russia. I have stepped far outside the university classroom and put myself in harm’s way to see what is happening in Ukraine’s remote regions.

My book may not be to everyone’s taste, but at least get the facts right about my professional background, my credentials for writing it, the time it has taken me to accumulate my insights, and the multilayered nature of my argument. •

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Samir Puri’s Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine is one of the first kind. “Rapidity was the key to writing this book,” he admits — and it shows. Puri’s opinions, strongly expressed throughout, oscillate between sincere shock at the invasion, empathy with Ukraine and the Ukrainians, and dismissal of Ukraine and Ukrainians as khokhols (a slur he claims is harmless slang) who might be creating “legends” about their heroic self-defence but are ultimately mere “pawns” in “the unforgiving world of geopolitics.”

Orthodox international relations theory, also misleadingly known as “realism,” sees the world as an anarchic place where the strong rule and the weak obey. Russia, a former empire, is strong; Ukraine, a former colony, is weak. The rest follows. That Russia might indeed be in the process of learning that Ukraine is stronger than expected, that Putin might be schooled by “the unforgiving world of geopolitics,” doesn’t compute.

You want to rebuild an empire? A perfectly normal aspiration, according to the theory. Just make sure that you have a functioning military and adequate economic resources before you try to take over neighbouring countries. Such preparation would probably show “realism.” Russia’s current behaviour certainly does not.

Why did Putin go to war? Puri doesn’t really know. An international relations scholar, he suspects that it has to do with another great power — NATO, the European Union, the United States or a coalition of all three — having encroached on Russia’s turf. The overall argument of the book: It’s NATO, stupid!

The problem is that this theory doesn’t fit the observable facts. It is true that neither NATO nor the European Union has covered itself in glory in interacting with post-Soviet Russia. Russia no longer mattered, they seemed to believe, and thus could be ignored, or maybe even bossed around. Among many Europeans, that arrogance was coupled with the utopian notion that the post-1991 world was all about “soft power.” Tanks were no longer needed. Dependency on one source of oil and gas was fine. We’re all civilised, after all. War is a thing of the past.

Writing earlier this year, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a historian of Russia, was scathing. “Western diplomacy,” he wrote, was “by turns arrogant and incompetent.” He was right: to dangle NATO membership in front of Ukraine without a consensus in the alliance, a plan of how to achieve it, or a mechanism to ensure Ukraine’s security while the details were worked through, was “an unserious position.” Not to think about how to manage the Russian reaction was, likewise, negligent.

But Braithwaite also argued that “Putin’s military posturing around Ukraine is several degrees more irresponsible,” a qualification Puri ignores when he quotes the former ambassador.

Did the issue of Ukraine’s putative NATO membership drive Putin to war? Puri tries hard to squeeze recalcitrant facts into this mould. The Russian government has indeed repeatedly expressed its irritation and resentment at NATO enlargement. But NATO didn’t expand into Ukraine in 2021–22. Quite the opposite. Russia’s expressions of discontent convinced enough members — Germany chief among them — to oppose a NATO accession plan nearly a decade and a half before the current escalation. Ukraine was snubbed by NATO in 2008 only to be told repeatedly that the door was open “in principle.”

Anybody who had even the slightest knowledge of NATO’s internal affairs knew that these assurances were gestures towards the never-never. NATO’s approach was, indeed, “unserious.” In 2021–22, as Puri admits in passing, there were “no immediate signs of Ukraine’s admission into the alliance that Russia could say it was retaliating against.” That should have been the end of this theory. But no: Puri spends another seven pages trying to make the case that Putin’s “paranoia” was perfectly understandable.

Historians are used to reading international relations scholarship with sceptical tolerance. This discipline doesn’t rest on detailed knowledge of any one time, place or culture; instead, it tries to construct universalising models to be applied to any case.

But Puri doesn’t just simplify. He also makes mistakes, at time egregious ones. Russia’s provisional government of 1917, in place between the abdication of the Tsar in February and the Bolshevik coup in October, was not, as he claims, anti-imperial. The people in charge might have been liberals but they were also supporters of the empire. Looking askance at Ukraine’s parallel revolution and requests for autonomy, they continued to prosecute a war with imperial aims. That was indeed a major cause of the provisional government’s fall.

The (second) Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Bolsheviks were forced to sign in 1918, did not, as Puri believes, afford “Ukraine’s Nationalists a rare opportunity to make a break for freedom.” The Ukrainian People’s Republic’s declaration of independence actually preceded the treaty and Ukraine signed its own treaty with the Germans, the First Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, before the Russian Bolsheviks.

Nor did the “independent Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania” spring from Lenin’s head in 1918 or 1919, as Puri implies. They were independent anti-Bolshevik states until Stalin brought them back into the empire in 1940, and only then did they become Soviet republics. Western Ukraine was invaded by the Red Army on 17 September 1939 and annexed in November of that year rather than “incorporated into the USSR only after 1945,” as Puri believes.

There was indeed a referendum in Ukraine on 17 March 1991, but 71 per cent voted not “for independence,” as Puri writes, but for a reformed union of Soviet republics. It was only on 1 December of that year that a majority voted for independence, but in that case the figure was 92 per cent.

Kazakhs, meanwhile, might more than quibble with the claim that “Ukraine’s suffering was worse than in any other part of the Soviet Union” during the great famine. A larger share of Kazakhs died than of Ukrainians, although in absolute numbers Ukraine — a much larger nation — lost more.

Puri’s account, in other words, is deficient on both empirical and analytical levels. Unless readers are looking for quick soundbites, his book is best left on the shelf.

Journalist Anna Arutunyan’s Hybrid Warriors falls into the second category. Based on her years of reporting since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, it combines a deeply textured knowledge of ground-level politics with a well-theorised sense of how Putin’s regime works.

Arutunyan’s Putin is no master strategist. Nor is he an all-powerful dictator. He’s indecisive and relatively weak, driven along by his more dynamic (and often more radical) underlings. He rules “by signal” rather than by command, issuing “vague directives that could, depending on the recipient, be interpreted as commands or mere opinions.” More often than not, political entrepreneurs, both in Russia and abroad, have “projected onto the Russian president’s cryptic words everything they wanted to hear.” In reality, Russia’s strategy has been “confused, convoluted, unformed.”

The Crimean annexation was the result of improvisation. Contingency plans for the operation had been on the shelf for a while, but when they were activated the exact goal of the operation wasn’t completely clear. What transpired was the interaction of a planned and well-executed special forces operation (the famous “little green men,” unmarked, polite, silent and well equipped), local militias enraged by the revolution in Kyiv, which they saw as a coup, and local politicians.

The staged referendum, in which the vast majority of Crimean residents voted to join Russia, lacked validity in international law. But annexation nevertheless had a significant degree of popular support, with a 1996 Gallup poll showing 59 per cent support among Russians living in Crimea and 41 per cent among Crimean Ukrainians.

In a way, the Russian government caved in to pressures from below, breaking the pledge to respect Ukraine’s borders that it had made in both the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership with Kyiv. But while Moscow was riding a popular wave and interacting with local pro-Russian forces, it was clearly Putin’s regime that took the initiative in Crimea.

Donbas was different. Here, local initiative was key. Yes, a gang of fifty-two military veterans and second world war re-enactors trudged across the border in April 2014 and took the regional city of Slovyansk, which they would hold until the Ukrainian army pushed them out in July. True, they were led by a retired agent with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, Igor Girkin (known as “Strelkov,” or shooter), but Girkin was a freelancer at that stage.

Elsewhere, it was angry locals — a militant minority, but still locals — who were inspired by the Crimean example to take matters into their own hands. “By early May 2014,” writes Arutunyan, “miners, truck drivers, an assortment of local pensioners and shady businessmen, and an army of local and Russian adventure-seekers had set up their own pretend governments with flags, parliaments, defence ministries, militias, declarations of independence and even proto-constitutions with formal elections scheduled for later in the month.”

While their grievances were local and of long standing, these groups didn’t represent the local population. Independent opinion polls showed only 30 per cent support for secession. Also unlike Crimea, they were not guided by the Kremlin. As Arutunyan puts it, they “lacked the main thing… that they had fought for: Russia’s formal recognition and protection.”

Essentially, a militant minority — scared by the revolution that had driven president Viktor Yanukovych from office, saturated by Russian state television propaganda about “fascism” in Kyiv, and inspired by the takeover of Crimea — staged a coup and then appealed to Moscow to bail them out. But the weak dictator in the Kremlin refused. By the end of April 2014, the Kremlin had decided not to send troops to the Ukrainian mainland.

We don’t know why this decision was made, but it’s worth remembering that the European Union had suspended preparations for a G8 summit in Sochi on 3 March 2014, cancelled bilateral talks with Russia on 6 March, and begun imposing sanctions against Russian officials and companies on 17 March, 20 March and 15 April. Europe also threatened “broader economic and trade sanctions” should Russia further escalate its aggression against Ukraine.

These EU measures were synchronised with a set of executive orders by US president Barack Obama on 6, 17 and 20 March, which added sanctions against individuals in Russia’s elite. The timing suggests that the Kremlin retreated from exposed positions because it found the likely cost of escalation prohibitive.

Sanctions were indeed one of three reasons Putin changed his mind, according to Arutunyan. He also recognised that, in contrast to Crimea, Russia would have to contend with military action by Kyiv, which had announced its “anti-terrorist operation” on 15 April. And he understood that, wishful thinking aside, local support for the insurgents in Donbas was nowhere near as widespread as in Crimea.

But the tough EU and US response had a contradictory result:

Putin felt he was in a bind. Crimea had demonstrated that the Kremlin and its army was perfectly capable of decisive action — of securing an entire peninsula and enabling a parliament to vote to join Russia — swiftly and secretly, with the help of the local population. However, in the Donbas the risks were higher, the opposition greater and the support weaker. If he launched a full-blown military intervention, he would trigger a tougher Western response and quite possibly find himself trying to prop up a regime with no real constituency. Yet if he backed away entirely, he would show weakness to the Americans and to his own nationalists. He could neither advance nor abandon the Donbas project.

Thus, Russia continued to be involved in Donbas. By July 2014 the FSB and military intelligence were competing to command the Donbas insurgents in an attempt “to demonstrate their own value to the Kremlin.”

The FSB in particular became deeply embroiled in the Donbas mess. Its assessment that the revolution against Yanukovych was a CIA-inspired plot rather than a popular uprising had contributed to the decision to annex Crimea. Now it had “300 men in Donbas,” as one FSB major told Arutunyan, and was awaiting orders from Moscow. “Putin — give us orders!” they demanded. “We need just one day and Ukraine will be ours.”

The weak dictator was being bum-steered by his most devoted underlings. But he was resisting their push without being in a position to call back the FSB, which he had once led and which was full of his old comrades from KGB times. “His very power as president rested on their loyalty to him — and thus on his loyalty to them,” writes Arutunyan.

The support for the Donbas adventure went far beyond the FSB. To put a stop to it would have required a veritable purge of the power apparatus. Thus, the strange limbo in which the situation remained. Neither willing to escalate nor able to reverse, the Kremlin began imposing control over the separatist movement and its self-proclaimed “governments.”

Eventually, however, Putin did send troops. He had been hitching his political wagon increasingly to the ultra-nationalist right since 2012, when massive demonstrations against his return to the presidency had alienated him decisively from the political middle (to say nothing of the left). His new right-wing constituency supported the political freelancers in Donbas, so when Kyiv launched a successful operation to take Donbas back from the putschists, his new allies convinced him that it was in Russia’s interest to resist.

Russian troops, regular ones this time, were fighting in Ukraine by August 2014. This “covert Russian invasion of mainland Ukraine” halted the Ukrainian army’s attempt to re-establish control of Ukrainian territory. It was regular Russian troops that turned the Donbas insurgency into a frozen conflict; it was regular Russian troops that won the battle of Debaltseve in February 2015. Then the frontlines froze.

Once again, according to Arutunyan, no grand Russian strategy existed. Events were driven not by geopolitics but by the balance of power within the Russian dictatorship.

The right wing of politics, on which Putin’s regime increasingly relied, could only be contained if Ukraine could be stopped from taking back Donbas. This dynamic became self-reinforcing: the support of the nationalists, imperialists, monarchists and fascists at home required support for the Donbas rebels; the continuing existence and, as they saw it, martyrdom of the Donbas proxies propelled the domestic far right further into the mainstream. “For Putin,” writes Arutunyan, “it was paramount that these people continued viewing the West as their true enemy, and not the Kremlin itself.”

How did we get from this impasse to 24/2? Arutunyan doesn’t really know. Her account becomes much less richly textured after 2015, and in particular after 2019. Why negotiations with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president since 2019, were abandoned remains unclear. Why the decision was made to allow all-out war remains mysterious. The logic of her argument would point to some dynamic from below, some initiative by political entrepreneurs. But there is no evidence to that effect. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that the initiative came from Putin, and that it shocked even those closest to him.

Arutunyan’s explanation thus focuses on the Russian president, and his resentments and likely thought processes. The invasion, she writes, was “about one man, and his vendetta.” Earlier in the book she had dismissed such mind-reading, but what is the alternative given Putin’s centrality in Russia’s political system?

This centrality seems to have increased since 2014. The destruction of civil society, which hampered the left, might also have hampered the right. The disaster of the Donbas war, caused by freelancers, might well have made Putin more reluctant to take advice from the same or similar people. Coronavirus isolation in 2020–21 might have done the rest: Putin spent the pandemic reading history books, stewing in his resentments (about NATO expansion, about not being taken seriously), and pondering his legacy (he turned seventy this year).

Then there was Russia’s recent success in Syria, which suggested its army was top-notch. The FSB presented the Ukrainian army’s intensified training and improved equipment as a Western conspiracy to weaken and maybe destroy Russia. Yet the West also seemed weak. Maybe now was the time to solve this problem once and for all? Whatever the reasons, in the end it was Putin who pulled the trigger on 24/2.

What are the implications of Arutunyan’s analysis for policymakers confronting an aggressive Russia? She is unsure herself. “[I] gave up my futile attempts to come up with some sort of possible solution to this mess,” she writes in frustration. And she’s right: if the invasion was the result “of a Kremlin fumbling in the dark, staggering to respond to a multitude of real and perceived threats and opportunities, and proving itself largely incapable of distinguishing one from the other,” and if 24/2 was the result of an increasingly isolated and erratic dictator steaming in his own resentments and historical analogies, then rational outside action is difficult.

Arutunyan’s description of the complexity of the political environment in which Putin functions, moreover, serves to remind outsiders of how little influence their actions have on the Kremlin. This might chasten both the critics of NATO, who overestimate how much Putin was swayed by the perceived aggression of “the West,” and the supporters of sanctions against Russia, which Arutunyan’s account makes clear were just one factor, and mostly marginal, in Putin’s calculus.

What is left? For the time being, all we can do is try to support Ukraine as best as we can to give it a chance to survive and win this war. And when Ukraine is ready to negotiate with Russia, we should support this process with as much humility as we can. A lot of bitterness exists on both sides of the frontlines now, and it won’t go away anytime soon. If we take into account not just the war itself but also the rebuilding effort, we are talking about a long haul indeed.

Stamina will thus be required at a time when inflation and the climate crisis also call for sustained government attention.

Russia, meanwhile, won’t be defeated in the way Germany or Iraq were. Putin’s troops might eventually be pushed out of much or all of Ukraine’s territory, but nobody in their right mind will want to go further and march on Moscow. The regime might thus survive, more resentful than ever. Or it might be replaced by another, probably no less resentful or autocratic. In any case, Russia could require containment for some time to come. Here, too, stamina will be necessary — and a significant amount of humility about what can be achieved.

All things come to an end eventually. And maybe Arutunyan is right when she says that Russia’s younger generation will in time provide more rational leadership for this large, rich and beautiful country. The rising generation is “muzzled” but “watching, in horror” while “learning from the mistakes of this dying regime,” she writes. A “new Russia, with its own, new national identity, will eventually emerge.” Let’s hope she is right. •

Samir Puri responds to Mark Edele’s review

Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires
By Samir Puri | Biteback | $39.99 | 304 pages

Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine
By Anna Arutunyan | Hurst & Company | $44.99 | 352 pages

The post “It’s NATO, stupid!” appeared first on Inside Story.

You might even argue that Meloni’s Brothers of Italy is the most democratically inclined and sanest of the three parties of the right and centre right that form the new government. If the world has survived governments that included the xenophobic populists of the League (formerly the Northern League) and Silvio Berlusconi’s increasingly pro-Russian Forza Italia, there’s nothing to suggest that Meloni will be the one to bring on a Hungarian-like descent into authoritarianism.

Yet the real trickery of the Brothers-as-fascists yarn is that it ignores the impact of the upheaval in Italian politics following the corruption scandals and violence of the early 1990s. The unpalatable extremes of Italy’s postwar firmament — from the fascist-in-all-but-name Italian Social Movement, or MSI, to the Italian Communist Party — embraced moderation and chose to come in from the cold, leaving corrupt, once-powerful Christian Democrats and Socialists to seek exile in Tunisia or scurry towards whichever party offered them the best chance of rehabilitation.

That’s not to say that some cynicism isn’t in order. With the ideological battlefield no longer delineated by the Berlin Wall, the parties’ 1990s reinvention was also about self-preservation. But their leaders’ decision to jettison the illiberal components of their postwar worldview wasn’t totally devoid of sincerity.

When Massimo D’Alema was appointed as prime minister in 1998, the common perception was that his road from firebrand leader of Italy’s communist youth organisation to pro-Western social democrat had been a little too slick. Then, in what was arguably his only significant foreign-policy decision, he supported NATO’s military operation in Kosovo — to the surprise of his anti-communist detractors and the horror of his former comrades, who had assumed his pro-Western conversion had been merely for show.

Whatever the optics, the swerve away from extremism among both fascists and communists, and the dissolution of the ostentatiously corrupt Christian Democrats have served Italy reasonably well. Often at significant personal cost, leaders moved their fringe-dwelling parties into the sphere of democratic traditions. They mostly embraced the European Union, which had long been reviled by both the far right and the far left, and they became atlantisti, supportive of NATO and significantly less hostile to the United States.

The political adjustment to the collapse of communism certainly required some fancy ideological footwork, but it avoided purges, violence and recriminations, and it marked the finish of a devastating campaign of domestic terrorism. That the end of the First Republic didn’t also mark the end of Italian democracy should be cause for celebration.

Given its fifty-year history of embracing the cultural heritage of Mussolini’s reign, the post-fascist MSI’s decision to move towards respectability was just as dramatic. When the party Meloni frequented as a teenager in Rome disbanded in 1995, its more moderate members eventually congregated into a new party, the National Alliance, with leader Gianfranco Fini doing everything that needed to be done to reassure the electorate and build bridges with homeless conservatives and liberals. It was a brutal if not always frank reckoning with the MSI’s past, and it culminated in Fini’s 2003 state visit to Israel and subsequent appearances at Rome’s synagogue.

One of the reasons local commentators have been urging us to ignore that transformation and frame Meloni as a fascist is that it’s less intellectually demanding than trying to make sense of her as a homegrown conservative.

Postwar Italian politics didn’t develop a credible model of conservatism that the Brothers of Italy could claim as its own when it eventually emerged as a conservative political force in 2012. Italy never had an equivalent of Britain’s Conservative Party; there has been no Italian Benjamin Disraeli and no Italian Margaret Thatcher. In fact, since the 1990s, Italian right-wing or centre-right political parties have been quirky and idiosyncratic, dominated by strong personalities rather than ideology.

Any plans that Berlusconi, for example, may have had to bring about the liberal reforms Italy’s economy so desperately needed were quickly swept away by political scandals; the rest of his time in office became an exercise in survival rather than a chance to establish a political legacy. For its part, the Northern League embraced the most populist elements of far-right politics, but its secessionist attitude towards “thieving Rome” was never going to lay the foundation for a palatable national political force.

But Meloni hasn’t inherited a completely blank slate. One of the matrixes on offer comes from the most right-wing factions of the Christian Democrats, the party that collapsed in 1992 under the weight of the kickback scandals known as Tangentopoli. The factions, which produced leaders such as former prime minister Giulio Andreotti and former president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, were socially conservative, reactively Roman Catholic and usually strong proponents of a managed economy under the supervision (and often direct ownership) of a large state apparatus.

That economic outlook, which remains highly influential in Italy today, didn’t come out of nowhere — its cultural roots can be found in the twenty-year fascist dictatorship that preceded Italy’s cold war political ferment. Almost no contemporary Italian political leader would be willing to campaign on the need for market liberalisation. Liz Truss’s ill-fated decision to stake her leadership on unfunded tax cuts would have been unthinkable for Meloni.

A cautious approach to the economy and a respectful view of Italy’s bureaucracy is where parties on both the right and the left see themselves. The local word for it is statalismo — the inclination to favour the state’s involvement in every aspect of the country. Italian left-wing activists love to whinge about neoliberalism, but they’re putting the cart before a dead horse. Classical liberalism has never been tried in Italy; all Italians are statalisti, albeit to differing degrees.

That said, elements of Meloni’s political outlook do appear to harken back to a period when trains ran on time — or at least when people were told that trains ran on time. It’s true, for example, that the patriotism underpinning Brothers of Italy rallies may not be seen as extreme in other countries — you’d find more nationalistic fervour during a cricket match at the MCG. But since the collapse of Italian fascism’s final incarnation in 1945, most political parties have tried to keep a lid on over-the-top expressions of nationalism.

Some Italians may be happy to wave flags at soccer games; others tend to get narky when they sense that foreigners are treating the country with disdain (as happened with the Economist’s recent Truss-inspired “Welcome to Britaly” front cover). But overt expressions of italianità have usually been seen as the domain of right-wing subversives, avoided by those craving political respectability.

Meloni has brought nationalism to the table, though, along with a willingness to bristle at any perceived slight by a foreign government. The party’s name, Fratelli d’Italia, is a reference to the first verse of a particularly problematic Italian national anthem (the words could arguably be translated as “brothers and sisters of Italy”). The controversial symbol of the party, a flame in the colours of the Italian national flag, was inherited from the MSI and remains just one example of the connection between patriotism and the far-right worldview of Brothers of Italy.

There have been some other, slightly unexpected throwbacks to Mussolini’s twenty-year rule. Towards the end of the campaign, Brothers of Italy started advocating for young Italians to adopt healthy lifestyles and avoid the devianze — roughly translated as “deviances” — of modern life. Sport was held up as the antidote for the attractions of drugs, alcohol and violence (an earlier version of the party’s Facebook post promoting healthy lifestyles had included obesity and anorexia). In any other society, the promotion of healthy lifestyles may be uncontroversial; in Italy, where at least some people still remember the fascist cult of masculinity, it was big news.

The same could be said for the election of Ignazio La Russa to the key institutional role of Senate president. La Russa, a blokey Sicilian who co-founded Brothers of Italy, collects busts of Mussolini and is happy to concede that he retains a very strong emotional link to his youthful MSI militancy.

The reason none of this makes the Meloni government subversive or antidemocratic is that the cultural legacy of fascism is so pervasive in Italian society it can transcend both party politics and fascism itself. Just one example is the baffling reincarnation of corporazioni, the pre-fascist and fascist-era professional guilds and syndicates that regulated the means of production. To be a journalist in Italy, you have to be a member of a legally enshrined guild; if you want to learn how to ski, your teacher will be a member of the legally protected College of Ski Instructors (not to be mistaken for the College of Alpine Guides).

Outside medicine and the law, no equivalent of this network of professional restrictions exists in most Western countries, yet the guilds are backed by all sides of Italian politics, often to the detriment of fairness in employment and competition.

It’s against this backdrop that the Meloni government appears set to become capital-C conservative. Think of the pre-Trump Republican Party, minus the drive for small government, or the far right of Britain’s Conservative Party, minus the libertarian Thatcherites. Traditional families are now set to loom large in Italy, tempered only by the often-complicated marital arrangements of right-wing Italian politicians; the country will also remain deeply hostile to homosexuality and gay rights.

And where a modern, pro-business right wing would have used immigration policy to harness the economic benefits of desperately needed workers and help migrant communities integrate, the new government is set to treat immigrants as a burden and a threat. Meloni is, after all, the politician who in August reposted a security video of a woman being raped in the city of Piacenza by an African asylum seeker and only took it down following the desperate plea of the victim.

This may all sound horrible, but the election result could have been a lot worse. First, there’s the fact that Meloni’s strong level of support has left her ascendant over her right-wing and centre-right coalition partners, the League and Forza Italia. While Brothers of Italy claimed 26 per cent of the vote, the other two parties polled around 8 per cent each, allowing Meloni to drive a hard bargain with Berlusconi in particular — as the recent public sniping between the two leaders has demonstrated — and leave her mark on the ministerial team.

Berlusconi didn’t get everything he wanted but was able to claim the foreign ministry. Italy’s new top diplomat is the multilingual and eminently presentable Antonio Tajani, a former president of the European Parliament and a former EU commissioner, who has already vowed to increase his department’s presence in Brussels. The League received three ministries peripheral enough to keep the new ministers out of trouble, although party leader Matteo Salvini has already started to speak across portfolios and is likely to continue doing so with impunity.

But it’s on the issue of justice that Meloni made her best appointment. Carlo Nordio is a former magistrate who ran for parliament with Brothers of Italy but is widely seen as standing outside the political fray. He was part of the “Clean Hands” investigations of the 1990s that marked the end of the First Republic and was a key figure in the corruption probe linked to the construction of flood barriers around Venice.

Unlike most magistrates, Nordio has expressed concerns about the politicisation of the judicial system and has identified the dysfunctional operation of both the courts and Italy’s massively overcrowded prisons as a human rights issue. With fifty-nine people having committed suicide in custody since the beginning of the year, he has vowed to make prison conditions a top priority of his term as justice minister.

Nordio’s views may not be enough to tame or override the Brothers’ strong law-and-order tendencies — in fact, at the time of writing he appeared to be losing a battle over the application of life sentences without benefits, a particularly inhumane penalty known as ergastolo ostativo. Yet his presence as minister of justice will be a moderating force on the government.

That Meloni was able to establish a relatively pro-European and centrist cabinet and keep the more unsavoury instincts of her coalition allies at bay is a big deal. It will allow her to forge ahead with a pro-European foreign policy — the slow-burn catastrophe known as Brexit being enough to dampen, if not extinguish, her earlier Eurosceptic carry-on about the need to wrest national sovereignty back from Brussels bureaucrats.

This, in turn, will clear the way for €220 billion (A$340 billion) worth of EU Covid recovery funds to slide into the national coffers at a time when Italy needs to reassure the markets about its debt levels. Meloni used her first speech to parliament as prime minister to say she wouldn’t stand in the way of future EU integration and vowed to work pragmatically with other EU members to protect “freedom and democracy.”

Even more significantly, Meloni’s success in imposing her will on her coalition partners will allow her to keep a lid on the pro-Putin instincts of Berlusconi and the League. Berlusconi’s controversial public and private utterances about the war in Ukraine during the election campaign would have startled other EU member states, which have remained resolute in their opposition to Russia’s invasion and now face a bleak winter of high energy prices. Yet the Forza Italia leader repeatedly riffed off Putin’s talking points, claiming that the invasion was justified because of Moscow’s need to defend Russian minorities.

The pro-Russian thread that runs through Italy’s political firmament is probably the biggest untold story of the elections. The Five Star Movement, a left-wing populist party, secured more than 15 per cent of the vote in both the House of Deputies and the Senate despite its openly pro-Russian, anti-Western stance. Five Star’s strong support for Russia’s foreign policy has been rebranded as pacificism, and the party is now arguing that any support for Ukraine is likely to extend the war, and the EU needs to give peace a chance.

If we were to tally the 8 per cent that the League and Forza Italia each won in the election and Five Star’s 15 per cent, that’s around 31 per cent of Italy’s political representation working to undermine the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Had Brothers of Italy, whose members have themselves expressed pro-Russian views, added its 26 per cent to the pro-Russian camp, the European Union’s successful attempt to present a united front on the issue of Ukraine would have been undermined.

This is why Meloni’s first speech as prime minister was significant. Her vow that Italy wouldn’t give in to Russian blackmail — a reference to Moscow’s threat to turn off the gas pipeline — was a message both to the world and to her Italian allies and adversaries. The takeaway of the speech was that she wouldn’t be providing oxygen to Italy’s cross-party, pro-Russian political faction. In fact, Meloni has hitched her government’s fate to the success of the European Union, in a move that appears largely in line with the priorities of the technocratic government that preceded hers, which was led by former European Central Bank head Mario Draghi.

Nor should we overlook the significance of a woman being appointed as chair of the Council of Ministers, as the role of prime minister is known locally. For a country in which women have long been politically sidelined — with no major party led by a woman, no prominent female newspaper columnist and very few female editors — this amounts to a major breakthrough. Meloni’s election eclipses the only precedent: the Berlusconi government’s appointment of liberal politician Emma Bonino as a European commissioner in 1995.

That Meloni can also claim to come from a working-class or lower-middle-class background is also noteworthy given that Italian politics has traditionally been dominated by the upper-class establishment and its networks of support. Meloni’s preparedness to work as a waitress to support herself during the early days of her political career is at odds with the sheltered political trajectory of most Italian politicians.

None of this is to say that Meloni’s government will be a good one. But she is set to remain bound by her institutional responsibilities and committed to Italy’s role in both Europe and the world. If she loses power in Italy’s volatile parliamentary system, or if she’s booted out by the electorate, there will be no March on Rome, no demands to overturn the results and no Roman salutes. Giorgia Meloni’s election may prove to be Italy’s first real experiment with a truly conservative yet democratic government. It may be bleak, but it’s not revolutionary. •

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But if its perspective is accepted as the left’s view, it will be a disaster for progressive democrats and the idea of socialism. The call is profoundly misconceived, with respect to both Ukraine and Taiwan, especially Ukraine, and also in the general political analysis it offers.

I say this with regret. One of the main drafters is American law professor Richard Falk, a comrade from the struggle against the US war in Vietnam. His outstanding work helped lay the basis for the development of modern international law and human rights. I’ve worked with and admire two of the lead signatories.* So far there are thirty-eight of them, including Jeremy Corbyn.

“All Who Care” says wise things, including making a call for “a massive global awakening of human wisdom and energy.” The writers explain: “Important as governments and international institutions are, the initiative for a coherent response to the challenges we face lies largely with the people, with civil society.”

But it is primarily an intervention in conflicts of the moment, and it is in this respect that it needs to be judged.

On Ukraine, a call for peace that sets out to be principled should state that any threat to use nuclear weapons is an outrage. It does not. It must state that invading other countries is wrong. It does not. It was wrong for the United States in Iraq, it is wrong for Israel in Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza, and it must now be reversed in Ukraine.

“All Who Care” demands that Ukraine be “neutral.” If its neutrality were guaranteed by military commitments from outside to safeguard the country’s independence in a way that satisfied the government in Kyiv and did not deprive it of weapons for self-defence, then this would be reasonable. Given the risk of a world war, those outside Ukraine have a right to say that it cannot become a base that might be used to threaten Russia, or any other neighbouring country.

But in any such call, tone and attitude are of vital importance: it has to be said respectfully as a request to the Ukrainian people. It is arrogant, and even a touch imperial, to demand the country’s neutrality without also making clear that this does not take away Ukraine’s democratic right to decide what economic and social trajectory it aspires to. Neutrality should not prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union if it so chooses (something even Putin’s Russia seems to have accepted). This, too, needs to be said.

The approach to Ukraine taken by “All Who Care” demands the “phased withdrawal of Russian military forces” and “an end to the delivery of lethal military aid to Ukraine.” Why should the withdrawal be “phased” but not the end of military aid?

The document suggests that the underlying cause of the conflict is “the cynical use of the Ukraine war by great powers intent on pursuing their geopolitical ambitions.” But it was the uncynical resistance of Ukrainians themselves, much to the surprise of both Washington and the Kremlin, that shaped the war. “All Who Care” disregards Ukrainian agency and the commitment of a huge majority of Ukrainians to their country’s integrity and independence. Instead, it frames Ukraine as being manipulated by the United States. This echoes Vladimir Putin’s perspective.

What is the thinking that leads the authors and signatories to their conclusion? They sum it up in four short paragraphs which need to be quoted in full:

More troubling still is the toxic relationship between the United States on the one hand and China and Russia on the other. Here lies the key to both conflicts.

What we are seeing is the culmination of decades of gross mismanagement of global security. The United States has been unwilling to accept, let alone adapt to, the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. It remains unwilling to break with outdated notions of global dominance — a legacy of the Cold War and the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A global power shift is taking place. The West-centric world, in which first Europe and then the United States held sway, is giving way to a multi-centric, multi-civilisational world in which other centres of power and influence are demanding to be heard.

Failure to accept this new reality spells immense danger. A new Cold War is now in full swing, which can at any moment mutate into a hot war. In the words of UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”

But it is the authors and signatories who are unwilling to face up to new realities of the nature of the regimes now challenging the United States, the autonomy of the demands for democracy, especially those led by women, and the way these are responses to the fact of America’s irreversibly diminished role, which Washington is certainly aware of.

Historically, they are right: we are caught in the legacy of decades of gross behaviour by the US governing elite. But its ambition failed more than a decade ago. This in turn gave birth to monsters even worse than US hegemony. The problem the world faces is not that the United States has failed to relinquish “outdated notions of global dominance,” it is the struggle over how and by whom its dominance will be replaced.

The United States is not innocent nor a mere bystander in this process. Under Joe Biden it is striving to re-establish global “leadership.” But it is doing it from a position of weakness. A recent example of how emaciated US power has become is the behaviour of what historically was its client state, Saudi Arabia. Despite being courted by a humiliating personal visit from the US president, who wanted their help against high energy prices, the Saudis have cut back production to ensure the opposite.

This is a direct help to Putin as it keeps the price of oil high, as well as being an intervention in the American midterm elections designed to aid Donald Trump and his family by making Biden unpopular.

How did we get to a situation where Washington is so weakened?

A NEW WORLD: MULTI-CENTRED AND MORE UNEQUAL

In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, president George H.W. Bush celebrated US “primacy” and boasted that no other country need “dread” its influence. In fact, the United States exercised its post–cold war supremacy with catastrophic stupidity and greed. Across the Global South, the wealth extraction of colonialism was replaced with the wealth extraction of the “Washington consensus.”

In the West itself, the working and middle classes saw their incomes flatline as the financial system transferred riches upwards, generating unparalleled inequality. Russia, in particular, was treated to the most brutal “shock therapy” and its oligarchs were encouraged to loot the country, with the West providing safe havens for their theft. Ordinary Russians suffered a deep, humiliating loss of income and livelihood.

The rise and nature of Putin are rooted in the rage this engendered. Only China had the sense and political means to ensure its economy was governed rather than handed over to the “freedom” of Wall Street. It grew exponentially, while its low wages were instrumentalised to break and impoverish the working classes in developed countries.

The rise of China and its admission into the World Trade Organization in December 2001 birthed a genuine economic rival to the United States. Meanwhile, the US used the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to occupy Afghanistan and later to invade Iraq, to supervise the world’s second-largest oil deposits and almost encircle Iran. In this way, the world would understand that the United States’ unprecedented economic hegemony would be underwritten by an unparalleled military supremacy.

That was then. Unrivalled hubris led to catastrophic humiliation. Five years after the “shock and awe” of its assault on Baghdad, as it faced strategic defeat in the deserts and mountains on the other side of the globe, the great financial crash of 2008 terminated US primacy. It also put an end to the justification of its “neoliberal” economics — the claim that markets know best. Which in turn undermined the claim that voters are powerless, and the political fatalism essential to its ideological success.

With Washington’s global dominance shattered, the world became irreversibly “multi-centred,” as well as even more unequal. Because the left had been so systematically marginalised, it was the right that tolled the bell. Trump gained the leadership of the Republican Party by denouncing the Iraq invasion as “a big fat mistake” that cost the US$2 trillion and benefited Iran, and excoriated the globalists who had sold out American business and workers. He specifically abjured the ideology, as well as the costs, of US global leadership. He praised Russia, refused to condemn Lukashenko’s crushing of democracy in Belarus and admired China’s Xi Jinping for his strength.

In his last speech to the United Nations (unless he is re-elected, that is) he advocated a gangster’s division of the world. He told his fellow leaders: “I have rejected the failed approaches of the past. I am proudly putting America first, just as you should be putting your countries first. That’s OK. That’s what you should be doing.”

In this way, the US “accepted and adapted” to the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. Only it did so by proclaiming a pluralist modern fascism, built on corruption and surveillance, and expressed in the language of The Godfather. The fact that the Biden administration seeks to reverse this while also terminating US efforts at “regime change” in Afghanistan is welcome.

Today, the most pressing danger that humanity faces is the return to the White House of Trump or a Trump clone, who would rig the US system permanently. This is of world importance because once joined by the economic and military weight of a far-right America, the global network of authoritarian regimes would enjoy irreversible domination for at least a generation. Xi, Putin and Trump, together with India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, Iran’s Ali Khamenei and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, would ensure that more nations joined them in Trump’s mobster international.

REJECTING THE RIGHT: UKRAINE ON THE FRONT LINE

The front line of resistance to such an outcome is, tragically, Ukraine. It did not ask for this role, but it is not just fighting for itself. Our democratic future, too, is at stake in its battle. To defeat Trumpism outside the United States as well as inside, we have to defy and frustrate Putin.

Of course, politically, this is not a clash between socialism and capitalism, but between capitalist democracies with some regard to the rule of law, freedom of speech and an open politics on the one hand, and lawless, oppressive capitalism on the other.

In this situation, the only way forward for the left, after decades of defeat, is through unconditional support for more rule-based democracy based on universal principles. Without this there is no hope for the democracy of feminism, of racial justice, of a sustainable environment, of a fair economy, of human rights, of participation, pluralism, deliberation and national self-determination. Or, to borrow from the inspiring slogan of the protests in Iran, “Women, life and freedom.”

This also means that the people of Crimea have the right to decide for themselves whether to be part of Ukraine or Russia, and the people of Taiwan must be free to decide for themselves if they want to be ruled from Beijing.

Some fear a Western victory in Ukraine would take us back thirty years to 1992, with Francis Fukuyama celebrating the triumph of liberalism over history all over again. But the younger generations are not going to be easily persuaded into passivity or believing that “the market knows best.” The United States has withdrawn from Afghanistan and can be prevented from ever again engaging in “regime change.” China is now its economic equal and this cannot be undone. The process in Ukraine is not one of collapse, as in eastern Europe, but the result of decades of effort to slough off the corruptions of Stalinism. Nor are Ukrainians alone. From Iran to Chile the genie of popular agency has shattered the bottle of neoliberal fatalism.

The authors and signatories of “All Who Care” are right to sound the alarm in one important respect. These are very dangerous times that demand wisdom, not glorification or the triumphalism that feeds arms industries.

Our larger aim should be to welcome the emergence of democracy in Russia — maybe the last thing that the Western security establishment actually desires.

The alternative is rule by a mobsters international, which would ensure that the world will fry. It is as important as that. •

* Of the thirty-eight initial signatories, Victoria Brittain, a pioneering editor of coverage of the Global South, is someone I was proud openDemocracy published. I worked with Yanis Varoufakis when I helped a little with the draft of the original DiEM 25 call for democracy in Europe (which we discussed together with the much-missed Rosemary Bechler).

This article first appeared in openDemocracy.

The post A betrayal of Ukraine and the left appeared first on Inside Story.

While Keiron Pim says nothing further about Schapiro in his biography of Roth, Endless Flight, we know that the essential part of the teacher’s prophecy came true: Roth went on to achieve international fame as a journalist and a novelist. His career took him from Brody to university studies in Lviv, to Vienna, to the Habsburg army during the Great War, to long periods of residence in Berlin and Paris, and on extensive travels throughout Europe, including as an exile from Nazism in the 1930s.

As all these journeyings perhaps suggest, any attempt to assign Roth a distinct religious, ethnic or political identity on the basis of his own actions or words would fail. He was born into a Jewish family and Jewish traditions, but was known to attend the Catholic Mass. He moved from Lviv to Vienna because — as he told a Polish-speaking uncle — he “could not be unfaithful to the German language” but rhapsodised over Paris the first time he went there, writing to his editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung that: “I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world… Whoever has not been here is only half a human, and no sort of European.” He was pacifist and a socialist in his younger days, but joined the Habsburg army in 1916 and later advocated a restoration of the Habsburg monarchy, believing it preferable to the other forms of conservative and nationalist rule that threatened to overtake — and of course eventually did overtake — Austria in the 1930s.

Pim sees Roth’s shifting self-concept, and his experience of and fascination with the Austro-Hungarian empire, as two important factors that attract twenty-first century readers to his works — those readers who “recognise his crisis of identity; and, not least, are primed for a nostalgic pull towards the aesthetics and perceived values of his Mitteleuropa as its last inhabitants fade from view.”

It is clear from Pim’s pages that the intriguing contradictions he identifies in Roth’s personality and mentality do not mean that Roth was always an admirable man, or an easy man to deal with. He lied repeatedly about his service in the Great War, claiming experiences of combat, capture and escape that never occurred. His complex relationship to his Jewish heritage included abuse of his employers at the Frankfurter Zeitung, with whom he had various contractual disputes, as “scheming Jews.” While he adopted the habitus of a Habsburg gentleman from the mid 1920s onwards — wearing narrow-cut trousers like an army officer’s, carrying a walking stick, indulging in chivalrous flourishes such as kissing women’s hands and sending them yellow roses — he was anything but gentlemanly in other ways, writing while at university in Vienna that female students were “no more women than streetwalkers” were, engaging in affairs throughout his marriage to Friedl Reichler, and — during his relationship with the German author Irmgard Keun in exile in the mid 1930s — sleeping with one fist grasping Keun’s hair from sheer possessiveness.

He was also a heavy drinker for about half of his life, and an alcoholic in his last years; Keun left behind a harrowing description of how he retched for extended periods every morning before vomiting blood and bile. And Roth’s hopes of restoring the monarchy to Austria eventually moved from wishful thinking to black farce; I doubt that I have ever read anything more ridiculous than Pim’s account of how, in 1938, Roth and others planned to smuggle the exiled Otto von Habsburg to Vienna in a coffin purporting to contain the body of an Austrian commoner who had died abroad, whereupon Otto would be proclaimed Emperor. (“With the monarchy thus restored, Roth believed that the British monarchy would ally with their Austrian peers and France to present a strong front against an expansionist Germany.”)

Given that Pim identifies various qualities in Roth’s writing as attractive to twenty-first century readers, I found his attitude to Roth’s fiction surprisingly mixed. He describes Roth’s most famous work, The Radetzky March, which chronicles the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as “one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.” (I would prefer to say that it is one of the greatest German-language novels of the twentieth century.) Beyond this, though, he often qualifies his praise of one work or another, if he praises it at all.

Thus, Zipper and his Father is “a wonderful novel,” but also the first to contain a “thoroughly realised, deeply imagined, three-dimensional character,” which of course says little for its predecessors. Similarly, while The Antichrist is “of biographical interest,” it is “a dissatisfying work to read.” Moreover, Tarabas is “not among [Roth’s] best works” and Confession of a Murderer is “weak.” As  for the short story “The Triumph of Beauty,” it is misogynistic, and “an ugly blemish on [Roth’s] œuvre.”

Pim’s remarks about Roth’s journalism are more positive. This is the work that first made Roth famous, and in which he claimed (in a letter to one of his editors in 1926) to be doing nothing less than “paint[ing] the portrait of the age.” Pim positions Roth’s journalism adroitly within the sometimes arid literary debates of the 1920s (and after) about “New Objectivity.” He praises Roth’s accounts of a journey in eastern Europe in 1924 for showing “how beautifully he wrote about phenomena others perceived as ugly,” and singles out his sketches of cities and lives in southern France in 1925 for particular attention as “the peak of what we could call Roth’s ‘lyric journalism’.”

Pim also notes numerous incidental but striking facts about Roth’s newspaper work: for example that in the year 1927 he travelled to nine different countries in search of material; that the Frankfurter Zeitung deleted criticisms of Mussolini in his despatches from Italy in 1928 without consulting him; and that the same newspaper paid Roth one mark per printed line (with a guaranteed minimum of one thousand marks per month), which prompted him to handwrite his copy in such a way that one line in manuscript corresponded to one line in newsprint.

Pim’s accounts of Roth’s work more generally also contain a number of fascinating details. His novel The Spider’s Web, which was published as a newspaper serial in 1923, was the first novel to mention Hitler. (I am not sure how this could be proved absolutely, but it seems highly credible given the date.) When a newspaper interviewer asked Marlene Dietrich in 1936 about her favourite book, she nominated Roth’s novel Job. And — more chillingly than these passing references — the manuscripts and other papers Roth left behind when he emigrated in 1933 were fortunate to survive a Gestapo raid on his German publisher. Similarly, the papers from exile that survived after Roth’s death in France in May 1939 were preserved by a redoubtable elderly Parisienne who told one of Roth’s cousins in 1946 that she had hidden them under the concierge’s bed.

Alhough I read Endless Flight with interest, I sometimes felt that Pim was unnecessarily eager to provide comprehensive information. For example, I could probably have done without the half-page description, plus photographs, of how the street and the building in Lviv where Roth lived in 1913–14 look today: “The chipped wooden handrail is supported by an art nouveau balustrade, and as you tread the wide, worn steps they croak like marshland frogs.” And I could definitely have done without the footnote explaining that Pim’s grandmother lived in the same street as Friedl Reichler’s family in post–Great War Vienna and speculating rather bathetically: “Perhaps my ancestors were even acquainted with Roth owing to his regular visits to the apartment across the street. There is no way of knowing, as they are all long gone.”

As the quotation about the steps that “croak like marshland frogs” suggests, Pim sometimes attempts a colourful or evocative style. Though other readers may disagree, I found some of these attempts rather pretentious or clichéd. Thus the passage about the steps is followed by some rather breathless remarks about Lviv: “In the twenty-first century this palimpsestic city has a strange mystique… The present here is a membrane pressed upon by a heavy past: you feel its weight without knowing its details,” and so on. And Pim’s evocation of the view from the hotel where Roth stayed in Paris in 1925 put me in mind of a travel brochure:

The windows of the Hôtel de la Place de l’Odéon look out from between blue shutters over an eighteenth-century Parisian plain dominated by the eponymous neoclassical theatre, before which roads spear out like compass points, tempting the visitor to pursue every angle into the Left Bank. To the hotel’s right runs the Rue de l’Odéon, which was home in the early twentieth century to a community of Anglophone authors and the Shakespeare and Company bookshop; in 1922 its owner, Sylvia Beach, published Ulysses by James Joyce, who dubbed the area “Stratford-on-Odéon.” The gorgeously sombre twin-towered church of Saint-Sulpice stands 200 yards to the west.

Pim sometimes also uses this portentous style to prop up political and literary judgements for which he offers very limited evidence. His description of Roth’s first foray to Berlin, in 1920, prompts him to declare that the Weimar Republic was “a curious mixture of postwar chaos and compromise dressed in unattainably high ideals that lent it a haunting capacity for failure” — a pronouncement that sounds more like wisdom after the event than informed intellectual analysis, notwithstanding Pim’s brief references to such phenomena as the proportional voting system (which of course has operated successfully in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949).

I was also puzzled by Pim’s opinion of Stefan Zweig, a literary colleague who lent Roth considerable support during their exile:

Zweig is less remarkable for his own artistry than for what he connotes, namely the bohemian Viennese coffee-house culture… from the fin-de-siècle to the entre-deux-guerres period. Judging by his work alone it is hard to gauge how he gained such prominence…

His memoir The World of Yesterday is a detailed and valuable exposition of that era… His prose is often engaging, but never irresistible. It is competent and smooth, but too smooth, too dispassionate, written with pathological reserve… Where Roth is a double espresso, Zweig is a half-decent mocha, served lukewarm.

Pim’s grounds for this lofty dismissal of Zweig are unclear, beyond a few passing observations, including the remark that some of Zweig’s fellow authors “mocked his grasp of grammar.” Moreover, if I have interpreted correctly a paragraph in Pim’s acknowledgements about his familiarity with German literature and language, he has not read Zweig in the original.

Endless Flight is well produced and well edited. There are many intriguing  photographs, though a few (like that of the present-day railway station in Brody) seem rather superfluous, and most of the photos are annoyingly small. I found no misprints, and only one error of fact — when Pim says that the Frankfurter Zeitung paid Roth in “deutschmarks” rather than reichsmarks; the deutschmark did not exist until 1948. In noting the latter point, I send a prayer — assuming there is a deity that protects literary reviewers — that I have not made any errors myself here. •

Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth
By Keiron Pim | Granta | $49.99 | 544 pages

The post Portraying the age appeared first on Inside Story.

The battle for Ukraine is part of a larger conflict over empire and decolonisation that reaches back to the period 1914–22, broke open again in 1989–91, and has simmered since the Soviet Union split into fifteen successor states in 1991. What we are witnessing, in effect, is one battle in one theatre of a potentially much more regional conflict made up of the (civil) wars of the Soviet succession. They have combined domestic and international struggles over independence and empire with contests between dictatorship and democracy.

Ukraine is only one theatre of these conflicts. In Belarus, mass protests against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in 2020–21 were subdued with utter brutality. Russian support for the Belarusian dictator kept his regime going despite crippling sanctions, effectively turning him into a client of Moscow.

While the violence in Belarus was administered by domestic forces, similar anti-regime protests in Kazakhstan in January prompted the intervention of Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Tajik and Kyrgyz troops to help prop up the government. Most recently, the conflict over landlocked Nagorno-Karabakh, in the South Caucasus, has turned from a frozen conflict between Russian-backed Armenia and Turkish-supported Azerbaijan into a shooting war after Azerbaijan, exploiting Russia’s distraction elsewhere, attacked Armenian positions on 12 September. Two days later, fighting broke out further east as well, at the volatile central Asian border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

What all of these conflicts have in common is that they are rooted in unresolved problems stemming from the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991.

Wars and civil wars are not unusual when empires break apart: boundaries between possible successors are unclear, loyalties fragile, legitimacies tenuous. When the Romanov empire imploded in 1917–18, the horrible fighting lasted until early 1920 in some regions, into early 1921 in others, and until 1923 in central Asia. The result, however, was a re-establishment of a new empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Only Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland remained independent, at least until the second world war. Then the three Baltic states were annexed, Poland made a satellite and Finland forced into neutrality.

What is unique about the current conflicts of the Soviet succession is that they took so long to gestate. The breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 was largely peaceful. This point can be overstressed: there was violence in Georgia in 1989 and in Lithuania in 1991, wars for and against independence in South Ossetia in 1991–92, Transnistria in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1992–93, a civil war in Tajikistan and a war-turned-frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh from 1992, and two wars to prevent Chechnya’s breaking away from Russia in 1994–96 and 1999–2000. Nevertheless, the Soviet lands were largely spared the horrors of the wars of the Yugoslav succession nearby.

One reason for this relative lack of violence was that the Soviet Union broke apart not through acrimony but from exhaustion. Anti-imperial feelings were rife not only in the non-Russian periphery of the empire, but also in the Russian heartland. Many thought their economic woes were caused by the drain the empire imposed on the state’s coffers. Better to let the non-Russians go and build a Russian national homeland.

Borders, too, were relatively well defined, with the Soviet Union’s republics providing ready-made territories for successor regimes. Again, there were exceptions (South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria) but the boundaries of Soviet times generally held firm, at least until recently.

The imperial centre, Russia, experienced not only decolonisation at the periphery but also state breakdown domestically. The years after 1991 saw economic collapse accompanied by a disintegration of the state’s monopoly over the use of violence on its territory.

This was not a state capable of maintaining empire, and that only began to change with Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power from 1999. At the heart of the current president’s longstanding popularity has been his ability to rebuild the state, coupled with his good luck when rising oil prices allowed economic growth to resume.

What is easily forgotten, however, is that this was an imperial presidency from the get-go. Putin’s first major political success was the brutal victory in the second Chechen war of 1999–2000, which prevented a further decolonisation of Russia and kept a prominent non-Russian region within Moscow’s control.

The victory in Chechnya was popular across the political spectrum. I remember discussions with otherwise thoroughly liberal Russian intellectuals who insisted that this was a necessary war: if Chechnya went, who would be next? Soon, nothing might be left of Russia beyond the heartland around Moscow, from where the old empire had grown since the fourteenth century.

The Chechen war provided a model for how to leverage imperial feelings for political gain. When the petro-dollar-driven economic recovery began to stutter, when internal opposition continued to challenge his regime, however ineffectually, and when neighbouring Ukraine showed that an East Slav nation could mount repeated revolutions against kleptocrats and Russian-aligned would-be dictators, Putin mobilised the imperial undercurrent of his regime.

The proxy war in Donbas and the 2014 annexation of Crimea seemed to provide a model for how this would work: no effective resistance would be encountered; Europe and the United States would wring their hands and impose minor sanctions but do nothing of substance. An alliance of pacifists, Russophiles and “realists” could be counted on to pressure Ukraine to submit to the invader; Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas would mute its response. The government in Kyiv would run away and Russia would annex more of Ukraine and make the rest a vassal state similar to neighbouring Belarus. Putin would enter the history books as saviour of Russia’s greatness.

This strategy failed miserably. The Russian invasion got quickly bogged down by incompetence, lack of training and poorly maintained equipment. Ukraine’s government stood firm and its army fought intelligently and effectively, supported by a surprisingly united NATO and European Union.

After Ukraine had won the battle of Kyiv, Russia focused on Donbas as well as the south of Ukraine, where it could leverage shorter supply lines. Progress was slow and grinding, however, relying largely on massive artillery bombardments of Ukrainian positions. While the battle for Donbas rumbled on, Russia was unable to complete the conquest of Ukraine’s coastline, where success had initially been swiftest.

Now the tide of war has turned. If Europe, the United States, Australia and other democracies continue to support Ukraine, chances are that it will eventually liberate the rest of its territory, quite possibly including Crimea. This outcome is far from guaranteed, but it looks much more realistic now than in the dark days of February and March.

Where does this military setback leave Russia? The wager on empire has clearly failed. With Russia weakened, the other theatres in the wars of the Soviet succession might well flare up again, further threatening Russia’s claim of hegemony over the region. We are already seeing this in the recent fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia as well as the Tajik–Kyrgyz border war. In Belarus, the opposition is subdued but not eliminated. It might rear its head again, threatening one of Russia’s client regimes in the west.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, Putin could finally declare his “special military operation” an actual war, and thus invoke conscription to replenish his by now anaemic forces. This is a course of action that many on the hard right as well as the Communists support. There is a reason, however, why Putin has thus far avoided such a move: it would be deeply unpopular with men of draft age and their families.

Even if it were mobilised, it isn’t clear that an army of poorly trained conscripts could make a difference now that the effects of sanctions are starting to limit Russia’s ability to resupply its army. Short of a desperate move like a nuclear strike, Putin has few good options at present. He has missed his opportunity to pull out of Ukraine in a face-saving manner. The military setbacks have weakened him both domestically and internationally.

What is far from clear is whether this weakening will translate into regime change. A popular revolution following the Ukrainian examples of 2004–05 and 2013–14 seems unlikely, although not altogether impossible. Belarus in 2020–21 has shown that even mass protests can be repressed if army and police remain loyal. And Putin’s dictatorship has toughened up dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine in February.

If the agents of organised violence remain behind him, Putin can politically survive the military catastrophe. But whether he will pull his troops out now he has clearly lost is another matter. He is more likely to try to stay the course and defend the territory he still controls. Thus Ukraine will continue to need outside support — including supplies of heavy weapons — to win this crucial part of the delayed wars of the Soviet succession. •

The post The long war of Soviet succession appeared first on Inside Story.

Commentators generally agree a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would involve the following elements, alone or in combination:

• a decapitation strike, using special forces to kill or capture the Taiwanese leadership and install a Beijing-aligned government

• a seaborne invasion, with a large force crossing the Taiwan Strait

• an extensive bombing campaign using aircraft and missiles

• a blockade of the Strait to cut off Taiwan’s imports and exports.

All of these approaches have been tried by Russia, under highly favourable conditions, since it attacked Ukraine. All have failed.

In the lead-up to the 24 February invasion, the Russians were able to assemble large forces on Ukraine’s borders while maintaining ambiguity about their intentions. For fear of inflaming the situation, Ukraine could do little to prepare, and its allies provided little or nothing in the way of lethal military aid.

These conditions were ideal for Russia’s opening move. A rapid assault on Kyiv was planned to begin with the takeover of Hostomel Airport by elite airborne troops, who would be followed in by a much larger airborne force. Things didn’t go to plan: the assault force was driven off with heavy casualties and the main force turned back. By the time Russian land forces reached Hostomel, the chance of a surprise attack was lost.

Even if the strike had not been a military failure, the political calculation on which it was based turned out to be absolutely wrong. Far from welcoming Russian invaders as liberators, Ukrainians fought back furiously. Even in Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv, Putin found little or no support.

A decapitation strike against Taiwan would face immensely greater difficulties. There would be no possibility of surprise. Taiwan’s air defences have been built up over decades. Reunification has essentially zero support among Taiwanese. And even if the current leadership could somehow be eliminated, local replacements would be equally or more hostile.

The most commonly discussed scenario for forcible reunification is a seaborne invasion. Even before the Ukraine war this idea seemed far-fetched, as a comparison with the Normandy landings in 1944 shows. The Allies had complete air superiority, the narrow English Channel to cross, a wide choice of poorly defended landing sites and a numerical superiority of five to one. The Germans didn’t detect the attack until landing craft were within reach of shore. Even so, the Allies fell far short of their Day 1 objectives.

A Chinese invasion fleet, by contrast, would have to cross the 170 kilometre Taiwan Strait with no chance of avoiding detection, then land on one of a handful of well-protected beaches and face numerically superior defenders.

The Ukraine war drives the lesson home. Before the invasion, Russia’s Black Sea fleet was widely seen as a major strategic asset. When the initial attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv failed, a seaborne attack on Odessa was generally anticipated. Ukraine had only a handful of domestically produced anti-ship missiles, and its own navy had been wiped out on the first day of the war. Russia was in complete command of the sea.

Yet the attack never took place. The sinking of the Moskva in April by a Ukrainian Neptune missile proved that the Russians had been right to hold back. Russian naval forces were inadequate even to defend the famous Snake Island, kilometres from Ukrainian mainland. With Ukraine’s acquisition of increasing numbers of modern missiles, most of the fleet has been withdrawn entirely to the relative safety of Novorossiysk on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.

Ukraine repelled the Black Sea fleet with a handful of missiles. Taiwan has hundreds, including American-made Harpoons and domestically produced missiles easily capable of hitting Chinese ships before they leave port. Many are truck-mounted and effectively impossible to destroy even with an intensive air campaign.

All the evidence suggests that China understands this. While it is politically necessary for the government in Beijing to maintain that it has the capacity to reunify China by force, the announced plan for doing so is outlandish. It involves securing landing sites with a handful of craft then sending in the main force on lightly modified civilian ferries. No sensible person could take such a plan seriously.

Much the same points can be made about the idea of an extended bombing campaign. Bombing an enemy into submission has been tried many times since its initial success at Guernica in 1937 and has almost invariably failed.

Moreover, Russia’s massive air force has proved incapable of overcoming Ukrainian air defences, or even driving the much smaller Ukraine air force from the skies. With the exception of the mythical “ghost of Kyiv,” air-to-air combat has been almost non-existent, and crewed aircraft have played at most a marginal role. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese air force, operating under far less favourable conditions, could do any better against Taiwan.

Finally, there is the possibility of a blockade. Like the other options for an assault on Taiwan, this idea has always been problematic. It would be easy enough to close the South China Sea to shipping, but that would be more damaging to China than Taiwan, which could use air transport or develop ports on its eastern coast.

By contrast, Russia’s strategy of blocking Ukrainian exports through the Black Sea looked relatively easy, and for a while it seemed to work. But a combination of military failures (notably the loss of Snake Island) and global condemnation forced it to abandon the idea. The resumption of Ukrainian grain exports (billed as a “goodwill gesture”) has reversed one of the few successes of Russia’s war.

Taiwan is clearly aware of this, and has shifted its focus  from traditional air and naval warfare to a defensive “hedgehog” strategy based primarily on anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile warfare. (Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute has suggested a similar “echidna” strategy for Australia.)

If an invasion of Taiwan is militarily impossible, why is it continually discussed? The answer is that it is in the interests of all the major parties to pretend that an invasion is a real possibility. The Chinese government can’t concede that it lacks the capacity to unify the country by force. The Taiwanese government has every reason to present itself as being threatened by China. And the US military, particularly the navy, has no incentive to downplay threats that demand high levels of defence expenditure.

This continued focus on conflict over Taiwan, and more generally in the South China Sea, increases the risk of accidental escalation, possibly even involving nuclear weapons. Moreover, it distracts attention from arguably more serious threats, most notably the rise of North Korea as a rogue nuclear power under effective Chinese protection. It also undermines possibilities for cooperation, particularly in relation to climate change.

A realistic Western approach to China would accept that it is a powerful adversary in a number of strategic dimensions but a necessary partner in others. The same realism is needed on the Chinese side. Focusing on the chimerical idea of an invasion of Taiwan is counterproductive on both sides.

The post Why an invasion of Taiwan would fail appeared first on Inside Story.

People know the numbers. What they might not know is that Greece never really recovered. Unemployment remains at almost 16 per cent. GDP still hasn’t recovered to its pre-crisis level. Wages and businesses have been devastated, to say nothing about the immeasurable human cost of the crisis.

The name “Greek debt crisis” suggests the problem was debt. But this is misleading. Plenty of countries have more debt than Greece without suffering a crisis. The United States, Italy, Singapore and Portugal all have more debt as a percentage of GDP than Greece did before the crisis. Japan has more than twice as much.

The real culprit wasn’t debt. It was a shared currency. Those who advocate for having more shared currencies — a shared currency between Australia and New Zealand, for instance, or even replacing currencies with shared cryptocurrencies — should be careful what they wish for.

To understand the problem, imagine Australia had an economic crisis. At least three things would come to our aid: the Australian dollar would fall, our central bank would slash interest rates and our government would spend more to stimulate activity. None of these things was available to Greece, and the result was a prolonged, painful recession.

Greece’s shared currency — the euro — was to blame. It didn’t depreciate because, although Greece was in a crisis, the economic heavyweights in the euro area, Germany and France, were not. It also meant that Greece didn’t have its own central bank. The European Central Bank didn’t cut interest rates, which would have been right for Greece, because it would have been the wrong setting for the rest of Europe.

Nor could the Greek government spend to encourage economic activity. The debt limits imposed by the euro area meant that new spending was not an option. Instead, Greece’s shared currency created a vicious cycle.

If markets became nervous about the Australian government’s debt and stopped buying its bonds, our central bank would step in and buy the bonds instead. Markets would be reassured that the odds of Australia defaulting on its debts are exactly zero since the central bank can create new money to buy bonds that don’t sell.

Because Greece had closed its own central bank (a precondition for a shared currency) this wasn’t an option. As investors became nervous about the threat of default, they charged higher interest rates to compensate themselves for the increased risk. But those higher rates made default more likely, leading to even more nervous investors and even higher interest rates. So the cycle continued. Eventually, Greece required an expensive bailout from Europe and the rest of the world. But the damage had already been done.

In a nutshell, this is the problem with shared currencies. If one country suffers a crisis and the others don’t, you’re in big trouble. This isn’t to say that a shared currency can’t work. It definitely can. But the price of making it work — giving up most of your economic sovereignty — is no longer a price governments are willing to pay.

After all, Australia has a shared currency that works pretty well. Western Australia and New South Wales are very different economies, and a crisis in the mining sector would hurt one much more than the other. So, why can they share the same currency?

They can share the same currency because they don’t have sovereignty over fiscal policy. At least, not much. The federal government taxes the citizens of both states and distributes that money across the whole country. If Western Australia gets in trouble, its residents pay less tax to the Commonwealth (because their incomes fall) and receive more money from the Commonwealth (through unemployment benefits and grants).

This mechanism would have solved the Greek crisis. But Germany and France wouldn’t have a bar of it. Allowing the European Commission to tax German and French citizens and give that money to Greek citizens was beyond the pale.

So serious is this problem that a shared currency without a proper fiscal union will eventually kill the euro area. Future crises are inevitable. If the next crisis is in a big country — like Italy or Spain — the odds of the euro surviving, at least in its current form, are slim.

All of which means it’s strange that plenty of people still advocate shared currencies.

Sometimes this advocacy is direct. Some have called for Australia and New Zealand to adopt a common currency; others have called for ASEAN countries to do it, or even the whole world. None of these is a good idea.

But sometimes the advocacy of a common currency is indirect. Those who want countries to replace their currencies with a cryptocurrency (like Bitcoin) or a stable coin (like Libra) are also advocating a shared currency, whether they realise it or not. The fact that a currency is digital is irrelevant: a shared currency is a shared currency.

If Australia were to replace its currency with a cryptocurrency — either directly (through a policy decision by the government) or indirectly (if households and businesses abandoned the Australian dollar in favour of a digital alternative) — we would be in the same position as Greece in its debt crisis: too much water and not enough buckets.

Some countries have edged down this path. El Salvador, for example, has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender. But the counterfactual here is important. El Salvador already had a shared currency. Its official currency was, and still is, the US dollar, chosen primarily to help control inflation. Making Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador isn’t replacing a sovereign currency with a shared one — they did that twenty years ago — it is about having two shared currencies instead of just one.

None of this is to say that cryptocurrencies are a bad thing. Cryptocurrencies and the technologies that underpin them will offer huge benefits to societies and economies. They offer the opportunity to substantially increase financial inclusion and help billions of people around the world who don’t have bank accounts. Technologies like blockchain could revolutionise supply chains and substantially increase efficiency in critical areas like health. Getting our regulations right will be the key to maximising the benefits of cryptocurrencies while minimising their risks. Cryptocurrencies might be game changers, but the rules of macroeconomics still apply. •

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Johnson’s claim — made in an upbeat, joke-strewn speech to last week’s Conservative Party conference — looked like a novel way of brushing aside Britain’s current woes. The country’s troubles, he said, were just the growing pains of the country’s post-Brexit transition to a “high-wage, high-productivity economy” no longer dependent on immigrant labour. Castigating both Labour and Tory governments over the last thirty years for failing to deal with structural weaknesses, he declared that his administration would at last fashion a different and better kind of economy.

To most observers Johnson’s optimism seemed outlandish. Britain is currently experiencing a welter of economic problems. Tens of thousands of East European workers have gone back home since Brexit, leaving critical labour shortages in key sectors. A scarcity of lorry drivers has meant long queues at garages; too few seasonal fruit pickers has left produce rotting in the fields; an exodus of abattoir workers means healthy pigs are being shot on the farm. Not just supermarkets but toy shops are warning they will be short of stock at Christmas. As global gas prices rocket, meanwhile, Britain has been hit particularly hard. The government is subsidising vital fertiliser-making plants; energy-intensive industries such as steel and paper are desperately seeking government support to stay solvent.

The idea of drawing anything positive out of this might be dismissed as fantasy. After all, Johnson can’t argue that losing so many immigrants was simply misfortune: this was precisely what the “Leave” campaign he led during the Brexit referendum promised voters. With a small exception for 5000 lorry drivers (and only till Christmas), the government has steadfastly rejected business pleas to issue more visas for key workers, instead telling industry bosses that if they want more staff they should pay higher wages. Yet it is already painfully obvious that this won’t be enough: in key sectors there simply aren’t enough workers in the population both sufficiently skilled and willing to do the manual work previously done by East Europeans.

And yet Johnson also has a point. For it is indeed the case that over the past four decades Britain has become a predominantly low-wage, low-productivity economy. Since its dramatic deindustrialisation in the 1980s, the country has lost manufacturing jobs much faster than its comparator economies. Manufacturing now makes up just 10 per cent of GDP, compared with 19 per cent in Germany and 16 per cent in Italy. The financial sector, Britain’s major export industry, continues to provide high salaries and skilled work. But the country’s once-lauded “flexible” labour market has proved a powerful driver of low productivity.

Fifteen per cent of the UK workforce is now self-employed, many of them contracted to just one client — a convenient way for the employer to avoid paying social security and providing holiday and sick leave and other employee benefits. Almost a million people are on “zero hours” contracts, with their working hours determined just a few days (or hours) in advance, and no level of work guaranteed. This has kept employment levels high — much higher than in other European economies. But it has also kept wages low, and given employers little incentive to invest in the skills or capital equipment that would raise productivity. Output per hour in Britain is around four-fifths of German and French levels.

Where Johnson is wrong is on immigration. Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that immigration reduces wages. Though it does mean a bigger labour supply, it also means higher demand (immigrants are also consumers) and therefore higher employment. The two effects largely cancel one another out. And, as Britain is now painfully discovering, immigrants do (or did) jobs that Britons simply don’t want to.

If his views on immigration are put to one side, Johnson’s criticism of the British economic model is much more usually heard on the left. This is, after all, a classic critique of modern capitalism: dominated by financial capital, more concerned to extract short-term profit than invest in long-term prosperity, seeking to pay workers as little as possible. And the solutions too come more naturally from the left: a stronger role for government in directing investment through active industrial policies; stronger trade unions to bargain wages up; reforms to corporate governance and finance to end the fixation with short-term returns.

Johnson didn’t propose any of these things, of course. His conference speech was almost entirely rhetoric, with virtually no policy content. But the implication of his remarks was not lost on the Conservatives’ ideological bedfellows. “Vacuous and economically illiterate,” railed the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute. “An agenda for levelling down to a centrally-planned, high-tax, low-productivity economy.” It would be fair to say that they didn’t like it.

And the reason is not hard to identify, for Johnson is confronting the legacy of the Conservatives’ great heroine, Margaret Thatcher. It was Thatcher who initiated the deindustrialisation of the British economy; who deregulated the financial sector and let foreign capital flow in freely to buy up Britain’s most valuable companies; who destroyed the power of the unions and created the flexible labour market. The British economic model is of the Tories’ own making, and if Johnson is serious about reforming it he will have to break decisively with the party’s free-market nostrums.

This is not just about raising Britain’s productivity and investment levels. All of Johnson’s stated priorities will require leftish policies. He has promised to reform the country’s poor-quality social care system — and has already raised income taxes to pay for it. He has pledged to “level up” Britain’s disadvantaged regions — which are more or less everywhere that isn’t London and the southeast of England. But that will require both higher public spending and more directed investment; he has already established a state-owned National Infrastructure Bank for the purpose.

He is also committed to tackling climate change, with a goal of achieving a 78 per cent reduction in emissions (on 1990 levels) by 2035 and “net zero” by 2050. That will require even more extensive regulation of the energy sector and industry, and public investment in energy efficiency and sustainable transport. None of these policies is comfortable territory for the post-Thatcher Conservative Party, and his critics on the right have not been slow to say so.

It is still possible for Johnson to differentiate himself from the Labour Party and the left. The new battleground is Britain’s version of the culture wars, in which the Conservatives cast themselves as the defenders of British nationhood and tradition against the “woke” metropolitan liberals who criticise the country’s colonial history and proclaim their multiple identities, none of them patriotic. This political dividing line, virulently reinforced by Britain’s largely conservative press, may work to bolster Tory support of a particular kind. But it doesn’t look like a strategy to win elections.

And this, in the end, is how Johnson’s foray into a new ideological positioning will surely be judged. If he can succeed in reviving the British economy with interventionist policies and higher taxes and spending after the pandemic — and if his plans to reform social care, reduce geographic inequalities and tackle climate change begin to look as if they might work — then the next election, due in 2023 or 2024, could vindicate his optimism. But if the coming months spiral downward into a Shakespearean winter of discontent, and the prime minister’s rhetoric proves to be as unhinged from reality as it looks to many today, then all Johnson will have proved is that he can wield words with boisterous skill.

But that has never been in doubt. It is on whether he can govern competently that the jury of British public opinion remains out. •

The post Between the idea and the reality appeared first on Inside Story.

Hamburg’s Polish Jews were part of a larger group of long-term German residents deported during what was called the Polenaktion. The Nazi authorities were responding to a law passed in Poland in March 1938 — and brought into force in October — that cancelled the citizenship of Polish nationals who had been living abroad continuously for five years or more. While it didn’t specify who those Polish citizens were and where they lived, it was clearly directed at Polish Jews living in Germany and Austria who, the Polish government feared, would move to Poland if their persecution by the Nazis intensified.

About 18,000 Polish Jews were expelled from Germany in late October 1938. Because the German authorities reasoned that the breadwinners’ deportation would compel their families to follow, the majority of them were men. Most deportees were taken to the Neu-Bentschen railway station, a few kilometres from the border, and then forced to walk to the Polish border town of Zbąszyń. “We were warned not to look back, but we heard the rattling of machine guns in the rear. The SS men threatened to shoot if anyone tried to stay behind,” a woman from Hamburg told a New York Times correspondent a couple of days after her deportation.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, rifle shots broke the silence. The people ran or dropped to the ground, where they were beaten and trod on by guards. Many were injured during the stampede. I lost my baggage, as did many others. There was no time to recover it.

The worst happened when we came to a ditch right on the frontier. There was a barbed-wire fence on the other side. We were pushed across it carrying children and those who could not move.

Far from welcoming its citizens, the Polish government protested against their expulsion and initially refused to accommodate them. Thousands of them, variously referred to as deportees or refugees, remained stuck in Zbąszyń, a town of fewer than 5000 people ill-equipped to handle such a large number of arrivals. Some were put up in barns and stables, others slept in open fields. A month after the expulsions, the New York Times correspondent observed their “strange, comfortless existence at Poland’s front gate and Germany’s back door — unable to move in either direction.”

Polish Jews after their arrival in Zbaszyn on 29 October 1938. Alamy

The Zbąszyń refugee camp stayed open until August 1939. A couple of weeks after that, the German army invaded Poland. Some of those deported in October 1938 were lucky, because they had been able to leave Poland before the war. They included a handful of unaccompanied minors who were allowed to migrate to Australia. Most of the deportees who remained in Poland were murdered during the Holocaust.

The German government of 1938 wasn’t the last to try to inconvenience, if not destabilise, a neighbour by swamping it with refugees. Think, for example, of the incident in 1980 that became known as the Mariel boatlift, when Fidel Castro’s government encouraged — and in some cases compelled — about 125,000 Cubans unhappy with its rule and their own circumstances to leave for the United States. They included people considered to be socially undesirable —because they were gay, for example, or lived in psychiatric institutions or had been convicted of criminal offences.

The Mariel boatlift was designed to create problems for US president Jimmy Carter, who was committed to rescuing people from the clutches of communism but unprepared to accommodate such a large number of arrivals in a relatively short time and unwilling to resettle people who were considered socially undesirable from a US perspective.

Or think of Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attempt in February and March 2020 to put pressure on the European Union by bussing thousands of refugees living in Turkey to the Turkish–Greek border, where border guards told them to cross over into Greece. His ploy largely failed because the Greeks temporarily suspended the country’s asylum regime and deployed their military at the border to prevent refugees from crossing. The Greek government had the backing of the European Union, with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declaring that Greece was Europe’s ασπίδα, or shield, gesturing towards its efforts to resist an Asian invasion of Europe 2500 years earlier.

Erdoğan’s use of irregular migrants to unsettle and blackmail a more powerful opponent — namely the European Union, for Greece was just the incidental target — was soon identified as an instance of “hybrid warfare.” For the US military analyst Frank G. Hoffman, who coined the term in 2007, hybrid warfare means the “blurring of modes of war, the blurring of who fights, and what technologies are brought to bear,” which “produces a wide range of variety and complexity.”

Vladimir Putin is a master of hybrid warfare. Employing mercenaries in one conflict, unleashing hackers or spreading fake news in another, the Russian government has become expert in using an array of non-conventional means to make life difficult for its adversaries. It, too, has used irregular migrants to put pressure on the West: in 2015 and early 2016 it encouraged refugees to enter the European Union via the Russian–Norwegian and Russian–Finnish borders, prompting US general Philip Breedlove, supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, to tell the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee: “Together Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”

The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, a Russian vassal, has emulated some of Putin’s tactics. Responding to sanctions imposed on members of his regime by the European Union, his government has opened up a route for irregular migrants to enter the EU via Belarus. Iraqis who had arrived in Minsk by plane from Baghdad began turning up at the Lithuanian border in June, ferried there by Belarusian authorities. By early August, some 4000 refugees had crossed the border. In mid August, Lithuanian border guards caught red-handed twelve members of the Belarusian security forces in riot gear who had crossed over into Lithuanian territory while they were pushing migrants across the border. When Lithuania fortified the crossing, Belarus began targeting Latvia and Poland.

People smugglers were quick to see the business opportunities created by the Belarusian government, and offered their services to desperate people hoping to be able to seek protection in the European Union. Those entering the EU via Belarus now include irregular migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, the Republic of Congo and other refugee-producing countries.

Passing by the memorial for Hamburg’s Polish Jews a couple of days ago, I was reminded that Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare hasn’t just had geopolitical repercussions but has also had an impact on the migrants he has “weaponised,” just as Germany’s actions had on the migrants forced to live in squalid conditions in Zbąszyń in 1938 and 1939. “The situation is undoubtedly complex, but it is hard to forget about the group of human beings stuck in no-man’s land,” Justyna Kajta wrote recently about the situation at the Polish–Belarusian border. “The unanswered question is: what will happen to them, and when?”

Hamburg’s monument to the 800 Polish Jews deported on 28 October 1938. Klaus Neumann

Much like Poland in 1938, the three EU member states that share a border with Belarus have resisted admitting people pushed across the border by the Belarusian authorities. All three have declared states of emergency, erected fences and deployed additional security forces at the border. Lithuanian and Polish border guards have also been accused of forcing irregular migrants back to Belarus before they can make asylum claims.

The focus in recent weeks has been on the border between Poland and Belarus. With police and border guards from both countries stopping people from leaving the immediate area, groups of migrants have been stuck in no-man’s land, without access to shelter, food, clean water or medical aid. At least four people have died, presumably from hypothermia.

In 1938 the world soon found out what was going on at Zbąszyń; in 2021, although we live in the age of mobile phones and citizen journalists, we know little about what’s happening at the Polish border. That’s because Poland has declared a three-kilometre exclusion zone around its border with Belarus, preventing journalists, lawyers and the representatives of refugee advocacy groups from talking to the people stuck there. We have only a sketchy impression of how many people have managed to slip into Poland, the circumstances of those caught between Poland and Belarus, and the means used by the security forces of the two countries to stop migrants crossing into Poland or going back to Belarus.

On 30 September, Amnesty International said that it had used “spatial reconstruction techniques” to track a group of thirty-two people from Afghanistan — twenty-seven men, four women and a fifteen-year-old girl — who crossed the Polish border on 8 August. Its analysis suggests that the group had camped on the Polish side of the border but been illegally pushed back to the Belarusian side. In each case, while they were technically in Poland or Belarus, they remained in no-man’s land.

The case of the thirty-two Afghan nationals had been brought to the attention of the European Court of Human Rights on 20 August. Five days later, in an exceptional interim ruling, the court told the Polish government to provide them with food, water, clothing, adequate medical care and, if possible, temporary shelter. But although the court told the Polish government that failure to comply with its interim measures might constitute a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Poland has so far stuck to its guns, quite literally.

Poland has just extended its state of emergency — the first since the end of state socialism — for another sixty days. Defending the decision, the Polish government claimed that it had evidence of terrorists masquerading as refugees and had found a video stored on a migrant’s phone that depicted a sexual act involving a naked man and a cow. It subsequently transpired that the video has been circulating online for years.

The governments of all three EU member states have boasted of their ability to keep out potential asylum seekers. The Latvian authorities claim that they have turned back some 1400 migrants since 10 August and allowed only thirty-eight to enter. The Lithuanian authorities pride themselves on having repelled twice as many. On 28 and 29 September alone, Poland recorded 786 attempts to enter the country from Belarus, all of them unsuccessful.

The term “no-man’s land” acquired its prominence and much of its present-day meaning during the first world war, when it denoted the stretch of land between enemy trench lines. Having been shelled repeatedly, it was devoid of trees and buildings, making attempts to cross it hazardous. But it could also be a space where the war was temporarily suspended; at night, the warring sides occasionally allowed each other to retrieve the bodies of the wounded and dead. It could even, as in Victor Trivas’s 1931 film Niemandsland, be imagined as a utopian space where peace becomes possible.

But the no-man’s land occupied by the thirty-two migrants from Afghanistan tracked by Amnesty International has little in common with the space between the trenches in wartime:

In peace, No-man’s Lands are strips of field between the frontiers of the European countries, haunted by the living. No one crawls to the barbed wire at night, to fetch a dead comrade back. There is no comradeship among the survivors of this peace.

In this peace, Europe traces its lines of barbed wire through fields and hearts. Into this land between the frontiers the continent pushes the men it has no use for.

These are lines from Renée Brand’s novel Niemandsland, published in the original German in Switzerland in 1940 and then, a year later, as Short Days Ago in New York. Brand acknowledges no-man’s land’s connotations at the time while highlighting how different her Niemandsland — a literal rendering of “no-man’s land” — is from the wasteland between the trenches of the first world war.

Brand’s novel is set in the late 1930s, not long before the outbreak of the second world war. It features a motley group of people — “ministers and physicians, teachers and engineers, painters, writers, mothers, people in love, children” — stranded on a field between Germany and an unnamed European country. “This field is No-man’s Land,” the narrator explains; it is “outside.” The people inhabiting the Niemandsland are referred to as Niemandsleute — “No-man’s people” in the published English translation.

The group includes seven men, four women and eight children, one of them born in the no-man’s land. Some of them have been deported to this piece of land, others have made their own way there. Some have been persecuted as Jews, others have left or been deported from Germany for other reasons. Some were “simply men with some responsibility, the kind of men who were what we had always thought men should be.” They have in common that the unnamed European country outside whose borders they are camped refuses to admit them, and that they can’t or don’t want to return to Germany.

While Niemandsland’s protagonists don’t yearn for a lost home, they are not projecting all their hopes onto life in a country of refuge either. They simply want to be somewhere (rather than in the nowhere of no-man’s land), and don’t harbour any particular expectations about life on the other side of the border.

Brand drew on her own experience of being a refugee. Born in 1900 in Berlin, she studied in that city and in Freiburg but quit her studies when she married in 1922. When the Nazi party assumed power in Germany, Brand and her seven-year-old son emigrated to France. They moved to Switzerland in 1934, and from there, in 1941, to the United States. While in Switzerland, Brand returned to university, and completed a doctorate in German literature. In the United States, she reinvented herself, studying psychology and eventually practising as a Jungian psychoanalyst.

Niemandsland is Brand’s only published work of fiction. Its Swiss publisher thought the novel’s literary qualities raised it above most of the literature produced by émigré writers at the time, and it was well received when it first appeared in 1940. But in the mid 1940 the Swiss censorship authorities banned any displaying, advertising or reviewing of the book, presumably out of concern that Germany might consider it provocative. The ban was only lifted in August 1945. The novel’s English-language edition attracted favourable reviews — a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times marvelled that “Wonder is aroused that such lyrical intensity, such universal passion and pity and beauty could be encompassed in so brief a tale” — but has long since been forgotten.

The widely reported deportation of Polish Jews in late October 1938 may well have informed Brand’s narrative, if not prompted her fiction. But other groups of Jews, expelled from one country but unable to enter the country they were deported to, also found themselves stuck in no-man’s land. In late 1938, about 2000 Jews expelled from Slovakia to Hungary became marooned at the Slovakian–Hungarian border for several months. Earlier in 1938, sixty-eight Jews expelled from Austria’s Burgenland to Czechoslovakia had been confined for several months on a tugboat on the Hungarian side of the Danube River — an episode that inspired the 1938 play Das Schiff auf der Donau by the German writer Friedrich Wolf, who at the time was living in exile in France.

Both because of its literary qualities and because it hasn’t dated, Brand’s novel is in a different league from Wolf’s rather didactic play. It also brilliantly analyses the essential qualities of the kind of no-man’s land inhabited by forced migrants: it is no terra nullius, it isn’t fiercely contested (as in war) and its status is not fixed. It is a no-man’s land only for the Niemandsleute: only they are confined there.

As three examples show, refugees and stateless people are often stuck in no-man’s land. In an infamous case in 1992, Israel deported 415 Palestinians from the Occupied Territories to a no-man’s land at the Israeli–Lebanese border. In 2001, authorities in Uzbekistan deported more than one hundred ethnic Uzbeks who had fled their native Tajikistan in the course of that country’s 1992 civil war; when Tajikistan refused to admit them, in the words of reporter Bruce Pannier, they became “trapped in a small stretch of land between the two countries.” In 2016, Amnesty International drew attention to the plight of 75,000 Syrians who were said to be stranded at the Syrian–Jordanian border.

The space that housed Palestinian deportees at the border between Israel and Lebanon, or the ships adrift in the Andaman Sea in 2015 because no country wanted to accommodate their Rohingya passengers became no-man’s land because their inhabitants had been deprived of rights. No-man’s land isn’t sitting waiting: it only comes into being once people are abandoned to it and enclosed on it.

Brand puts it like this: “Between [Germany’s] far-flung frontiers it has become narrow, so that one has had to invent a No-man’s Land for those who have no room in there.” She highlights the transformation of refugees and deportees into Niemandsleute. “Only former people here,” one of her characters says, “Former ministerial counsellor, former judge. Former mothers, fiancées, sweethearts. And look: our former children are running along to get their soup. Former all of them. Former human beings.”

Brand’s novel was directed at a specific audience: “Americans and Europeans of the twentieth century.” She suggests that the book’s readers have been compromised, if only because they are unable to imagine what is happening to those banished from Germany, and are unwilling to raise their voices. Addressing the reader directly, she writes: “This face at the window, behind the curtain, doesn’t it strike you as familiar? Do you not recognise your own face, well hidden behind curtains, prying through panes as yet unbroken?”

Brand doesn’t allow her readers to be distant observers. Instead she implicates them in the novel’s events and thereby encourages them to take sides. As soon as they identify the predicament of the novel’s characters with that faced by forcibly displaced people today, today’s readers are similarly called to account. They too are prompted to ask themselves: am I not hiding behind my curtain, witnessing injustices without intervening? And if so, is it not my responsibility to act?

At the Belarusian–Polish border, some bystanders have been quick to lambast the Lukashenko regime for ferrying refugees to that no-man’s land. Individual European governments and the European Commission blame the government in Minsk for the migrants’ plight. On 29 September, the commission published a communication about a “renewed EU action plan against migrant smuggling,” and used it to condemn the role of “State actors in artificially creating and facilitating irregular migration, using migratory flows as a tool for political purposes.”

But there is little the European Commission can do to stop Belarus’s weaponisation of irregular migration. On 30 September, the EU partially suspended the visa facilitation agreement with Belarus, yet it’s doubtful that this will hurt a regime whose key members are already barred from entering the European Union.

Rather than demonstrating their outrage at Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare, the European Commission ought to concern itself with the illegal practices of its member states, including Poland. Von der Leyen and her fellow commissioners may be reluctant to do so not because of a likely backlash from the Polish government but, first, because other EU members have not done nearly enough to provide credible assurances to Lithuania, Latvia and Poland that the three countries won’t be left alone to deal with any migrants seeking asylum, and, second, because Poland is by no means the only EU member state accused of pushing back irregular migrants and violating human rights.

EU member countries that don’t share a land border with a non-EU country and can’t be easily accessed by sea from outside the EU have shown no sign of being prepared to accommodate people entering Lithuania, Latvia or Poland in search of protection. If they had, then those three Eastern European countries would have had little incentive to violate international and EU law and force migrants back across the Belarusian border, confine them in no-man’s land at the border, and restrict access to them.

Any condemnation of Polish practices would be hypocritical if it did not imply a condemnation of such practices in principle. Other EU member states too have been guilty of pushbacks and of violating the human rights of people trying to seek asylum. They include Croatia, Greece and Italy, not to mention the sordid saga of the EU’s collaboration with the Libyan “coast guard” to stop migrants from crossing the Mediterranean.

It’s little wonder that the European Commission has reserved its outrage for Lukashenko and approached the governments in Warsaw and Vilnius with kid gloves. Asked repeatedly during a press conference on 29 September how the commission viewed Poland’s pushbacks, EU home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson was only prepared to say that “the commission has several question marks.”

The following day, Johansson met with Polish foreign minister Mariusz Kamiński. If her tweets after the meeting are any guide, then the two sides agreed to disagree. He did not seem to be troubled by whatever question the commissioner put to him. “We agreed that Belarus’s actions must meet with a firm response from the member states,” he tweeted after the meeting. He assured Johansson that “Poland grants international protection to people whose life and health are at risk.”

“Europe… is this field here Europe? Or what continent is it?” asks one of Renée Brand’s protagonists, whereupon another responds: “There is no Europe any more. It has become a lie. Could it be true that men live as we live in the heart of Europe?”

No matter how you look at the Niemandsland, it is outside, Brand explains in the opening pages of her book. “Outside of moon and earth: in the sphere of total indifference.” Later, she seemingly allows her readers to object to the charges of indifference, of hiding their face behind the curtains, only to expose their hypocrisy:

You protest. No, you say, this is not your face. You intervened wherever it was possible. How did you intervene?

With both hands you have reinforced the boundaries against which the waves of despair were surging. You appointed committees to confer on how to relieve the stricken. Honorable men and women exerted themselves. Conferences were in session for days and days. Misery is in session for nights and nights.

And maybe fifty years from now, there’ll be a memorial for those who froze to death at the European Union’s eastern border. •

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Judging by the bemused looks in his audience, few were familiar with the musical oeuvre of Sesame Street circa 1970. But it was not really them that Johnson was seeking to convince. It was his own Conservative Party and his own government back home. For the prime minister has found himself facing an acute difficulty as COP26 approaches.

It’s not merely that Johnson has something of a reputational problem of his own. Only six years ago he was a paid-up climate sceptic, accusing global leaders of being “driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear — as far as I understand the science — is equally without foundation.”

Given that Johnson’s entire career has been one of political shapeshifting according to the views of his audience and his prospects of personal advancement — he’s the socially liberal mayor of London who became the figurehead of the Brexiteers’ “Leave” campaign — Johnson’s conversion to climate advocate has surprised no one. His problem, rather, is that being green is actually proving much more difficult than he had bargained for when he blithely offered to host the crucial UN climate talks a couple of years ago.

His rationale was that Britain needed to show after Brexit that it remained a big international player: no longer central to Europe, but still a “global Britain.” What could be a better signal than leading the world in tackling the climate crisis? Unfortunately for Johnson it is now clear that Britain is almost completely failing to do that.

At home, the Conservative government boasts that Britain is the first major country to put a “net zero” emissions reduction target into law: under the amended Climate Change Act, the government is obliged to achieve this by 2050. It has also adopted one of the world’s most ambitious medium-term targets, a cut in emissions of 78 per cent on 1990 levels by 2035. (Of this, 44 per cent had already been achieved by 2019.)

But setting targets is the easy bit. Meeting them is more difficult. And here Britain is well off track. As the government’s independent Climate Change Committee has been warning for some years, policy has lagged well behind promises. In its latest report on the government’s progress, the committee didn’t mince its words. “This defining year for the UK’s climate credentials,” it declared, “has been marred by uncertainty and delay to a host of new climate strategies. Those that have emerged have too often missed the mark. With every month of inaction, it is harder for the UK to get on track.”

To respond to this criticism, the government has for some time been promising a “net zero strategy.” But this has been repeatedly delayed amid disagreements between Johnson and his ambitious chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak. The Treasury under Sunak has been preparing a review of the costs of achieving net zero, designed to show that it will hit middle- and lower-income earners hard through higher energy, transport and food prices. The review’s methodology is highly contested. It takes almost no account of innovation, which has already pushed the costs of green technologies — wind and solar power, for example, and electric vehicles — far below the levels predicted when policies to promote them were introduced. In this way, the Treasury’s critics argue, the review will considerably overstate the actual costs of achieving the net zero target.

But this is not really an argument about obscure economic methodologies. It is an entirely political one, for Sunak is pitching himself as the Conservatives’ next leader, and to do that he wants to appeal to the sizeable chunk of Tory MPs and party members who are not at all signed up to the net zero idea.

There are two sources of resistance. One is cost: the genuine anxiety that moving to a net zero economy — even over thirty years — will hurt Conservative supporters, and that any government pursuing it will pay a political price. The other is that it is patently obvious that the only way to make such a transition is for government to intervene much more actively in the economy, through industrial strategy, regulation and taxation, and such a prospect makes most Tories deeply uncomfortable.

This resistance has already spurned a new Conservative organisation, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, designed to rally political opposition and slow down the government’s climate ambitions. Not coincidentally, it was founded by the same backbench MP, Steve Baker, who led the hardline Tory Brexiteers in parliament and harried Theresa May’s government into successive concessions and defeats until Boris Johnson replaced her and acceded to their demands.

These factors mean that Johnson is feeling the squeeze. On the one hand, he needs to go into COP26 with an ambitious domestic plan to achieve net zero. It will hardly do for the conference hosts, desperately trying to persuade other countries to take stronger climate action, to be so visibly unable to produce a plan to do so themselves. On the other, Johnson can’t afford to risk producing a plan that in its implementation could cost the Conservative Party votes among its core supporters — and give Sunak the ammunition with which to succeed him.

This is not, of course, a problem unique to Britain. Some version of this political squeeze is occurring in almost every advanced economy. Most governments accept that they must take stronger action to reduce emissions. Most will say (rightly) that the green transition offers huge opportunities to develop new industries and create new jobs. But all are worried that higher-carbon industries will lose out, and that consumers and households will face higher costs and punish them at the ballot box.

And this is why Johnson has a problem with COP26. The conference in Glasgow is just a month away. But the media triumph that Johnson envisaged when he decided to host it looks increasingly unlikely. On the contrary, he could be facing a PR disaster: a conference denounced for its failure not just by Greta Thunberg but by many of the UN climate negotiators themselves.

And the reason is that, if no major advanced country is doing enough to achieve net zero, the global emissions trajectory is even further off track. With China’s economic growth having resumed after Covid, Brazil experiencing rapid deforestation, and Russia and India largely uninterested in the climate agenda, the collective commitments of governments are not nearly enough to hold the global average temperature rise to the “well under 2°C” goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, let alone the 1.5°C that the poorest countries demand.

The numbers are these. To have a reasonable possibility of being on track to hold the temperature rise to 1.5°C, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says global emissions in 2030 must be limited to around 26 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or GtCO2e. Announced emissions reduction pledges for 2030 will reduce global emissions to 46–49 GtCO2e. The “emissions gap” of 20–23 GtCO2e, between where the world needs to be and where it is currently likely to be, represents almost an additional 100 per cent of maximum desirable emissions.

If many countries were still to announce their commitments, COP26 might still have a chance of success. But among large emitters only China has yet to make its new 2030 pledge. The European Union, the United States, Japan, Britain, Brazil, Australia and most others have already submitted their “nationally determined contributions,” the UN term for emissions pledges. As COP president, Britain is desperately trying to persuade China to announce an ambitious target — for example, to have its emissions peak earlier, in 2025, and commit to stop building coal-fired power stations. But China has never been amenable to external pressure of this kind, and after the recent defence pact announcement between the United States, Australia and Britain, it is particularly resistant to British overtures. China will make a big commitment. But it can’t bridge the global emissions gap.

So what will happen at COP26? There will be negotiations. But the gap to 1.5°C will remain. And in those circumstances it will be almost impossible for the poorest and most vulnerable countries to agree on a final communiqué, except one that acknowledges the conference has failed. And it will be very hard for the global media to report anything else.

One of the popular stories about Boris Johnson is that as a small child he wanted to become “world king.” Perhaps he thought COP26 might fulfil his dream. Right now it looks as if it could turn into his worst nightmare. •

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After the second world war, Germans often cared a lot about how they were perceived by others. They worried a great deal, for example, about the reputational damage caused by the pogrom-like riots in Rostock and Hoyerswerda in the early 1990s. Many were proud when commentators adopted Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy’s description of Germans as “world champions of dealing with the past.” They liked the fact that Angela Merkel was perceived as the only Western leader willing and able to stand up to Donald Trump. Some were even proud when Merkel was praised abroad for her decision in September 2015 not to close Germany’s borders, and for her refusal to flinch when Germany admitted close to 900,000 asylum seekers that year, although they might have had misgivings about Merkel’s policy when talking to fellow Germans.

Given this history, it’s surprising that the attention paid by people outside Germany to the election that will determine Merkel’s successor has not been matched by the contestants’ references to the world beyond their borders. True, both Christian Democrat Armin Laschet and the current frontrunner, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, recently paid visits to French president Emmanuel Macron. But those encounters were hardly noticed, and weren’t in any case used by either candidate to talk in any detail about Germany’s crucial relationship with France or the Berlin republic’s future role in the European Union.

The candidates’ apparent blind spot was in evidence on Sunday night, when more than eleven million viewers watched a televised debate between Laschet, Scholz and Annalena Baerbock of the Greens. As the only one of the three pre-election debates aired by both the public broadcasters during this campaign, it was widely seen to be the most crucial event in the lead-up to the election. During its ninety minutes the candidates made brief comments about the foreign policy credentials of the left-wing Linke, but otherwise didn’t mention Germany’s role in the world and their own ideas for the European Union, for Germany’s relationship with China, Russia and the United States, and for the country’s relations with the developing world. Not once.

The absence is also reflected elsewhere in the campaign. The only posters I have seen that refer to foreign policy — yes, posters are still important in German election campaigns — have been Linke posters in East Germany demanding “peace with Russia.”

While correspondents for the international media have been trying to fathom what a government led by Scholz or Laschet would mean for the rest of the world, the politicians engaged in the campaign, including international law graduate Baerbock, seem oblivious to the wider world. That’s not because the world has been of no concern recently. The scandalous mismanagement of Germany’s withdrawal from Afghanistan by three senior government ministers — Social Democrat foreign minister Heiko Maas, Christian Democrat defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and the Christian Social Union interior minister Horst Seehofer — could have been one of the key issues of the campaign. It wasn’t. The fact that Germany leased planes in June to evacuate Afghans who would be in danger following a Taliban victory, but then cancelled the evacuation because Seehofer’s ministry objected to Afghan employees of the German military entering Germany before the completion of all relevant paperwork, received barely any attention.

The absence of the European Union and foreign policy from Sunday’s debate is partly the responsibility of the two journalists who chaired it. But it’s also a reflection of the stature of the three candidates. It makes even Angela Merkel, a skilful diplomat but hardly a foreign relations visionary, look farsighted.

In one sense, though, the three candidates’ failure to mention other countries comes as a pleasant surprise. All three acknowledge that Germany must do its share to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris Agreement. They might differ about how to do that, but none of them follows the lead of other world leaders by declaring that Germany’s approach relies on what China, the United States or other major emitters of greenhouse gases do. No mention was made on Sunday of Polish coal-fired power stations or Finnish and French reliance on nuclear energy. Emissions in Russia weren’t cited as an excuse for a lack of ambition by a future German government.

Part of the reason the candidates didn’t try to shift responsibility is that the country’s highest court committed the government to a comparatively ambitious German target earlier this year. The court found that Germany’s existing policy would unduly restrict the choices available to today’s young people after 2030. In a press release, the court said that:

fundamental rights are violated by the fact that the emission amounts allowed until 2030… substantially narrow the remaining options for reducing emissions after 2030, thereby jeopardising practically every type of freedom protected by fundamental rights… The legislator should have taken precautionary steps to ensure a transition to climate neutrality that respects freedom — steps that have so far been lacking.

The ruling forced Merkel’s coalition government to legislate to bring forward its climate neutrality goal to 2045 (rather than 2050, as in the legislation passed in December 2019) and its emissions-reduction goal to 65 per cent (rather than 55 per cent) by 2030.

So far, so good. The bad news is that a detailed study conducted by DIW Econ, the German Institute for Economic Research’s consulting company, has found that the 2021 climate protection legislation would not ensure Germany’s compliance with the Paris targets.

That study wasn’t concerned with the gap between the climate neutrality law and what the German government had committed to in Paris (although it identified such a gap); rather, it asked whether the election manifestos of the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats, the Greens and the Linke included measures commensurate with the revised legislation’s targets. It concluded that a government formed by any of the first three of those parties — assuming they were in a position to implement their programs — wouldn’t even come close to meeting the targets. Perhaps more surprising was the study’s finding that the measures envisaged by the Linke would also fall short. And the Greens? The study found that their measures, while more effective than those of the other four parties, would also be insufficient.

Climate change is the election campaign’s most important issue. That’s particularly the case after the floods in the west and southwest of the country in July, which claimed 180 lives and swept away houses, bridges, roads, rail tracks and other infrastructure. The repairs and rebuilding will, on current estimates, cost about €30 billion. Yet all main contestants in this election campaign pretend that climate neutrality can be achieved without any impact on consumers’ hip pockets and without changing the way we move around, eat, work or build our houses. Christian Democrats and Free Democrats even maintain that neither new taxes nor new public debt will be needed.

Angela Merkel’s departure could have been an opportunity for Germany to talk about its place in the world and how to tackle the enormous challenges of global justice and climate change. It could have been an opportunity for all contestants to agree that procrastination à la Merkel is no longer an option.

While the composition of Germany’s parliament is determined by the percentage of votes won by parties that exceed the 5 per cent threshold, 299 seats are decided in individual electorates, where the first-past-the-post system applies. Electorate #158 (Sächsische Schweiz–Osterzgebirge), in the southeast of the country, gained notoriety in the 2017 election because it was one of three electorates won by the candidate of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

A debate last week between six of the candidates vying to win electorate #158 was even more dispiriting than Baerbock, Scholz and Laschet’s encounter on Sunday night. When it came to climate change, the Green and Social Democrat candidates, perhaps trying to appease the local audience, were even reluctant to endorse their own parties’ manifestos. The Greens candidate went as far as declining to rule out building new nuclear power stations to compensate for the decommissioning of coal-fired generators. (Perhaps in an attempt to reciprocate, the pro-nuclear AfD candidate then demanded more bicycle paths.)

Nearly all the questions from the audience came from local politicians or supporters of minor parties that hadn’t been invited to the forum. Towards the end of the debate, though, a seemingly unaligned audience member — a teacher in a vocational school — put up his hand. His students had instructed him to ask the candidates how they thought Germany would meet the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C target. He hadn’t come unprepared: he had read the DIW Econ study and knew that whatever the parties were offering wasn’t going to be enough. He also had first-hand experience of the frustration of young people, many of them too young to vote. The candidates acknowledged that frustration, but not one of them had a satisfactory answer to the question.

Given the reluctance of politicians to promote painful decisions, the teenagers asking hard questions and demanding answers are our best bet. Fridays for Future activists, who have already had considerable influence on German policymaking, are mobilising for nationwide demonstrations on 24 September, two days before the election. “This election provides us with a once-in-a-century choice,” the group’s Luisa Neubauer wrote. “The political decisions taken during the next four years will determine the fate of my generation.”

And while they are at it, maybe Fridays for Future activists could also raise the issue of Germany’s place in the world — not in order to provide excuses for it to sit on its hands, nor to lecture the world about a German model. Global injustice is one of the key impediments to a sustainable world, and a vision for global sustainability and justice is sorely needed.

In any case, the world may soon look towards Norway, rather than Germany, when contemplating how to tackle climate change and accelerate the transformation of economies. Yesterday, an alliance of parties led by Labour’s Jonas Gahr Støre won the Norwegian election with a mandate — and seeming resolve — to end Norway’s reliance on fossil fuel production and export, with one potential government party, the Greens, demanding an end to fossil fuel production by 2035. That should interest others whose countries rely on the production coal, oil and gas, including the people of Altona, New York and Altona, Melbourne. •

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Although the turmoil was sparked by disagreements over the housing market, the fuel had accumulated in the post-election jostling among eight parties over Sweden’s most pressing problems (wealth concentration, bureaucracy, immigration) and possible solutions (better welfare, lower taxes, tougher action on criminal gangs).

Rising wealth inequalities, regional disparities fuelled by Stockholm’s strong economic growth, and the privatisation or marketisation of services including telecommunications, the railways, education and public housing — all played a part in the election result and the ideological manoeuvring that followed.

Between the 1970s and 2010, up to three-quarters of Stockholm’s housing was made up of publicly or mutually owned not-for-profit rental apartments. The national tenants’ association negotiated rents based on the cost of construction rather than the location, ensuring that younger police, nurses, teachers and other essential employees could afford to live near where they worked in the capital.

But as the queues for apartments lengthened to many years, a black market in insecure and expensive secondhand contracts emerged. After the financial crisis of 1991–92 and Sweden’s entry into the European Union in 1995, the government ceased providing public and not-for-profit housing bodies with cheap finance. Later, in 2010, an EU court ruled that the housing corporations must compete on an equal footing with private providers. After the privatisation of many public apartments by centre-right local councils, less than half of all rental apartments are public or not-for-profit; now, two-thirds of people living in Stockholm can’t afford to live in newly constructed apartments.

These problems are much less marked in the rest of Sweden, where centre-right local councils win office less often and wealth is less concentrated.

The free market in apartment rents was one of the conditions imposed on the Social Democrats by the Centre and Liberal parties when they negotiated an agreement to support a “government of the middle” — a mittenregering — in January 2019. This loose coalition was a sharp departure from Sweden’s usual pattern, in which government has alternated between blocs made up of left or right parties. The condition was the smaller parties’ price for abandoning their longstanding bourgeois alliance with the Moderates and Christian Democrats.

The Liberal Party also insisted that the Left Party would have no influence over government policies, even if the new government depended on that party’s votes in the Riksdag. Like the Centre Party, the Liberals believe that the government of the middle must exclude not only far-right but also far-left influence. For its part, the Left Party argues that it has been many decades since it dropped “communist” from its name, that it was a “Eurocommunist” party long before the end of the cold war, and that it has been part of the mainstream for a long time.

The Left Party insisted it would only support the government against no-confidence motions and guarantee supply for budgets if apartment rentals continued to be negotiated by the tenants’ association. The Social Democrats bought time by appointing an inquiry into problems in the housing market, but its report ultimately recommended market-oriented reforms.

The Left Party’s new leader, Nooshi Dadgostar (whose parents migrated from Iran), rose to prominence as an activist campaigning for affordable housing in Stockholm. Löfven initially underestimated her resolve — and the resolve of her party — but counterattacked earlier this week by pointing to what he sees as an unholy alliance: the Sweden Democrats’ enthusiastic endorsement of the Left Party’s no-confidence motion.

Recent opinion polling suggests that the Left Party’s resolve has attracted new voters. The Social Democrats’ support has slipped a little, the Centre Party, Moderates, Christian Democrats, and Sweden Democrats remain steady, the Greens have fallen just below the 4 per cent hurdle for seats in the unicameral parliament, and the Liberals have plunged well below that level. The Liberals seem certain to lose their place in the Riksdag at the next election. If the Greens manage to hold on then a government of the middle might continue; but if they also lose their place then the Moderates and Christian Democrats could govern with the support of the Sweden Democrats, with whom they are already negotiating.

The next elections are not due until September 2022. Earlier this week, the speaker of the Riksdag, Andreas Norlén, asked the Moderate Party leader, Ulf Kristersson, to assess whether he could form government. Kristersson, who then offered to legislate policies that would be attractive to Centre Party voters but failed to speak directly to the Centre Party, told the speaker he was unable to assemble the necessary support. Norlén has now asked the Social Democrats’ Löfven to report back by Monday on his prospects of leading a new government.

As leaders of the first- and second-largest parties, Löfven and Kristersson face similar but opposite problems in assembling a viable government. For Löfven, the Left is demanding a say in negotiating any budget it is expected to support, but the Centre refuses to agree to the Left’s having any influence. For Kristersson, the Liberals have pledged to join a party of the right that would bring more market forces into rental housing but insist that the Sweden Democrats must have no influence on any government they are part of. For their part, the Sweden Democrats point out that they have secured a much larger share of the national vote and that must be reflected in influence over a government they support.

After the last elections, the January agreement took an unprecedented four months to settle. Political turmoil is usually good business for the media, and Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, has put all its reporting on the political crisis outside its paywall. Given that the numbers in parliament resemble a diabolical sudoku puzzle, it looks like politics will be gripping holiday reading and viewing for many Swedes. •

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As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed, small government might deliver prosperity for some, but at a cost of public squalor. The Nordic countries proved that private and public affluence could coexist.

Contrary to the rhetoric of the right, they also showed that extending government’s reach beyond the bare minimum need not suppress people’s freedoms. Norway, Iceland and Sweden occupy the top three places on the Economist’s 2020 Democracy Index, with Finland and Denmark coming sixth and seventh. (New Zealand and Canada come between, in fourth and fifth place; Australia is equal ninth.) These same Nordic countries also come near the top of rankings on absence of corruption. And while their material living standards are high, so too are other indicators of wellbeing, such as “life satisfaction” and “work–life balance.”

To quote Michael Booth in his ever-so-slightly sarcastic book The Almost Nearly Perfect People, their populations are “not only the happiest and most contented people in the world, but also the most peaceful, tolerant, egalitarian, progressive, prosperous, modern, liberal, liberated, best-educated [and] technologically advanced.”

So if there is a group of people living in the best of all possible worlds, surely we should import their public policies? That is just what a group of fifteen writers assembled by the Australia Institute urge in this new book.

They are not the first to suggest we adopt the Nordic model. The Whitlam government often looked to Sweden for policy ideas, as did the union movement at the time of the Hawke government. And Andrew Scott himself wrote the 2014 book Northern Lights: The Positive Policy Example of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway.

Usually the suggestion that we should emulate the Nordic model falls on deaf ears in Australia, where the dominant economic culture is summed up in the aphorism “We can’t tax our way to prosperity,” and in the Liberal Party’s belief that “businesses and individuals — not government — are the true creators of wealth and employment.”

The authors of The Nordic Edge quote prime minister Scott Morrison’s response when he was asked for evidence that higher taxes weaken an economy: “Well, I think it’s just fundamental Economics 101.” But that’s not what Economics 101 says. A country’s economic performance is actually weakened when public services are inadequate and public policies fail to deal with gross inequalities in wealth and income.

To our economic detriment, Australia has a badly underfunded public sector. Taxes may be high in the Nordic countries — ranging between 37 and 44 per cent of GDP — but not by European standards. Germany’s taxes fall within that band and France’s taxes are even higher. Australia’s 27 per cent (for all levels of government) gives us almost the smallest public sector of any “developed” country.

This book does a sound job of demolishing the idea that small government is good for the economy. In fact, if anything the authors understate their case. They could have pointed out, for example, that Australia has used inefficient and inequitable “privatised taxes” — superannuation and private health insurance — to fund services that Nordic countries pay for using taxation.

While it is easy to demolish the idea that small government leads to prosperity, some sceptics offer a slightly more sophisticated objection to importing the Nordic model. They assert that the political and economic cultures of those five countries are deeply rooted in their own, mainly monocultural traditions, and can’t be transplanted to settler societies such as Australia.

But the authors firmly reject the idea that countries are bound by what might be called “historical path dependency.” As they point out, both the Nordic countries and Australia have gone through tremendous transformations over the past century. They briefly mention the French economist Thomas Piketty’s reference, in Capital and Ideology, to the widely held view that Sweden (and by extension the smaller Nordic countries) is inherently egalitarian. Until the early twentieth century, as Piketty also points out, “Sweden was a profoundly inegalitarian country, in some respects more inegalitarian than countries elsewhere in Europe.”

Australia, too, has undergone a huge economic and economic transformation in recent years, with the longstanding “Australian Settlement” giving way to deregulation and market forces. Rather than path dependence, the metaphor of ships passing in the night may better describe Nordic and Australian histories.

Critics might also argue that the economic structures of these countries are very different from Australia’s. But Norway, for example, with a large share of its exports taken up with fossil fuels, has many of the same problems. The Norwegians are more aware of their structural problems, the authors point out, and have dealt with them far more effectively than we have. By capturing most of the revenue from oil and gas, it has “ensured that greater benefits of resource extraction flow to the national budget, instead of to overseas shareholders.”

While Australia spent its resource windfalls during the Howard years on tax cuts and let our soaring exchange rate wipe out otherwise competitive industries, the Norwegians built up a sovereign wealth fund to help stabilise their economic performance. They are also taking serious action on climate change. Anyone who believes electric vehicles are suitable only for geographically small countries would do well to have a map of the Scandinavian countries on their screen as they read Audrey Quicke’s chapter on Norway’s electric vehicle policy.

The great strength of The Nordic Edge lies in the practicalities it explores. It’s easy for policy advocates to argue in general terms that Australia should emulate Nordic practices, yet ignore the detail. Seven of the book’s ten chapters are about specific areas of policy, with descriptions of how they are put into effect in their respective countries. Although the authors support the general idea of well-funded public services, most of their suggestions don’t involve significant public expenditure. The chapters on international diplomacy, gender budgeting, press freedom, and crime and rehabilitation all feature low-cost proposals and include suggestions about how Nordic practices could be applied in Australia.

In my view the book could have done with two more chapters — one on healthcare and the other on education. When asked if they would be willing to pay more tax and how they would like their taxes to be spent, healthcare and education always come out as Australians’ top two priorities.

The Nordic countries all have high-quality, inclusive healthcare systems. Although the private sector is prominent in providing healthcare services, private insurance, which has inflicted so much damage on our healthcare system, plays hardly any role. In relation to education, the chapter on workforce participation and wages has some well-directed advice for Australia: early childhood education is about more than getting women into the workforce; it’s also about the children. The same chapter also describes retraining programs in Denmark. But in between early childhood and retraining we might have expected to see something on school education. A large part of Scott’s earlier book was devoted to Finland’s school education system.

Some readers may criticise the book on the basis that it implies the existence of a strongly cohesive Nordic culture, when in reality these countries are markedly different. Indeed, most of them seem to have been at war with one another in times past.

To a large extent they are defined by their geography, which in turn shapes their economic structures and their relationships with the rest of the world. Norway, Sweden and Denmark are connected to the rest of western Europe through bridges and tunnels in ways that Iceland and Finland are not. Language differences are significant too: Finland’s is quite different from the Germanic languages of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and the Icelandic language, although Germanic, is on another old linguistic branch.

Noting these differences, a critic may charge the authors with cherrypicking from a diverse set of examples rather from an imaginary “Nordic model.” But why should we not pick the best?

Although each of the five countries has its own culture, some unifying characteristics not covered in the book do seem to explain why the Nordic people put so much trust in government and aren’t engaged in a tax revolt. Nordic people often mention the unifying effect of dealing with a harsh climate, and even the most secular Nordic people mention the influence of Lutheranism: they are Lutheran in nature if not in religious observance.

Although church attendance is low in the Nordic countries, as it is in Australia, the moral teachings of Christianity seem to continue influencing Nordic people’s behaviour (while clearly demonstrating that misogyny is not a core tenet of Christian morality). Perhaps in Australia, where many people seem to be morally adrift and others are turning to fringe sects of Christianity that focus on individual prosperity, we could learn a thing or two about social morality from the Nordic people.

These are all minor omissions, leaving plenty of ideas that could be applied in Australia. The authors seem to hope that the pandemic might have taught us the importance of good government in our lives and encouraged us to apply some of the Nordic countries’ best policies. “In responding to that crisis,” they write, “Australia and some other countries have implemented economic policies of a type and scale that previously did not seem politically plausible or feasible. Indeed, one benefit of the pandemic is that it has forced many governments to adopt policies that they had previously been unwilling to support. Policies such as free childcare and income support, improvised for a time of crisis, have often resembled those of Nordic countries, which see them not as emergency measures but as necessary for normal life.”

As it turns out, that seems a bit optimistic. The Morrison government has indeed undertaken a huge expansion of public expenditure, but that is more in the nature of a short-term fiscal boost than an ideological awakening. For this government the public sector is simply a convenient channel to get some money into the economy.

The book is likely to find its most responsive readers among those who are seeking better public policy and are not shackled by beliefs that all public expenditure is wasteful and that governments are intrinsically incompetent. It could well contribute to the policy platform of an aspiring social democratic party. •

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Take Kapka Kassabova, the author of a fine new book, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace. A poet, novelist and memoirist of a very particular kind, born in Bulgaria of Macedonian parents, she spent her childhood under communist rule, migrated to New Zealand in her twenties and now lives in Scotland. This book, her fourth, was written in English, though it might have appeared in Bulgarian, Greek, Albanian, or any number of Macedonian dialects seemingly at her command.

The lake, Lake Ohrid of the title, is one of two lakes that straddle the borders of Albania, Greece and what is now North Macedonia, so called to distinguish it from the Greek region of Macedonia, after Greece complained about Macedonians taking the name, and thus a chunk of its glory, for their own. Alexander the Great, remember, like his father Philip before him, was from Macedonia, and established a Hellenic empire.

Adding the “North” was just one of the readjustments entailed in the break-up of Tito’s communist Yugoslavia, and was certainly the most benign. The horrific border disputes between Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo are inscribed in recent memory. But the entire region, what we know as the Balkans, or the Balkan Peninsula, has been haunted by the wars of remoter pasts.

To the Lake is as rich and layered as the history it imparts. It’s a fascinating and stunningly written mix of travelogue, family history, geography, geology, economics, psychology and international politics, enlivened by the many moving stories of people Kassabova meets in her journey. The result is both a totally absorbing tale and a lot to take in.

A unifying order, however, centres on the mesmeric pull of the twin lakes, Ohrid and Prespa, high in the mountains in this little-known corner of Europe. The Balkans of Kassabova’s narrative, named for the mountains in Bulgaria but often conflated with the former Yugo-slavia, consist of Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Greece and Bulgaria. This is a little-understood and much-maligned region, its very name conjuring a wild, broken place, resistant to stability or civilising.

Indeed, “balkanised” has come to signify any area beset with murderous vendettas and partitions. And yet, under the Ottomans, the region’s peoples lived in relative harmony. “Contrary to the lazy and inaccurate stereotype of ‘ancient hatreds,’” Kassabova writes, “the peninsula had long housed a polyphonic, sometimes cacophonous, diversity. It still does.”

It’s a measure of my ignorance that I hadn’t realised just how mountainous the region is, or how that topography, along with its complicated history, might influence the character of its people, and particularly its women, who are depicted as being exceptionally strong yet hollowed out by the wars and poverty they lived through.  The calamities of the past hundred years triggered what might be called a serial migration of the women in Kassabova’s family, moving from country to country in an effort to cope. The collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and the later dissolution of the Soviet Union all left their imprints too.

In Street Without a Name, her first book, and the one that established her reputation, Kassabova recorded a childhood in communist Bulgaria, and the adjustments that came after the Soviet grip on that country was no more. The sufferings in her family are difficult to quantify, and it’s hard to say who suffered most — the men who’d been conscripted, imprisoned or killed, or the women who endured their long absences, and sometimes permanent damage if they were reunited.

Kassabova’s grandmother Anastassia, who played a significant role in raising her, is a case in point. As portrayed here, she was a resourceful, stylish, spirited woman, but psychologically rigid. “Perfection or death,” the motto she used against life’s vicissitudes and implanted in her granddaughter’s psyche, was the legacy of her own antecedents. In one period of dire privation recounted by her grandmother, the women and children sat each night at a dinner table set with the family’s finest china, but had no food to put on it.

A lake, any lake — as those like me with an interest in analytic psychology will recognise — is a symbol reverberant with meaning. In this context a lake is said to represent the female, most particularly the female psyche. Which could help explain the enormous psychic energy Kassabova brings to this project, her need to explore the landscape of her ancestry to better plumb her own depths.

As the work of a worldly writer, though, To the Lake isn’t limited to personal or family experience, but draws on the wealth of Balkan literature, written and oral, and that of other cultures as well. The book opens with a quote from Thoreau, and is sprinkled with the insights of poets, novelists and other observers that further illuminate and deepen the narrative. Along the way we are briefly introduced to writers such as Konstantin Miladinov, Edith Durham, Zhivko Chingo, Nikola Madzirov, Geo Milev, Lasgush Poradeci, Ismail Kadare and Stratis Haviaras. It’s also surprising to encounter those, like Edward Lear and Rebecca West, whom I would never have expected to find in such a setting.

But it’s the people, the living ones, that Kassabova meets along her journey who carry the weight of the narrative. Every one of them has a story, a perspective, a stoic acceptance that enriches her understanding and, needless to say, the reader’s as well. It would be impossible, indeed pointless, to attempt to relate them all. So I’ll settle on Nick, a cousin, whom Kassabova catches up with on the last leg of her journey, on the shores of Ohrid’s twin, Lake Prespa. A youngish gay man of warmth and exuberance, with “an unerring magpie’s eye for the telling detail,” his interest in the Soviet period and his competence in several languages (five Slavic ones, Spanish, Greek, Romanian, Mandarin and Hebrew) had his friends repeatedly asking if he wasn’t, after all, a spy.

After such an introduction it comes as something of a shock to learn that Nick grew up in Adelaide. He was one of the detsa begalci, the child victims and survivors of the bitter Greek civil war, and through a complicated set of circumstances had been rescued and raised by relatives in Australia. The mind spins trying to grasp his experiences, which encapsulate those of so many from this region. The wonder of it is that so many do go back, as visitors or to stay.

To the Lake, as you may have gathered, is an amazing book. To help us navigate, the author has furnished it with two maps and a glossary. Even so, I found I needed to consult other maps in my now out-of-date atlas. The two lakes are not only the oldest in Europe, they are skirted by the Via Egnatia, the old Roman road connecting the Bosphorus with the Adriatic. It is a landscape of remarkable beauty, replicated in the sinewy yet delicate prose Kassabova uses to describe it. The reflections of mountain peaks in the depths of lake waters, their colours with the changing light, the roll of vegetation through the seasons — all this and more are vividly captured.

“Seen from above,” Kassabova writes, “Ohrid and Prespa are a topographical image of the psyche — the light self and the shadow self, the conscious and the unconscious, linked through underground channels. Each contains the other without denying it, like a perfect yin and yang symbol. This is how they have survived as a self-renewing system for a million years.” •

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Prior to its encounter with North Macedonia on 31 March, Germany had won eighteen World Cup qualifiers in a row. Just days earlier, it had beaten Iceland at home and Romania, the most highly rated team in its group, in Bucharest. “The most important question is not who will win this game,” read one pre-match assessment, “but by how much the winner of the 2014 World Cup will prevail.” After all, Germany had triumphed in the World Cup four times and in the European championship thrice, whereas North Macedonia had never even qualified for either tournament.

The teams played in an empty stadium, but that could hardly count as an excuse for the German loss. At least the lack of a crowd saved the home team the humiliation of being booed by its fans while North Macedonia proceeded to its well-deserved win. Germany’s only goal came courtesy of a questionable penalty decision. German coach Joachim “Jogi” Löw’s team was outfoxed, outplayed and outclassed by a disciplined but by no means outstanding opponent.

This was not the first time Löw and his men have stumbled badly. In a first for Germany, they were eliminated in the first round of the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Then, in November 2020, they went down by six goals to Spain. As the calls for Löw to be sacked became louder, he announced in early March that he would retire right after Euro 2020, the European championship postponed until June this year by the pandemic.

Löw has been Germany’s head coach since July 2006. His contract was extended for another four years in 2018, well before Germany’s dismal performance in Russia, and it seemed at the time as if he was going to be around forever. The youngest player in the current German side, Jamal Musiala of Bayern Munich, wouldn’t be able to remember a time when Löw was not in charge of Germany’s national team.

Depending on whom you ask, managing the national side is either the most important job on offer in Germany, or a close second behind the task of running Germany’s government. Angela Merkel has been in office even longer than Löw, since November 2005. Her contract was last renewed in 2017. She too is on her way out, and the parallels don’t end there.

Lately, most Germans have been as dismayed by Merkel’s team as they have been by Löw’s. That’s mostly to do with Germany’s response to Covid-19.

Germany did well in the first wave of the pandemic during last year’s northern spring. The rate of infections and the number of fatalities were much lower than in most other European countries, let alone the United States and South America. But the authorities reacted too late and not decisively enough when the second wave began building in October, even though the expert calls for a hard lockdown were hard to ignore. After shops and schools eventually had to close, the country got through that wave as well, but the price — in terms of deaths from Covid-19 — was much higher than in spring.

Early this year, virologists predicted that Germany’s caseload would once more go up because of the mutations that had emerged in Britain, South Africa and Brazil. From mid February, case numbers began climbing as the prevalence of the so-called British variant, also known as B.1.1.7, grew. On Monday, the rate of new infections per 100,000 over seven days reached 136, the highest incidence in twelve weeks. It keeps rising. The virologists’ predictions were proving accurate, but the federal and state governments still couldn’t agree on measures to stop this third wave of the pandemic, or at least flatten the curve.

Not only did the incidence figures keep rising, so did the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care wards: from about 2800 in mid March to more than 4600 on Monday. Soon, more Covid-19 patients are likely to be in intensive care than at the height of the second wave. Because most people aged seventy-five and over have been vaccinated, hospitals are increasingly treating young people. Their chance of survival is better than that of octogenarians, but many of them will suffer what is popularly called Long Covid and referred to by scientists as post-acute Covid-19.

Meanwhile, the number of people who have been fully immunised is still too small to make a real difference. As of 11 April, about 6 per cent of the population had received both doses of any of the three available vaccines, and only about 16 per cent have been given at least one.

Behind the sluggish immunisation campaign is a shortage of vaccines. That can’t be blamed on the German authorities, because the European Commission, rather than the Merkel government, was responsible for their procurement. It’s true that Merkel lobbied her European colleagues to agree to a concerted approach rather than let each EU country buy its own supplies, but that was the right call. If the poorer EU countries had missed out, the recriminations would have damaged the European Union beyond repair. Countries such as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary and Slovenia have already suffered disproportionate human losses because their hospitals are not as well equipped as those of Germany, Denmark, Austria or the Netherlands.

But the German government could be blamed for sowing confusion about the AstraZeneca vaccine. First it deemed the vaccine unsuitable for those aged sixty-five or more; now it considers the vaccine too dangerous for the under-sixties. The message that the benefits of this vaccine far outweigh its risks didn’t get through, and now a considerable number of those due to be immunised are frightened to receive one of only three vaccines available in Germany.

Strictly speaking, Merkel and her ministers aren’t responsible for the dilatory response to the spread of the virus either. It’s up to Germany’s local and state governments to impose curfews and shutdowns of schools, childcare centres, shops and restaurants. Throughout the pandemic, the federal government has tried to convince the states to agree to uniform measures. Merkel has met regularly with the sixteen state premiers, although such heads-of-government consultations are not a formal feature of German federalism.

Usually lasting many hours, the meetings have sought to bridge the divide between Merkel, the trained scientist who tends to argue for more measures to halt the spread of the virus, and some of the state premiers, who want fewer restrictions. While these meetings have usually concluded with an agreement, individual premiers have often been quick to distance themselves from decisions and deal with the pandemic as they see fit, oblivious to expert advice and seemingly unconcerned about the consequences.

The last such consultation began on the afternoon of 22 March and lasted until 2.30 the next morning. Its only significant result was the declaration of additional public holidays on the Thursday and Saturday before Easter, thereby creating a five-day “rest period” during which schools and businesses would be closed and the pandemic, it was hoped, slowed down. Only a day later, though, Merkel had to concede that the plan wasn’t feasible. She then apologised — uncharacteristically — for announcing and then cancelling the measure. But she had no plan B. Each state has continued to prescribe its own measures, and it’s become impossible to keep abreast of the myriad different rules and sanctions.

The patchwork approach is partly explained by electoral pressures. Armin Laschet, the Christian Democrat in charge of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Markus Söder, the premier of Bavaria and head of the Christian Democrats’ Bavarian sister party, are both vying to lead the conservatives in September’s federal election campaign and then succeed Merkel as chancellor. They have used the pandemic to sharpen their public profiles: Laschet by arguing against lockdowns and other restrictions, Söder by endorsing Merkel’s hard line. With five state elections this year, other premiers have also sought to impress voters first and deal with the pandemic second.

States with comparatively low infection rates refuse to agree to measures designed to flatten the curve in high-incidence states. And then there are the usual differences of opinion between states led by Social Democrats and those led by Christian Democrats, and between East German and West German state governments. That some premiers seem to find it difficult to understand how the virus spreads hasn’t helped.

To say that Merkel isn’t to blame for any of this would not be entirely correct. For one, her decision to relinquish the leadership of her party a few months before the end of her last term in office has undermined the authority she needs to make the state premiers act in unison. And when it became clear that individual states weren’t doing enough to contain the disease, the federal government should have stepped in.

It will try to do so, belatedly, this week. Merkel cancelled the heads-of-government meeting that had been scheduled for Monday. Parliament will debate a bill that would give the federal government the power to impose lockdowns and curfews. But such an initiative should have come much earlier.

A fortnight ago, Merkel took the unusual step of participating in a live one-hour interview with Anne Will, whose eponymous program on Sunday evenings, immediately after the latest episode of the popular crime drama Tatort, is the most-watched talk show on German television. In the interview, she reprimanded the premiers (singling out two who belong to her own party) and threatened a federal move to take control of Germany’s response to the pandemic. At last, things seemed to be moving in the right direction. But then she waited for almost two weeks. Perhaps she was hoping that such a move would prove unnecessary, or perhaps she was just dithering.

And then there was the federal health authorities’ decision to remove Spain’s Balearic Islands from the list of risk areas just in time for the Easter holidays. Maybe they thought nobody would book a trip — and it’s true that the airlines were offering hardly any flights to Mallorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands, which is Germans’ favourite holiday destination (sometimes called Germany’s seventeenth state). But around 45,000 holiday-makers descended on Mallorca over Easter, proving that the laws of supply and demand also work during a pandemic. Because of the time lag between infections and symptoms, it remains to be seen what impact this mass gathering will have.

Meanwhile, the reputation of the ruling Christian Democrats has suffered a further blow after several of its members of parliament were accused of corruption. In some cases, the politicians concerned had received large amounts of money — €660,000 in one instance — for putting the suppliers of medical masks in touch with the federal health ministry when it was desperately seeking large quantities of masks last year.

Looming above all of this is the question of why on earth the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party have been unable to nominate a successor for Merkel. It’s been more than fourteen months since her designated successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, fell on her sword after she failed to prevent collusion between her party and the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) in the East German state of Thuringia. Since then the speculation has been endless: first about who would succeed her, and then about whether her successor Armin Laschet would be the conservatives’ candidate for chancellor. The conflict between Laschet and the Bavarian premier Markus Söder entered an extra round on Monday, with both receiving a ringing endorsement by their respective parties.

Germans, regardless of their political persuasion, age or class, are exasperated. A majority is in favour of tougher restrictions to curb the spread of the virus. A vocal minority, represented in parliament by the AfD, refuses to believe that the virus is dangerous and wants no restrictions at all. I suspect the only reason why few outside the AfD are calling for Merkel’s resignation is that there is no one in her party who would be able to replace her.

On Saturday, the front page of Hamburg tabloid Morgenpost featured just one word in lieu of the usual article: Nichts* (nothing*). The asterisk explained: “This is what the chancellor and the state premiers have implemented to alleviate the state of emergency in the hospitals.”

The bungled response to Covid-19 didn’t come as a total surprise. Germans know that the country’s bureaucracy is slow to swing into action at the best of times. The fact that crucial technological developments seem to have bypassed the public service didn’t help. It’s no secret, for example, that federal, state and local governments have only slowly come to terms with the digital revolution. German health departments still report the number of infections by fax, rather than digitally. When schools were told that students needed to be taught remotely, some teachers took that to mean that they would simply post photocopied worksheets to their students once a week. And don’t even mention German Rail and the coverage of the mobile phone network.

But now, as Covid-19’s global reach prompts comparisons not just of infection numbers, vaccination rates and fatalities but also of government responses, German inefficiency is no longer a well-kept secret. Germans can’t keep complaining that their trains are always late but then find solace in the idea that others believe Germans are naturally more efficient. It’s the realisation that German stuff-ups are now regularly reported in the New York Times that has come as a shock.

Similarly, the millions of Germans who are convinced they would do a better job than Jogi Löw have long known about the weaknesses of Germany’s national side. Löw and his team just haven’t been that good since their triumph in Brazil seven years ago. But nobody else seemed to take much notice of the slide. That’s changed: now that Germany has succumbed to North Macedonia it is no longer possible to pretend that this was the same side that beat Brazil by six goals in the 2014 semifinal and went on to win the cup.

Germans feel that they not only need to get on top of the pandemic, they also need to restore their reputation as world champions of efficiency and innovation. They need not just to win their next qualifier — given that their opponent will be Liechtenstein, that’s perhaps not such a big challenge — but also to convince others that they are still one of the heavyweights of world football.

When it comes to football, there’s a short-term remedy. Germany just ought to field its best side — which means that Jogi Löw must admit it was a terrible mistake to tell Thomas Müller, the star performer of Champions League winner Bayern Munich, that his services were no longer required. Having Müller in the side might at least prevent the embarrassment of exiting Euro 2020 at the group stage.

Then there is the pressing question of who will be Germany’s new coach. Four of the eight clubs currently competing for this year’s title in the Champions League are coached by Germans, and their names naturally came up when Löw announced his resignation. But that’s not how the German Football Association works. It won’t appoint a Thomas Tuchel (the head coach of Chelsea) or Jürgen Klopp (who’s in charge of Liverpool); they are too independent or too flamboyant. (Not that either of them would want to give up their current gig in Britain.)

Löw’s job is more likely to go to an understudy, in the same way that Sepp Herberger’s assistant Helmut Schön became head coach in 1964, Jupp Derwall followed Schön in 1978, and Löw got the job when his immediate boss, Jürgen Klinsmann, resigned. Perhaps Germans should simply transfer their attachment from the men’s to the women’s side, which has won thirteen of its last fourteen games, including, most recently, a friendly against Australia.

Unlike Jogi Löw, Angela Merkel can’t draft somebody for her cabinet whom she had previously sent packing (although there would be no shortage of potential candidates). And, to stay with the analogy, while the Christian Democratic Union might be as conservative as the German Football Association and pick an uninspiring understudy as Merkel’s designated successor, it won’t be up to the party to appoint the next chancellor.

Germany could well do with a Jürgen Klopp of politics: somebody to motivate and inspire them as they face their next big task, curbing the emission of greenhouse gases. They also need somebody to remind them that their glasses are half full rather than half empty; after all, despite the chaos surrounding the government’s handling of the pandemic, so far proportionately fewer people have died of the virus than in eight of Germany’s nine neighbouring countries. (Only Denmark has done better.)

On 19 April, the Greens will announce who will run as their candidate for the chancellorship in September. As the Christian Democrats are only five percentage points ahead of the Greens in the latest polls, Merkel’s successor might be either of the two Green contenders, Annalena Baerbock or Robert Habeck. While neither has the charisma of a Jürgen Klopp, both would be keenly aware of the need for Germany to arrive at last in the twenty-first century. Both would lead a government intent on changing the country rather than administering the status quo. Both would know that the challenge of climate change will eventually dwarf that of Covid-19.

Germans’ concern with how their country is perceived has led them to believe that their government’s lack of action is a very recent phenomenon. But when was the last time the Merkel government did what was necessary without backtracking afterwards? Some would say that this was in 2015, during the so-called refugee crisis, but it should be remembered that the image of Merkel as an activist relies on a simple narrative: she decided that Germany should open its borders. Germany didn’t do that; it just didn’t close them. When the Merkel government swung into action, it helped negotiate a deal with Turkey to halt the flow of refugees while simultaneously tightening the asylum laws. In fact, Merkel last acted decisively in 2011, following the Fukushima accident in Japan, when her government decided to phase out Germany’s nuclear reactors.

Preoccupied as Germans are with appearances and perceptions, they tend to believe that the decline of Germany’s fortunes on the football field began after the 2014 World Cup. But the team that won the cup that year was arguably not as good — and certainly not as exciting — as the team that competed in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Germany won in 2014 because the competition was not as strong as four years earlier. In other words, the defeat at the hands of North Macedonia and the government’s ponderous response to the pandemic came after a long period of wasted opportunities. The summer of welcome in 2015 and the World Cup in 2014 just felt like moments when Germans were champions of the world. •

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As recently as two years ago, the rise of right-wing populism seemed unstoppable. From India to Brazil, from Hungary to the United States, populist leaders had won political office by railing against the “elites” and purporting to speak for “the people.” In democracies across Asia, Europe and the Americas, right-wing populist parties and movements had gained political influence using ultranationalist rhetoric and vilifying minorities. We became used to the idea that the Donald Trumps and Jair Bolsonaros were here to stay.

At least in Western countries, the trend seems to have reversed. Donald Trump has been voted out of office; the right-wing populist parties that had been in government in Western Europe — Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy and the Freedom Party in Austria — have been sidelined. And isn’t it only a matter of time until Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ousts Bolsonaro? It is now possible to imagine that the era of right-wing populism is drawing to a close.

Often mentioned as evidence of the inexorable rise of right-wing populism was the success of the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD. Less than 200 days after it was formed at a meeting of eighteen men in a church hall in Oberursel, just outside of Frankfurt, the AfD won more than two million votes in Germany’s 2013 federal elections.

At that election, the AfD fell just short of the 5 per cent threshold designed to keep minor parties out of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. Four years later, in 2017, it exceeded that figure, and for the past four years it has been the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. AfD is also represented in all sixteen state parliaments, and is now the second-largest party in the five East German states of Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

But just as the AfD’s rise fits the pattern of a surge of right-wing populism in the 2010s, its recent fortunes could be evidence of the waning of this political phenomenon. In elections in the southwest states of Rhineland-Palatine and Baden-Württemberg, the AfD shed more votes than any other party. In Baden-Württemberg, its stronghold outside the former communist east of the country, its support slumped from 15.1 to 9.7 per cent. Has the AfD’s time already passed?

The matter is more complicated than the figures might suggest. What has definitely passed is the party born in Oberursel on 6 February 2013. Of the eighteen men present that day, most have long left. One of them, the economist Bernd Lucke, led the party until 2015, when he was deposed in favour of Frauke Petry and subsequently quit the party. Petry herself resigned from the AfD in 2017 immediately after winning a seat in the Bundestag.

The old AfD was largely made up of three sets of people: conservatives who thought Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats had veered too far left, advocates of neoliberal economics who wanted Germany to leave the eurozone, and elderly men afraid of cultural diversity and appalled by the official rebranding of Germany as a country of immigration. Since then, aggressive nativism and opposition to refugees and other migrants have become the party’s trademarks.

Not all the leaders who emerged in 2013 have resigned from the AfD. Notable among them is Björn Höcke, a high school teacher of history and physical education born in West Germany in 1972, who has led the AfD in Thuringia for the past eight years. Rather than championing economic liberalism, as the majority of the AfD’s founders did, he has identified neoliberalism and globalisation as twin evils. He is socially conservative but wants a complete overhaul of Germany’s politics and culture.

In 2015, Höcke founded the Flügel, a network that brought together the far right of the AfD. Attempts by moderate forces within the AfD leadership to expel Höcke failed in 2015 and again in 2017. In 2019, the domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, published a report arguing that the Flügel, as well as the party’s youth organisation, was advocating attitudes and policies irreconcilable with the German constitution. Of the report’s 436 pages, fifty were devoted to Höcke’s views, reflecting the fact that he is rightly seen as the AfD’s most influential proponent of extremist positions.

The Flügel’s leadership eventually dissolved the organisation last year after pressure from Jörg Meuthen, the AfD’s relatively moderate co-leader, and his allies, who argued it was tarnishing the AfD’s brand and attracting unwelcome attention from Germany’s intelligence agency.

Another survivor of the class of 2013 is Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s deputy leader from 2013 until 2017, its co-leader from 2017 until 2019, and co-leader of the AfD’s parliamentary party in the Bundestag since the last election. Born in 1941 in East Germany, he emigrated to West Germany as an eighteen-year-old, gained a doctorate in law, and also studied history. From 1977 until 1991, he worked as chief of staff of the Christian Democrat Walter Wallmann, who was in turn mayor of Frankfurt, federal environment minister and premier of Hesse.

After Wallmann’s defeat in the 1991 state elections, Gauland moved to the East German state of Brandenburg, where he became editor of a local newspaper. He joined the Berliner Kreis, a loose network of conservative Christian Democrats critical of Angela Merkel, but meetings with like-minded conservatives only exacerbated his alienation from the party that had been his political home since the 1970s. Although he is not usually considered to belong to the far right of the AfD, he has consistently taken Höcke’s side in factional struggles and signed the Erfurt Declaration, the Flügel’s foundational document.

More than anybody else, Höcke and Gauland have shaped today’s AfD: the former by attracting a sufficient number of followers, particularly in East Germany, to shift the AfD towards the far right, the latter by personifying the party’s radicalisation over the past eight years and providing cover for Höcke whenever necessary. More than anybody else, these two men can tell us where the AfD is heading.

Höcke and Gauland have each attracted more controversy than any other AfD politician. That’s partly because they habitually refer in offensive terms to people belonging to ethnic or religious minorities. In 2016, for instance, Gauland criticised the successful Berlin-born footballer Jérôme Boateng, son of a Ghanaian father and a German mother: “The people like him as a player. But they don’t want to have a Boateng as a neighbour.” A year later, he suggested it would be desirable to “dispose of [“entsorgen”] in Anatolia” the prominent Hamburg-born Social Democrat Aydan Özoğuz, whose parents had migrated from Turkey.

Even more controversial have been Höcke’s and Gauland’s demands for a reappraisal of Germany’s Nazi past. In a 2017 speech in Dresden, Höcke said that German president Richard von Weizsäcker’s famous address to the Bundestag on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the second world war, in which he acknowledged Germany’s responsibility for that catastrophe, was a speech “against his own people.” Referring to the national Holocaust memorial in Berlin, Höcke said that “we Germans are the only people in the world who have built a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” adding that “a 180-degree turnaround of German memorial politics” was needed. In a speech in 2018, Gauland infamously remarked that “Hitler and the Nazis are only a Vogelschiss [a piece of bird shit] in more than a thousand years of successful German history.”

Gauland and Höcke have consequently been branded Nazis and fascists. But however reprehensible their views, the labels are misleading. Neither of them would like to see a return to the Third Reich, and neither has endorsed the Nazis’ policies. Ostensibly, AfD figures violate taboos to defy political correctness, but their real aim is to attract the media’s attention, to unsettle their opponents, to shift the boundaries of political discourse and to demonstrate to their supporters that the “ruling elites” are vulnerable.

“It requires a provocation to be noticed,” Gauland said in defence of his suggestion that Özoğuz ought to be “disposed of.” “Again and again, the limits of what is sayable have to be extended by means of small advances,” Höcke explained to the Dresden writer Sebastian Hennig in a book-length conversation. Too often, commentators have fallen into the trap of denouncing individual AfD leaders as Nazis or fascists without recognising the intention behind their violations of taboos.

Unlike other parties on the far right that have had an impact in postwar Germany — including the German Right Party, which was represented in the 1949 Bundestag, and the National Democratic Party, the German People’s Union and the Republicans, all of which have at some stage been represented in state parliaments — the AfD is not a party in the tradition of the (historical) Nazi party. Rather, Höcke and other Flügel stalwarts have been influenced by the New Right.

In fact, the Flügel’s Erfurt Declaration is said to have been drafted by the Höcke confidant Götz Kubitschek, a publisher and author who is one of the leading proponents of the German New Right. Kubitschek and others think of their movement as a response to the New Left, and adopt some of the latter’s strategies. They aim not just for political power but also for cultural hegemony.

The German New Right draws on ideas developed by writers associated with the Conservative Revolution in the 1920s and early 1930s, including the constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt, the philosopher Ludwig Klages, the writer Ernst Jünger and the philosopher Oswald Spengler. Martin Heidegger, while arguably not himself part of the Conservative Revolution, is another whose ideas have had an impact on the thinking of the German New Right.

Gauland and Höcke frequently cite writers associated with the Conservative Revolution. In doing so, they ignore the fact that Schmitt, Spengler and others provided intellectual ammunition for the Nazis and sympathised with them, at least during the first half of the 1930s. But then, the Third Reich, which AfD politicians often refer to only as “those twelve years,” was supposedly but a Vogelschiss in a glorious past spanning a thousand years.

Another key difference between outfits such as the German Right Party and the National Democratic Party, on the one hand, and the AfD, on the other, is that the latter is populist. It has embraced a populism that pits “das Volk” against an “elite” that supposedly dominates government and the media. The AfD’s 2016 manifesto also favours some form of direct democracy: Swiss-style referendums to approve legislation passed by parliament and opportunities for extra-parliamentary groups to put bills to a popular vote.

Volk is a central category in Höcke’s and Gauland’s universe. It is both demos, the political citizenry, and ethnos, an exclusive group defined by common ancestors, language and cultural practices. Höcke has described Volk as a “community whose members are linked by fate and across generations.” Not everybody with a German passport is a German, Gauland once told the journalist Jana Simon; they would need to have a German mother, be fluent in the German language and share “German values” (which he did not specify). According to Höcke, whether someone belongs to a particular Volk is determined not only by kinship ties but also by association (“Verbandschaft”) — that is, by a willingness to belong. Those formally belonging to a particular Volk by descent could therefore be excluded if they don’t identify with it or extend their loyalty to it.

As a historical category, Höcke’s and Gauland’s German Volk is ill-defined. For them, it becomes concrete only in the present, when it is defined in opposition to what they variously term a “globalised class,” “new elites” (Gauland), a “caste” of politicians and media professionals (Höcke), or “a transatlantic political elite” of “cosmopolitan universalists” (Höcke). They contrast this new “class,” “caste” or “elite” not only with the Volk but also with the “genuine” elites of yesteryear.

They want the Volk to have more direct political influence. But Höcke worries that, “As a Volk, we are already very fragmented, and we no longer produce a homogeneous people’s will, but rather dissonant cacophony.” Referring to the summer of 2015, when most Germans were in favour of welcoming refugees, he told Hennig that the people’s will must be tempered by “responsible politicians” who, if need be, make decisions “against current public sentiment and in favour of the Volk.” He then compared the “statesman” favourably with the populist, because in his view the latter is prone to pave the way for ochlocracy, or the rule of the mob.

Yet Höcke is also fascinated by the mob’s raw energy: “At some point the pent-up pressure will be released, clenched fists will be raised in the air, and the people, that big lout, will shake the fortified gates of power.” He regularly professes his love for the Volk, but I believe he does so from the position of somebody imagining himself in the role of the “statesman” who would be able to harness the energies of “that big lout.”

While baiting journalists and other public commentators with statements that are racist or smack of historical revisionism, and while mimicking the rhetoric of Hitler and Goebbels, Gauland and Höcke have been careful to draw a line between themselves and the Nazis. Thus they have rejected the adjective “völkisch,” which former AfD leader Frauke Petry had wanted to reanimate in 2016. Höcke said that it is associated with a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century politics whose demands he does not share. More importantly, however, unlike Volk, the connotations of the term völkisch place it firmly in the context of “those twelve years.”

The other term the pair avoid is Führer, because that is now associated only with Hitler — according to Gauland the sole “progenitor” of National Socialism and the Holocaust. That is not to say that Höcke, in particular, is unsympathetic to the concept of an authoritarian leader who knows best what the Volk needs. For him, the term “statesman” might be but a placeholder.

Following the recent state elections, Meuthen blamed two factors — the pandemic and the party’s supposed victimisation at the hands of the domestic intelligence agency — for its losses. He also tried to talk down the poor showing. Gauland and Höcke took a different approach, referring to the result as a “wake-up call” (Gauland) and a “rout” (Höcke). Höcke blamed the rout on what he perceived to be timid and lame election campaigns designed to increase the party’s appeal among moderate middle-class voters. When lambasting the desire to appease mainstream voters, he clearly had in mind Meuthen’s keynote address at the most recent party congress in November 2020, in which Meuthen famously said, with a wink to Höcke, “We won’t become more successful by presenting as increasingly uncouth, aggressive and uninhibited.”

In Höcke’s view, the AfD ought to have targeted traditional non-voters, who “are fundamentally opposed to the ruling politics” but can’t be mobilised to vote by means of policy positions that come across as half-hearted and tame. He was also concerned that the party had done poorly in working-class areas; like Gauland, he believes the AfD needs to champion the interests of the “kleine Leute” (literally: the little people). Höcke’s rather than Meuthen’s strategy seems likely to be adopted during the next campaign, ahead of state elections in June in Saxony-Anhalt, one of the Flügel’s strongholds.

Although Höcke was quick to blame the Meuthen camp for the losses in Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg, he has otherwise not been too concerned about losing or gaining a few percentage points in elections. For him, the AfD is not only a party but also a movement. It needs to pressure ruling “elites” both in parliament and by organising demonstrations outside parliament. This is a lesson the AfD might have learned from the Nazi party of the late 1920s and early 1930s, but also from Germany’s Greens of the 1980s and 1990s. In other respects too, the Greens provided a model: like them, the AfD has two leaders, one representing the moderate camp that wants to be in government and one representing the Flügel.

With the Greens having developed a taste for participating in governing coalitions, their more radical faction, the so-called Fundis, have been sidelined. It’s unlikely that something similar will happen anytime soon in the AfD. While the Greens have become a sought-after ally (they are in power in eleven out of sixteen states, and a sure bet to be part of the federal government after the national elections in September), the other established parties consider a close association with the AfD poisonous. (Inside Story reported on the turmoil that ensued last year after a Free Democrat was elected premier of Thuringia with the help of Christian Democrats and the AfD.)

The fates of Trump and Salvini are no necessary guide to what will become of the AfD. Its isolation makes its case unique among right-wing populist parties and movements. Elsewhere, the rise of right-wing populism increased the chances of populists taking power; in Germany, that is not an option. In some European countries, right-wing populists came to power indirectly because other political leaders adopted their key policies in an attempt to deprive them of oxygen. Danish Social Democrat leader Mette Frederiksen and Austrian People’s Party leader Sebastian Kurz, for example, embraced far-right positions on immigration. A similar thing happened way back in the late 1990s in Australia, when prime minister John Howard attempted to neutralise Pauline Hanson’s appeal. Thus far, the German Christian Democrats have not given in to the temptation to copy key planks of the AfD’s platform. It is unlikely they will do so any time soon.

Björn Höcke was right in his analysis of the recent election results: it doesn’t matter to the AfD who forms the next government in Rhineland-Palatinate or in Baden-Württemberg. Nor, in order to predict the party’s fortunes and future role, is it necessary to know who will win the upcoming elections in September. The AfD won’t be invited to help form a government, and it hardly matters to its leaders whether Angela Merkel’s successor will be the Christian Democrat Armin Laschet or his Bavarian colleague Markus Söder — or Annalena Baerbock or Robert Habeck from the Greens.

For the AfD, this year’s crucial elections will happen in December, when the party selects its leadership team. It may well be that its transformation will be complete by then, and there will no longer be the need for two leaders covering the party’s range of positions. The epithet “populist” may then be less relevant than that of “far right.”

Another reason the outcome of the September elections won’t matter much for the AfD is that whoever forms government will introduce policies to meet the Paris climate agreement’s targets. That will offer an opportunity to the AfD to mobilise climate change sceptics and those who believe they are personally bearing the costs of the government’s policies. Björn Höcke will be hoping that the people, “that big lout,” will then rise up. •

The post Waiting for “that big lout” to rise up appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite growing community support for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, some members of the federal government remain reluctant, echoing prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s immediate dismissal of the proposal as “a radical change to our Constitution’s representative institutions.” Indigenous representative bodies, they say, are “inconsistent” with democracy.

International experience suggests otherwise. Around the globe, this kind of institution is relatively common. In Sweden, Norway and Finland, for example, national representative bodies — Indigenous parliaments, no less — have been set up within the processes of government. The story of these parliaments is complex and their success is mixed, but they throw light on the key challenge that must be resolved if a First Nations Voice is to be effective in Australia.

Sweden’s Sámi parliament, or Sámediggi, was opened in August 1993 with a ceremony led by King Carl XVI Gustaf in Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost city, far above the Arctic Circle. The Sámediggi was designed to enable Sámi people to develop their culture and community on their own terms, and national newspapers remarked on the size of the crowd that day and the colourful, festive atmosphere.

The creation of the Sámediggi both reflected and contributed to a shift in the rights of Indigenous peoples across the Nordic states. Just four years earlier, in October 1989, King Olav V of Norway had presided over the first session of his country’s Sámediggi. In neighbouring Finland, a Sámi representative body had existed since 1973, though its authority was limited to issuing statements on Sámi affairs; in March 1996, less than three years after its Swedish counterpart was established, it was reconstituted and its role enhanced.

Ingwar Åhrén, the first president of the Swedish Sámediggi, hailed these representative bodies as a “milestone” in Sámi self-determination. Twenty-five years later, laws and policies affecting the Sámi still vary across the Nordic states, but these three institutions continue to serve as the main vehicles for self-determination. According to the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, they are important models “that could inspire the development of similar institutions elsewhere in the world.” UN treaty bodies and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples agree.

The Sámediggi represented a new beginning for the relationship between Sweden and the Sámi. But on the very day the parliament opened, three Sámi reindeer herders completed the fifth day of a hunger strike denouncing proposed legislation to divest Sámi of their right to be consulted about the issuing of hunting permits on their traditional lands. As Josef Pittja, one of the hunger strikers, declared, “we have repeatedly asked to be given a say in the new rules but we have been ignored.” The legislation was passed against the wishes of major Sámi organisations and before the Sámediggi could consider it — “a provocation so rough,” according to one national newspaper, “that it is hard to believe it was accidental.”

The Sámediggi clearly faces constraints, and circumstances in Australia are different. So does it offer any lessons for a First Nations Voice?

The Sámediggi is composed of three institutions: an elected thirty-one-member plenary, a board and a secretariat. Elections are held every four years, with the entire country forming a single constituency. Voting is conducted under a system of proportional representation, with no minimum threshold required to secure a seat. All people on the Sámi electoral roll aged eighteen and over are entitled to cast a vote, but to be placed on the roll they must identify as Sámi and satisfy a language-based criterion — by speaking a Sámi language at home, having parents or grandparents who speak a Sámi language at home, or having a parent listed on the roll.

Elected members of the plenary choose a board of directors, which serves as the executive. The board prepares and presents motions, manages financial administration, implements the decisions of the plenary and performs assignments referred to it by the plenary. The chair of the board, also known as the president of the Sámediggi, is elected by the plenary. Although the Swedish government formally appoints a chair of the plenary — a largely symbolic role similar to a speaker of a national assembly — by convention it acts on the nomination of the plenary.

The plenary holds three sessions each year in locations across Sápmi, the traditional lands of the Sámi people. Only the president serves full-time. No budget exists to employ parliamentary staff, but representatives are compensated for loss of income during plenary sessions.

A secretariat of around fifty staff, employed through the civil service and headed by a chief secretary, assists the plenary and board. This arrangement reflects the fact that the Sámediggi is an elected government agency. Housed within Sweden’s culture ministry, the secretariat’s principal role is to monitor issues related to Sámi culture in Sweden. It also cooperates and collaborates with its Norwegian and Finnish counterparts, as well as colleagues in Russia, to protect and promote Sámi rights.

This institutional structure is a novel attempt to make Indigenous voices heard in the processes of government. But the Sámediggi’s legal status suggests some complications. It is both a popularly elected parliament representing the Sámi in Sweden and a state authority required to observe objectivity and operate under close regulation.

How does this conflicted legal position play out in practice? On one level, the Sámediggi appears well positioned to empower Sweden’s Sámi. Its legislation gives it responsibility for “providing information on Sámi conditions” to relevant decision-makers, and “ensuring that Sámi needs are considered.” But despite this structural hook and an ostensibly accommodative political culture, the Sámediggi often struggles to ensure Sámi voices are heard.

While divisions within the Sámi community can complicate the Sámediggi’s capacity to articulate a clear position to government, the more significant challenge is the Swedish state’s approach to the parliament. Without an enforceable obligation to engage with the Sámediggi, too often the government simply ignores it.

Like all substantial political communities, the Sámi are not homogeneous in their political attitudes. The Sámediggi’s proportional representation electoral system has enabled a diverse cast of candidates and parties to secure seats. In the first election held in 1993, the thirty-one seats were distributed among eleven different parties; in the most recent election, in 2017, nine political parties secured representation. But the multiplicity of views can make it difficult for the Sámediggi to speak authoritatively, weakening its impact. Although this tension is inherent in any representative institution, it is more problematic for Indigenous representative bodies designed to channel distinctive minority views to government.

But the process can work smoothly, and the parliament has successfully used its structural link with government to influence proposals. In 2009, for example, the Sámediggi heavily criticised a draft bill purportedly aimed at bringing Swedish laws into conformity with the International Labour Organization’s convention 169. The government withdrew the bill and announced its intention to substantially revise the proposal.

At other times, the Sámediggi’s lobbying has been less successful. In 2008, for instance, the government shelved a proposal to define the Sámi as an Indigenous people in the Swedish constitution, affording them a distinctive position within the state. It proposed instead to add the Sámi to the list of minorities whose rights are protected in the constitution. The Sámediggi criticised this approach, but the government dismissed its push to adopt language that stipulates the Sámi’s special status.

In other words, the Sámi might not always be successful in influencing government, but the Sámediggi means their interests are heard in decisions that affect them. Yet the gaps in the system are significant.

Under the Swedish Minerals Act 1991, for instance, no consultation with the Sámediggi or relevant Sámi communities is required before an exploration permit is issued, even if the permit area covers traditional Sámi territory. While affected communities are entitled to comment on proposed exploration work, the chief mining inspector can approve projects using a test that strongly favours exploration. Under the Forestry Act 1979, affected communities must be consulted about tree-felling permits in year-round reindeer grazing areas but not in winter grazing areas. And even on year-round grazing areas, Sámi participants report that they have “very few” opportunities to influence proposals.

Reflecting on these and other examples, many scholars and members of the Sámediggi have expressed concern about the parliament’s effectiveness. The UN Human Rights Committee has criticised the “limited extent to which the Sámi Parliament may participate in the decision-making process on issues affecting land and traditional activities of the Sámi people.” The UN special rapporteur has reported that the Sámediggi itself is concerned by a lack of “guaranteed genuine influence or decision-making power.”

Part of the problem may be an absence of structures to promote dialogue. A 2010 report by the Swedish Agency for Public Management found that informal contacts between the government and the Sámediggi are “limited” and formal discussions are scheduled only annually and not always well attended.

A general responsibility to consult the Sámediggi has been considered and rejected several times by the Swedish government. Before the parliament was created, the government considered that consultation would occur naturally, as did the commission designing the parliament. The Sámi Rights Commission assumed that political practice would lead the Sámediggi to “acquire the status of an obligatory advisory body.” In 2002, the government acknowledged that this had not occurred, but reiterated its position. In 2006 and 2009, it again rejected proposals to impose a general consultative obligation, contending it would “represent an excessive change.”

This view may be shifting. In 2017, the culture department released a ministerial report acknowledging that consultation is not carried out in a “consistent and comprehensive way” and is “not sufficient to ensure Sámi influence.” It proposed a draft consultation law that would oblige all levels of government and state administrative authorities to consult the Sámediggi and relevant Sámi communities in matters of particular relevance to them. Consultation would be undertaken in good faith, with the intention to reach an agreement, and would be documented to reveal how genuine the process was. The report also recognised that the Sámediggi and other Sámi organisations would require better funding to effectively manage an enlarged workload.

The consultative arrangement fell off the agenda following the Swedish general election in 2018 and has not been revived. The legal onus remains on the Sámediggi to initiate consultation, with little guarantee that its position will be considered. The capacity for Sámi voices to be heard would obviously be enhanced by a political agreement or legal requirement that national, regional and local decision-makers consult at an early stage on issues that affect Sámi interests and publicly identify how those interests were considered and how they influenced the decision adopted.

Can we draw direct conclusions for the design of a First Nations Voice? The Sámediggi’s experience suggests two points: meaningful consultation is key to the effectiveness of Indigenous representative bodies; and, on certain matters at least, governments will only consult Indigenous representative bodies if they are legally obliged or politically compelled to do so.

The Australian government or parliament can’t be required to engage with a First Nations Voice, and the experiences of previous national Indigenous representative bodies in Australia suggests that the new body could lack influence. It’s for this reason that the Uluru Statement called for a constitutionally entrenched First Nations Voice.

A grassroots popular campaign leading to successful constitutional reform could place considerable moral and political pressure on the federal government and parliament to listen to and engage meaningfully with the body. The government wouldn’t be legally required to consult, but the Australian people would expect it to do just that. The experience of the Swedish Sámediggi suggests that constitutional entrenchment is vital if a First Nations Voice is to succeed. •

The post The Sámi’s voice appeared first on Inside Story.

Her nomination by the European Council in July last year seemed less about her personal qualities and expertise than about the hostility of influential council members, including French president Emmanuel Macron, towards Weber and/or Timmermans. Last week, however, von der Leyen demonstrated that her previous assignment, as German defence minister, had prepared her well for the top job in Brussels. Only fatigues, helmet and flak jacket were missing when she fronted the press to declare Europe’s support for Greece’s treat response to refugees arriving from Turkey. The tone was befitting a general’s calm assessment of a grave threat.

“We… have seen how tense and how difficult the situation is,” she told journalists. “The Greek authorities are facing a very difficult task in containing the situation… I am fully committed to mobilising all the necessary operational support to the Greek authorities.” Flanked — and dwarfed — by Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Croatian prime minister Andrej Plenković, European Council president Charles Michel and the president of the European parliament, David Sassoli, she was nevertheless obviously in charge when she decreed: “We will hold the line and our unity will prevail.” She ended her brief statement by thanking “Greece for being our European ασπίδα in these times.”

Her statement assumed that Europe needs a Greek ασπίδα, or shield, because Greece is defending Europe’s borders. Just a few days earlier, on 28 February, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had announced that Turkey would no longer prevent asylum seekers from crossing into neighbouring Greece or Bulgaria. Thousands of them, many of them Afghans and Iranians who don’t enjoy the limited protection available to Syrian refugees in Turkey, immediately rushed to the Turkish–Greek border, some of them on board free buses provided by the Turkish authorities to ferry migrants from Istanbul.

The Greeks responded by closing their border and deploying additional military units and border police to guard it. Greek security forces then repelled prospective intruders by firing tear gas canisters and stun grenades. According to a report in the German magazine Spiegel, a twenty-two-year-old Syrian man died after being hit by a bullet. Turkish sources claim he wasn’t the only casualty. All those who had managed to cross the land border but had been picked up by the Greek police were immediately returned to Turkey, often after being beaten up by police or border guards. Greece also announced that it would accept no new asylum applications.

Von der Leyen’s use of the term ασπίδα may have been meant as a reference to Operation Aspida, which was launched in 2012 by the government of Antonis Samaras, Mitsotakis’s predecessor as leader of Greece’s conservative New Democracy party. Then, too, Greece’s European partners expected it to control a section of the EU’s external border: a 200-kilometre stretch mostly marked by the river Evros, which divides Greek West Thrace from Turkish East Thrace. Operation Aspida involved the construction of a barbed wire fence and the deployment of an additional 1800 border guards to keep out refugees and other irregularised migrants. It was accompanied by Operation Xenios Zeus, which was aimed at detecting — and then detaining — migrants living without a visa in Greek cities. Both operations were terminated when left-wing Alexis Tsipras replaced Samaras as prime minister in 2015.

I suspect Mitsotakis and his cabinet associate the term ασπίδα not only with the securitisation of the border eight years ago but also with an earlier effort to keep Asian invaders out of Europe, 2500 years ago. “Who doesn’t understand that this is a normal Turkish invasion?” Adonis Georgiadis, vice-president of New Democracy and minister for development in the current government, tweeted last week. As far as invasions from an Asian neighbour are concerned, perhaps none is better remembered — in Greece and elsewhere — than that of the Persians in 480 BCE. Then, a small Greek force led by King Leonidas of Sparta held up the vastly superior Persian army at the pass of Thermopylae. While their famous last stand only delayed the Persian advance, it allowed the Greek forces to regroup; the following year the Persians were decisively beaten and had to withdraw.

The Greek far right has frequently drawn on the history of Leonidas’s last stand to argue that all “illegal immigrants” need to be deported. The Golden Dawn, the fascist party that until last year held eighteen seats in Greece’s parliament, used to gather regularly at Thermopylae. References to Thermopylae are also used by the far right outside Greece. Last week, for example, a contributor to the white supremacist website VDare wrote: “Like their ancestors at Thermopylae, Greeks are trying to repel an Asiatic invasion… Western Civilisation began with ancient Greece. And it might end with the Third Hellenic Republic if the West doesn’t fight back.”

The river Evros is one of the sites where a replay of the battle of Thermopylae is now being imagined. The other is the Aegean Sea, or rather those of the Greek islands that lie only a few kilometres from the Turkish mainland. There, the heroics of the defenders of Greece against the imagined invasion include burning down facilities operated by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and the Swiss charity One Happy Family, assaults on journalists and aid workers, and attempts to prevent rubber dinghies carrying irregularised migrants from reaching Greek shores.

But it would be unfair to lay the blame for Greece’s hostile response to asylum seekers squarely at the feet of the far right. At the time of Operation Aspida, Human Rights Watch and other non-government organisations accused Samaras’s New Democracy government of violating the human rights of people seeking Europe’s protection, and of forcing desperate people to resort to using riskier routes, thus contributing to a higher number of border-related deaths. Similar accusations can now be levelled at the Mitsotakis government. It has been responsible for pushbacks (which are illegal under international law) and for endangering the lives of people trying to reach Greece by boat.

According to a recent New York Times report, Greece is also maintaining extrajudicial detention centres. It wants to deport to their countries of origin asylum seekers who arrived after 28 February and are being detained on board a Greek navy ship — without formally assessing whether they are owed protection. Police have done little to curb the activities of Greek vigilantes and far-right activists from France and Germany, who have taken it upon themselves to repel or expel asylum seekers and the people helping them.

Von der Leyen did not visit One Happy Family’s torched community centre on Lesvos, and only observed first-hand Greece’s ασπίδα in operation at the river Evros. Yet even there, it should have been obvious to her that the Greeks have been using tear gas and stun grenades to repel desperate migrants, including families with small children. She would certainly have been briefed about Greece’s decision to suspend its refugee determination procedures. But in an attempt to “hold the line,” she offered only praise for the Greek government’s hardline approach, and ignored its flouting of European human rights and refugee law. She presented as a visiting commander-in-chief, inspecting her troops at the southeastern limits of Europe, thereby distinguishing herself from her avuncular predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker. (To be fair, von der Leyen had not sought to become Juncker’s successor; the job she had eyed was that of NATO secretary-general.)

After 28 February, asylum seekers also tried to reach Greek islands just a few kilometres off the Turkish west coast. According to local media reports, 977 people succeeded within the space of twenty-four hours on the first weekend of March alone. Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Kos and some smaller islands were often the first European port of call for Syrian refugees during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–16. It was opposite the island of Kos that Alan Kurdi and his family boarded a small inflatable boat in the early hours of 2 September 2015; for many readers internationally, the photo of three-year-old Alan’s dead body on a Turkish beach would have epitomised the crisis.

Although the number of arrivals dropped sharply in early 2016 after the Balkan route was closed, conditions on the islands went from bad to worse. By the end of last year, the Moria camp on Lesvos, for example, which had been built for 3100 people, accommodated more than 20,000. “The suffering is palpable, the hopelessness is insidious, the feeling of abandonment is all-consuming,” wrote Annie Chapman, an English volunteer doctor working in Moria, in the Guardian in early February. She was particularly concerned about the situation of the most vulnerable camp residents: “Guardians work hard to keep the most vulnerable safe, but… monitoring and care is stretched, and problems continue to spiral. With finite space and an infinite number of increasingly vulnerable people arriving, many minors and women are living alone outside the [secure] sections, at risk of abuse, violence, and systemic failings.”

The conditions have been appalling not least because Moria and other camps have been hopelessly overcrowded. And that’s because the Greek authorities have been slow in processing asylum seekers, and because until very recently they refused to transfer people from Lesvos and other islands to the mainland. Conditions have also been poor because Greece didn’t take full responsibility for the asylum seekers crossing its borders and instead left their care to private agencies, individual volunteers from elsewhere in Europe, and local people.

At the height of the crisis of 2015–16, Greek islanders often welcomed new arrivals — so much so that Lesvos fisherman Stratis Valamios and eighty-six-year-old Lesvos islander Emilia Kamvysi were among the favourites to win the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize. Pundits assumed the extraordinary hospitality of the islanders would have to be acknowledged. But the arrival numbers kept growing and, with the Greek government failing to transfer people to the mainland, many islanders began to resent their presence. The islanders’ anger was initially directed at the authorities, but its target has shifted to the unwanted foreigners themselves. The Greek government saw no need to defuse the situation on the islands. It was demanding that other EU member states accommodate some of its asylum seekers and probably calculated that images of suffering children were aiding its cause.

Elsewhere in Europe, the appalling conditions on Lesvos have been a symbol of the failure of Europe’s asylum seeker policy for at least the past two years. In Germany, in particular, civil society groups have demanded that asylum seekers be evacuated from the islands and, if necessary, accommodated in Germany. Two years ago in Hamburg, for example, a coalition of civil society groups calling itself Hamburg hat Platz (Hamburg has space) began demanding that the state government agree to the resettlement of 1000 additional refugees from Greece.

Städte Sicherer Häfen (Safe Harbour Cities), a 140-strong network of German towns and cities formed last year in response to Italy’s refusal to let migrants rescued in the Mediterranean disembark, was also ready to welcome asylum seekers and refugees, including people accommodated in Moria and other overcrowded camps in Greece. Network members have been willing to accommodate asylum seekers over and above those assigned to them by Germany’s federal and state governments under a quota system.

These calls became louder towards the end of last year. Just before Christmas, Robert Habeck, the co-leader of the Greens, gave a much-quoted interview to the Sunday paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Asked what he thought of the Greek prime minister’s repeated call that other European countries relieve Greece’s burden, Habeck said, “First, get the kids out. Around 4000 children crowd on the islands. Lots of girls, lots of fragile little people. Our humanity demands that we help quickly.” His sentiments were widely echoed, although it was not clear whether he meant unaccompanied minors or children more generally.

Among those backing Habeck’s call was Heribert Prantl, a senior journalist with the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung. He called the German government’s inaction “criminal” and likened the children on Lesvos to the infant Jesus, pointing out that the latter too had not been a Christian. Although the government rejected Habeck’s call, its timing (which meant that the children in Moria became associated with Mary’s child in Bethlehem) generated significant momentum, shifting the German debate. The issue was no longer whether to assist Greece and accommodate some of the asylum seekers stranded there, but when to evacuate vulnerable children.

The images of asylum seekers being tear gassed at the Greek land border focused the attention of critical European publics on several linked issues: Europe’s failure to develop a new common asylum system that could replace the existing Dublin regulations; the humanitarian crisis in Idlib that prompted Erdoğan to blackmail the European Union by unleashing a wave of irregularised migrants in its direction; the fact that Turkey is currently hosting more asylum seekers and refugees than any other country; the shortcomings and potential collapse of the refugee deal between the European Union and Turkey; and the intolerable conditions in Greek refugee camps.

In Germany, the spectacle of stun grenades being lobbed in the direction of unarmed men, women and children sparked demonstrations and pledges by mayors and state premiers to accommodate asylum seekers from Greece. The day after the first images of violence at the Turkish–Greek border appeared on German television screens, spontaneous demonstrations and vigils in support of a more generous German policy were held in nineteen German cities. More such rallies occurred over the following days. On 7 March, for example, some 5000 people took to the streets in Hamburg, and 4000 in Berlin.

Predictably, representatives of the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany, or AfD, called for sanctions against Turkey, categorically rejected calls to admit children from Greece (calling them, borrowing a term used by Donald Trump and the Australian government, “anchor children”) and suspected a plot that would allow the German government to let in yet more people of the wrong colour and religion. They also showed their solidarity with Greece (the same country, by the way, whose people were accused not so long ago by AfD politicians of being lazy and undeserving of a bailout by fellow eurozone countries).

Perhaps surprisingly, however, many ordinary Germans remain open to the idea of resettling refugees from Turkey or Greece. In a reputable survey conducted three days after Erdoğan’s announcement, 57 per cent of respondents concurred with the following statement: “The refugees ought to be allowed to cross the border into Greece, and afterwards should be divided among the EU member states.” And 48 per cent thought that “Countries such as Germany and France should take in refugees, even if other EU member states are opposed to that.”

Last week in parliament, the Greens put forward a resolution calling for the admission of 5000 children and other vulnerable asylum seekers from Greece, an issue over which the governing coalition has been divided. Most Social Democrats want Germany to admit a sizeable number of asylum seekers from Greece. They agree that states and local councils prepared to take in extra people should be encouraged and enabled to do so. Speaking in his capacity as interior minister of Lower Saxony, prominent Social Democrat Boris Pistorius pleaded with the federal government to allow the states to go it alone and lead a coalition of the willing within the European Union.

The Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, have been saying that there must be no repeat of 2015: of the mass influx and the ensuing debate that divided the country and damaged the party’s brand. But they too were divided. Of the two main contenders for the party leadership, one, the conservative Friedrich Merz, opposes Germany taking in any asylum seekers whatsoever from Greece, whereas the other, the North Rhine-Westfalian premier Armin Laschet, who is considered to be a loyal Merkel supporter, advocates a more generous approach. The issue has also created unusual alliances: at a recent meeting of the parliamentary party, it was Merkel’s bête noire, interior minister Horst Seehofer, who defended her record and objected when it was suggested that Germans did not want any more refugees. Merkel herself has remained largely silent on the issue.

In the end, with the exception of eight members of the governing coalition who either abstained or voted against the government, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats toed the government line: that a German initiative could only happen as part of an EU initiative. Last Sunday, though, the Koalitionsausschuss — a committee comprising the leaders of the three governing parties together with Merkel and her deputy, Social Democratic finance minister Olaf Scholz — agreed that Germany would, after all, go ahead and accommodate between 1000 and 1500 children from Greece on the basis that a handful of other EU governments signed up to a joint initiative. By then, that condition had already been met, with France, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg and Croatia indicating they were willing to help out.

Given the size of the problem, though, the capacity of countries such as Germany and the willingness of municipalities to help, the evacuation of perhaps no more than 2500 children and other particularly vulnerable asylum seekers from Greece would be largely symbolic. Besides, it remains to be seen whether the promises will be kept. It wouldn’t be the first pledge by EU member states to resettle refugees and asylum seekers, or fund programs to assist them, to be left unfulfilled.

“We will hold the line and our unity will prevail,” Ursula von der Leyen said last week in Greece. “Now is the time for concerted action and cool heads and acting based on our values.” Given the uncompromising attitudes of Hungary and other Eastern European EU member states, a joint European approach that respects the rights of asylum seekers and other irregularised migrants — an approach that is indeed guided by their rights — is unrealistic. “Our unity” therefore means unanimous support for the response summed up by von der Leyen in Greece: a show of solidarity with Greece, a commitment to sealing the European Union’s external borders for asylum seekers, and — publicly at least — a shying away from criticising the Greek government’s flagrant violations of EU human rights and refugee law.

This is not an approach that would uphold the values considered intrinsic to the European project, enshrined in Article 2 of the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon:

The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.

In 2015, at the height of the last large-scale influx of asylum seekers, von der Leyen was one of the staunchest defenders of Angela Merkel’s decision not to close the German border. She strongly supported the sentiments encapsulated in Merkel’s famous statement, “Wir schaffen das” (we are able to do this). Perhaps she adopted the persona of Europe’s commander-in-chief last week because she sensed that this was the only way she could speak for all EU member states. If so, then von der Leyen made the mistake of identifying the smallest common denominator and thus mirroring the views of the likes of Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who are obsessed with “illegal immigration.” The current leadership of von der Leyen’s party, Germany’s Christian Democrats, may also have made the mistake of assuming that a simple majority would not be sufficient when it comes to deciding to take in additional asylum seekers and refugees, and that nothing short of unanimity would be required for such a momentous decision.

Von der Leyen made another mistake by focusing exclusively on the member states’ national governments. More so than most, she should know that an alternative approach is available, one in which European cities and regions are empowered to respond to situations such as those unfolding on Lesvos, thereby upholding the values spelled out in Article 2 of the Lisbon treaty. That’s to do with her family history. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was also a prominent Christian Democrat. Six years after his return from Brussels, where he had headed the Directorate-General for Competition, Albrecht became the premier of Lower Saxony. Today he is perhaps best remembered for his unfortunate commitment to building a nuclear waste facility in his state.

But Albrecht should also be remembered for his decision, on 24 November 1978, to invite 1000 Indochinese “boat people” to settle in Lower Saxony. This was well above the number allocated to Lower Saxony by the federal government. In fact, in the previous three-and-a-half years, since the end of the Vietnam war, West Germany as a whole had taken in a total of only 1300 Vietnamese refugees. Albrecht and his state government subsequently decided to accommodate further contingents of “boat people.” He also prompted fellow state premiers to follow his example, was a supporter of the charity operating the Cap Anamur, which carried out search-and-rescue missions in the South China Sea, and lobbied conservative politicians in Europe in support of a European rescue mission for “boat people.”

If the German government is concerned about the backlash against the arrival of a sizeable number of asylum seekers in, say, Saxony, it could take up the offers of the eight German states and 140 cities and towns that so far have pledged to go it alone if a national consensus couldn’t be reached. They include, for example, the state government of Berlin, which has said that it has the capacity to take in 2000 people from Greece, including 150 unaccompanied minors, immediately.

German cities are not the only ones offering a safe harbour for asylum seekers and refugees. A network similar to Städte Sicherer Häfen, the Association Nationale des Villes et Territoires Accueillants (National Association of Welcoming Cities and Territories), exists in France. At the European level, sixty municipalities are part of the European Network of Solidarity Cities. It includes, among others, Amsterdam and Milan, Barcelona and Gdansk, Strasbourg and Munich. Incidentally, it also includes Athens and Thessaloniki, the two largest cities in Greece.

Ursula von der Leyen’s performance in Greece last week and the subsequent arguments over the evacuation of children from the Aegean islands suggest that Europe is in a bad way. “Respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights” don’t seem to count for much. But things are not entirely dire: an alternative Europe — as evident in Athens and Amsterdam, Barcelona and Berlin — is slowly emerging. But that’s no comfort for those stuck in Moria, wedged between Greek and Turkish border guards at the river Evros, or forgotten in all the other camps at or beyond Europe’s borders that never make it onto the evening news. •

The post In defence of Europe appeared first on Inside Story.

What happened? Until last October, the East German state was governed by a coalition made up of the left-wing Die Linke, the Social Democrats and the Greens. Bodo Ramelow, leader of the senior partner in that coalition, served as state premier. Ramelow, a former trade union official who moved from West Germany to Thuringia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the first Die Linke leader to preside over a German state government.

When Thuringia voted on 27 October last year, Die Linke became the strongest party in state parliament. But its partners both lost seats, and the Red–Red–Green coalition lost its majority. The biggest losers, though, were the governing Christian Democrats, who crashed from 33.5 to 21.7 per cent. Apart from Die Linke, two other parties could claim to be winners: the liberal Free Democrats, who hadn’t been represented in the 2014–19 parliament but now cleared the 5 per cent threshold, albeit by a mere seventy-three votes, and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, which more than doubled its previous vote and beat the Christian Democrats into third place.

Both the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats had ruled out coalitions with Die Linke and the AfD, but between them the latter two parties occupied fifty-one of the ninety seats in parliament. This meant that no feasible combination of parties could command a majority in parliament. For the time being, the Ramelow government remained in office.

Not all Christian Democrats in Thuringia were opposed to the idea of supporting a Ramelow-led minority government. This was largely because politicians tend to have an eye on public sentiment. The Linke leader is immensely popular in Thuringia; according to a poll conducted at the end of January, 71 per cent of respondents approved of his performance as premier and 60 per cent said they would vote for him if the premier were popularly elected. Even among Christian Democrat voters, Ramelow is the most popular politician and remains the preferred state premier.

That’s not the only reason why some Christian Democrats have been open to deals with Die Linke despite the fact that it is the successor of the Socialist Unity Party, which ran the German Democratic Republic until 1990. The Christian Democrats in Thuringia are also a successor party — to the East German Christian Democrats. They were once one of the four non-communist Blockparteien, which were represented in parliament and supported the East German regime. Those of today’s party members who belonged to the pre-1990 East German Christian Democrats may well remember the close working relationship their party had with the Socialist Unity Party — and thus with some of the people who ended up with Die Linke.

But however much some of Thuringia’s Christian Democrats would have liked to cooperate with a government led by Ramelow, they were not allowed to do so, because their party headquarters in Berlin has categorically ruled out any deal, anywhere, with AfD or Die Linke.

Notwithstanding the lack of a clear mandate, a Ramelow government remained an option. That’s because the state’s constitution allows for a premier to be elected with a simple majority of parliamentary votes as long as two rounds fail to produce an absolute majority for a candidate. Die Linke, the Social Democrats and the Greens were confident that it would come to that — and that a minority government would work because it would solicit the support of Free Democrats or Christian Democrats on a case-by-case basis.

The election of the new premier was scheduled for 5 February. In the first two rounds of voting, Ramelow won comfortably against the candidate of the AfD, Christoph Kindervater, the mayor of a small village in Thuringia, who isn’t actually a member of the AfD. As expected, though, Ramelow failed to gain an absolute majority in either round because nearly all Free Democrats and Christian Democrats abstained. In the third round, Ramelow suddenly faced two challengers: Kindervater and the leader of the Free Democrats, Thomas Kemmerich. Much to the consternation of members of the Red–Red–Green coalition, Kemmerich won. Having formally accepted the position, he was duly sworn in as Thuringia’s new premier.

Kemmerich’s election was only possible for one reason: all AfD members of parliament voted for him rather than for their own candidate. He was also supported by all but three Christian Democrats, who were no longer abstaining.

Kemmerich’s candidature had not been a spontaneous decision; in fact, the AfD, knowing that he would stand, had executed a clever plan to prevent the re-election of Ramelow while allowing the far-right party to claim that it was simply part of a conservative bloc whose candidate won.

All hell broke loose after Kemmerich’s election. The outrage on the left side of politics was perhaps best epitomised by the response of Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, the parliamentary leader of Die Linke, who, rather than congratulate the new premier, threw a bouquet of flowers at his feet.

As far as Kemmerich himself was concerned, he had been democratically elected. He said he did not intend to govern with, or even courtesy of, the AfD and announced that he would seek talks with Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens to put together a cabinet. But the Social Democrats and the Greens immediately declined the invitation. Even the Christian Democrats, who after all had voted for Kemmerich, suddenly realised that they could not support a government led by him.

Kemmerich was born in Aachen, a city in Rhineland, in the west of West Germany. When he moved to Thuringia after the fall of the Wall, he brought a key element of Rhineland culture with him: carnival. According to its supporters, carnival allows people to be irreverent and call a spade a spade. Its detractors would argue that it encourages people to make tasteless jokes. His response on 5 February suggested that he might have thought of his election — at the height of the carnival season — as a great joke, and if others did not get it, he could simply resign as if the joke had never been made. But nobody outside Thuringia’s Free Democrats and Christian Democrats was prepared to treat his candidature in that way.

The outcry over Kemmerich’s election — and even more so over his decision to accept the result — was also deafening among conservatives. The Free Democrats and the Christian Democrats in Thuringia were not the only targets of sustained criticism. Those who had congratulated Kemmerich immediately after the vote were also in trouble. Among them was the federal government’s high-profile special envoy for East Germany, the Christian Democrat Christian Hirte, who had posted a tweet congratulating Kemmerich for his election “as a candidate of the [political] centre” and wishing him success for the “difficult task” ahead. Angela Merkel considered the tweet a sackable offence and promptly replaced Hirte.

The most important collateral damage of Kemmerich’s election was the national leader of the Christian Democrats, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer — or AKK, as she is usually referred to in Germany. Although she had distanced herself from the actions of her colleagues in Thuringia, she had been unable to stop them, and afterwards was unable to convince them to toe the party line and agree to fresh elections. Five days after the debacle in Thuringia’s parliament, she announced that she would not seek to succeed as chancellor and would resign as leader of the party once she steered it through the process of nominating a candidate for the chancellorship at the 2021 federal elections.

Like Kemmerich, AKK is a carnival tragic. In fact, before her elevation to the position of general secretary of the Christian Democrats in 2018 — when she was premier of Saarland, a state even smaller than Thuringia — she was known also for the irreverent (or tasteless) jokes she made as Putzfrau Gretel (Cleaning-Woman Gretel), a persona she used during the carnival season. Leaning on her broom, she would pontificate about the world and make her audience laugh. She seems to have left the broom behind when she moved to Berlin, where it could have been used to rid the Christian Democrats of their closet AfD bedfellows.

AKK’s lack of resolve and authority was put into sharp relief by two of her allies: first, by the premier of Bavaria, Markus Söder of the conservative Christian Social Union, who within minutes of the vote lambasted the behaviour of Free Democrats and Christian Democrats in Thuringia; and then by the German chancellor, who was on a state visit in South Africa as events unfolded in Thuringia. Often considered a ditherer, Merkel was quick to respond in unequivocal terms, calling the local Christian Democrats’ decision to vote for Kemmerich “inexcusable.”

On 8 February, only three days after his election, Kemmerich resigned at the urging of his own party. After initially hedging his bets, leader Christian Lindner had joined the chorus of those condemning Kemmerich’s election. Lindner was being true to form; in 2017, having decided to call off coalition negotiations between the Free Democrats, the Christian Democrats and the Greens in Berlin, he famously said, “It’s better not to govern, than to govern wrongly.” But his position, much like AKK’s, may turn out to have been irreparably damaged by the events in Thuringia.

What explains the extent of the outrage at Kemmerich’s decision to stand, and to accept his election?

In today’s Germany, it’s taboo for politicians belonging to Die Linke, the Social Democrats, the Greens, the Free Democrats, and the Christian Democrats or their sister party, the Christian Social Union, to collaborate with the AfD. This means that these parties are committed not to enter into agreements with the AfD and not to rely on the AfD’s votes — at the national, the state or the local level — to pass legislation. To depend on the support of AfD parliamentarians in a vote as crucial as that of 5 February in Thuringia was a violation of that taboo. The term most often used to describe what had happened was Dammbruch, a breaching of the dam.

The violation was perceived particularly acutely because Thuringia’s AfD is led by Björn Höcke, the poster boy of the AfD’s extremist Flügel faction, who according to a recent court ruling may be called a “fascist,” and whose words and deeds are closely monitored by the Bundesverfassungsschutz, Germany’s federal intelligence agency.

Taboos proscribe human behaviour that is ostensibly repulsive but might be considered attractive, at least by some. No taboo is needed, for example, to stop parliamentarians from using their speeches to abuse the people who voted for them — simply because it would not occur to politicians to do that. But the idea of forming an alliance with the AfD is sufficiently attractive, if only to some, that it requires a taboo to stop them from acting impulsively.

Despite its speed, intensity and near unanimity, the response to Kemmerich’s election doesn’t prove that a collaboration between, say, the Free Democrats and the AfD is unthinkable in today’s Germany. In East Germany, in particular, several prominent members of the Christian Democrats have questioned their party’s official line that it must not collaborate with the AfD. This is despite the fact that in the East German states the AfD tends to be far more radical than in West Germany. Advocates of a rapprochement between Christian Democrats and the far right have included the leader of the Christian Democrats’ parliamentary party in Saxony, Christian Hartmann, and key Christian Democrats in the East German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Prominent members of a 4000-strong network of self-confessed conservatives associated with the Christian Democrats, the Werte-Union, have also repeatedly argued that the differences between AfD and the Christian Democrats could be easily bridged.

But whenever such arguments have been made, they have met with a firm response from Christian Democrat leaders, including AKK and Merkel. After the Werte-Union welcomed Kemmerich’s election, for example, other Christian Democrats demanded that the party dissociate itself from that group (and possibly expel all its members), which compelled the conservative network hastily to endorse the party line and categorically rule out any collaboration with the AfD.

Thuringia’s Christian Democrats have convincingly argued that they had held no talks with the AfD prior to Kemmerich’s election. While they didn’t collaborate with the far right, though, they did collude with them. At the national or state level, this had never happened before. But at the local level, particularly in East German district and town councils, Christian Democrats have often collaborated, cooperated or colluded with AfD representatives. In local parliaments, the “dams” and “firewalls” conjured by AKK and others have been far less important. But local arrangements between Christian Democrats and the AfD have been informal and have usually been struck outside the media spotlight.

Elsewhere in Europe, the taboo that governs the relations between the democratic parties and the far right hardly exists at all. Last week, in an interview with the German news magazine Spiegel, Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin wouldn’t exclude the possibility that her Social Democratic Party would cooperate with the True Finns, the Finnish equivalent of the AfD. People in Finland expected politicians to identify solutions to pressing problems, she explained, rather than engage in ideological battles. In Denmark, centre-right minority governments have relied on the support of the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party for fifteen of the past twenty years. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party was the minor partner in conservative-led governments from 2000 until 2005 and again from 2017 until last year.

Why, then, do the overwhelming majority of German centre-right politicians, let alone Social Democrats and Greens, shun the AfD? Much of their response reflects a particular view of what happened towards the end of the Weimar Republic, when Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party — intent on replacing democracy, much like Björn Höcke’s AfD — came to power not least because it was tolerated by many conservatives.

In fact, the key historical moment that is often referenced in discussions about the ramifications of Kemmerich’s election happened in Thuringia. There, at the 1929 state elections, the Nazis won 11.3 per cent and the governing conservative coalition lost its majority. Rather than trying to form a coalition with the Social Democrats (which was then by far the largest party in state parliament), the conservatives opted to collaborate with the Nazis. In 1930, Hitler’s henchman Wilhelm Frick, who was later hanged as a war criminal, became Thuringia’s minister for education and the interior and set about “cleansing” the public service. The conservatives, who thought they had successfully co-opted the Nazis in Thuringia, tried to do so again three years later at the national level, thus paving the way for Hitler to become chancellor.

The historical analogy is, at best, problematic. Thuringia in 2019–20 bears little resemblance to Thuringia in 1929–30. Then, the conservative forces were not committed to democracy; nor, at the other end of the political spectrum, was the Communist Party. In today’s Germany, democratic ideals and a commitment to human rights and the rule of law are far more entrenched than they were during the Weimar Republic.

It is true, though, that Höcke’s AfD has borrowed some of the Nazis’ vocabulary. Much like them, the AfD is anti-democratic (and thus Kemmerich’s claim to have been “democratically elected” was not true in the sense that he had not been elected by people who believed in democracy). Much like Hitler wanted to destroy the Weimar Republic, Höcke and other Flügel representatives aim to tear down the Berlin Republic. And like Hitler’s party, Höcke’s AfD wants to become respectable and be taken seriously as a viable and legitimate alternative to the centre-right parties only in order to supplant not just these parties but all democratic structures.

Kemmerich and Thuringia’s Christian Democrats would have done well to cast their eyes back to the outcome of the 1929 elections, and to the successful attempts of a far-right party to use the conservatives’ loathing of the left to their advantage.

The taboo that prevents Christian Democrats and others from collaborating with the AfD is only part of the story; in fact, it obscures what might prove a more important issue, the question of whether the democratic parties are adopting views held by the AfD.

None of the parties outside the AfD has ruled out embracing positions of the populist far right. Obviously, a categorical refusal to advocate a particular stance on the sole grounds that it has been endorsed by the AfD would make little sense. But how about positions that are, for example, anti-democratic or racist — that is, positions that are an integral part of the far-right mix?

In the past, many prominent Christian Democrats, as well as some Social Democrats and Free Democrats, held views that are now principally associated with the far right. Occasionally, they also formed alliances with groups that were committed to particular varieties of right-wing extremism, without necessarily being likened to the Nazi Party. The first time the Christian Democrats collaborated with radical right-wing populists was not the election of Kemmerich in 2020 but the formation of a coalition government between the Hamburg Christian Democrats and the so-called Schill Party, led by the extremist law-and-order advocate Ronald Schill, in 2001. (While Kemmerich’s tenure lasted only three days, the government of the Christian Democrats and the Schill Party was in office for more than two years.)

Before the emergence and rapid rise of the AfD in 2013, Christian Democrats sometimes justified embracing extremist positions by arguing that a major conservative party needed to cover the entire right of the political spectrum, if only to deprive more radical alternatives of oxygen. The long-time leader of the Christian Social Union, Franz Josef Strauß, famously said that “there must not be a democratically legitimated party to the right of the Christian Social Union.”

Since it became obvious that the AfD is here to stay, Christian Democrats have put forward two arguments against adopting AfD positions. One is that the right-wing extremism often embraced by conservative politicians like Strauß is no longer compatible with the principles of a centre-right party. This is an argument made by Angela Merkel, among others. For her, she said in 2016, Strauß’s dictum was valid only as long it was possible to remain true to Christian Democratic principles. At the time, she had in mind the opposition to her asylum policy led by politicians of the Christian Social Union, including Merkel’s own interior minister Horst Seehofer. Christian Democrats who make the same argument, such as Daniel Günther, the premier of Schleswig-Holstein, tend to identify as liberals.

The other argument is strategic. Strauß and others were convinced that far-right parties could be kept small if they were unable to claim that they alone championed particular extremist views. The evidence from Bavaria largely supported this argument: only once, in 1966, did a far-right party manage to win seats in state parliament. But this stance came at a price: it positioned Strauß’s party to the right of all others represented in federal parliament; his image as a politician toying with ideas that were otherwise associated with the far right ensured that the conservatives, led by Strauß as their candidate for chancellor, lost the 1980 elections.

Markus Söder, the current leader of the Christian Social Union, was long a faithful Strauß disciple. In 2016, for example, he demanded to “end the asylum tourism” in the expectation that such statements would appeal to prospective AfD voters. But just ahead of the 2018 state elections in Bavaria, Söder realised that Strauß’s strategy no longer worked. He made an about turn, drew a clear line between the Christian Social Union and the AfD, regained the support of traditional conservatives who had threatened to vote for the Greens, and thereby ensured that his party remained the dominant force in Bavaria. Since then, another deeply conservative state premier, Saxony’s Michael Kretschmer, has also won a state election by distancing himself from the AfD.

At present, the leading politicians of the Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union agree that their parties should reject extremist positions advocated by the AfD — whether it’s because they believe, as Günther does, that their party ought to occupy the political centre and be open to progressive ideas, or because they are convinced that Söder’s und Kretschmer’s strategy has worked. But AKK’s retreat will reignite debates about principles and strategies. If the Christian Democrats ultimately reject both Günther’s and Söder’s arguments, then the taboo on cooperation would no longer hold. It would make little sense to embrace the AfD’s positions but refuse to form an alliance with a party representing up to a quarter of the electorate.

Outside Germany, too, the question of whether conservative parties should embrace the demands of the far right is more relevant than the issue of coalitions. But a preparedness to consider coalition governments that include the far right can also pave the way for policy shifts. Denmark is a good example. For years the Danish People’s Party was lent credibility because successive governments relied on its support. The current government of Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen no longer needs the far right to govern, but it has nevertheless adopted key planks of its platform, particularly in relation to the far right’s asylum policy. Something similar has happened in Austria, where the conservative People’s Party, which twice formed a government with the far-right Freedom Party but is currently in a coalition with the Greens, is now championing policies that used to be owned by the far right.

Where to now for Thuringia? Kemmerich’s resignation could have been followed by a repeat of the election of 5 February, except with both Christian Democrats and Free Democrats abstaining in all three rounds. But the AfD has said that it might now vote for Ramelow, in which case he too would have to resign to avoid being tainted by its support.

Die Linke has demanded — unsuccessfully, thus far — that at least four Christian Democrats and/or Free Democrats must vote for Ramelow in the first round to ensure that he is elected with an absolute majority. On Monday, Ramelow put forward another idea, which was endorsed by the Greens and the Social Democrats: new elections and, until then, an interim “technical” government led by his immediate predecessor, Christiane Lieberknecht from the Christian Democrats, who retired as a member of parliament last year. On Tuesday, Thuringia’s Christian Democrats rejected that idea.

It is not hard to see why. Ramelow is likely to benefit from new elections; polling conducted last week put his party at 40 per cent, with the Christian Democrats down to 14 per cent and the Free Democrats below the 5 per cent threshold. If the election results approximated current polling, the Red–Red–Green coalition would command a comfortable majority in parliament. The threat of new elections may be what is needed to convince the Christian Democrats to support Ramelow’s re-election.

Whatever happens, the AfD has successfully exposed leading Free Democrats and Christian Democrats as naive, greedy and unprincipled. On Monday night, Björn Höcke addressed a demonstration organised by the far-right Pegida movement in Dresden, claiming that a coup d’état engineered by Angela Merkel had toppled democratically elected premier Thomas Kemmerich. While the majority of Germans may find such claims bizarre, they appeal to his followers. And there are many of those — in fact, the events since 5 February have only cemented Höcke’s position as the de facto leader of Germany’s far right.

Where to now for Germany? The Christian Democrats are currently experiencing the most serious crisis in their seventy-five-year history. Their internal problems affect the work of the coalition government in Berlin and are likely to further entrench the view among Germany’s partners that the country is not interested in providing leadership. The party that more than any other has shaped the history of the Federal Republic and has led the federal government for fifty-two of the past seventy-one years is at a collective loss about how to position itself. It does not know how to reverse its longstanding decision not to collaborate with both Die Linke, a democratic party with an anti-democratic past, and the AfD. It does not have a collective vision for a life after Angela Merkel. And it does not know how to deal with those of its members who are tempted to violate the taboo of getting into bed with certified fascists such as Björn Höcke.

The events of 5 February have strengthened the resolve of Christian Democrats like Daniel Günther to position their party as an antidote to the far right. Conservative Christian Democrats appear to get the message; on Monday, the Christian Democrats in Dresden called on their followers to demonstrate against another Pegida demonstration — the first time this has happened in the more than five years since Pegida began holding its regular Monday evening rallies.

AKK’s announcement that she will step down has meant that two positions are now up for grabs: that of the leader of the Christian Democrats and that of the conservatives’ candidate for German chancellor. At the moment, there are three likely candidates for the position of party leader (although none of them has officially declared an intention): the premier of North Rhine-Westfalia, Armin Laschet, who belongs to the party’s moderate left and has been a staunch supporter of Angela Merkel; health minister Jens Spahn, a conservative; and Friedrich Merz, another conservative and long-time Merkel critic. Those three would also want to lead the Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union into the next elections. But — notwithstanding his protestations — Markus Söder may also throw his hat into the ring. In any case, the question of how to deal with the AfD is likely to dominate the discussion over who will lead the conservatives from later this year and, potentially, Germany from 2021.

Or from 2020? AKK failed partly because last year Merkel resigned as party leader but not as chancellor. Whoever succeeds AKK will probably try to convince Merkel that she needs to go straight away. She won’t like it and will argue that she needs to remain at the helm in the second half of the year when Germany holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. But she may not have a choice.

If Merkel were forced out, the Social Democrats would probably demand new elections, and Germany may have a new chancellor by Christmas. I won’t hazard a guess about who will follow Merkel, but it seems certain that it will be a man: Laschet, Spahn, Merz, Söder — or Robert Habeck, the charismatic co-leader of the Greens.

That last possibility also says something about Germany in 2020. While the rise of the AfD has made life difficult for Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, it has strengthened the Greens. It has provided motivation and oxygen to groups outside parliament that not only oppose the far right but also fight for measures to combat climate change and for a generous asylum and refugee policy. In other words, Germany might have experienced a resurgence of the far right since 2013, but it has also seen a civil society–led backlash against the extreme right and in favour of an alternative vision of society that may otherwise have been utterly unrealistic. Watch this space. •

The post Anatomy of a broken taboo appeared first on Inside Story.

One of Lee’s duties hadn’t been mentioned when he was hired. Twice a day, after dark, he would tow a big tank of chlorinated hydrocarbon residue from the factory to the nearby Bayou d’Inde. After making sure he hadn’t been seen, he would back up the buggy, check the wind, and turn the tap. The pressure inside would propel the thick, noxious fluid into the marsh.

Years later, Lee confessed what he’d done to a roomful of angry locals who relied on the area’s waterways for their livelihoods. By now, PPG and other factories in the state had propelled Louisiana to the top of the country’s hazardous-waste league table. Authorities were warning that fish from the Bayou d’Inde should be eaten no more than twice a month and humans should avoid any direct contact with the waters.

Lee had been fired by the company after an accidental drenching with chlorinated hydrocarbons sent him on sick leave for eight months. Not altogether surprisingly, his experiences had turned him into an ardent environmentalist — but an environmentalist, Hochschild discovered, who also supported the Tea Party, a movement that wanted the Environmental Protection Agency abolished and companies freed of red tape.

This seeming paradox was the starting point of Hochshild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land. What she learned from four years of visiting Lousiana — where just 14 per cent of white voters supported Barack Obama in 2012 — is that Tea Party supporters, many of whom became part of the Trump “base,” feel quite differently about the world from the people she mixes with back in San Francisco. They feel that way for a complex mix of reasons, some of them particular to the southern United States — a prickly resistance to northern liberal attitudes, for instance, that dates back through the civil rights movement to the civil war — and some that would resonate in Europe, Russia and even Australia.

Out of Hochschild’s attempt to scale what she calls the “empathy wall” came a “deep story” that attracted a great deal of attention when her book was published. She concluded that the Tea Party supporters she met in Louisiana — “white, older, Christian, and predominantly male, some with college degrees, some not” — felt like they were standing in a queue that was moving extremely slowly. Ahead was the American Dream, “the goal of everyone in the line,” and behind were people of other races, young and old, often poor.

This line had always existed, but what had changed was the feeling that other people were cutting in ahead — black people, propelled by affirmative action programs, as well as “women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers — where will it end?” And who was helping these queue-jumpers? It was Barack Obama, who seemed more sympathetic to the people pushing in than he did to the ones patiently waiting. “You feel betrayed,” Hochschild writes, addressing her informants. “The president is their president, not your president.”

This feeling is essentially why the people Hochschild came to know, and in many cases like, happily voted for Donald Trump, a man who vilified anyone who wasn’t white, who flouted the conventions of public discourse, who didn’t understand the difference between public and private interests, and who seemed to understand how they felt about being forced to stand stationary in the queue.

Political scientist Ivan Krastev and New York University law profesor Stephen Holmes also use a striking metaphor to explain the current political mood, though theirs is applied more boldly, and perhaps less successfully, across a wider canvas.

The Light that Failed is structured around the idea that Western history since 1989 has been shaped by three waves of imitation. First, the newly liberated countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union set out to imitate the fabled West that they’d envied for so long. Then, after Russia’s failed transition to Western-style democracy, Vladimir Putin created an authoritarian system that cynically imitated many of the features of Western democracy and began parodying America’s international interventions. And finally, taking a lead from Putin and other would-be despots, Donald Trump renounced America’s claim to exemplary behaviour and injected a dose of Russian-style authoritarianism into the US system.

“The future was better yesterday,” begin Krastev and Holmes. “The geopolitical stage seemed set for a performance not unlike George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, an optimistic and didactic play in which a professor of phonetics, over a short period of time, succeeds in teaching a poor flower girl to speak like the Queen and feel at home in polite company.” But it soon became clear that the East’s integration into the West wasn’t unfolding quite as expected. “It was as if, instead of watching a performance of Pygmalion, the world ended up with a theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Worse than that, the process of imitation had begun moving in the opposite direction.

Among the people of Central and Eastern Europe, the post-1989 euphoria fuelled hopes of dramatic improvements in living standards and general wellbeing: “Some thought it would suffice for communist officials to quit their posts for Central and East Europeans to wake up in different, freer, more prosperous and, above all, more Western countries.” When that didn’t happen, people began to leave for the West in an exodus that quickened once Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia and other countries joined the European Union in 2004. Since 1989, two million East Germans — more than one in eight — have moved to West Germany. Latvia has lost a staggering 27 per cent of its population, Bulgaria almost 21 per cent. More than two million Poles, or one in eight, have left for the West. After the process accelerated again during the global financial crisis, more people left these countries than would later arrive as a result of the war in Syria.

As the historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote recently, “Emigration is the region’s real problem, but immigration is its imagined one.” The Light That Failed describes the psychic impact of that exodus on those who stayed behind — and how it fuelled fears of more broad-scale emigration — and suggests that loss helps explain support for parties pledged to restore the kind of ethnic makeup that had prevailed in 1989.

Something similar was going on in Russia — vast numbers of people leaving, Western-inspired economic reforms backfiring, disillusion turning to nostalgia — but with an important difference. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe had thrown off Moscow’s control, and now resented the feeling they were expected to exchange that subjection for another set of rules, these ones imposed by the West. Russia, on the other hand, was coming to terms with the fact that it had lost the cold war, and with it, territory and stature. Democratic reformers made less headway there, and its tissue-thin copies of Western practices and institutions — elections, parties, a constitutional court — were masking deep economic changes taking place with little or no public support.

Putin, now in control, preserved these “Potemkin” institutions but started planning for the future. Even at a time when the economy was doing well and his popularity was high, he blatantly rigged elections to display his strength and prepare for a time when sentiment might not be so favourable. Rather than having to look fair, the elections were designed to showcase his ability to “manipulate the accreditation, nomination and voting process in an orderly and predictable way and thereby, paradoxically, to demonstrate his authoritarian credentials as a man who can get things done.” Landslide victories, part real, part manufactured, were the result.

After relations with the West soured and the Russian economy hit the rocks, Putin’s strategic imitation of the West became more internationally assertive. The hypocrisies of American foreign policy — especially the humanitarian interventions that were actually designed to preserve strategic interests — became a template for Russian forays into neighbouring countries, most notoriously Crimea and Syria.

When Putin announced Russia’s annexation of Crimea he used whole passages from speeches in which Western leaders had sought to justify freeing Kosovo forcibly from Serbian control. “Just as NATO violated the territorial integrity of Serbia in 1999, so Russia violated the territorial integrity of Georgia in 2008,” write Krastev and Holmes:

Just as the American administration has blacklisted some prominent Russians, preventing them from entering the US, so the Kremlin has blacklisted some prominent Americans, preventing them from entering Russia. Just as the Americans and Europeans celebrated the dismantling of the Soviet Union, so Russians now celebrate Brexit and the dismantling of the EU. Just as the West has supported liberal NGOs inside Russia, Russians are financing far-right and far-left groups in the West to undermine NATO, block US missile defence programmes, weaken support for sanctions and European unity. Just as the West (in Moscow’s view) lied brazenly to Russia about its plan for NATO expansion and about the UN-sanctioned attack on Libya, so Russia lies brazenly to the West about its military incursions into Ukraine. And just as the US is aiding the military of Ukraine (traditionally in Moscow’s sphere of influence), so Russia is aiding the military of Venezuela (traditionally in Washington’s sphere of influence).

“Contagious imitation,” as the authors call it, didn’t end there. Far-right parties in Western Europe used the same fears to capture greater support (though never anywhere near majority support) and, depending on the local electoral system, translate it into control or at least bargaining power.

The third element of the imitation trifecta came with Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House. The Russians undoubtedly meddled in the election that put him there, but their main aim, say Krastev and Holmes, was to show that they were a power to be reckoned with. Supporting Trump was simply the easiest way to disrupt their ideological enemy.

Trump saw Putin’s calculating cynicism as refreshingly free of the hypocrisy he believed was limiting America’s ability to exercise power. For the new American president, being a great country didn’t mean being a beacon of freedom and democracy; it meant being a winner. He saw Putin — along with Hungary’s unashamedly illiberal Viktor Orbán — as winners, and hence as guides to how a leader could and should behave.

There is so much that is original and challenging in this book that it seems ungrateful to quibble about its overarching theme. But I’m not sure that Krastev and Holmes’s three varieties of imitation — Central and Eastern Europe’s post-1989 Western-focused euphoria, Putin’s retaliatory foreign policy imitation, and the illiberal copying by Trump and the far-right parties of Western Europe — fit together as neatly as that summary might appear.

In their discussion of the third of these trends, for instance, the authors challenge those who see the roughly simultaneous rise of “reactionary nativism” in the United States and Western Europe as more of a coincidence than a trend. Responding to their own question — in that case, why today? — they write: “One possible answer is ‘contagious imitation.’” That’s certainly a possible answer, but they have already given us the ingredients of another, more plausible, explanation for the simultaneous rise of the extremist right in Western Europe and the United States (and the illiberal turn in Central and Eastern Europe). This was the interaction of the global financial crisis with decades of bottled-up disaffection — in many countries, including the United States, fuelled by decades of stagnant incomes — which combined to produce an electoral rebellion.

The disaffection was driven by a mix of factors, some common across the West, others particular to different locations. Emigration was a longstanding problem not only in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, but also in parts of the United States and Western Europe, where it left regions and even whole countries with an older and more conservative population. The problem persists: Putin spent much of his recent state of the nation address outlining measures to encourage more births; Hungary has begun offering free in vitro fertilisation on top of its existing pro-birth polices; and Poland, Lithuania and Bulgaria are among the other countries using incentives (usually unsuccessfully) to try to lift birth rates.

Life expectancy was another canary in the mine. In Hochschild’s Louisiana, life expectancy at birth is three years lower than the United States’s not very impressive national figure of 78.6 years (and falling), which itself is four years lower than Australia’s 82.6 (and rising). In Britain, gains in life expectancy have stalled nationally and the figure is falling in some regions.

Although the point gets sidelined by their imitation thesis, Krastev and Holmes do acknowledge the impact of population ageing and decline in Central and Eastern Europe. “In a country where the majority of young people yearn to leave, the very fact that you have remained, regardless of how well you are doing, makes you a loser,” they write. “It also readies you to cheer anti-liberal demagogues who denounce copycat Westernisation as a betrayal of the nation.” Without the reference to “copycat Westernisation,” that passage could be referring to Louisiana, or to many other regions experiencing population decline in the United States, Britain or Western Europe.

Those population-related statistics are part of an alternative explanation for why the light failed. If a country is ageing unusually quickly — because of fewer births, more deaths or departures exceeding arrivals — then the shift in sentiment in those countries is at least partly a shift in demography. The views of particular individuals needn’t change in order for the balance of opinion within a country or region to shift. The political impact of that shift can be magnified by the electoral system and how it is administered. In some countries, electoral laws are used to discourage younger or poorer voters from voting; in some of the same countries, and in others, the system is weighted towards older, rural and more conservative voters.

In the United States, the second phenomenon is bad and getting worse: “By 2040,” political analyst Ezra Klein wrote recently, “70 per cent of Americans will live in the fifteen largest states. That means 70 per cent of America will be represented by only thirty senators, while the other 30 per cent of America will be represented by seventy senators.” With the presidential electoral college system following a similar trajectory, says Klein, Republicans “represent a shrinking constituency that holds vast political power. That has injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy. Behind the party’s tactical extremism lurks an apocalyptic sense of political stakes.”

In what are essentially two-party systems, the behaviour and leadership of the parties also matters when demography and other factors shift sentiment. Britain is still basically the country that elected Tony Blair three times; the United States is still the country that elected Barack Obama. The fact that British voters failed to elect Jeremy Corbyn prime minister and enough American voters in enough states knocked back Hillary Clinton doesn’t necessarily the country has changed fundamentally. In the case of the United States, the Democrats have won the popular majority in all but one of the seven presidential elections since 1992, including the one that brought Donald Trump to power.

One other factor was present in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe though not to anywhere near the same extent in the other countries discussed in The Light That Failed. That’s the sheer speed and intensity of change after 1989, propelled (especially in Russia) by Western-backed “shock therapy.” Within a few years, the political and economic system of every iron-curtain country had changed almost out of recognition, and maps had to be redrawn to show the new boundaries of the diminished giant on its eastern edge.

Demographic change and suspicion of elites have long been at work in Hochschild’s Louisiana, too. At around the time Lee Sharman came clean at the meeting of local fisherfolk, he also joined a tiny environmental organisation called RESTORE. It was hardly the kind of group that the big polluting businesses had much to fear from, but it seems to have come to the attention of at least one of the companies operating in the area.

One day, a schoolteacher who no one knew joined the group. Strange things began to happen. At first he seemed helpful, but then, on a shopping expedition for the group, he bought two GPSs and then told other members that Lee had bought them for himself with the group’s money. Left alone with the computer holding RESTORE’s records, he installed spyware. When this was discovered, there was a confrontation and the group fell apart. It later emerged, via a sworn deposition from a senior company executive, that chemical manufacturer Condea Vista had hired former Special Forces agents to infiltrate the group.

Yet, after all his experiences of the big polluters — the after-dark chemical dumping, the peremptory sacking, the infiltration — Lee still preferred the companies (and the state government, which had long been in cahoots with the companies) to the federal government, as did his fellow Tea Party members. How could this possibly be the case? It’s worth quoting Hochschild’s answer at length:

Lee’s biggest beef was taxes. They went to the wrong people — especially welfare beneficiaries who “lazed around days and partied at night” and government workers in cushy jobs. He knew liberal Democrats wanted him to care more about welfare recipients, but he didn’t want their PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for. He had his own more local — and personal — way of showing sympathy for the poor. Every Christmas, through Beau-Care, a Beauregard Parish nonprofit community agency, he and his wife, “Miss Bobby,” chose seven envelopes off of a Christmas tree and provided a present for the child named on the enclosed card…

Two events further soured him on the IRS [the US government’s tax office]. In one, he got a part-time job to earn a little extra money, but worked more hours than federal rules allowed, got caught, and had to wait a year to get back on Social Security… More enraging was the second event. “I made a date with a clerk at the IRS office to collect a tax refund of a certain amount, and nothing about the meeting did I like,” Lee explains. “The gal wore a see-through blouse, to distract me. Then she asked for every possible receipt, tallied the amount up wrong, and gave me less than I had coming. She cheated me. I needed the money, but I never cashed that cheque.”

I’m not sure whether Lee could ever be persuaded that federal welfare funds are always well spent, but even liberals can sympathise with his response to tight, zealously enforced rules and seemingly arbitrary decision-making.

So would his counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe. As Timothy Garton Ash writes, “All current European populisms feed off anger at the way in which liberalism was reduced after 1989 to one rather extreme version of a purely economic liberalism, without the ‘equal respect and concern’ for all citizens that the philosopher Ronald Dworkin identified as essential to a modern liberalism.”

It’s easy to forget the upsides of a different kind of liberalism from the version that has had the upper hand since the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — a kind of liberalism that combines pluralism, tolerance and generous help for people in need, and needn’t have neoliberalism as its necessary end-point. You might call it social democracy — which, as the New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe wrote recently, “might seem like an anti-climactic suggestion” but brings together, in theory at least, “redistributive taxation, social insurance, universal public services, non-market mechanisms of coordination (such as trade unions) and a strategic role for the state where the market falls short.”

For their part, Krastev and Holmes are optimistic in a characteristically idiosyncratic way: “We can endlessly mourn the globally dominant liberal order that we have lost or we can celebrate our return to a world of perpetually jostling political alternatives, realising that a chastised liberalism, having recovered from its unrealistic and self-defeating aspirations to global hegemony, remains the idea most at home in the twenty-first century.” •

The post Was the future better yesterday? appeared first on Inside Story.

As I left Melbourne last Thursday, near the end of Australia’s hottest month on record, the temperature hovered just below 40 degrees. In earlier years, a day like this would have been considered part and parcel of summer, and perhaps an opportunity to hit the beach after work. Not so this summer, when scorchers have been associated primarily with an increased risk of fire. On the day my plane left, large bushfires continued to burn in New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, while new fires had started in Western Australia and Tasmania.

As we touched down in Hamburg the following winter’s day, I was met by temperatures more typical of spring. Throughout Germany, January 2020 was one of the warmest winter months since the beginning of systematic measurements in 1881. While the change has been as noticeable in Germany as it has in Australia, its consequences for Germany’s weather have not been considered all bad. But the fact that summers have become warmer and lasted longer hasn’t stopped many, if not most, Germans from becoming deeply worried about climate change.

Australians’ concern over climate change has been prompted by droughts, floods and fires at home. Germans, by contrast, are as alarmed by global as much as by local changes in weather patterns and their impact. They tend to point to the melting of ice in the Arctic, the desertification of the Sahel and extreme weather events in the Americas, Asia — and Australia.

So it isn’t surprising that the bushfires have received a lot of coverage in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. While the Australian media have paid particular attention to the loss of homes, the fires’ impact on the built environment has hardly featured in the German media. Here, the focus has been on the loss of wildlife and the destruction of a swathe of Australia’s forests.

Much of the German coverage has also focused on Australia’s ranking as the world’s largest polluter on a per capita basis and the fact that its government has been reluctant to combat climate change. Australia’s role at COP25, the Madrid climate change conference in early December, was widely reported and roundly condemned. Its refusal, alongside Saudi Arabia, the United States and Brazil, to agree to more ambitious targets led news bulletins on 14 and 15 December, the concluding days of the conference, and featured in long articles in the newspapers.

“Australia is considered the secret villain of the climate conference,” the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel reported. “Environmentalists are amazed at Australia’s stubbornness in Madrid. Because the country is well positioned economically, it would be easy for the government to launch renewable energy projects.”

In Europe, bewilderment is a common response to the Morrison government’s climate policies. Most commentators find it difficult to fathom why complacency and denialism prevail on a continent, perhaps the most vulnerable of all to climate change, whose people seem to have the resources to transition quickly to a net carbon-neutral economy and lead the world in developing innovative renewable energy technologies. But how to explain that Australia’s response to climate change is shaped, as much as anything, by its culture wars? Or that the Australian coal industry receives government subsidies while the parties currently or previously in government happily accept donations from the coal industry?

Australians, for their part, seem not so much puzzled by overseas responses to climate change as largely oblivious to them. While the European media devoted much attention to Australia’s position at COP25, their Australian counterparts showed little interest in the conference’s deliberations. Not only that — most of them also ignored the concern voiced in other countries about Australia’s intransigence.

That concern matters. The more people become alarmed about the rate of climate change and appalled by the behaviour of rogue states such as Australia, the more likely it is that they will put pressure on governments and businesses to take a stance.

European businesses are already feeling the pressure. The first news item I saw after touching down in Hamburg concerned a demonstration outside the Siemens offices in Hamburg. In one of a series of protests during January, sixty-five members of Fridays for Future picketed the offices early in the morning in protest at Siemens’s decision to provide signalling equipment for the railway line that will service the Adani coalmine in Queensland.

Siemens’s decision not to cancel the contract is only half of the story. On 12 January, Siemens boss Joe Kaeser announced that “there is a legally binding and enforceable fiduciary responsibility to carry out this train signalling contract” (while at the same time reserving “the right to pull out of the contract if our customer violates the very stringent environmental obligations”). But he also bent over backwards to reassure critics about the company’s green credentials. “Siemens, as one of the first companies to have pledged carbon neutrality by 2030, fundamentally shares the goal of making fossil fuels redundant to our economies over time,” he said. Earlier he had intimated that the contract was so small that it had “slipped through” the net, and that new control mechanisms had been put in place to ensure that Siemens avoids making a similar mistake in the future.

Kaeser’s misgivings about the contract were also obvious when he addressed a 3000-strong business council meeting in Berlin on 27 January. Before he could speak, a young climate activist mounted the stage and gave a short speech that was applauded by the audience. Not only did the organisers let her speak; Kaeser afterwards paid his respects to her concerns and said he wished that she had brought fifty or one hundred of her friends along and stayed for the meeting. This isn’t a sign of an ideological commitment to environmentalism, of course: it is good business sense. International corporations like Siemens have long recognised that there is money to be made in the transition to carbon-neutral economies and no future in fossil fuels.

So far, the protests against Siemens’s involvement in the Adani project have been unsuccessful. Long term, though, the pressure on companies involved in coalmining in Australia, and on the banks that fund projects like Adani’s, could pay off. The decisions by the Queensland and federal governments to grant the necessary approvals for the Adani mine may mean little if the company fails to raise the capital required to dig up the coal.

Why should young Germans feel strongly enough about a coalmine in Queensland to picket Siemens’s headquarters in Hamburg? While many Australians seem to believe that Australia’s natural environment belongs to them (and so it is up to them to either trash or preserve it), elsewhere, in societies that haven’t been shaped by settler colonialism, nature is considered to be part of humankind’s heritage. From a German perspective, a project that endangers the Great Barrier Reef is as bad as one that threatens to destroy the famed mudflats of the German North Sea coast.

And while the Morrison government may believe that it is entirely up to Australia to decide whether to mine and export coal (or uranium, for that matter), such beliefs are not shared by many outside Australia.

But the impact of civil-society pressure on companies investing in Australia is only one consequence of a global awareness about the urgent need to tackle climate change. Governments that implement policies leading to higher electricity, petrol and house prices in order to change consumer behaviour are likely to make efforts to ensure that other countries don’t take advantage of the price differential.

The European Union, which is committed to such policies, expects its trading partners to abide by the same environmental standards it is prescribing for its member states. Australia has been confronted with those expectations during the current negotiations about a free trade agreement, which are reported to have hit a snag because of the insistence by Australia’s second-largest trading partner that Australia meets certain climate change targets. The EU’s expectations mean that trade minister Simon Birmingham is kidding himself when he claims that FTAs are “overwhelmingly commercial undertakings between countries” and that they should “focus on commercial realities.”

Even without an FTA, Australia wouldn’t necessarily be able to evade the EU’s expectations. EU president Ursula von der Leyen has suggested that the European Union penalise countries that don’t pull their weight when it comes to combating climate change. As she said in a recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

[T]here is no point in only reducing greenhouse gas emissions at home, if we increase the import of CO2 from abroad. It is not only a climate issue; it is also an issue of fairness. It is a matter of fairness towards our businesses and our workers. We will protect them from unfair competition. One way for doing so is the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

So far, the carbon border adjustment mechanism (or carbon border tax) is little more than a thought bubble. But as the sense of urgency about climate change increases, it could turn into a firm policy before too long.

The idea that countries with policies detrimental to the effort to tackle climate change ought to be penalised is not new. Last year, Norway and Germany suspended aid to Brazil in response to the Brazilian government’s condoning of deforestation in the Amazon Basin.

Once there is broad agreement globally that CO2 emissions need to come down fast, it is also conceivable that the UN Security Council will be given the task of ensuring that countries do their fair share. The pressure on Australia may well come in the form of sanctions and tariffs that will hurt an unprepared economy.

This is not the first time that many Europeans have been aghast at Australian policies. Earlier, Australia’s Indigenous policies — particularly the Howard government’s refusal to issue an apology and successive governments’ refusal to enter negotiations about a treaty — and its asylum seeker policies have scandalised many people outside Australia. Then, too, the main response was one of bewilderment. Why is a country as affluent as Australia behaving in such a mean-spirited manner?

The Australian government may reason that it has nothing to fear from its steadfast commitment to the local coal industry, because international condemnation of government policies harmful to Indigenous people and non-citizens proved inconsequential. But in those two cases, the argument that the treatment of first nations peoples and asylum seekers was a sovereignty issue had some traction. And besides, Europeans may have sympathised with marginalised Aboriginal people and incarcerated “boat people” but they did not identify with them.

That isn’t the case this time. Nobody outside Australia thinks that Australia has the sovereign right to pursue policies that contribute to the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, to name but one example — let alone to pursue policies that hasten global climate change. Many in Europe take the Australian government’s extremist views on climate change personally — this is no longer about other people whose rights need to be upheld. It is about our future.

The Australian government argues that other countries, including those of the European Union, have also been slow in responding to the challenge of climate change. That is indeed the case. But most governments in the global north now recognise the catastrophic dangers posed by climate change, and are committed to act. And they are often called on to act by electorates that believe current government policies don’t go far enough.

The Morrison government is also hiding behind other recalcitrants, notably the United States. The idea that Australia could somehow be shielded from the anger of countries that try to tackle climate change is a dangerous illusion. There are now only two or three other governments that share Canberra’s extremist views. True, the all-powerful US government is one of them. But emissions trading schemes cover much of the United States already; in fact, California’s is second in size only to that of the European Union. And if anybody but Donald Trump were to win the elections in November, Australia would quickly find itself truly isolated.

It amazes me how unprepared the Australian public seems for the eventuality of other countries turning on Australia because it is seen to be wilfully ruining the commons. Australians ignore the resolve of other countries to tackle climate change — and overseas awareness of Australia’s role as an unrepentant contributor to global warming — at their peril. •

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Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the United States produced similar narratives, also based mainly on a confusion between votes and swings.

But on 12 December 2019 it actually happened. Surveys strongly suggest that the Conservatives received a higher proportion of votes from low-income people than from high-income ones, and more from low than high “social class.”

Was that because of Brexit? Certainly. It turbocharged a long-term trend: the rich have become not so reliably right-of-centre, the poor not so predictably left-of-centre. The same is happening in Australia and other advanced democracies, although in Australia we’ve not yet seen a crossover.

Brexit was also responsible for another dramatic feature of the result: the huge difference in voting by age. There’s nothing new, anywhere, in young people voting left of centre and old people voting right. But Brexit turned around a long-term trend. Over the decades, the old have become slightly less conservative and the young a bit less progressive — as the flattening lines prior to 2017 in this graph show. But at the two British elections since the 2016 Brexit vote, the gap widened, and then widened again.

So Brexit had an influence at the ballot box. Does that mean it determined the outcome? Is Jeremy Corbyn right to blame it for his big defeat?

As tempting as it is to read the result as a sign of the battle-weary British electorate’s resolve to get the thing over and done with, that can’t be sustained empirically. Across the United Kingdom, only around 47 per cent of people voted for a party that promised to leave on 30 January. Some 53 per cent voted for a party — Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Scottish Nationalist Party and a bunch of smaller ones — that either wanted to ignore the 2016 Brexit referendum or have another one.

But 12 December wasn’t a plebiscite; it was a general election under a first-past-the-post system, the Conservative Party won triumphantly, and Labour received its lowest share of House of Commons seats since 1935. It wasn’t Labour’s 32.1 per cent vote that did it — its vote was even lower in both 2015 and 2010 — but the high Conservative one of 43.6, the party’s biggest since 1979.

That 11.5 per cent national gap was the killer. Johnston cobbled together nearly all right-of-centre and pro-Brexit voters. The Brexit Party did its bit by not contesting electorates where it could have cost the Tories victory, and by running against Labour in others, siphoning off Labour-leave support.

Surveys tell us that that the 53–47 overall vote split roughly matches how people feel about Remain versus Leave. Does this mean that virtually everyone voted according to their position on Brexit? Not remotely. That percentage match is pure coincidence. For one thing, a sizeable slice, around a quarter, of remain supporters don’t want a second referendum because they believe the 2016 verdict should be honoured. If every elector had been motivated purely by a wish to “get Brexit done,” the Tories and the Brexit Party would have won a majority of the vote between them.

Brexit probably made a difference around the edges. But the edges are where elections are often decided.

When a Lord Ashcroft exit poll posed a hypothetical that began, “If Brexit had not been an issue in this general election…,” just 15 per cent responded that they “would probably have voted for a different party.” Some 77 per cent would “probably” have voted for “the same party,” 2 per cent would “probably” have not voted, and 6 per cent were “don’t knows.” Eliminating the last two gives 16 per cent for “probably a different party” and 84 per cent for “probably the same.”

Even throwing in lots of allowance for error and less-than-full human knowledge about how one would behave in a hypothetical situation, that’s very lopsided. Sixteen per cent might sound like a fair chunk of the electorate, but you’d expect the flow to go both ways, if not necessarily quite summing to zero.

Of course, a majority didn’t faced a conflict between party of choice and attitude to European membership. Survey after survey has shown that big majorities of people who voted Labour in 2015 and/or 2017  (around 70 per cent) were remainers anyway. And similar proportions of Tory voters were Brexiteers.

Recently a Corbyn supporter tweeted this graph (from that same Lord Ashcroft poll), noting the “loss of 25% of @UKLabour Leave voters to Tories, but only 2% of its Remain voters” as evidence for the Labour leader’s explanation. But that’s a selective reading. For one thing, he’s comparing 25 per cent of a smaller number with 2 per cent of a larger one. More importantly, the graph shows a lot more 2017 Labour remainers fleeing, with some 9 per cent going to the Liberal Democrats. In total the party lost 16 per cent of its 2017 Remainers.

How would Brexit have motivated people to do that?

That graph also has 66 per cent of people who voted Tory in 2017, but supported remaining in Europe, voting Conservative again in 2019. The proportion of 2017 Labour-leavers who voted Labour in 2019 was pretty much the same, at 64 per cent. The big majority of these people, at least, did not let Brexit influence their vote.

That 64 to 65 per cent is just a minimum, because some people would have changed their party vote for reasons other than Brexit. People vote for many reasons.

And while 25 per cent of Labour leave supporters went to the Conservatives, only 8 per cent of Conservative remainers switched to Labour, and 21 per cent went to the Liberal Democrats.

(Obviously the 2019 Liberal Democrats vote was heavily made up of Remain supporters — a ratio of around nine to one, excluding those who didn’t vote at the referendum or can’t remember.)

Without disappearing down the rabbit hole of this and other surveys and constituency-by-constituency results, it seems reasonable to believe that while Brexit didn’t produce the landslide result, it did make it a bit worse for Labour, and it is responsible for the unusual make-up of the votes, as I described at the beginning of this piece. But whether or when to leave the European Union was not a major vote determinant for most electors. Labour lost relatively few Remain votes to the Conservatives, but a lot more left them for other Remainer parties in 2019. The numbers are consistent with Corbyn and the general state of the party being mostly responsible for Labour’s electoral flogging.

There’s been a lot of shoehorning of this result, and our own May election, into the “populist” genre alongside Donald Trump’s 2016 win. Every centre-right victory earns a guernsey it seems.

Actually Corbyn’s better-than-expected 2017 result, and our own Bill Shorten’s in 2016, are better “populist” fits. Like Trump, they were considered easybeats — big, irresponsible targets, by conventional standards — and they did very well thanks largely to those low expectations. (Trump lost the national vote by 2.1 per cent, Corbyn Labour by 2.4 and Shorten Labor by 0.7 per cent.) But in only one of these contests did the losing vote take them into office. 

And what about British electoral life after Brexit? Once it’s done and dusted, will voters revert to the mean?

We’ll probably have to wait five years to find that out. •

The post The Brexit blame game appeared first on Inside Story.

These two epic moments have an odd symmetry. Tony Blair’s landslide for New Labour and, twenty-two years later, Boris Johnson’s thumping win for the Conservatives, were alike powered by cross-class support, kinetic leadership, demotic edge and skilful use of the other side’s schisms (not least over Europe). But the strongest link is the deepest: a palpable awareness that not just politics, but history — and even, perhaps, geology — has shifted decisively.

Sure, the two events differ greatly in context and detail. New Labour’s hegemony in Scotland and Wales made 1997 a pan-Britain triumph, unlike Johnson’s dependence on English votes. While Blair’s offer of (British) national renewal was served with emollience, Johnson’s pledge to break the Brexit logjam invited a partisan style. Both points reflect the divisions forged by the 2016 referendum on the European Union, which put the two men on opposite sides of a chasm. In this light, Johnson’s teasing echo of Blair’s celebratory cry on the morrow of victory (“A new dawn has broken, has it not?”), followed by a visit to none other than Sedgefield, Blair’s old seat and New Labour touchstone in England’s northeast, were also a wave from the future.

Across the gap, in other words, there is correspondence. Blair’s was an anti–status quo revolution, but so was Johnson’s. It may not look like that: Blair ended the Conservatives’ run of four election wins after eighteen years, while Johnson caps another foursome, thus granting the Tories a second decade in office (the first a story of coalition followed by desperation). But just as Tony ran against Labour’s own past of extremism and defeat to burnish his newbie credentials, so Boris seeks to avoid any taint of the David Cameron (2010–16) and Theresa May (2016–19) governments — and Brexit is the perfect solvent. That wave is also a salute.

Even the figures stand comparison. Blair’s party took 43.2 per cent of the vote on a 71.3 per cent turnout, gaining a working majority of 177. Johnson’s has 43.6 per cent on a 67.3 per cent turnout (compared to 68.8 per cent in 2017), securing an eighty-eight-seat cushion. (The seat figures take note of Sinn Féin’s boycott of the House of Commons, the Irish party having nominally gained two MPs in 1997 and seven in 2019.) The earth clearly moved more for Tony than Boris: his record 10.2 per cent Con-to-Lab swing broke Margaret Thatcher’s 5.3 per cent Lab-to-Con swing in her 1979 revolution. But Johnson’s unique sweep, as both pro-insurgency and pro-incumbency, is in its way equally stupendous.

Elective affinities, and contrasts, go further. Labour’s astonishing 1997 haul of 418 seats (out of 631, discounting Northern Ireland, where British parties don’t stand, and the Commons speaker) included fifty-six (of seventy-two) in Scotland and thirty-four (of forty) in Wales. These countries also elected ten nationalists, six from the Scottish National Party and four from Plaid Cymru, the Welsh party. But John Major’s Conservatives were wiped out there, losing their eleven Scots and eight Welsh MPs.

Those results, a boost for Blair’s devolution plans, also painted the Tories as irredeemably — guess what? — an English nationalist party. The mordancy here is that Major, a bitter opponent of Brexit and Johnson, accuses the latter of taking the party into an English ghetto. Yet after a mixed performance in 2019, the Johnson-led Tories are second in seats and vote share in Scotland and Wales. They retained just six of their thirteen Scottish MPs, taking 25.1 per cent of the vote on a 68.1 per cent turnout, but in Wales added six to reach fourteen MPs, a record 36.1 per cent on a 66.1 per cent turnout. In England itself, the Conservative vote share was just short of 48 per cent.

A future Scottish referendum will be competitive, as was 2014’s vote of 55 per cent to stay in the United Kingdom. But to say independence is nearer, the consoling wisdom of bruised anti-Brexiteers in London media-land, is overplaying it. Electoral cycles, and multiple contingencies, can still give destiny a run for its money. The dizzying events of 2019, accelerating in the five months since Johnson became prime minister, are clinching evidence.

No one owns the future. But a period when the UK is living close to the edge suits leaders claiming steerage rights over history’s tides. Amid so much insecurity, people want leaders with a higher sense of direction as well as an ability to keep the show afloat. Thatcher and Blair, at their zenith, had it; Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May didn’t. Cameron acted the part well, but after winning four big contests (two elections, two referendums) out of five he ended a loser. Now Johnson is a candidate for the pantheon. A twist in his wipe-out of Corbynism is to make Blair’s placement there, as controversial as Thatcher’s, look steadier.

A whiff of destiny came earlier for Boris, the proto-“world king,” than for Tony, whose artless, pretty-straight-guy memoir ups gear in a riveting dissection of the Labour left grandee Tony Benn’s politics of half-willed failure. Johnson, a decade younger, also had a more zig-zag route to the summit than Blair’s conventional lawyer-to-MP trajectory: journalism, souffle TV, London mayor, scandals all the way. His persona, mid nineties onwards, was a perfect fit for a popular culture ever more blokey, vacuous and right-on. Many who invested in him then are now big loathers thanks partly to buyers’ remorse, as I sketched in 2011:

[This] was also a period when comedy was becoming a major cultural industry, and — for a media that loves contrarians and the facade of difference — when “political satire” was filling the gap left by the end of ideology and the infirmity of political opposition. Boris was funny and clever; he stood out; he charmed; he got into scrapes, but even this seemed part of the Just William–style deal; and perhaps most effective of all, in a media-political culture becoming ever less serious, he reflected back to the audience a fashionable unseriousness, the sense that it — political argument, public life — was at heart all a jolly jape…

But the media, and certainly his left-wing opponents (very many, and what material he delivered them!), seem to have got Johnson wrong. Behind the charm offensive and the prolific journalism was always a formidable brain and a cold ambition. When the critics began to catch up in 2007–08, the sound of intellectual gears changing — from Boris ridiculous to Boris dangerous — was thunderous.

Still, they were wrong-footed. The left had loved, embraced and championed comedy’s colonisation of politics — most of it still does — but this was a step too far. The big mistake, it seemed, had been to characterise Johnson as above all a media figure (even if in the modern era every successful politician must be that), and to miss the possibility that the deceptively jocular exterior was also a mask. Could Boris even be more serious than the left? It was a question too fearful and disturbing to ask.

From this angle, Johnson’s ascent may be less unlikely than it can appear — as long as those contingencies are factored in. Blair too was a beneficiary of randomness, in particular the sudden death in 1994 of John Smith, which catapulted him to the Labour leadership after a much mythicised trade-off with rivalrous ally Gordon Brown. Thus was New Labour born. The steel he acquired in winning the party round proved its mettle in first-term foreign-policy crises, from the Kosovo war to 9/11. Thus was the road to Iraq opened. Blair, by then up against destiny with ever fewer tools in his kitbag and an enemy next door in 11 Downing Street, made a fair fist of the asymmetrical combat.

A third win in 2005, with a majority of sixty-eight on 35.2 per cent of the votes, turnout being 61.4 per cent — an anti-war surge having rewarded Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats with 22 per cent — was the graffiti on the wall. Blair lasted two more years, armour-plated now as he had to be, before leaving the piteous Brown to fritter New Labour’s already drained capital while lashing at phones, doors, keyboards and voters in frantic search of a governing purpose to keep Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne at bay. He never found it. In the event, Brown’s three years, ending in electoral defeat, Ed Miliband’s five, and Jeremy Corbyn’s four (and counting) saw Labour’s most baleful leaders drive the party into, respectively, ditch, pit and sewer.

In 2007, no one saw that coming. Many still blame Blair for it all (and everything else), which is an oblique tribute to his stature. “We have to rise to the level of events,” Johnson told cheering supporters on the morning of 13 December. Blair did so, destiny his motor and undoer, and every later British politician since is in his shadow, as he was in Thatcher’s. In the utterly changed context of 2020, Johnson — his vow of a “new golden age” another edict to self and colleagues — has to make good on those words. That electoral revolution is now his energy source and compass.

Johnson, well advised by Dominic Cummings, played a blinder between July and December in turning parliamentary zugzwang into checkmate of many adversaries: Tory grandees, backbench coup-makers, a calculating speaker, a casuistic Supreme Court, the BBC, Channel 4 and the opposition parties (the SNP excepted). So much had to happen, and not happen (for example, Labour possessing a mite of strategic nous), to ensure this. Hindsight alone lays inevitability’s false trail. Had the Europeanist remainers tied Johnson down, blocked an election and fixed a new “people’s vote” — their campaign name, which the luminous Times columnist Janice Turner describes as “blood-boiling” — everything would look different. Democracy had a close call.

That said, Brexit always had on its side an iron logic, rooted in the 2016 “no” to the EU: democratic legitimacy, popular sentiment, unbending belief — and redemptive “for all that” fairness (perhaps the supreme English value, exalted in the Scots-universal New Year song). These elements, strikingly, are now being quietly ceded by leading remain voices. Yes, populism also came into it, as how could it not, though endless Trump and far-right comparisons in New York Times-land and Guardian-land (to cite only these outlets) are wildly overcooked.

Lost in translation is that Brexit’s principal impulse was always democratic patriotism. Johnson’s adjusted withdrawal agreement with the EU having passed its second reading by a Commons’ majority of 124, the UK is on course to leave on 31 January.

In winning the establishment contest and now redrawing England’s electoral map, Johnson became voters’ conduit more than their ruler. If references to “the people’s government” sound bombastic, populist if you like, he seems to get this: “The voters of this country have changed this government and our party for the better. We must work to repay their trust.” The significant reference to the Tories, and cautionary insistence that so many ex-Labourites “lent us their votes” (italics added) again recall Blair’s victory speech: “we ran for office as New Labour, we will govern as New Labour… This new Labour government will govern in the interests of all our people — the whole of this nation.”

In the hinge elections of 1979, 1997 and 2019, millions of voters also wanted tangible, visible improvement in the public realm and their own lives. In the first two cases, that took until the second term. Thatcher benefited from a Labour split and a close-shave war with Argentina (contingency again), while Blair — who inherited a better economy than Thatcher or Johnson — was given a long Tory trauma, only some of it cast by his own spell.

Will voters be so patient with Johnson, or he so lucky? Given difficult economic terrain, steep policy challenges, perilous geopolitics and often-unhinged media, maybe not. A high-spending agenda joined to better public services — what the Independent journalist John Rentoul calls Johnson’s “sudden conversion to Blairism” — will be imperilled by a financial downturn. There are early glimpses of tension. Free-market Brexiteers like the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne feel “politically homeless” and fear their saviour may prove baby-snatcher. Nigel Farage plans to nibble at the Tories’ right flank by turning his Brexit Party vehicle into an anti-system Reform Party. And any attempt “to suppress the chaos-inducing entropic forces of Westminster/Whitehall,” as Cummings described his mission in 2014, will meet resistance inside these citadels.

“[In] every great victory lie the seeds of subsequent defeat,” the novelist Robert Harris observed of the election. How might it happen? A conceivable trajectory is that the new era’s first big scandal revives a “they’re all the same” mood, policy foul-ups ensue, Johnsonites tire and tussle (where is the flame, and who lost it?), voters seethe, by-elections are lost, recession hits, Scotland boils, Labour claws back in the north, LibDems in the south — and a general election looms. The now impossibly distant catharsis is cut up in a zillion ways to mock Johnson’s spoor of bombast, fantasy and broken promises. “2019, not such a big deal” columns mushroom.

Some are being written already.

What gives further pause is another bond between Johnson and Blair: the obsessional, onanistic abuse hurled at them. In part a subset of the vicious targeting of public figures, its impulse often misogynist and racist, the two men’s treatment has a distinct history. The anti-Blair hate-fest began, significantly, in a left–right media–political alliance that was forged over Bosnia and Kosovo, escalated after 9/11 and reached a paroxysm with Iraq. His 2007 departure brought no let up. Then came Jeremy Corbyn and a new swamp. Rentoul, co-author with Jon Davis of the best survey of New Labour to date — Heroes Or Villains? The Blair Government Reconsidered — classified the pathology as “Blair rage.”

Johnson’s more niche infamy, earned by serial misdemeanours, a lax private life and high-grade froth in his Telegraph and Spectator columns, morphed into serious villainy when he became Brexit champion then a careless foreign secretary. Earlier, in 2004, Johnson had backed a vain Commons attempt to impeach Blair led by the Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price, now party leader and Wales’s own man of destiny. But in 2016 the left–right front trained sights on Boris too. When Johnson ran for the Tory leadership in May-July, the virulence was eye-popping. “Boris derangement syndrome,” a phrase lifted from Brexit’s generic ability to madden, came into its own.

Such tags matter less than the wider discourse they signify. Complex as it is — and that mingling of left and right is an overlooked part of Britain’s last two decades — it bespeaks a politicised herd instinct, encouraged by social media, that often starts with an absolutist conclusion and then works backward to join the dots. Politics must always be made to fit the already known, auto-validating story. Blair was nothing short of evil and must be seen to have failed; then Brexit; now it’s Johnson’s turn, as dictionaries are raided to keep the spittle flowing, column after tendentious column.

A grave harm of this thought-blocking babble is that it squeezes the room for justified, rational criticism, and not just of Blair and Johnson. Its withered natural partner, contrarianism, is summoned to pre-empt the vacuum. The ensuing semblance of debate between these terrible twins reinforces an asphyxiating conservatism, often in radical guise. A voracious 24/7 news-and-comment mincer pumps febrility everywhere, preferring noisy partisanship and repetitive banality to informed, independent analysis that admits of complexity. Many institutions too have become fearful cheerleaders of entrenching orthodoxy. Although there are blessed oases in the desert, Brexit’s four-year limbo fortified this entire condition.

On 12–13 December, four hours of ballot counting brought catharsis. “Remember, if you are Britain, something always seems to turn up,” I wrote in 2017, channelling Dickens’s Mr Micawber. That something arrived as another implacable deep rumble from England’s middle earth. Oh, and Boris Johnson too. The way it has sent hearts and minds reeling is the best thing to happen in Britain for a generation. Voters have broken the lock and thrown open the window. Wherever the winds now blow, 2019’s end is a big new beginning. •

The post Echoes of revolutions past appeared first on Inside Story.

As they prepare to set off from the town square, Lee is accosted by a resident, Jennifer Barker, who coolly lambasts him as a racist and misogynist given to “whipping up prejudice.” He is also shown making a furtive call warning Steve, the constituent he plans to doorstep, not to let the visitor from London know they’re pals. When the clumsy ruse dissolves, the ex-pitman’s “you’ve killed my career” feels unfazed, as if he’s quite enjoying the attention. In context, Crick’s endnote is a touch ponderous: “A lesson to us, journalists and viewers, that in this world of fake news, we should be a little more sceptical about what we see on screen.”

Ashfielders are blunt, the kind of trait that a media presence tends to amplify. Labour candidate Natalie Fleet tells the Economist of a male constituent who raged against her party’s votes-at-sixteen policy. I was a mother at that age, said Natalie. “Well, you should have kept your legs closed.” “Well, you can fuck off.” A vote lost, then? Not necessarily. Ashfield is “perhaps the strangest seat in Britain, with enough characters and subplots to fill a political soap opera,” says the newspaper. The seat’s three-way contest, with the insurgent Ashfield Independents also pitching to overturn Labour’s 441 majority in 2017, lures party strategists and media outlets alike.

Around a hundred near-marginals, out of 650 first-past-the-post races, will decide the colour of the next parliament. The most competitive include historic Canterbury, where a student vote helped Labour take the 185-year Conservative bastion by, yes, 185 votes in 2017; Crewe & Nantwich in the northwest, which Labour snatched by forty-eight; and North-East Fife, where a Scots nationalist is defending a two-vote margin from Liberal Democrat and Tory contenders.

In England, whispers of volatility reach to Workington in the far northwest, with its 3925 Labour majority. Were the Conservatives to win coastal Cumbria’s ex-mining redoubt, a few miles and a world away from the famed Lake District’s western fringe, a renewal of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street tenure would be assured. Indeed, this campaign kicked off with a flurry over “Workington Man,” distant offspring of 1990’s (Thatcherite) Essex Man and 2001’s (New Labour) Worcester Woman as a London politico’s idea of the must-have voter. Today’s version — according to Onward, a centre-right “ideas factory” — is a middle-aged grafter, fan of rugby league and Brexit, now notionally ready, like his peers in similarly neglected towns, to junk Labour red for Conservative blue.

This newly identified beast was soon being avidly scouted by journos in search of earthy wisdom, then just as quickly discarded until the post-election inquests. But the passing frenzy served to focus attention on a churning electoral market, in which voters’ greater readiness to shop around intersects in unpredictable ways with Brexit’s effect of polarising much of the electorate into “leave” and “remain” camps. The British Election Study finds that 49 per cent of voters didn’t vote for same party across the general elections of 2010, 2015, and 2017. Two years ago, 40 per cent of Labour’s voters switched to the party during Jeremy Corbyn’s vigorous campaign.

Such volatility makes for caution about the result tomorrow. Both 2015’s Conservative majority and 2017’s hung parliament came as exit-poll stunners at 10pm on election night. Most projections this time veer between those two outcomes. Current indicators — a Tory squeeze of the upstart Brexit Party to reach 42–43 per cent of vote share, a Labour creep to 33–34 per cent at LibDem expense, and the Scottish National Party’s guaranteed forty or so seats — could produce either. On election eve, YouGov’s vaunted MRP model projects an overall Conservative majority of twenty-eight, down from sixty-eight a fortnight ago.

Much depends on how strong Labour’s northern “red wall” proves to be, and how vulnerable southern Tory seats are to the anti-Brexit LibDems. Amid larger uncertainty, those local jousts and regional swings will be pivotal. So will variable weather on a deep-winter, pre-Christmas Thursday, which may affect turnout. This time, excuses for defeat might well be more entertaining than the election has been.

The campaign has had a bad press. Boring, joyless, dire, empty and depressing, say many commentators. Sheer length underlies the mood: after a pretend war lasting months, a few weeks of round-the-clock airtime for yet more repetitive hyperbole can hardly create a spark. Brexit’s unrelieved four years, and politics’ banal colonisation of every crevice of public life, add to the mix. What else should be expected?

Especially so, given that fragmentation now extends as much to election campaigning as to the political system, its parties, and the United Kingdom itself. The comforting surface of leaflets and rallies, head-to-heads and vox pops is reduced ever more to a palliative, while unseen marshals deploy much sharper tools of viral grooming — attack ads, rousing videos, targeted messages — to hustle key demographics towards the voting booth. No wonder modern elections feel so elusive, in a Kundera-like “life is elsewhere” sort of way, and to many, so frustrating.

Michael Crick himself observes “almost a conspiracy between politicians and journalists to pretend there is a vibrant contest on the ground. In reality, most voters have no personal contact from candidates beyond a few leaflets. That seems true even in many marginal seats.” What’s left of elections is a wall of noise: both ubiquitous and ungraspable.

But lay aside expectations, and the imprint of this deep background is tangible. The Tory high command is haunted by 2017, when a dud leader and stuffed manifesto led to a calamitous victory. This time, a risk-averse Conservative document has helped shield a distrusted Boris Johnson from close policy scrutiny and allow him space to bore “get Brexit done” into every voter’s skull. At headquarters, Isaac Levido and his Kiwi partners Sean Topham and Ben Guerin — credited with Scott Morrison’s win in May — lead an agile online strategy of experimental provocation, pithy sloganeering and constant rebuttal. Move fast and shake things, give Boris his lines, and let his presence do the rest: it’s not pretty but it is coherent.

By contrast, Labour’s sense of its near miss last time has prompted a straight remix at even higher volume. The proposed state control of capitalism, its £83 billion (A$161 billion) starter cost to be conjured up by taxes on high earners, runs with the grain both of Jeremy Corbyn’s lifelong ideology and his makeover of the party since 2015. That brings a catch: his often-popular ideas are sold with vengeful rhetoric that lifts believers but worries the unattached. This matters more as Corbyn himself is both better known than in 2017 and anathema even for many traditional Labour supporters. The ten leadership approval polls since mid November, gathered by five companies, have given him an average net rating of –39.5 per cent, against Johnson’s –5.3 per cent.

For all their flaws, Johnson and Corbyn have been their party’s undisputed figureheads in interviews, staged workplace or hospital visits, and at gatherings of the faithful. The prime minister often seemed distracted, the opposition leader flat. The whole circus’s robotic air and want of electricity again suggested, for all the accompanying hype, a backroom script. True, the BBC’s half-hour studio debate, after a dismal one on ITV, offered a good contrast between Corbyn’s lucid if formulaic droning, honed by decades of all-purpose platform speeches with no stopwatch, and Johnson’s digressive burbling, a hit-and-miss procession of forays and darts that equally eludes skewering. Jellyfish met butterfly, the result — despite the ludicrous avidity of rival post-match “spin room” teams — a tie.

The Boris–Jeremy duopoly sucked up much of the TV oxygen, and made the contest look heavily male. Still, the LibDems’ Jo Swinson — hyperactive, green, feminist and Europhile, like her party — contrived to miss the breakthrough bus. Her initial branding as “next prime minister” was absurd, her promise to cancel Brexit by fiat (“let’s make all this go away” in the ineffable words of her brief rival Layla Moran) felt undemocratic even to many remainers. Swinson’s own average poll rating is –24.5 per cent. But if the party over-promised, its energetic focus on target seats could garner high-profile Tory scalps such as foreign secretary Dominic Raab.

Adding lustre to the LibDems are the smooth Chuka Umunna and the dauntless Luciana Berger, ex-Labour centrists and Corbyn critics, and the ex-Tory rising star Sam Gyimah, all now standing in Tory-held London marginals. The first two reached the LibDems via the short-lived Independent Group (created in February, an aeon ago in British politics). Berger’s experience of sustained anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s party, a scourge whose scale and depths are still being uncovered, is echoed by many others in a party once seen as British Jews’ primary political home. Their fear of a Corbyn premiership is real.

For their part, ex-Tories standing as independents, such as Dominic Grieve, are backed by grandees from the 1980s and 90s — John Major, Michael Heseltine, Chris Patten — whose raging embitterment against Brexit and Johnson, reminiscent of postwar empire loyalists, is accorded reverence on the BBC. On the Labour side, Gordon Brown, an addictive thunderer of doom, similarly resembles a lost soul from a distant era. Of this caste, Tony Blair alone retains the capacity to make an actual argument about Britain and Europe now, misguided though his call for a hung parliament is. (Juliet Samuel, who sees politicians’ abandonment of responsibility as today’s fulcrum, writes in a brilliant column: “Rather than defending liberal democracy, a hung parliament would only endanger it more.”) Nonetheless, given the self-inflicted wreckage of the more demented remainers, Blair’s relative sanity could still be influential.

If the above broadcasting reference is not gratuitous, it’s because the shallowness of much political coverage may become unignorable after the election. The best of BBC journalism is excellent, but is submerged in a trivialising and patronising sea. To be fair, the networks’ problems overlap with those of politics as a whole, with both sides now existing in the shadow of voracious social media and spending most of their energies trying desperately to keep up. That dynamic visibly turns fine journos, and mediocre politicians, into manic puppets.

Some impresarios of the bearpit, on BBC and C4 in particular, but also ITN and Sky, now act less as public-service journalists than as squall merchants for social media. A gleaming exception is Andrew Neil, ex-Sunday Times editor turned incisive BBC interviewer, who above all works for his supper and thus allows the viewer-citizen to share it (in both old and new senses). His granular, relentless dissections of Corbyn’s economic illiteracy and of Nicola Sturgeon’s abysmal record as Scotland’s first minister were joyous in great part for being unheard of — and this after the two leaders’ four and five years in charge — but mainly for the quasi-dissident thrill of “Blimey, is this allowed before the watershed?!”

Neil didn’t net the butterfly, however, for Johnson avoided his show with lame dissembling. The interrogator then, after a studied demolition of Nigel Farage, challenged the PM direct to camera on this “question of trust.” It was a huge viral hit, and no more. Johnson’s evasion looked cowardly, though the shoddy snub may also reflect his notable obedience to the Tory campaign playbook. In turn, Michael Grade, respected former TV executive, responded that Neil’s reaction “crosses a line” of impartiality, and went on to criticise his and C4’s “empty chairing” of politicians who decline to appear. “Neither the BBC nor ITN [which supplies C4] is Fox News — yet.”

If modern politics lives ever in the moment, this election is no exception. Its disruptive events are already consigned to the great churning maw — flooding in Yorkshire, an Islamist atrocity, Trump’s presence at a nervous NATO summit — though Johnson’s “empathy bypass” (© Jo Swinson) on Monday when shown a distressing hospital photo might linger until voting day. In parallel, the world — Hong Kong, Iraq, Ukraine, Chile, Lebanon, China’s Uyghurs, Zimbabwe, Australia’s blazing eastern states, even the WTO’s fraying, to name only a few — made no imprint. In these times, Britain’s amnesia is reflexive, its bubble impermeable.

Much needs to change to let memory, light and the world flood back in, and so to move forward. Everyone will have their own ideas about what that change should be. In my long-held view, a clear government, leadership and direction is the sine qua non. Juliet Samuel is so right: “[A] democracy can only learn by doing, not by trying to wind back the past… Blame is a risk inherent in any action. If there is no one to blame, there is no democracy.”

But what do the people want, and what does their decision make possible? Soon, Britain will find out. •

The post Britain’s elusive epic appeared first on Inside Story.

This electoral amalgam was seeded by New Labour’s devolution reforms of the late 1990s. Not everything came to fruition: a regional plebiscite said no to an assembly in England’s northeast, thanks to the feisty Dominic Cummings (now a Downing Street aide), thus quashing plans for a sequel in the northwest. In several cities, people rejected offers of a mayor; in others, they chose one after the model had been decreed. These signs were, or should have been, an early warning that hustlers of engagement can induce apathy or disillusion.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and David Cameron after 2010, framed their institutional bustle as a refit of British democracy. But the jargon used to finesse new outfits and voting channels — citizenship, access, participation, empowerment, civil society, progressive, accountability, closing the people–power gap, devolution and engagement — helped disguise their often top-down impulse.

Perhaps inevitably, rhetoric outran delivery. More seriously, mushrooming elections coincided with democracy’s growing deficits of performance and trust. From 2004, a host of studies measured citizens’ alienation from their rulers and core institutions, citing the Iraq war, the global financial crisis, austerity, MPs’ misconduct, and business greed as key factors. A Pew survey in 2019 records 70 per cent of people disputing the notion that elected officials care what they think. Democratic Audit’s 2018 report shows “unprecedented declines in the core institutions of the UK’s democratic system, particularly at the centre.” The Hansard Society’s 2019 audit of political engagement finds public views of Britain’s governing order bleaker than any in its fifteen-year history: as many (or perhaps as few) as 63 per cent of respondents think the system is rigged to the advantage of the rich and powerful, and 72 per cent say it needs big improvement.

This democratic recession permeated the 2016 vote on European Union membership and its ensuing, endless limbo. Brexit, as both political logjam and immense psychic weight, is now well into its fourth year. The whole experience deepens the slump. (True, the recurring contrarian argument that Britain’s system is gamely coping has merit, but is fixated on process.) The Hansard study says 73 per cent have little or no confidence in MPs’ handling of Brexit, with 42 per cent even agreeing that “many of the country’s problems could be dealt with more effectively if the government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in parliament.”

Such decay — David Van Reybrouck calls it “democratic fatigue syndrome” in Against Elections: The Case for Democracy — seems all the more corrosive in light of the surge in voting channels preceding and running alongside it. Britain’s recent history, its lowest point the non-enactment of the 2016 decision, suggests the link between voting and democracy is indeed broken: that ever more injections have enabled immunity. If that is so, the latest general election will be just another Thursday, leading to yet more delay and obfuscation.

But could the link yet be restored? At heart this election sets Boris Johnson’s attempt to uphold the EU referendum verdict against parties seeking to reverse or cancel it. Brexit thus remains the raw power struggle it became under Theresa May’s wretched premiership, eventually driving the new Conservative leader to Downing Street on 24 July with a pledge to “get Brexit done.” Losing, over three volcanic months, a tiny House of Commons majority, a tranche of Tory defectors or expellees, a series of votes, control of the daily agenda, and a Supreme Court ruling on his proroguing of parliament, he earned a lifeline by signing a revised agreement with the European Union. Still confined by brute Westminster numbers, unable to secure his preferred “deal-then-election” tango, escape came via a Liberal Democrat–Scottish National Party démarche: by 24 October, this “election-then-what?!” was on.

Its early phase echoes Brexit’s years of frenzied torpor. There’s no uplift yet from the parties’ combat over health spending, floods and broadband, nor from a hyped-up and numbing TV debate on 19 November between Johnson and Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. But if this election is to be different, then a brief look at what people actually turned out to vote for (or, notably, didn’t) during Britain’s two-decade voting boom might yield a countervailing glimmer.

Turnout statistics are the enduring Cinderella of Britain’s election reporting. Hugh Brogan, respected historian of the United States, would periodically write to the Guardian lamenting their absence among its acres of comment. In a country where voting is voluntary, the neglect gives politicians a free pass and skews understanding of the salience of politics in people’s lives.

A portion of such figures from these years, albeit lacking the granular detail they deserve, is sobering illustration. Turnouts in Wales’s assembly and Scotland’s parliament have, in four later elections, never matched their inaugural 46 and 59.1 per cent in 1999. Indeed, it’s worth recalling that the 1997 referendums on whether to create these bodies drew just 50.1 per cent of voters in Wales, of whom 50.3 per cent said yes, and 60.1 per cent in Scotland, of whom 74.3 per cent said yes to the principle and 63.5 to the institution having tax-varying powers. (The pro-independence SNP, in power in Edinburgh since 2007, ever presumes to speak on behalf of — in effect to own — Scotland, but has never won the votes of even 37 per cent of the country’s electorate in any election.)

A 2011 referendum on extending the Welsh assembly’s powers drew 35.6 per cent. In two PCC cycles, a turnout rise from 15.1 to 27.3 per cent was “clearly influenced by combining the PCC contests with other elections,” while much-heralded 2017 metro mayor elections in the greater Manchester and Liverpool areas lured 28.9 and 26.1 per cent to the polls. This year’s council elections in England had 32.6 per cent, within the usual range and shared by five mayoral run-offs on the same day.

Northern Ireland, in the UK’s variegated realm of (at least) four nations, is particular in its own way. Belfast’s assembly too has never reached the heights of 69.8 per cent in the first, 1998, election, but a domestic scandal and Brexit’s strains helped catapult turnout in a snap 2017 poll to 64.8 per cent, a ten-point increase over a year. That said, the body is in a three-year limbo due to the stranglehold of hegemonic ethno-religious parties without whose agreement no executive can form.

In eight European parliament elections since 1979, the peak UK vote was 38.5 per cent in 2004; this year’s tally was 37.2 per cent, an increase of 1.6 per cent from 2014. Even amid Brexit’s morass, most Brits can’t be induced to rate Brussels and Strasbourg’s torpid palaces.

By the same token, the higher the stakes are perceived to be, the more voters join. Scotland’s 2014 referendum had an 84.6 per cent turnout, over twice the 42.2 per cent in the UK’s 2011 poll on ditching first-past-the-post for the alternative vote in electing the Commons. Only the tight general elections of 1950–51 (turnouts 83.9 and 82.6 per cent), the Churchill–Attlee era’s last hurrah, come near. And the UK’s 2016 vote on EU membership, at 72.2 per cent well exceeding the 63.1 per cent average of the four general elections between 2001 and 2015, in turn echoed the 71–78 per cent range of the twelve held from 1955 to 1997. To a degree, the popular investment in both events was a throwback to the long post-1945 era.

These votes by turn shook and toppled pillars of UK statehood: 44.7 per cent of those cast in Scotland in 2014 were pro-independence, 51.9 per cent of UK ones in 2016 pro-Brexit (including 38 per cent in Scotland). Although the first was a near miss — and establishment panic on the eve was palpable — both results incorporated a verdict on those wider failings of governance: this time communicated not by mass apathy but by mass involvement. Against the feeble post-1997 institutional mishmash, with its slow draining of initial modest enthusiasm (where that existed at all), the big-issue referendums stand as acts of great democratic affirmation.

That’s not all they were, of course. Their disfiguring by vicious abuse, most of it online and perpetrated in the name of strident nationalism, reached a nadir in the murder, a week before the EU vote, of Labour MP Jo Cox by a neo-Nazi shouting “Britain first!” This inherent ambiguity will forever haunt them. Neither should it eclipse their infusion of therapeutic, if abrasive, vigour into a lethargic body politic where leaders’ promise of renewal had long gone sour.

Here is that glimmer. If the outcome of this general election allows the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union by 31 January, the fourth such deadline, the 2016 vote will at last be honoured and the link to democracy — in this vital instance at least — restored. The psychological impact will be multilayered and profound.

But an open-ended election, at a time of exceptional volatility in British party politics, holds no guarantees. For one thing, keen regional contests allied to unprecedentedly fluid party loyalties make the Commons patchwork hard to forecast. For another, the main anti-Johnson forces have two arguments with strong partisan appeal: Labour’s, that the Brexit obsession of a trio of Conservative PMs since 2010 has relegated a mounting pile of economic and social problems, which must now be the priority; the LibDems’, that Brexit is a disaster which must be stopped. For yet another, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, even after half its candidates were stood down or withdrew, may thwart Tory gains in crucial target seats.

Were Labour to recreate its 2017 momentum, Jo Swinson’s LibDems further advance, and Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP restore its 2015-style dominance north of the border, the arising anti-Johnson majority would likely assent to a Corbyn premiership (though not a coalition). Yet bar ousting Johnson, nothing else unites these parties. On Brexit, unavoidably urgent after the election, Labour plans quick negotiation of close alignment with Brussels, then a vote between its deal and staying in the EU. The SNP, trumpeting Scotland’s pro-EU credentials, is pressing Labour to concede a second independence vote in 2020. The LibDems, having attracted pro-EU Tory and Labour dissidents to the fold, would simply revoke the UK’s choice to leave. Keeping any pantomime horse upright will be testing.

A pitch of clarity against opposition muddle may be Johnson’s ace in clinching a seasonal coup, ending Brexit’s deadlock and lifting its mental weight. Once the Commons pushes through the redone EU deal, the UK will wave farewell to Brussels, and hello to knotty trade talks, within weeks. At last, the end of the beginning, then down to work. But if not? More ruling the void, and the prospect of Brexit endless. •

The post A vote beyond the void appeared first on Inside Story.

In which direction this moment leads is less sure, however. Above all, that’s because the judgement is also a deeply political one, with its timing and character inevitably embroiled in the bitter national debate about Brexit. The gleeful partisanship of its backers outside the court — jostling for the cameras to pour anathemas on Johnson and advance their favourite anti-Brexit solution — was stark evidence.

So was the reaction of Britain’s semiofficial historians, pumped up with now rather formulaic gravitas. The national treasure Peter Hennessy welcomed “one of the greatest days in the history of the British constitution,” excoriated Johnson for “insensitivity and illegitimacy towards the Queen” in requesting the suspension — and called for a written constitution, which is rapidly becoming the new orthodoxy.

Equally striking was the personalised adulation of Lady Hale, who had just cited a 1611 precedent to the effect that “the King hath no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him.” The reference is doubtless to Johnson rather than Elizabeth Windsor, the Bill of Rights and regime change of 1688–89 having taken the state beyond absolutism. But as with Hennessy’s commending the judges for “penetrating the most intimate part of the UK state — the monarch-prime minister relationship,” it’s plain to see that today’s judicial interventionism and its ecstatic embrace are inseparable from the campaign to render illegitimate the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union.

Indeed, the Supreme Court case itself was part of that campaign. It follows three others in English, Northern Irish and Scottish lower courts initiated by anti-Brexit MPs and activists, the first two of which failed. The judges held that Johnson’s proroguing of parliament was designed to silence it in the crucial period before 31 October, when Brexit falls due, and thus was a democratic outrage. In the Supreme Court’s words, the move “prevented [parliament] from carrying out its constitutional functions for no good reason.”

Johnson’s advisers responded that the current parliamentary session is the longest since the 1640s; that the government needed room to conclude a deal with the European Union (with which, it could scarcely add, opposition members were colluding); that a suspension was routine during the party conference season; and that only five extra days were at issue before parliament was anyway to return on 14 October. Nonetheless, the court, having received a forensic submission from barrister David Pannick representing lead appellant Gina Miller, held that “the effect [of proroguing] on the fundamentals of our democracy was extreme.”

What is also extreme is the formalism of this judgement. It could only be reached by ignoring the House of Commons’s degeneration — taking its lead from John Bercow’s speakership, and amid Brexit’s three-year paralysis — into a theatre of narcissism. The court cannot countenance the brutal fact that Brexit has become a raw struggle for power, in which it is now not just referee but player.

Even before the legal cases, Johnson was charged with attempting a coup in planning to leave the EU by the agreed (and twice-postponed) deadline of 31 October. When his slim majority vanished as Conservative MPs defected or rebelled, the opposition cohered to pass a law requiring the government to ask the European Union for yet another extension and accept without demur Brussels’s timing and terms. Johnson pressed for a general election, but MPs — Labour, Liberal Democrats, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, independents, Greens, dissenting Tories — stymied this, as they feared Johnson would win and implement Brexit. Given that the people voted to leave the European Union in 2016, whose is the coup against democracy?

Then, at the moment of proroguing, Bercow’s permissive belligerence overflowed. Many MPs boycotted the ceremony in the neighbouring House of Lords, instead staging a demo in the Commons around his chair, posting selfies and singing political hymns. MPs’ social media posturing is now a more urgent concern than breaking the country’s deadlock, and the Supreme Court has vindicated them. Such judicial overreach, opening a new front in the anti-Brexit strategy, will make Britain’s polarisation all the more intractable.

At heart this is a political crisis, not a legal one. The evasion of that reality requires an unrelenting effort to cancel or censor the past “as it really was” (messiness and all) in favour of an approved, self-satisfying version. I am reminded here of a scene in The Ploughman’s Lunch, Ian McEwan’s second film partnership with director Richard Eyre. Begun in 1981, two years into Margaret Thatcher’s era, its motif — politics and commerce’s manipulation of history — would be vitalised by her South Atlantic war with Argentina in 1982, which the work cleverly incorporates.

The film portrays a cynical young mover through the newly porous silos of media, advertising, publishing and academia who plans a revisionist, pro-establishment account of the long discredited British–French–Israeli invasion of Suez a quarter century earlier. Its social lens, reaching from patrician gatekeepers to a women’s peace camp, probes deep and with scalpel precision. Its title, an adman’s boast of how the fake rurality of a cheese, pickle and crusty-bread combo lured customers into failing pubs — “a completely successful fabrication of the past” — was triply effective. It identified a source of regenerating power and acknowledged its meretricious appeal, yet proposed no easy route for those who might wish to resist its charms. The work’s bleak prescience still resonates.

At one point James, our antihero, visits a country house to collect grist for his mill. There he encounters a precocious little swot who offers to recite a chronology of the kings and queens of England. Six centuries in, a breathless shift from Charles I to Charles II — in reality separated by a civil war, a war of three kingdoms, and a revolution — triggers James to a mild query about the interregnum decade: “What about the Cromwells?” Instantly, the proto-Rees-Mogg sprog retorts: “They don’t count.”

This week McEwan, who in 2017 welcomed a death-harvest of ageing leavers and their replacement by enlightened young remainers, publishes a smug Brexit satire (The Cockroach) and describes leaving the European Union as “self-harmingly loony.” Every day in Britain, you can quite randomly encounter similar views from a dozen cultural panjandrums, often looking down from a great height at what they candidly imagine — vilely, and wrongly — to be an ignorant, racist, empire-obsessed mass: their fellow citizens.

Three years ago these citizens turned out to vote on a declared once-in-a-lifetime issue and were promised their choice would be enacted. Now they, and their votes, don’t count. Once, self-styled democrats might have spoken up for them. No longer. And you wonder why Britain is divided? •

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Populist radical-right parties can have three kinds of electoral victories: they can win seats in parliament; they can be treated as the effective winner by the media; they can win by dragging established parties from the ideological centre closer to their own position. (They can pull off a combination of these feats, of course.)

Sometimes it can be hard to distinguish between winning the media contest and winning the election itself, even for well-informed citizens. That’s why it’s worth taking a close look at what happens after the shock has died down. Here we focus on Belgium and Sweden, the countries we know best, where populist radical-right parties have been part of the political system for decades. Have they had significant wins? In what way? And what happened next?

Let’s take Belgium first. Depending on which source you consult, the radical-right party Flemish Interest won either 19 per cent or 12 per cent of the vote in the May 2019 elections. Why the different figures? To understand this, you need a brief history lesson about Belgium, the small country (population eleven million) at the heart of Europe.

Famous for its complicated federal structure, Belgium consists of two regions that don’t share a language (Flanders in the north is Dutch-speaking, Wallonia in the south French-speaking) but do share a federal parliament. Since the 1970s, the party systems in the regions have been disconnected: in Flanders, voters can only choose a Flemish party or candidate; in Wallonia, they must vote for a Walloon party or candidate. This means that most ideologies are represented twice: there’s both a Flemish and a Walloon green party, and the same goes for social democrat, Christian democrat and liberal parties.

But one part of the spectrum, the populist radical right, has never been as popular in Wallonia as it continues to be in Flanders. This is a supply-side issue: radical-right parties in Wallonia have been elected to parliament occasionally, but they were never organised well enough to survive the infighting that erupted over the spoils (seats in parliament and then places on electoral lists for the next elections). On the demand side of politics, it’s worth noting that Flemish Interest builds on a Flemish emancipation struggle dating back to the foundation of Belgium in 1831.

Flemish Interest became the second-biggest party in the Belgian parliament in May of this year. Here’s where those confusing numbers come in: it won 19 per cent of the Flemish vote and 12 per cent of the Belgium-wide vote. But did it win in our three senses of the word?

Well, yes. It won seats: it now has eighteen in the federal parliament, having gained fifteen. (There are 150 seats in total, eighty-seven of which are reserved for Flemish parties.) It also won the framing contest in the media: with its previous election performance (the loss of more than half of its votes and nine of its twelve seats in 2014) interpreted as being “the beginning of the end” for the party, it’s not surprising that its 2019 result was framed as a rebirth. And it won by dragging centre parties towards the more extreme end of the ideological spectrum in a way that should worry anyone who doesn’t share the party’s ideas. To understand why, we have to again go back to a time when it was still shocking for a radical-right party to gain a foothold in a European parliament, let alone become the second-biggest party.

On 24 November 1991, a day known since as Black Sunday, Flemish Interest shocked the political world by going from two to twelve seats in the federal parliament. With its roots in extreme-right movements, the party had campaigned on a racist agenda. In response, all the other Belgian political parties swore never to govern with the party at local, regional or national levels. They called this agreement the cordon sanitaire, underlining the urgent need they felt to build a barrier around what they considered a dangerous party. Even today, parties routinely reaffirm this stance through the media.

In that sense, all votes for Flemish Interest have been wasted, given that the party is highly unlikely to be part of a governing coalition. But surveys conducted after the 2019 election show that its supporters don’t particularly care — theirs is a protest vote against the political system. That may be different at the next election, though: for the first time, Flemish Interest has participated in talks to form a regional government. This underlines the fact that it is not only an election result that matters but also how other parties respond. What Flemish Interest really won in 2019 was a seat at the negotiation table, however short-lived, and with it some legitimacy and respectability.

There are good reasons for inviting radical-right parties into negotiations to form a governing coalition. Politicians from all parties like to show respect for “the will of the people.” And politicians from centre-right parties like to use radical-right parties as leverage to force the hand of potential coalition partners. This is what we’re seeing in Belgium, two months after the elections. The centre-right nationalist party that is taking the lead in forming a regional government, New Flemish Alliance, was in “serious talks” with the radical-right party for weeks. The two parties share a preference for greater Flemish independence, according to New Flemish Alliance president Bart De Wever, and together won 44 per cent of the vote in the Flemish regional elections. Voters, survey research shows again and again, are not interested in devolving more powers from the Belgian to the Flemish level. But the cards are on the table, and it is up to the elected parties to play them.

What does this mean for Belgium’s radical-right party? Flemish Interest won the elections by recording a big jump in support, by impressing the media, and because the biggest centre-right party invited it to join coalition-forming talks. But the biggest win, a place in government, is out of reach because the other potential coalition parties are maintaining their cordon sanitaire. But the party now has an unprecedented platform from which to campaign and oppose government. Its two-month-long participation in government coalition talks has given it legitimacy and the veneer of governing potential. What will happen at the next election is anyone’s guess.

Then there’s Sweden. Long considered an outlier among European countries because it lacked a successful populist radical-right party, Sweden has witnessed the rise of the extremist Sweden Democrats over the past decade. The September 2018 election continued the pattern: the party was a winner in at least two of the three ways we listed above.

The Sweden Democrats went from forty-nine to sixty-two seats in the 349-seat Riksdag (from 14 to 18 per cent of the vote), comfortably confirming its position as the third-largest party. It was also declared one of the winners by the media, both because it gained more new seats than any other party and because it seemed that no governmental majority was possible without it. Indeed, much of the election coverage centred on the question of if and how the other parties could continue to refuse any collaboration with the Sweden Democrats. The election ended in a stalemate, and was followed by the longest government-formation process in Swedish history. Normally, these negotiations take only a few days; this time they took 129 days.

To understand why, some background is needed. For most of the twentieth century Swedish politics was dominated by the Social Democrats, usually with the support of the Communist/Left party and sometimes in collaboration with the smaller Liberal and Centre parties. Over time, two fairly stable blocs formed: the Left Bloc (the Social Democrats, the Left Party and the Greens) and the Alliance (led by the liberal-conservative Moderate Party, with the Centre Party, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats). It was generally assumed that one of these two constellations would win any election.

This all changed in 2010, when the Sweden Democrats entered parliament for the first time. The party had been formed in the late 1980s, but for a long time its nationalist ideology and neo-Nazi roots made it unpalatable for most voters. But it started to moderate its position in the 1990s, among other things by prohibiting the use of uniforms at party events and cracking down on overt racism among its representatives. In the aftermath of the successful Riksdag elections in 2010 it also decided to change its official ideology to social conservatism.

Despite all this, the established Swedish parties also maintain a strict cordon sanitaire. A few instances of collaboration occurred at the local level during 2014–18, but at the national level it only took a mild reference by the then Moderate leader Anna Kindberg-Batra to the idea of governing with the support of the Sweden Democrats for an outcry to occur. Kindberg-Batra’s successor quickly returned to the previous party line of no collaboration, at least until the election.

At the 2010 and 2014 elections the established parties largely dealt with the rise of the Sweden Democrats by attempting business as usual. Minority governments had been the norm even before the appearance of the Sweden Democrats, with formal rules and informal praxis making it possible to govern without a stable parliamentary majority. Soon after the 2014 election it became clear that this was no longer possible because the Sweden Democrats refused to follow these informal rules. The Alliance parties helped Stefan Löfven’s Social Democrat–Green government to pass its budgets in order to avoid early elections, but at a high cost. Many Alliance voters and activists were outraged at this support of the traditional enemy, the Social Democrats, and the Alliance itself at times seemed in danger of breaking up.

The 2018 election results pushed the situation to the breaking point. The Left Bloc won 144 seats, the Alliance 143, and the Sweden Democrats the remaining sixty-two. The two liberal parties in the Alliance had both promised voters not to become dependent on the populist right party, but the left’s one-seat lead meant that the Alliance couldn’t form government without support from either the Sweden Democrats or one of the parties of the left. At the same time, none of the Alliance parties was inclined to support a government led by the Social Democrats. In the end, the reluctance to appear dependent on the Sweden Democrats won out for the Centre and Liberal parties, which agreed to support a second Löfven government in exchange for policy concessions.

What does all this mean for the Sweden Democrats? In the short run they didn’t win in our third sense of achieving policy changes; indeed, some migration policies are set to become slightly less restrictive again after being tightened in 2015 in response to the large influx of refugees. On the other hand, the Sweden Democrats’ electoral successes have profoundly altered Swedish politics. The Moderates and the Christian Democrats now face a difficult situation — they can only return to power by mending their relationship with the other Alliance parties and outperforming the Left Bloc in the next election, or by joining forces with the Sweden Democrats.

As Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson has pointed out, such a conservative bloc is currently only twelve seats short of a parliamentary majority. When faced with a similar choice, other European centre-right parties have often opted to collaborate with the populist radical right.

We started by describing how populist radical-right parties can “win” elections. People tend to think about elections as binary — either you win or you lose. Once it’s clear that the populist radical right hasn’t become the largest party, interest often fades, at least in the international media. The Belgian and Swedish cases illustrate that the reality is far more complicated, and that the most crucial period often comes after the election.

In most European party systems it is rare that one party wins outright, and thus governing is all about negotiations and finding majorities. This is where even a modest gain for a populist radical-right party can have a large impact on the political system. These parties are no longer newcomers to Western European party systems, but the traditional parties have still not found a way to how to deal with them.

You don’t need to look hard to find examples of less-than-successful attempts to collaborate with populist radical-right parties. In Italy, for example, the leader of the radical-right party Lega recently brought down the coalition government in which he himself was a minister, plunging the country into yet another political crisis. On the other hand, we have described two cases where maintaining a cordon sanitaire around a populist party has proved costly, forcing policy shifts and/or breaking up established party constellations. Since the populist radical-right parties continue to do well in many countries, the traditional parties will have to continue making tough choices. • 

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Where Power Stops opens with a story frequently told about, or by, presidents and prime ministers. These unusual people, driven by a mix of ambition and ideals, have often spent half a lifetime working their way into the top job. But when they reach the summit, they find the authority they expected to exercise doesn’t really exist. “They issue their instructions,” writes Runciman. “Dutiful officials nod along encouragingly. But nothing really changes… It feels like true power is still somewhere out of reach.”

How do leaders cope with this reality? Some deny the problem exists. Some try pulling any old lever, and often find that the one linked to the armed forces turns out to be the most responsive. (Tony Blair is a prime example of the latter, says Runciman.) Others leap on a crisis — any crisis — and turn it into an opportunity.

Boris Johnson and his circle have certainly leapt onto a crisis, but they’ve also done something more novel, at least in British politics. In essence, they’ve attempted to suspend the normal rules of government and parliament, not just by proroguing parliament last Wednesday but also by centralising power, not so much in the prime minister as in the prime minister’s office. In some ways, it’s like the early months of the Trump presidency, when Steve Bannon seemed to be running the administration.

Playing the Bannon role with the same dishevelled intensity is a shadowy figure named Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s special adviser, who was a key figure in the Vote Leave campaign in the lead-up to the Brexit vote in 2016. Once described as a “career psychopath” by former Conservative prime minister David Cameron, the combative Cummings propelled himself to the centre of the debate this week by summarily sacking a member of the staff of the chancellor, Sajid Javid, and having her escorted from Downing Street under police guard. Her crime was to have been in touch with a former colleague who works for one of Johnson’s critics within the party, former chancellor Philip Hammond.

Javid wasn’t told about any of this until after it had happened. In fact, despite having been appointed chancellor just a few weeks ago, he appears to have been comprehensively sidelined by Johnson and his inner circle. Earlier in the week Downing Street ordered him to cancel his first scheduled speech as chancellor, and recent announcements in his portfolio area have come straight from the PM’s office.

Another turn of the screw came on Sunday, when Johnson told rebel Tories they would no longer be considered members of the parliamentary party if they voted against a no-deal Brexit, and would be refused party endorsement for the next general election. Among the potential targets are some of the Conservative party’s most senior MPs.

This strategy, with its echoes of Facebook’s “move fast and break things” (and a dash of Beijing’s politburo), will be a further test for those Conservative MPs who’ve had to retreat from a series of lines in the sand in recent weeks. Former members of the no-Brexit-without-a-deal camp are suddenly in favour of a hard Brexit on 31 October, regardless of its likely cost. Former adherents of the no-proroguing viewpoint now unabashedly favour last week’s dubious strategy. The very real possibility of an election, and the belief that Boris Johnson is the man to win it, have proved remarkably potent.

There is another way of getting the machinery of government moving, and it is personified in Runciman’s book by another Johnson, Lyndon Baines Johnson, president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. “First as majority leader in the US Senate, then as president, Johnson achieved his goals by his ruthlessness, his relentlessness, his attention to detail and the sheer force of his political personality,” writes Runciman. “Johnson passed the legislation that had defeated his predecessors, including the great civil rights reforms of the mid-1960s.”

Ruthless Boris Johnson might be, and his battered political persona still has some force. But “attention to detail” doesn’t sound much like him. It doesn’t capture the seeming carelessness at the heart of his government, and at the heart of the whole Brexit enterprise, and the apparent yearning for the heady days when slogans dreamed up by people like Dominic Cummings stood in for reality, and the messy business of negotiating deals — the routine business of government, in other words — wasn’t necessary.

Reality, meanwhile, is getting uncomfortably close. As the Financial Times reported on the weekend, the “most comprehensive” study yet of Brexit’s impact on British companies — a survey of more than 6000 businesses — reveals that productivity has declined by 2.5 per cent as a result of Brexit-induced cuts in investment. Despite the majority vote to leave in 2016, public opinion could easily sour when the reality — a crashing out of Europe — proves so much less attractive than the one-liners promised.

The FT’s widely read columnist Robert Shrimsley thinks that the damage won’t just be economic and reputational. Last week’s decision to prorogue parliament was damaging not because it broke any rules but because it broke a convention, and conventions have a habit of staying broken. “Even if it proves decisive,” says Shrimsley, “Conservatives may still come to rue his contentious but legal gambit.”

David Runciman might be a little more sanguine. In one of his earlier books, The Confidence Trap, he makes a strong case for the intrinsic durability of democracies. (Italy, which weathered yet another crisis last week, is a prime example.) Authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, can be surprisingly brittle. The question Boris Johnson should ponder is whether his government has begun adopting some of the characteristics that make those regimes vulnerable to abrupt collapse. •

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We now know that the League’s fiery leader appears to have miscalculated. His former allies in the left-wing populist Five Star Movement were so keen to avoid an early election that they did the unthinkable and reached out to the Democratic Party, the centre-left party that epitomises everything they and the League despise about Italy’s establishment. Within days, Five Star and the Democratic Party were sorting out the distribution of ministries according to what Italians call an inciucio — a squalid, unpleasant deal. A populist-left coalition now seems to be the most likely outcome.

Creating a new government from the ashes of a previous one, without returning to the polls, is a tradition that goes back to the birth of the Italian state in 1861. But this time the reversal has taken on particular significance because it marks the end of a populist experiment. The alliance between the right-wing League — the rebranded, formerly secessionist Northern League — and Five Star had been predicated on the assumption that populists of the left would have enough in common with populists of the right to keep government ticking over indefinitely. And, from May 2018, that assumption appeared to be at least credible. Sure, Five Star never really bought into the League’s xenophobia and the League never embraced Five Star’s most whacky anti-capitalist rhetoric. Yet the values they shared saw the marriage last for more than a year.

The similarities between the two populist movements were considerable and, for a while at least, far more important than traditional left–right divisions. It’s true that the two parties’ hostility to Europe, and to the West in general, came from very different places: Five Star’s anti-Americanism would have been familiar to anyone caught up in Italian student politics in the 1980s, and the League’s far-right notions of Italian grievance have been bubbling away ever since the country’s experience of national socialism from the 1920s to the 40s. Yet the two parties shared common ground on foreign policy and had a semblance of unity on domestic issues. The things that united the pair enabled them to establish what became known as the yellow–green government (yellow being the colour of Five Star and green that of the League).

Yet there were always going to be differences. When I was covering European affairs from Brussels a few years ago, the Five Star parliamentarians I met came across as hard-working and determined to change EU institutions from within. They were idealistic and consistent in their disdain for free markets, infrastructure spending and the English-speaking world in general. They were pro-Russian purely because Russia was an adversary of the United States (the enemy of my enemy…) and many of them appeared happy to embrace conspiracy theories that no established political party would touch. At the end of one interview, for instance, a Five Star member of the European Parliament mentioned “chemtrails” — the utterly discredited belief that condensation trails from airplanes contain biological agents released by governments. The same MEP then made a passing reference to Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, shot down by a Russian missile in 2014: “We’ll never really know what happened,” he said. Did the Americans do it? Who knows? I don’t know. Do you? Who can say? There’s so much misinformation out there…

Then there was the George Soros puppet-master stuff that would sound anti-Semitism alarm bells in any other Western democracy. Yet on that front Five Star and the League appeared to be in lock step. Salvini, too, made no secret of his anti-European, anti-Western outlook, and the League’s contempt for the European Union was expressed by simply not showing up in Brussels. As for the party’s pro-Russian bona fides, they were on display recently when a BuzzFeed investigation found that Gianluca Savoini, an aide to Salvini, had taken part in negotiations for the clandestine funnelling of Russian funds to the League. It wasn’t a good look, but Salvini laughed off the revelations before throwing Savoini under a bus.

The cleavage between the two parties was felt more keenly in the policy area broadly defined as giustizia — justice not in the sense of crime and punishment, but in the sense of the politicisation of the judicial system and its complex relationship with Italian politics. Five Star’s founder, comedian Beppe Grillo, envisaged a party firmly in the camp of giustizialismo, the untranslatable term representing the idea that prosecuting magistrates deserve greater powers to pursue political corruption — indeed, to pursue crimes of all kinds. The League, with its origins as a northern secessionist party that saw Rome’s elites as a foreign enemy, was also well disposed towards giustizialismo, at least in theory, and the party had shown little sympathy for its former coalition partner, Silvio Berlusconi, when he found himself on the receiving end of judicial probes.

But investigations by unelected and highly politicised judges stop being fun when they come knocking on your own door — as the League discovered in 2016 when it was targeted over its sometimes-murky funding arrangements. The courts’ more recent bids to overturn Salvini’s blocking of asylum seeker boats placed even more strain on League–magistrate relations — and, as a result, on the relationship between League and Five Star. Salvini’s stance towards the judiciary became one of extreme hostility.

Earlier this month the differences between the populist partners came to a head in an unexpected way. For years now, Italy has been struggling to build high-speed rail corridors — in the form of a project known as the TAV (treno alta velocità) ­— to get around saturated local lines. When and if completed, the TAV would take both passengers and goods from southern Italy to connections with France on the northern border — in other words, to EU markets. It was a project that Five Star was always going to oppose: the combination of free trade, capitalism and large infrastructure was toxic for its members. (Could Soros be funding it? Who knows? I don’t know. Do you? Who can say? There’s so much misinformation out there…)

Yet Salvini and the League were adamant that the TAV should proceed. Somewhere, tucked away in the League’s political memory, were the legitimate grievances of northeastern Italian businesses that had struggled with poor infrastructure in attempting to get their products to European markets. By the beginning of August the divisions within the coalition over the TAV were threatening to split the government, with Salvini pitted against the other deputy prime minister, Five Star’s Luigi Di Maio. Meanwhile, Grillo — who isn’t a member of parliament but is effectively the co-owner of Five Star — was urging the party to hold the line on the project. The wheels of the coalition were coming off and Salvini started to make plans, buoyed by his party’s strong showing at the European elections in May.

Salvini didn’t do himself any favours during the days after he brought down the government. At a rally in the Adriatic city of Pescara, he said that fresh elections could grant him pieni poteri (full powers) to bring about real change. In most democracies that kind of talk would sound like a call for an electoral mandate to govern in his own right — and that’s presumably how Salvini meant it. But the words were strangely reminiscent of a 1922 speech by Benito Mussolini, whose plans for Italy always went beyond securing democratic mandates.

From that moment on it was up to the country’s president, a dignified former Christian Democrat from Sicily called Sergio Mattarella, to work out what to do. There are essentially three large blocks of votes in the Italian parliament: League, Five Star and the Democratic Party. To form a government, two of them needed to enter into a coalition.

Salvini could have been forgiven for thinking that elections were on the cards. In 2018 it took the two populists eighty-eight days to form a coalition, and only after all other solutions — including an alliance between Five Star and the Democratic Party — had been exhausted. In fact, those two parties concluded that the mutual contempt they had expressed so publicly over the years was, indeed, underpinned by actual contempt. For them ever to work together would amount to what Italians describe as swallowing a toad — and the likelihood of that happening appeared slim.

Then something changed. Perhaps it was the result of chemtrails released by the CIA over Rome, but Five Star appeared ready to set aside its hostility towards the Democratic Party to avoid an early election. In fact, the grillini were now very keen for the legislature to go its full term, possibly suspecting that the 2018 general elections had been the party’s high-water mark and that the protest vote it had marshalled so effectively could be suctioned up by the League and its firebrand leader. Importantly, there were no guarantees that the north–south divide between the two parties, with Five Star dominating the south and the League performing best in its northern stronghold, would hold.

Looking at things clinically, there was nothing particularly untoward about the change of government. No single party emerged from the 2018 election as the frontrunner, so it’s hard to claim that the new government, assuming it is established in coming days, has overturned the will of the people. The alliance between the Democratic Party and Five Star — if Five Star’s members and President Mattarella agree to sign off on it — is as democratically legitimate as the Five Star–League coalition was before it.

Yet the manoeuvre did come with a loss of face — not so much for the Democratic Party, whose voters are old-school enough to accept a level of pragmatism, but for Five Star, whose followers have taken to the party’s online chat rooms to express their dismay. And that’s the tricky part of managing the expectations of a populist movement: encouraging your followers to lash out at a common enemy is easy; turning around and asking party members to embrace that enemy is a much bigger ask.

The one humiliation that the Democratic Party will have to accept is the reappointment of Giuseppe Conte, the prime minister chosen in 2018 by the two populist parties as the vanilla candidate they could all agree on. As prime minister, Conte’s job was to keep the peace between the two populist formations — and, on that front, he got the government from A to B for a year. But while he was a compromise candidate, he had always been a Five Star man and his loyalties remained firmly on the yellow side of the governo gialloverde.

As prime minister, Conte won’t be expected to lead the country, something that will be done by the top officials of the two parties making up the new governing coalition. That’s assuming the Democratic Party secretary Nicola Zingaretti survives the feud currently under way with former leader and deposed prime minister Matteo Renzi. Conte’s one job will be to keep the peace and present the world with a credible public face. After meeting President Mattarella this week, Conte said he hoped to lead a government that will focus on new directions — by which one can only assume that he plans to break with the most unpalatable aspects of life with the League, starting with Salvini’s anti-immigrant and anti-Roma invective.

Yet while both the Democratic Party and Five Star may be ideologically of the left, the Democratic Party’s pro-European, pro-Western outlook — policy positions that recent leaders had to take on the party’s communist diehards to establish — may yet create cultural divisions that prove difficult to overcome. As for the future of the TAV — again, deep-seated divisions are in play between the two parties. But ultimately it will be Five Star’s history as a protest party that will prove the biggest challenge. For populists, the transition from opposition to government may ultimately prove too painful to manage. •

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The immediate background is Johnson’s replacement of Theresa May as prime minister on 24 July, which has given Britain an actual government where a protracted void had been. A restless new order in Downing Street has two linked imperatives: leaving the European Union on 31 October — with a deal if possible but without one if need be — and then winning a quick general election. These aims serve to energise a still-united team of committed Brexiteers, the product of Johnson’s sweeping change of personnel in the days after he took office.

Success is far from assured. No real dialogue with the European Union is in train because it rejects Johnson’s precondition (namely, willingness to amend the futile agreement it made with May, especially over the “anti-democratic” Irish backstop) and is waiting to see if he is ousted. Johnson’s meetings this week with Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, ahead of the G7 summit in Biarritz, will be the first attempt to break that deadlock. His artful letter on 19 August to Donald Tusk, head of the European Union’s intergovernmental council, says that “the UK is ready to move quickly” and he hopes “the EU will be ready to do likewise.” But such interlocutors — and this is new in Brexit — are not the main concern of Britain’s prime minister; the home front is.

Domestic policy announcements, reflecting focus group concerns — a splurge on hospitals and police numbers, a harsher approach to criminal justice, skills-based immigration — have earned a modest, wait-and-see polling boost. But a defection or illness could in an instant erase the Conservatives’ notional majority of just one in the House of Commons, where seething hostility to the PM and his plan extends to the Tory benches. The former chancellor, Philip Hammond, who resigned as Johnson took office, reopened hostilities in mid August with a scathing attack on the government and a promise to resist any effort towards a “no-deal Brexit.” At the next opportunity, around fifty Conservative MPs (out of 311) could join him in voting with the opposition.

This chance will come on 3 September, when the chamber meets after the latest long recess. (For all the talk of parliament’s vitality, MPs have had little to do since 2016 except vent, gossip, plot and click.) In advance, various cross-party cells scour Erskine May, the Victorian-era procedural bible, for any device that might thwart a no-deal Brexit. An intense if deep-cover positional war sees rival Westminster files bulge with flow charts, game plans and media lists. The “anti-no-deal” side consists of the Tory dissidents, most Labourites (247 MPs), Scots and Welsh nationalists (thirty-five and four), independents (sixteen), Liberal Democrats (thirteen), the lone Green, and the brazen speaker, John Bercow. The rivalrous ambitions and vast egos in play hinder cooperation. But the shared aim of averting a “cliff edge” fall or “crash out” from the European Union compels a diplomatic dalliance.

The shift to attritional war in parliament could begin with a motion of no-confidence in the government, its text given a nonpartisan flavour to maximise its chances. In the sole post-1945 precedent, James Callaghan’s 1979 defeat triggered a general election (which the Labour prime minister lost to Margaret Thatcher). This time, victory’s reward is uncertain, partly thanks to the blundering Fixed-Term Parliaments Act of 2011. Designed to transfer power of dissolution from PM to Commons — and shield the monarch from any controversy — it mandates an interval of fourteen days after a no-confidence verdict, during which a putative new leader (or the recharged incumbent) can seek to win a new vote and thus avoid an election short of the “fixed,” five-year term.

Here, the dilemma of the anti-Johnsonites (or anti-no-dealers) comes into focus: namely, they outnumber Boris’s Conservatives but lack the latter’s leadership and unified purpose. By itself, a no-confidence vote will only magnify these tensions: in those circumstances, there is simply no plausible Commons candidate for prime minister. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition, is beyond the pale for too many MPs, though on 14 August — between a Romanian holiday, a celebration of Allende’s Chile and a trip to Ghana — he offered himself as a caretaker PM. Not to worry, was his signal: he would govern only as long as it takes to halt no-deal, create more time for EU talks, and call a general election (which, few seemed to notice, he would oversee from Number 10, with all the leverage of pole position).

This received a dusty answer from Jo Swinson’s Lib Dems, a mind-bending welcome from disaffected Tories, and contained glee from Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party, which sees London Labour’s flirtation with an anti-Tory pact and agreement to a new independence referendum as a windfall. Soon, the media buzz switched to promoting veterans Kenneth Clarke (a garrulous Tory Europhile) and Harriet Harman (a New Labour–era minister and aspiring speaker) as potential saviours.

These forlorn quests confirm the endurance of August’s political “silly season.” But there’s a serious side. A no-confidence vote without a leader of stature and clear next steps is a bad move. It will descend into a febrile two-week scramble dominated by a clamorous media, counter-demos in central London, haywire markets, and the release of latent hysteria in every direction — the flames fanned all the way by Westminster’s new tribe: obsessively clicking, publicity-addicted MPs. Queen Elizabeth’s embroilment in politics would then be the fitting nadir of Brexitannia’s three corrosive years. How public opinion would react is hard to tell, but the likeliest beneficiary is the man with the plan.

Aware of the hazards of a frontal assault, some anti-Johnsonite MPs favour a less pyrotechnic approach: seizing the parliamentary agenda and then passing a law requiring the PM to seek a further extension of EU membership, in principle allowing time for a revised agreement with Brussels. (After Britain missed the initial leaving date of 31 March and was given a respite until 12 April, the European Union granted a “final” extension to 31 October; on that date, as is often forgotten, it has the unilateral right to employ the guillotine.) A debate on Northern Ireland’s suspended executive on 9 September is a potential lever for the Commons’s notional rebel majority to deliver a late reprieve. This legislative path would echo the strife of January–April, when backbenchers tried, and intermittently managed, to take hold of the day’s business and sideline May’s flailing government.

Again, everything depends on this being more than a one-hit wonder, and on rebels being able to turn the no-deal flag of convenience into a banner of — not principle, it’s far too late for that — credible authority at least. The mixed response to Corbyn’s démarche (even setting aside his invariant EU-phobia and trust deficit) and to other candidate PMs signals the difficulty, which goes beyond leadership alone. Strands of the opposition to no-deal variously prioritise a new referendum (options unclear), repeal of the decision to leave the European Union (wrongly assumed to return Britain to its 2016 status), a newly negotiated “soft” Brexit, a general election, a “national unity” government (exclusively composed of, ahem, pro-EU figures), and a role for citizens’ assemblies (status vague). All take for granted patience and amenability from the European Union, whose own internal politics are strikingly ignored by its warmest fans. How to find a straight road among all this, even as the clock runs down?

The legislative route could well give the anti-Johnsonites at least a short-term win. In turn, that prospect might lead Johnson to call a general election, preferably held just after 31 October to ensure Brexit, the legal default, happens; or, reluctantly but to avoid being toppled, before that date. The former circumstance would oblige him to parley with Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party in order to avoid splitting the anti-EU side’s vote, but Farage’s near-inevitable competition — if the cast-iron promise to deliver Brexit were on hold — might well sink the Tories’ election chances. In either case, Boris’s election theme, drawing on widespread pro-Brexit and anti-Corbyn sentiment, would be a variant of “people vs parliament.”

Johnson has the initiative; his opponents are boxed in. A revealing clue to their morass is that ugly but necessary term, “anti-no-deal(ers).” It covers two broad groups, as “anti-Brexiteer” now does not: unbending supporters of EU membership and tolerators of agreed, or soft, withdrawal (of the type signed by May’s insiders and thrice spurned by the Commons, albeit with narrowing margins). Tactically, the relentless, even obsessive focus on no-deal has served each half of the campaign very well: in targeting a shared enemy, deflecting scrutiny, gaining solid backing in opinion polls, and keeping options open. Now the decisive battle is near, its strategic deficiency is plain: no leader, no message, no endgame, no positivity. Brute politics are all the anti-no-dealers have left.

Switching mode from vehement “anti” into binding, heart-lifting “pro” looks impossible at this late stage, even more as the ingrained style of Britain’s pro-EU orthodoxy is the male rant: preening, haranguing, sneering, alienating. Johnson’s operation is hardly sweetness and light; it is coordinated by the fertile anti-establishment maverick Dominic Cummings, architect of the libertarian (as opposed to nativist) wing of the Brexit campaign in 2016, and an unforgiving if stylish polemicist on his own account. But the contrast in mood music is becoming stark. Receiving aural muggings by the likes of Alastair Campbell, James O’Brien, Ian Dunt, Andrew Adonis and Stig Abell — however much or little such names resonate beyond their fevered world — is to be reminded that the deepest enemies of any cause are its most fervent advocates.

Anything might happen now. Without the millstone of the wasted years since 2016, it could even be exciting. Brexit by 31 October looks at the same time doable and impossible. A general election is a safer bet. Conceivably, Johnson could deliver the first and lose the second — and at last earn a link to Churchill. It’s about democracy, and a people’s vote that, one way or another, simply must be honoured. Only then can Britain begin to breathe again, take stock, and move on. If not now, when? •

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What they propose is a treaty to democratise the governance of the euro area. Its key feature would be a parliamentary assembly composed largely of deputies from existing national parliaments, supplemented by representatives of Europe’s various institutions and, not least, the European parliament. The assembly’s main function would be to increase the transparency and accountability of those institutions, which tend to escape serious scrutiny or to act in what is effectively an unaccountable manner. They include the ensemble of subterranean groups and committees that have caused so many headaches for, among others, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

More generally, the authors are keen to push the idea of the European Union as the guarantor of “solidarity,” which is code for measures designed to tackle inequality and environmental protection and protect workers’ rights. At one level, it’s all very laudable. Who could possibly be against greater democratisation, greater accountability, and lots more goodies for hard-pressed European citizens? Well, quite a few of us, it seems.

The elephant in the room of this bien pensant and largely Europhile discussion is Brexit and the rise of populism across the European mainland, and with it a deepening scepticism about the virtues of the “European project,” however it’s articulated. We can perhaps forgive the authors for not taking on board recent populist developments — many of the more eye-catching have taken place since the discussions that led to the book — but their near silence on the Brexit referendum of 2016 is more striking. Perhaps their view is that the British vote is too idiosyncratic to merit a great deal of comment, or perhaps that it is too soon to see how other European countries will react.

Whatever the case, the danger is clear: in dealing with what we think are the causes of the “crisis” — in this case a lack of “solidarity” and of institutional mechanisms to render governing processes more transparent — we ignore the perhaps more glaring issue of the growing alienation of citizens from the European Union and its institutions more broadly. Do we really think that those British citizens who voted to leave the EU would have been convinced otherwise by the promise of another European assembly? Do we think they would have been impressed by the argument that more of Britain’s financial contribution to the EU should be used in the name of social justice to help provide infrastructure in Romania or Croatia?

That has to be doubtful, to say the least. And what goes for British Eurosceptics goes as well for citizens in France, Italy and elsewhere. The point is that there are few votes in the core European countries for increasing and widening the EU’s powers, no matter what its institutional configuration or how accountable those acting at this level are.

So one of the key problems about this book is its premise: that the answer to the “crisis” of the EU is to broaden and deepen democracy at the European level. Such a postulate may be an article of faith among left-leaning intellectuals on the European mainland, but this doesn’t in and of itself make it correct, and I write as one of those Guardian-reading commentators myself. What seems apparent, rather, is that there is no great desire for a “European project” as an endpoint to which our efforts should be directed.

A project implies something to be completed or finalised. It implies that we need some collaborative approach to bring about a better state of affairs. Without agreement on what the European project is aiming to create, questions about institutions and processes are just so much detail. We can only really decide whether we’ve got the right institutions, and by extension whether a European assembly is going to be an enhancement, once we have some sort of consensus concerning what Europe can and should be doing.

Over the past decade the elites’ self-confidence about where European integration is taking us has taken a major hit. The causes are multiple, and not easy to remedy with institutional innovation. The global financial crisis rocked confidence in market solutions, transnational flows of funds, and open markets. The austerity measures adopted by many countries also backfired in the sense that it was ordinary citizens who bore their brunt while banks were bailed out and wealth protected. The refugee crisis of 2015 exposed significant differences between national elites, in terms both of how they perceived that turn of events and of how well prepared they were for a mass inflow of refugees. Brexit, the Italian and Swedish elections of 2018, and the strengthening of the far right in Spain and Greece sounded further alarms.

While the elites might be in favour of greater integration, more porous borders, and a multicultural intermingling of peoples and cultures, many citizens are not. Maybe they will be; but until they are, the idea of a Europe built on a transnational solidarity of a kind that can sustain a further strengthening of the power of European institutions seems like an overstretch.

So if the answer to the crisis of the EU is not an expansion of the powers and accountability of European governance, what is? I think the answer is at once prosaic and counterintuitive. The EU should continue to play the role of a supranational regulatory body that brings countries together for specific purposes, purposes that individual countries self-evidently can’t achieve in isolation. If there is a powerful argument for Europe then it arises from the need for continent-wide environmental regulation, measures to combat climate change, and minimum standards for food imports, pharmaceutical products, toys and suchlike. Europe can provide a bulwark against the less desirable facets of globalisation, including the erosion of the rights of workers and the forced opening up of healthcare, schooling and other services to the market, and can promote and protect important sites of historical and cultural interest.

If this sounds a lot like what the EU does already, then to a large extent this represents an endorsement of a rather unheralded facet of the “European project,” if we can bear the title.

At another level, though, what is left out is just as important as what is left in. This book is full of an expressed and sometimes latent desire for a levelling of the playing field, structural adjustment policies, massive shifts in resources to fund infrastructure across the union, “solidarity” and so on. Its authors particularly want to leverage the fact of monetary integration via the euro into the realm of fiscal harmonisation and standardisation — or, in plain English, to set tax rates for citizens and corporations at the EU level.

This, I suspect, is where elite social democratic sentiment departs from mainstream citizen intuition. What has become evident over the last couple of years is that fewer citizens are feeling overly generous towards their European neighbours. Recession, austerity and the chill breezes of precarity, automation and zero-hour contracts have concentrated minds on maintaining the social compact between citizens at the local and national level but less so at the European level.

Would it be such a bad thing if we ceased to think of Europe as being borne along on a teleological process of integration, expansion and improvement? Clearly the authors of this book believe it would be, but I tend to think that the price for salvaging the European Union may well be the opposite: greater parsimony with respect to its form, function and destiny. A more compact, less integrationist EU would not be a failure of the “European project” but rather its realisation in terms that most citizens would find acceptable. •

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At last the finale — which is also a prelude to a new crunch — is imminent. Johnson’s 66–34 per cent win over Jeremy Hunt in the Conservative Party leadership run-off, announced on Tuesday morning in London, is followed at Wednesday lunchtime by May’s last House of Commons question time. Then come Boris’s anointing at Buckingham Palace, the limousine ride to Downing Street, and the obligatory pieties on the steps of Number 10. In Britain, rituals ever run smooth while policies (from Brexit downwards) ever mean pratfalls. Go figure.

Now that the ball has indeed “come loose from the back of the scrum,” as Johnson wittered in 2013, and this “great, great thing to have a crack at” is almost in his hands, what else awaits but satisfying confirmation of that verdict?

The fifty-five-year-old’s charge sheet is long. His sacking from the Times for embellishing an article with an invented quote from his godfather, an Oxford historian. His taped conversation humouring an old schoolmate (a fellow Etonian, inevitably) who plans to beat up a journalist. His years painting the European Union in lurid colours for the Telegraph and Spectator, seducing credulous minds (it is said) to fatal pro-Brexit effect. His affairs as a faithless husband, and his lying about one costing him his shadow cabinet place. His parodic language, as lovingly rumpled as his blond moptop, that strays towards insult of minorities. His woeful stint as foreign secretary and affinity with Donald Trump. His criminally bad book about Churchill, one might add (Shakespeare is forthcoming). And these are just the headlines.

Even in an era of brazen politicians, this bounder’s CV (to use Johnson’s own picaresque argot) has seemed prohibitive. That it has proved a stepladder rather than a barrier testifies to the upside-down world inaugurated by the UK-wide vote to leave the European Union. The vacuum of leadership and direction since then has sent emotions as well as democracy haywire. The feeling of malaise now feeds the despairing hope of Tory members, and more widely of Brexiteers, that Boris’s “can do,” “guts,” “will,” “drive,” “optimism,” and “do or die” resolve will at last honour the 2016 vote.

But personality politics of this kind horrifies anti-Johnsonites and supplies the other leg of their scathing verdict. So politically divided is Britain, so vulnerable its global status, so economically perilous the threat of a no-deal crash out of the EU, so tight the parliamentary arithmetic, that the madcap man-child Boris is the last type in charge the country now needs.

Look around and shudder, continues the prosecution. Iran’s bold seizure of a British-flagged merchant ship in the Persian Gulf, compounded by London’s lack of foresight and infirm response, is the tip of Britain’s foreign policy drift. After the European Union, a future squeezed between a wayward United States and an overbearing China beckons. A hard Brexit will deepen cross-border tension with Ireland and refuel Scottish separatism. A currency already listing amid Brexit uncertainty, yet bringing no improvement in the alarming trade deficit, faces a whirlpool. Domestic social problems — housing, health and elderly care, education, prisons, transport — are neglected, ill-funded or poorly managed. A wrong ’un in his own right, the blustery, attention-deficient Johnson is set to worsen already grave problems.

This swingeing critique reaches far inside his own party. Johnson’s arrival is already provoking resignations among ministers, including chancellor Philip Hammond, opposed to no-deal or to Brexit in any form (the categories are still blurred in practice). In depriving him of even the wafer-thin working majority inherited from May, their departures augur more of the grinding procedural combat that saw the deadlocked chamber vote down May’s deal with the EU three times, though without endorsing an alternative.

Johnson promises to break the logjam. He is adamant that, by agreement or not, Britain will exit on 31 October — the date decreed by the EU after the British government missed its initial deadline — which in turn became a pledge crucial to his leadership win and chances of outflanking Nigel Farage’s insurgent Brexit Party. With the domestic and European arms of his challenge so intertwined, he will need agile diplomatic skills at Westminster as well as among an understandably sour EU. Yet the repertoire needed in each is subtly different: hand-to-hand versus jaw-to-jaw.

In the House of Commons, a fiercely motivated ad hoc coalition will use every means — including seizing the legislature’s timetable — to prevent a no-deal Brexit. The numbers are there to stall the process. But 31 October is the current default: to reverse course, the rebels need to overturn MPs’ decision in 2017 to invoke Article 50 of an EU treaty that compels departure. Short of that, the EU is free to say “nee, c’est fini. te vas, Tschüss…” And who could blame it?

In any case, the EU’s own half-decade leadership carousel, the latest particularly bruising, leaves scarce appetite for more negotiations with London. A government now led by a man committed to (or trapped by) his offer of a quick Brexit further limits negotiating room. Any such narrow ground (a term once used to characterise the Northern Irish dispute) may yet lie in a codicil to the withdrawal agreement that amends the contentious “backstop,” which, as it stands, guarantees a frictionless Irish border at the cost of UK sovereignty. Add other small concessions, eased by frank personal contacts across the divide, and let Boris present the deal as diplomatic triumph.

That might prove too much for either Johnson or the EU to swallow. Much depends on how the shock of highest office changes him. So far, he lacks the statesman’s art of dousing as well as arousing fervour among his supporters, and indeed of successful negotiation. The ambiguous rationale of his no-deal case is relevant here. Only such a threat will shift Brussels’s position, his backers argue, and thus facilitate compromise — but many have come to believe in it for its own sake, embracing “very well, alone” as a positive strategy. This is just one side of Britain’s mutual radicalisation into hard leave and remain camps: May’s most harmful legacy, if not hers alone.

The tribal stand-off is the undertow of every Westminster discussion. Tories are fixated on avoiding a general election before Brexit is done, while Labour demands one. Outright pro-remain parties — Greens, Welsh nationalists, and Liberal Democrats (led by Jo Swinson since their own leadership election this week) — have reached a single by-election pact to dislodge a sitting Tory, which may be a harbinger. They want a second referendum to cancel the first, the term “confirmatory vote” having succeeded “people’s vote.” In Scotland, the priority is different, as the nationalist government is eager to use the English toff’s unpopularity north of the border to secure a repeat independence ballot.

For his part, Johnson’s aim is to get Brexit through before levering a mandate, perhaps in early 2020 if he lasts until then. (George Canning’s 117 days in Downing Street in 1827 is the unwanted record to beat.) With no majority, a no-confidence motion looms. But not yet, for after the 24 July drama the Commons goes into recess until 3 September. Unless, as so often in history, an August crisis intervenes.

Brexit accomplished and a general election win are the two routes to Boris Johnson’s holy grail. One could conceivably happen without the other. But without the first, a quick unravelling of his premiership is likely. Do or die, all or nothing: the stakes could not be higher. That unforgiving verdict aside, such absolutism of choice and the prime minister with the task of navigating it look perfectly matched.

But this also focuses his great political challenge. Brexit’s polarisation, buttressed daily across the twittified political–media world, now squeezes classic politics as “the art of the possible.” Johnson, the former’s beneficiary and target, can only succeed, even in his own terms, by using its logic. That means bringing the less committed onside, in practice via a big-tent populism lodged in a recognisable Conservative–British idiom. His victory speech hinted at this before it descended to blather: “[At] this pivotal moment in our history, we again have to reconcile two noble sets of instincts. Between the deep desire for friendship and free trade and mutual support in security and defence between Britain and our European partners. And the simultaneous desire, equally deep and heartfelt, for democratic self-government in this country.”

It might be hoped that his cabinet jigsaw and the larger tone he sets will bring greater clarity. But that is not Johnson’s way. The blah-blah, with all its hostages to fortune, is integral to the act. In this sense there is pathos in his remark that, across two centuries, “we Conservatives have had the best insights into how to manage the jostling sets of instincts in the human heart.”

His more ideological allies, today exultant, are strangers to such complexity. Mature friends make a subtler case. They cite Boris’s ability as mayor of London to build a team, delegate and win loyalty as a template for his government. Harry Mount, who edited his Telegraph column for five years (“always late, always word-perfect”), calls him “essentially a cerebral introvert” whose various influences — a Turkish grandfather named Kemal, a mother stricken by mental illness, childhood semi-deafness, his family’s financial insecurity (albeit at high level) — gave him an “outsider status” that renders him “strangely unknowable.” They also “made him play up his P.G. Wodehouse Englishness.”

Such portraits occupy the narrow ground between adulation and hatred, as do Sonia Purnell’s critical biography and Andrew Gimson’s more sympathetic one. The formulaic animosity is feeding on itself to an extraordinary degree, as Brexit catastrophists seek new channels for their addictive fury. Many high-profile writers and publications, already hugely invested in a disastrous Brexit outcome, now equally have bet their reputational house on a Johnson government taking the UK to perdition.

In fact, there is no certain outcome of this or any other kind. The European Union does not represent “reality” and Britain “fantasy,” as is obsessively said. What is happening in the UK, and between the UK and EU, is politics rather than destiny. Boris Johnson may be more likely to fail, or at best reach another messy trade-off, than to reach his grail. But in the end it’s not about him. After three years on Theresa May’s desolation row, politics — old and new mixed — is breathing a little freer. Whatever happens next, this is a good day for democracy. •

The post A good day for democracy appeared first on Inside Story.

The man whose followers call him Il Capitano (the captain) has been able to position himself as the strongman of Italian politics and the de facto leader of the European far right. He has effectively sidelined both prime minister Guiseppe Conte and Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the Five Star Movement, the nominally senior partner in Italy’s governing coalition.

Salvini is well-known for his racism and for trying to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Italy. His policies and practices have been controversial not least because they appear to contravene Italian and European law, though so far neither Italian nor European courts have issued rulings against him. But it was only a vote in the Italian senate that stopped him from facing criminal charges for directing the coast guard vessel Diciotti not to dock at an Italian port with rescued migrants on board.

Neither Di Maio nor Conte, nor Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Partito Democratico, the largest opposition party, have had Salvini’s measure. Even Pope Francis wields less influence among Italy’s Catholics than Salvini, who claims to be a devout Christian and often fondles a rosary in public but has dismissed many of the Pope’s views, particularly concerning the human rights of migrants. According to an analysis published recently by the Guardian, it was former Trump strategist Steve Bannon who in 2016 advised Salvini to go after the Pope.

But Salvini might have met his match: thirty-one-year-old Carola Rackete, a German woman who, in Italy, is referred to as La Capitana.

Unlike Salvini, who failed to complete his university studies in history, worked briefly as a journalist, and has otherwise been a full-time politician for most of his adult life, Rackete is a ship’s captain by training. She has a degree in nautical science from Jade University, and worked for several years as an officer on German and British research ships in the Arctic and Antarctic, on cruise ships and on a Greenpeace vessel.

Rackete joined the German activist group Sea-Watch in 2016. The organisation had been established the previous year to keep the European Union accountable by patrolling the Mediterranean and, if necessary, rescuing migrants at sea. Rackete briefly captained the organisation’s Sea-Watch 2 in 2016, and in June 2019 was put in charge of the Sea-Watch 3, a fifty-metre Netherlands-registered vessel built as a supply ship for Brazilian oil platforms.

Over the past two years, Sea-Watch has clashed with Libyan, Maltese and Italian authorities. On two occasions in 2017, dozens of people died because the Libyan coast guard thwarted attempts by the crews of Sea-Watch 2 and Sea-Watch 3 to rescue them. Between June and October 2018, Maltese authorities prevented the Sea-Watch 3 from leaving the port of Valetta because, they claimed, the ship had not been properly registered. In January and May 2019, the Italian authorities tried to prevent the Sea-Watch 3 from disembarking people it had rescued; in both these instances, though, they were eventually landed in Italy to be taken to other EU countries for the processing of their asylum claims.

On 12 June this year, the Sea-Watch 3, under Rackete’s command, rescued fifty-three people in international waters off the Libyan coast. Two days later, the Italian government issued a security decree making it an offence for non-government organisations to disembark rescued migrants in Italy, and provided for hefty fines for noncompliance. Rackete rejected Libya’s offer to let the Sea-Watch 3 disembark its passengers at a Libyan port, because migrants are exposed to torture, rape, forced labour and extortion in that country. She also rejected suggestions by European politicians that she head for a Tunisian port, because, like Italy, Tunisia had closed its ports to migrants rescued in the Mediterranean and has no refugee determination process.

Sea-Watch 3 nevertheless aimed for the Italian island of Lampedusa to disembark its passengers. But while he allowed the medical evacuation of some of them, Salvini prohibited the ship from entering Italian waters. He accused Rackete and her crew of being the “accomplices of traffickers and smugglers” and running a “pirate ship.” For two weeks, the vessel remained in international waters in deference to the Italian government’s order, but on 26 June Rackete declared a “state of necessity” — a provision in international law describing circumstances that preclude the unlawfulness of an otherwise internationally unlawful act — and took the ship to within a couple of miles of Lampedusa.

Three days later, with people on board becoming increasingly restless and the situation threatening to spiral out of control, Rackete decided that she had no choice but to dock at Lampedusa. As the Sea-Watch 3 approached the quay, a much smaller Italian customs vessel tried to block it. A minor collision ensued, with no injuries, and Rackete completed her manoeuvre. Video footage of the incident suggests that Rackete did not deliberately endanger those on board the Italian ship and that it was more likely that the latter’s recklessness led to the accident.

When the German captain left her ship, she was arrested by Italian police and later charged with resistance, violence against a warship, and people smuggling, and put under house arrest. On 2 July, a judge in Agrigento, Sicily, ordered her release after throwing out two of the charges. Another judicial hearing is scheduled for 17 July.

Since her release, Rackete has been holed up at a secret location in Italy. That’s not because she wants to avoid the publicity surrounding her case but because she has reason to fear for her safety. She has been subjected to online abuse and has received death threats. In Germany, former police officer and serial video blogger Tim Kellner published a YouTube video attacking Rackete and her family, which to date has been viewed more than 320,000 times. Most of the more than 3700 comments posted so far applaud Kellner and are informed by hatred. Some contain threats. For example, “Grillgucker” wrote: “A bullet between the eyes would solve the problem.” Others referred to her as Assel (woodlouse) or Zecke (tick), or to her and her supporters as Volksverräter, the term used in Nazi Germany for traitors.

In Italy too Rackete has been threatened with rape and murder, for which Salvini can take part of the blame. He has used social media to attack her, calling her a criminal and claiming that she committed an act of war. Referring to the crew of the Italian customs vessel, Salvini said she had tried to kill five members of the Italian military.

If Salvini’s tone has become more strident, I suspect that’s because twice in the past week he has suffered a defeat. First Rackete was able to defy his order and dock in Lampedusa. Then two of the charges against her were dismissed and she was released from house arrest. Salvini has also attacked Alessandra Vella, the Agrigento judge, claiming her decision was politically motivated, shameful, scandalous and dangerous, and suggesting that Vella resign from her position and seek a career in politics. After her decision, Vella too has been subjected to abuse and death threats. Salvini has also threatened to push for “judicial reform.”

In other, forthcoming court cases Salvini’s own policies and conduct will be closely examined. Last week, Rackete’s Italian lawyer Alessandro Gamberini announced she would launch a libel lawsuit against the minister. At least outwardly, Salvini remained unconcerned about that prospect, writing on Twitter, “She breaks the law and attacks Italian military ships, and then sues me. The mafia doesn’t frighten me, so why should I be afraid of a rich and spoiled German communist.” But now Gamberini has upped the ante: in the fourteen-page statement prepared for the court, he not only claimed that Salvini broke the law on twenty-two occasions, he also asked the court to order the closure of Salvini’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

But a case before the European Court of Human Rights might provide a bigger headache for Salvini. It concerns one of the incidents in 2017 in which the Libyan coast guard prevented a Sea-Watch ship from rescuing migrants. Seventeen survivors are now suing the Italian government for abetting the Libyan coast guard in their return to Libya, where they were exposed to extreme forms of violence.

If the court finds against Italy, the case might have similar ramifications as the Hirsi case, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2012 that Italy had breached its international legal obligations when returning migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean to Libya under a deal negotiated between the Gaddafi and Berlusconi governments. Italy had been taken to court by a group of Somalis and Eritreans rescued by the Italian navy only to be handed over to the Libyans.

In its ruling, the court found that “the Italian border control operation of ‘push-back’ on the high seas, coupled with the absence of an individual, fair and effective procedure to screen asylum-seekers, constitutes a serious breach of the prohibition of collective expulsion of aliens and consequently of the principle of non-refoulement.” This judgement was behind the decision by the European Union and Italy to use the Libyan coast guard for pull-backs. But it is conceivable that the court will find the pull-backs contravene international law no less than the Italian push-backs of 2009.

There are two more reasons why Salvini has been under the pump. First, the absurdity of Italy’s Libyan solution has again been put into sharp relief. This week, the Italian government announced that it wants to work even more closely with the Libyan coast guard. But Salvini’s argument that the Libyans could rescue and look after migrants trying to reach Europe sounds increasingly hollow. In the early hours of 3 July, a government-run migrant detention centre in the Libyan capital Tripoli was bombed, presumably by the forces of general Khalifa Haftar, who has been waging war against the government in Tripoli. At least forty-four of the detainees died when two missiles struck the centre, and more than 130 were severely injured. According to reports, the centre’s guards shot at detainees who were trying to escape after the first missile hit.

Salvini is also vulnerable as an indirect result of the fact that Italian and European support for militias aligned with the Libyan government has made it more difficult for people smugglers to sell places on small boats leaving from Libya. Why pay money to smugglers when the boat is likely to be intercepted by the Libyan coast guard and its passengers returned to Libya? Smugglers have therefore offered an alternative option: larger ships take people from the North African coast to an area within easy reach of Italy, and there they are transferred to dinghies or other smaller vessels that take them directly to Lampedusa or Sicily.

As a result, seventeen small boats, carrying more than 300 migrants, landed in Lampedusa alone during the two-week stand-off between Sea-Watch 3 and the Italian government. Salvini doesn’t want to talk about them because they make a mockery of his claim that he has been able to seal Italy’s maritime borders to migrants arriving by boat.

Carola Rackete and Sea-Watch have suffered much abuse in recent days, as has the Pope, who used a mass on Monday to speak out on behalf of migrants. But Rackete has also been hailed as a heroine, both in Italy and in her native Germany, and Sea-Watch has received much support, including from unexpected quarters.

Within twenty-four hours of Rackete’s arrest, a campaign launched by two German television presenters had netted more than €1 million in donations, mostly from people in Germany, but a sizeable amount also from Italians. In fact, Sea-Watch has received so much extra funding that the organisation has decided it can afford to share some of it with other organisations running private search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

Predictably, politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany have praised Salvini’s stance and condemned the Sea-Watch captain. Equally predictably, Rackete has been applauded by politicians from the Left and the Greens. Perhaps less predictably, among the first to defend her were the two most popular German politicians, federal president Frank-Walter Steinmeier and foreign minister Heiko Maas. They were followed by the European Union’s budget and human resources minister, and prominent Christian Democrat, Günther Oettinger, and by development minister Gerd Müller of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, the Christian Democrats’ sister party.

Remarkably, Müller has called not only for a resumption of European search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, but also for an evacuation of refugees from Libya in a joint EU–UN operation. On 8 July he told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung that “the people in the [Libyan] camps of misery have the choice of dying in the camps through violence or hunger, to die of thirst in the desert on the way back or to drown in the Mediterranean.” While Angela Merkel hasn’t yet commented on Rackete — or Müller’s proposal, for that matter — a government spokesperson has strongly condemned the criminalisation of private search-and-rescue missions. Even Merkel’s bête noire, hardline interior minister Horst Seehofer, wrote to Salvini to ask for the reopening of Italy’s maritime borders.

Sea-Watch’s and Rackete’s responses to the rhetorical support they have received from the federal government have been lukewarm. They have pointed out that Germany has also provided funding and logistical support to the Libyan government, and that more than words are needed.

The German print and electronic media have largely rallied behind Rackete, and have often been critical of the Italian government and the European Union. Numerous newspapers have published long feature articles about the deaths in the Mediterranean and the tussle between Salvini and Sea-Watch. Last Saturday, Germany’s premier news magazine Spiegel ran a cover story about Rackete. Most of the articles in the German media have avoided portraying the conflict in national terms, even though Salvini has tried to make much of the fact that Rackete is German.

Across Germany on the weekend, tens of thousands took to the streets in around ninety separate protests against Rackete’s arrest, the criminalisation of rescue missions in the Mediterranean and the German government’s complicity in migrant deaths. In Hamburg, about 4000 people marched under the slogan “Free Carola,” although the organisers had expected a crowd of only 1500. In Berlin, 6000 turned out for the same cause.

While European governments took their time to agree on the distribution of the people rescued by the Sea-Watch 3, there has been no shortage of offers to accommodate them. In Italy, archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Torino said that his archdiocese was willing to take care of the migrants from the Sea-Watch 3. In Germany, several towns and cities have offered to accommodate migrants rescued in the Mediterranean — over and above those asylum seekers assigned to them by the federal and state governments. Thirteen local councils have formed the Bündnis Städte Sicherer Hafen (Alliance of Safe Haven Cities). Among them is Rottenburg, a town of about 40,000 in Baden-Württemberg in Germany’s affluent and conservative southwest.

Christian Democrat Stephan Neher has been Rottenburg’s mayor for more than ten years. “We want to act globally and take advantage of globalisation,” he said soon after the Sea-Watch 3 announced that it had rescued fifty-three people. “Therefore, we also have to bear its negative consequences. Anyway, accommodating fifty-three refugees in Rottenburg would be a piece of cake.” He even offered to send a bus to Italy to pick them up. Neher’s stance seems to have attracted a lot of local support: this week, he told the German weekly Zeit that when he walks through his town, he is often stopped, because Rottenburg residents want to know when the refugees will arrive and how many of them the town is “allowed” to host.

What explains the magnitude of support for Sea-Watch in Germany? Carola Rackete is part of the answer. For a start, she is comparatively young. Since the emergence of Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, young people and their concerns are being taken seriously. To give one other example: the Social Democrats are currently looking for a new party leader, and the most obvious candidate is thirty-year-old Young Socialists chairperson Kevin Kühnert.

For those who have long campaigned for an about-turn in Europe’s approach to forced migration, Rackete is an activist with the necessary street cred. She is principled and determined and, sporting dreadlocks and appearing barefooted in a television interview, she looks every bit like somebody who might otherwise live in a treehouse in the occupied Hambach Forest protesting against open-cut coalmining or demonstrating against the deportation of asylum seekers or disrupting a gathering of Neo-Nazis. No doubt her appearance also helps explain the vitriol reserved for her by far-right trolls.

Moderates who are concerned about German, Italian and European asylum seeker policies but who would never join potentially violent protests can also embrace her because she does not come across as a radical. Contrary to what Salvini has claimed, she is no communist.

Rackete does not let herself be provoked by Salvini. In interviews, she is calm and her words are measured. Talking to German television station ZDF, she declined to comment on Salvini’s attacks on her. “I find it inappropriate to insult others,” she explained. “I like to work with facts. And anyway, as a captain you shouldn’t get excited. At least not in front of others.” In interviews, she presents as a captain: as somebody who is responsible for her crew and for the migrants rescued by them, and who takes that responsibility seriously.

Rackete is also highly articulate and clearly knows what she is talking about: about her ship, the international law of the sea, Europeans’ moral responsibilities, and conditions faced by migrants in Libya. At the same time she claims that she prefers her actions to do the talking for her.

Her arguments are convincing. She is not calling for Europeans’ pity but insists that Sea-Watch is standing up for the rights of forced migrants. A recent article in the online edition of the Bremen daily Weser-Kurier was illustrated by an image of Rackete with a quote from her: “There is a right to be rescued. It’s all about the principle of human rights.”

Commentators in Italy and Germany have likened Rackete to Sophocles’s Antigone: the woman who defies the law of Thebes by deciding to bury her brother Polynices. When brought before Creon, the King of Thebes, Antigone justifies her action by claiming that divine law trumps state law. Rackete too has claimed that she has obeyed one set of laws (namely international law) only to fall foul of another set of laws. But here the parallels end. For Sophocles, Antigone (rather than Polynices) is the key tragic figure of his play. Rackete would probably point out that the real issue is the drowning of migrants rather than her violation of Italian law, and that the conflict between the two sets of laws could be solved if domestic law were adapted to conform with international legal standards.

Finally, Rackete stood up to powerful, unscrupulous and objectionable Matteo Salvini, and did not let him bully her into submission. That explains why her case has attracted more support than that of Pia Klemp, a young woman who captained Sea-Watch 3 (and, before that, the Iuventa, a ship belonging to non-government organisation Jugend Rettet). Like Rackete, Klemp has been charged with people smuggling offences in Italy and, according to her Italian lawyer, she could face “up to twenty years in prison and horrendous fines.” Unlike Rackete, Klemp has been portrayed as Salvini’s victim rather than as an opponent who got the better of him.

The drama around the Sea-Watch 3 has also resonated with Germans for reasons that are unrelated to the attributes of particular individuals. (I discussed some of them in Inside Story a year ago, so I’ll focus on other aspects here.) Over the past decade in particular, the idea has slowly taken hold that non-German residents of Germany enjoy the same rights as citizens. To use the words of Angela Merkel, who ought to be credited with insisting on this idea even when it was unfashionable, “The values and rights of our Basic Law are valid for everyone in this country.”

Once it is accepted that the first line of the constitution’s Article 1, “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” (human dignity is inviolable) applies to everybody in Germany, then it makes little sense to deny this right to people outside Germany’s borders. An increasing number of Germans believe that the obligation to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean has nothing to do with their particular motivation for migrating or degree of suffering; rather, it’s to do with their being human. This conviction prompts people to attend rallies, donate money for organisations like Sea-Watch, and demand that their local communities commit to accommodating additional refugees.

Also in the mix is a commitment to Europe. When the Spiegel put an image of Carola Rackete on its cover last week, it did so with the headline “Captain Europe.” This should be read as more than a reference to the Captain America superhero movies. Those yearning for another, better Europe in which solidarity is not a hollow term focus on what happens at its borders, because it is there that the idea of Europe has been most severely compromised. As the following episode shows, this is not always made as explicit as it was on the Spiegel cover.

One of the German cities whose council has passed a resolution condemning Italian and European policies is Hildesheim in Lower Saxony. Because it’s the town where I was born, I was interested to find out about the debate surrounding this resolution.

Hildesheim’s councillors voted in August 2018 on a resolution jointly submitted by Social Democrats, Greens and the Left titled “Facilitate and support rescue at sea — fight against the dying in the Mediterranean — accommodate people in distress.” Although the Christian Democrats opposed the resolution on the grounds that these issues were none of the city council’s concern, one Christian Democrat rose to speak in its favour. According to the minutes, “It is true that the council cannot solve all of the world’s problems, such as the persecution of the Rohingya or the poverty of the elderly, and has to concern itself with the problems it has been entrusted with. However, the obstruction of rescue ships is a scandal which needs to be identified also by the Council of Hildesheim.”

This explanation is at once baffling and compelling: baffling because the persecution of Rohingya, on the face of it, is as much an event outside the council’s remit as the deaths at Europe’s borders; compelling because the councillor’s obvious reasoning is that the scandal is European-made, and that implies an obligation to speak up as a European.

The German support for rescue missions in the Mediterranean may also be informed by the experience of the Willkommenskultur (or culture of hospitality) of 2015–16, when many Germans rose to the challenge of accommodating a record number of asylum seekers rather than revert to the fear, if not panic, evoked by a comparable situation in the early 1990s. But I suspect that the safe haven initiatives by German cities and the recognition that human rights don’t end at national borders will prove more significant than the much-discussed Willkommenskultur.

While Carola Rackete is still in hiding, Sea-Watch is sending a new crew to Lampedusa. It is hoping that Italian authorities will release its ship soon, and that it can then return to the waters off the North African coast.

Meanwhile, three other non-government organisations are active in the Mediterranean. Earlier this month, the German organisation Sea-Eye’s ship Alan Kurdi handed over sixty-five rescued migrants to the Maltese authorities; the day after leaving Malta, it then rescued another forty-four migrants and is now looking for a harbour where it can disembark them. Alex, a yacht belonging to the Italian organisation Mediterranea Saving Humans, also defied Salvini’s orders and last week disembarked forty-one migrants in Lampedusa. And the Barcelona-based organisation Proactiva Open Arms is still active but has been threatened by Spanish authorities with fines of up to €900,000 if it continues its rescue mission.

The EU is once again talking about distributing migrants rescued in the Mediterranean among some member states without having to haggle over the quotas each time. But so far these talks, like many similar talks on previous occasions, haven’t had any tangible outcomes.

Gerd Müller’s idea of evacuating migrants from Libya has met with silence both in Brussels and in Berlin. But it may be less far-fetched than it seems. Germany, for one, has been resettling some migrants deported from Libya to Niger: according to unofficial figures, 276 Eritreans and Somalis were resettled in mid October and early December 2018, for example. Thus there is a precedent for another kind of “Libyan solution.”

In the meantime, conditions in Libya could hardly get worse, and the European border in the Mediterranean remains the deadliest border in the world, accounting this year for about half of the world’s border-related deaths. In the first ten days of July, the International Organization for Migration counted eighty-three border deaths in the Mediterranean, while there were seventy-eight in all of June.

When Carola Rackete described the seventeen days it took to find a solution for the people her crew had rescued, she drew attention to the fact that there was a lot of talking — in Rome, in Berlin and in Brussels — but no action. By acting, she exposed the emptiness of the talking. Even Matteo Salvini, who likes to portray himself as a can-do politician but, like Donald Trump, spends most of his time campaigning, was shown to be spouting mere rhetoric. •

The post The remarkable deeds of Captain Rackete appeared first on Inside Story.

May remains Britain’s prime minister and the Conservative Party’s (acting) leader until the bout’s winner is declared on 23 July, triggering a double shuffle the next day between Buckingham Palace and Number 10 — and, if Boris wins, a likely no-confidence vote from the Labour opposition. A scrappy House of Commons, whose triple snub to the PM’s withdrawal deal with the European Union belatedly sealed her fate, might soon be fluked into a general election. After insurgents battered the two main parties in recent local council and European parliamentary elections, there is no safe bet on the outcome.

Après May, le déluge, then? In its way that would be an apt sequel to three stagnant years. But there’s one already on show, for May’s two-month valedictory brims with “legacy” business: plans to splurge over £27 billion (A$50 billion) of public funds on favoured causes (now meeting Treasury pushback), video messages, Donald Trump’s state visit, two EU summits, the G20 summit in Osaka, and more. Decorous some of it can look — a prime minister bidding a stately retreat — but the whole performance is another sign of how Brexit’s paralysis has further degraded British politics.

PM-to-PM transitions, once brief, have been stretching. In 1997, a couple of hours in the blissful dawn of New Labour’s rout of the Tories did the job, with Tony Blair arriving in Downing Street minutes after John Major left, the very choreography an uplifting emblem of popular sovereignty.

In 2007, it took three days for Gordon Brown to succeed Blair in a mid-term, vote-free stitch-up; in 2010, five for Brown’s loss of Labour’s majority to usher in David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s rose-garden bromance. In 2016, though, nineteen days passed from the Brexit referendum and Cameron’s vanishing to May’s quiet rise.

That interval was an augur of Brexit’s disabling impact on the polity. It might have been longer, for the vote to leave the EU had shattered an unready government and rattled even the victors. No one knew what to do. A pyrotechnic Tory struggle left May the unexamined winner. Her implicit job contract, which was granted at that stage by all but the extreme partisans, was to reach acceptable Brexit terms while forging a consensus that bridged the deep fissures reflected in the referendum’s 51.9–48.1 per cent result. A tall order for a first-rate PM, but Theresa May proved to be a dud. Under her care Britain became a GINO (government in name only) country.

That became unmistakable at the snap 2017 election, when the Commons majority she had inherited from Cameron was lost and her authority shredded. A stultifying cabal mentality vaporised cabinet trust. She had no leadership skills, shrank from the people, and spoke in robotic and oft-repeated phrases. Her approval ratings plunged close to (though only once below) Jeremy Corbyn’s. With a bare policy cupboard, even as challenges accumulated, Brexit was May’s crutch — but it acted as homework not strategy, far less vision. Here she made crucial blunders. Only when her backchannel EU deal had been spiked did the walls at last close in. Even then she went reluctantly: “the sofa is up against the door,” an insider’s barb, was at the end almost believable.

Incapable as May was for so long, the Conservative Party kept her in place and then allowed her to set her terms of departure. (Such a reward for epic political failure is pervasive in Britain’s honours system and elsewhere.) It was among the most socially corrosive of deeds. The party’s next step? It rebooted the 2016 formula with a more bloated and protracted contest — ten candidates, eight weeks — as if the last three years never happened and hadn’t shown, foremost, that treating a national crunch as a partisan game only delays the reckoning. As a spectacle, the brawl for the Tory crown offers unmissable drama in real time. But in its snail’s pace and indifference to the public, it is a fitting coda to Britain’s three locust years in Theresa’s dismaland.

May’s GINO had many facilitators. The fact that survival became her chief goal, fed by recurrent advisers’ own bunker mindset, ranks high. The Tories’ wafer-thin Commons advantage, courtesy of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, and cold fear of a general election that might well bring Corbyn’s Labour to power, shrivelled horizons. The dire fixed-term parliaments act of 2011 cushioned the incumbent’s weakness. Brexit’s endless ennui fortified and toxified the core leave-versus-remain division: the worst of all possible outcomes, but giving May — who had nothing to say about it — more reason to hunker down.

On a major question of statehood, an equally riven political class could give disaffected citizens no direction or assurance. In response, millions tuned out or switched parties. Polls, think-tank reports and the occasional by-election confirmed growing alienation. A bigger measure arrived with the five-yearly elections to the EU parliament on 24 May, the first pan-UK choice since 2017 and thus a quasi-referendum.

The event had a bizarre aspect, in that the United Kingdom would be sending representatives to a body it wanted to break from. But having missed its 29 March deadline to leave the EU, and having secured from Brussels an extension until 31 October — “Please do not waste this time,” was the not unfriendly advice of Donald Tusk, president of the European Council — it had a legal obligation to hold the European parliamentary vote. Conditions were perfect for a two-sided backlash from those angered by Brexit’s delay (“Get on with it!”) or encouraged (“Call the whole thing off!”). And the results were chilling for Conservatives and Labourites, as Nigel Farage’s start-up Brexit Party took a 30.7 per cent vote share, and the firmly pro-EU Liberal Democrats (19.7 per cent) and Greens (11.7 per cent) did well, while Labour won only 13.7 per cent and the Tories 8.8 per cent — the two parties’ smallest-ever proportions in a national election.

Tory and Labour voters’ mass defection to parties with an unambiguously pro-Brexit stance recasts the historic giants of British politics as dinosaurs. Most Conservatives now agree that leaving the EU on 31 October is central to the party’s survival, for otherwise the populist Farage will cannibalise their base. The EU must, they say, agree to remove unacceptable elements of May’s deal (principally the “backstop” ensuring an open border in Ireland, which affects UK sovereignty), else the UK should opt for a “no deal” departure. The latter is now equally within the EU’s competence — and leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, fed up with London’s muddle, are tempted.

All this bolstered Conservative members’ wish to see Boris Johnson as their clear first choice to follow May. A tight race for the runner-up was edged by Jeremy Hunt amid claims of Borisite MPs “lending” him votes to ditch Michael Gove, seen as a deadlier rival. Johnson began the one-on-one stage in a graceless mood, avoiding a scheduled Sky News debate and then, at the first Tory hustings, lazily muttering about tough questions (“There’s some quite hostile bowling, I may say”). This win-by-shirking approach was soon replaced under a reshuffled team. Mark Fullbrook is the supremo, while C|T Group comrade Lynton Crosby advises BoJo by phone. If the polished Hunt starts winning hearts among the grassroots — and he has made a bright start — things could yet go according to the ugly playbook so well reviewed by James Murphy in Inside Story.

In a parallel Borisesque farce, a late-night, high-decibel row at the Camberwell flat of his partner, campaigning PR executive Carrie Symonds, led neighbours to call the police then pass to the Guardian an audio of the incident. When this turned out to be harmless, and the arty couple’s sympathies turned out to be pro-Labour/EU, culture warriors’ fuel tanks overflowed. More seriously, an alleged juicy morsel from Carrie’s harangue (“You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt! You have no care for money or anything!”) struck Dominic Lawson and Rachel Sylvester, respected columnists, as speaking truth to character.

About that, no one reading Sonia Purnell’s incisive and deeply researched 2011 biography, Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition, can have any doubts. Now, for the umpteenth time in his career, the media is filled with details of his rakish personal life (which, with reason, he now refuses to discuss) and professional misdeeds. The extreme virulence of many assessments is striking, especially from Tory warhorses (and thus long acquaintances) such as Max Hastings, Chris Patten, Michael Heseltine, Matthew Parris and Simon Heffer. If concentrated gut loathing could bring a man down, Johnson would be toast.

Yet the original celebrity politico thrives on all the abuse, or so it can seem. The constant noise around him may even help drown out his actual record: paltry as an MP (2001–08, and from 2015), mediocre as London mayor (2008–16), facetious as foreign secretary (2016–18). Tory loyalists’ affection is impervious, though, while street-level recognition remains more buoyant than hostile. Two-thirds of the 160,000 party members — 71 per cent male, 97 per cent white, average age fifty-seven — say they’ll vote for him.

Where they at least are concerned, the editorial overkill (as in Trump’s America) likely damages the purpose more than the target. By way of contrast, Johnson supporters’ quiet misgivings deserve more attention. Endorsing him, the Spectator admits a “wide range of risks,” such as “he could self-destruct at any point,” but this is a “gamble the Tories have no choice but to make.” Paul Goodman, wise editor of Conservative Home, notes Johnson’s indifference to “the irksome restraints of conventional morality,” concedes that he is perhaps “not the prime minister that the British people deserve,” but gives the journal’s approval “on a wing and a prayer.”

Alarmingly close to the summit as Boris now is, the guarded tone of those two endorsements resonates far more than the de rigueur fulminating. Between the lines is a lurking fear: that after the obligatory bromides on the steps of Number 10, pitched into emergency mode from the first hours, facing the relentless demands and pace of the job, with harsh mood music at home and abroad, the clanger and insult meter already whirring, cabinet members jostling for preferment in the court of the “world king” and a Commons seething with no-confidence and election calls, all Boris Johnson will deliver is his own GINO.

A polity stuck in Brexit limbo has been forced into fantastic contortions to prove itself alive. Anointing a clown-messiah would cap them all. Rosa Prince, ace biographer of Corbyn and May, sees karma in the way Conservatives “will be giving Brexit Britain the prime minister it deserves — a clown.” In a country so out of shape, such absurdism makes perfect sense. But gifts can be sent back and limbs revived by exercise. Ahead of anything else, Britain needs what has been lacking for three years: a coherent government with real authority. Time, then, to prepare for the Borexit power shift. •

The post Britain’s trapped transition appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet judging by her March–April procession through Berlin, Strasbourg, Rome and London — all journeys made by rail — Thunberg also needs to go (or at least talk) to those capitals and their hinterlands if her message that “our house is burning” is to take effective hold. This is but one paradox in a meteoric rise that seems already to hold both room for lasting good and risk of early burn-out.

Thunberg’s simple protest beside the Riksdag, drawing peers and publicity as the “Fridays for Future” accumulated, quite soon took her to the larger stages of Katowice’s COP24 and Davos, a would-be prop for anxious summiteers. Thence to encounters with Pope Francis, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and other dignitaries — though not Theresa May, whose plea of a full diary was met with a scornful empty chair. With no time to waste, Thunberg aims at the top and isn’t easily fobbed.

Here too her attitude is consistent with the belief that the highest stakes, the very sustainability of a habitable Earth, now require an unfailing sense of urgency. This driven, self-possessed, whip-smart young person acts as if her very being contains the despoliations inflicted each day on air, soil, seas and nature. Her Asperger’s syndrome, and the outsiderish sense it fostered, was an enabler of her insight, she says. “It makes me different, and being different is a gift, I would say. It also makes me see things from outside the box. I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things.”

The same guilelessness was plain in a February interview with Leslie Hook, the Financial Times’s environment and clean energy correspondent, who in quoting her riposte at a Davos gathering — “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic” — reflected: “Thunberg doesn’t believe in offering cheery prescriptions for change. The world she sees is a dark one, and she wants other people to feel the same way.”

If media coverage in Sweden initially amplified her propaganda of the deed, it was her emotional truth that cut through to the public. “Why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything to save that future?” she asked at a TED talk in Helsinki. Such lucid sentiments evidently reached the inner ear of many young people around the world, who made their own personal sense of Thunberg’s anguish and longing. An amorphous movement was born or, more strictly, as a student strike had marked the opening of Paris’s COP21 in 2015, revived.

The movement reached Britain in mid February via walkouts from school in London and other cities, with teachers’ blessing in many cases. A month later their numbers and reach were far larger. By then the Scottish Highlands campaigning of Holly Gillibrand, a thirteen-year-old from Fort William, had earned local stardust and a seat beside Thunberg at the politicians’ table. But the children’s crusade was but one game in town. Its mid-April protests coincided with those of Extinction Rebellion, or XR, a politically itinerant band of creative professionals trained, since its formation in April 2018, in the agile use of direct action to flummox authority.

Held on a bank holiday weekend to maximise numbers and impact — and given a serendipitous boost by Thunberg’s London visit — XR’s followers clogged main city arteries in a mini carnival whose vibe was more Glastonbury than end of the world. At Westminster, a naked dozen superglued themselves to the security glass of the House of Commons’s public gallery. Whether these tactics best served XR’s manifesto — “We are rebelling against the government for its crimes against humanity… [because] we are so very nearly out of time” — was unclear.

Well aired amid the passing annoyance and bemusement was actor Emma Thompson’s flight from Los Angeles to join the throng, brandishing a clenched-fist salute and a “There is no planet B” top, thus inverting one of Thunberg’s pithy one-liners: “You are never too small to make a difference.” For all that, the double dose of catastrophism won some favour in polls: clear majorities agreed on climate change’s peril and human responsibility for it, and as many as 26 per cent supported XR’s aims and tactics.

Outside the box: Greta Thunberg is applauded by (from left) environment secretary Michael Gove, Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, former Labour leader Ed Miliband and Green Party leader Caroline Lucas during a forum in the Houses of Parliament in London on 23 April. Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

There was plentiful disdain in the press, of XR as bourgeois-bohemian-tree-huggers and of Thunberg as an oddball in murky league with Europe’s grandees and luvvies. But many columnists, including centre-right ones, were notably positive about both. The FT’s Camilla Cavendish, now at Harvard after heading David Cameron’s policy unit, sensed among the protesters “the kind of courteous regret that is deadly serious,” and defended XR from the charge of privilege. After all, “it is the middle classes who must alter our lifestyles if change is to come,” while “this group’s leaders have the right credentials: Gail Bradbrook has a PhD in molecular biophysics, and Farhana Yamin, arrested after gluing herself to the pavement outside Shell’s HQ, was a lawyer for UN climate negotiations.”

Thunberg’s own schedule included meetings with needy Westminster figures, whose awkward lionisation met the antidote of her reproachful stillness. The politicians — Green, Labour, Liberal and Scottish nationalist, including the Commons speaker and the Conservative environment minister Michael Gove (“We have not done nearly enough. Greta, you have been heard”) — blathered away before posing for group photos. This riveting politics of the spectacle knocked the tedious strippers into a cocked hat.

Such encounters, and London’s festive days as a whole, illuminated rival approaches to climate politics. The conventional one sees a crisis with multiple stakeholders and many divergent short-term interests, requiring patient brokering of least-worst agreements whose tacit maximal aim is to fail better. Thunberg and XR see an existential threat mandating action equal to its unprecedented character — meaning wholesale transformation, not just retail trade-offs, guided by planetary needs rather than national interests.

In practice the contrast blurs when technocrats gesture to vision and radicals to pragmatism, as in XR’s proposal of net-zero emissions in Britain by 2025 or Thunberg’s saying the European Union “needs minimum 80 per cent reduction by 2030, and that includes aviation and shipping.” In Strasbourg, she even reflected that she has “learned how things work, how complicated everything is.”

Moreover, even these radicals’ actions and claims are made in the wake of pragmatist achievement (however limited) by “their own” governments. Thunberg’s self-propelled campaign, which Stockholm University’s Karin Bäckstrand credits with lifting climate change from “priority number eight” for Swedes, began three weeks before a general election amid a northern summer of heatwaves, drought and forest fires. Stefan Lövfen’s centre-left government had passed a Climate Act in January 2018 mandating pursuit of carbon neutrality by 2045, meaning an 85 per cent cut in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 (including offsets). Its successor, a more centrist coalition — with Lövfen and Isabella Lövin, the law’s architect, still in post — upholds Sweden’s image as one of the European Union’s climate pioneers.

The Swedish plan draws on Britain’s own Climate Change Act of 2008, whose target of an 80 per cent fall in CO2 emissions over the 1990–2050 period will now, after an advisory panel’s report published on 2 May, be extended to net-zero. Progress is steady: UK emissions on the producing side are 43 per cent less than in 1990, though the figure tumbles if shares of shipping and air transport are included. Periods without any coal-sourced electricity are becoming commonplace, an outcome charted by John Quiggin in Inside Story: a new milestone is the first coal-free week since 1882.

Meanwhile, the problems are growing, although Britain’s flash floods, heatwaves and coastal erosion pale before Australia’s Murray–Darling dystopia and much else. The energy sector is a mix of incoherence and, over nuclear and fracking especially, paralysis. Transport, health, agriculture and housing sectors are wheezing, with environmental impacts adding to their ills. And Britain’s burden on others, as Thunberg and XR argue, includes the accumulated legacy of early industrialism and today’s top-heavy global footprint. In London, the young Swede denounced Britain’s “very creative carbon accounting” and “ongoing irresponsible behaviour [which] will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.”

Still, Sweden and Britain’s climate record shows everyday politics making a difference. Too little too late, Thunberg and XR retort — and a failed politics too. Thus Thunberg told EU parliamentarians, or MEPs, that since “everyone and everything has to change” it seems pointless to “waste precious time arguing about what and who needs to change first.” Time magazine’s portrait of the grand tour reports her “brief smile” at mention of Barack Obama’s tweeted praise, before the language of ultimacy kicks in: “I believe that once we start behaving as if we were in an existential crisis, then we can avoid a climate and ecological breakdown. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We have to start today.”

For its part, XR’s urban swarm is an effort to turn Thunberg’s “as if” to purpose, and it has a manifesto: Common Sense for the 21st Century, a thoughtful booklet by the group’s co-leader Roger Hallam, aimed at inciting “high participation civil disobedience concentrated upon a single event: a rebellion.” The mechanics include “symbolic disruption” to “create a national conversation” and “bring the regime to the table,” and a national citizens’ assembly, chosen by sortition, which will eventually reduce the Commons to an advisory role. Despite the 1917-ish echoes, Hallam’s model of non-violent civil revolution is conceived as “an act of universal service and duty” in the “civic and republican tradition.”

Hallam’s work-in-progress — a rare blend of movement strategy, framing and ethics — is grounded in the world of English radicalism, as its Tom Paine title declares. That points up another paradox in the radicals’ case: that all climate politics (as opposed to diplomacy) are local. With favourable conditions, which usually means winning elections or at least arguments, the nation-state allows real progress. But the best of it will always be parochial as Earth’s emergency grows. More than most, Thunberg and XR are living in this truth.

The outlook, from Brazil’s Amazon to the Antarctic, is grim. CO2 emissions are still on an upward curve as the Paris agreement measures go awry. The International Energy Agency’s latest status report finds energy emissions grew by 1.7 per cent in 2018 to a historic 33.1 billion tonnes, thanks to Asia’s coal and the United States’s air-conditioning boom. Over 80 per cent of global energy production remains fossil-based.

Every year in which global emissions are not reduced, writes Oxford University’s Myles Allen, equates to another forty billion tonnes of CO2 being pumped out yearly for “today’s teenagers to clean back out of the atmosphere in order to preserve warm water corals or Arctic ice.”

The Arctic is but one of the world’s “potential tipping cascades” mapped by the Hothouse Earth report, a collaboration of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS. This forecasts temperature rises over double the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s precarity levels, even were its core targets to be met. Cambridge University’s Peter Wadhams, former director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, chides the IPCC in his book A Farewell to Ice for, as he sees it, hedging the “Arctic death spiral” (Mark Serreze’s phrase). Wadhams, noting that in his half century of research the area of summer Arctic sea ice has reduced by more than half, says that “rapid and drastic” change there amounts to “a spiritual impoverishment of the Earth as well as a practical catastrophe for mankind.”

Both sources are cited by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Telegraph’s compelling Cassandra, who references another PNAS study from 2018: a paper on the geohistorical analogues of near-future climates, by the paleoecologist Kevin D. Burke and five colleagues. “As the world warms due to rising greenhouse gas concentrations,” they write, “the Earth system moves toward climate states without societal precedent, challenging adaptation.” John “Jack” Williams, one of the co-authors, says, “We are moving toward very dramatic changes over an extremely rapid time frame, reversing a planetary cooling trend [tracing back at least fifty million years] in a matter of centuries.”

The unprecedented warming trend is confirmed in studies published in early 2019 from, among others, the World Meteorological Organization, the UK Met Office, and NASA/NOAA. The UN’s assessment of retreating global biodiversity, from corals to insects, came in May as bleak reinforcement. In Evans-Pritchard’s words, addressed not least to sceptics among his newspaper’s own readership, “Frightening reports are constant fare for those paying attention.”

The weight of evidence could justify almost any response: crisis diplomacy, intensified protest, clean-one’s-house regional or neighbourhood plans, personal regimes — as well as Greta Thunberg’s gut-wrenched mix of despair and defiance.

But technological and economic currents are also opening new horizons of possibility, albeit with concerns over pace, scale, finance, and (as with lithium-ion batteries) green tech’s own blowback costs. Wind and solar power, battery capacity (with electric-hybrid aviation one prize), plus carbon-neutral electricity and hydrogen to fuel transport and heating, are key innovation areas. So too is carbon capture, including ambitious plans to capture atmospheric CO2 via dual-purpose (energy and storage) bioenergy.

Renewables’ falling long-term costs and greater efficiency are central to the transformation under way, according to analysis on Carbon Tracker, IRENA and Energy Watch. Fossil fuel’s burnout could accelerate sooner than all but optimists now envisage. In another data-rich article on this race against time, Evans-Pritchard turns into Pangloss: “It is easy to succumb to paralysing pessimism. Yet the technology exists to crack the problem… We are reaching the inflection point where market forces may suddenly start to drive fossil fuels out of the energy system.”

The implication is that climate apocalypse will always be with us (alongside other, nuclear or pandemic, kinds). There is no guarantee of escape, for that is in our capacity only if the latter is put immediately to good use. The Hothouse Earth paper has a checklist:

Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System — biosphere, climate, and societies — and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.

For all this to come together, the world must “unite behind the science — make the best available science the heart of politics and democracy,” as Thunberg instructed Europe’s MEPs. In turn, that needs working ingredients now in deficit across a boiling planet: world security, core freedoms, legal order, social and informational trust. The reverse engineering involved — echoing Roger Hallam’s method of “first [working] out what success looks like and then work back to how it would be created” — looks even more forbidding than the XR strategy of “thousands of people breaking the law to create a transformation of political structures.”

Evans-Pritchard, who says XR is “right to raise the climate alarm in apocalyptic terms,” has faith in “cutting-edge technology and the creative élan of market forces” to do the job. These would depend on the same framework of law and freedom, unless environmental gains are so rapid as to release new, liberatory dynamics in other areas.

But the mood has shifted this year in Britain and Europe. Those reports, and timely broadcasts such as David Attenborough’s Netflix documentary Our Planet, capped by Thunberg and XR’s irruption, handed radicals a precious hat-trick of science, moral force and cultural momentum. Technocratic politics is taking ever more account of the new clamour, and conceding at the edges: British and Irish parliaments’ declaration of a climate emergency, France’s consultative citizens’ assembly. Elements of a lost political centre, craving a semblance of authenticity and the elusive youth vote, are only too glad to mingle with XR’s well-groomed principals, and proliferating media outlets to feature them.

The next big day of school strikes is 24 May, coinciding with elections to the European parliament, where Greta’s crusade is a boon for green parties. Its carousel aspect is also in full swing: press interviews, conference panels, festival invites, magazine features, celebrity encomiums, honorary degrees. A book of her speeches is out in days. Time’s profile makes “the teenager on strike for the planet” foremost among its “next generation leaders,” soliciting an all-purpose tweet from foreign minister Margot Wallström, a star in her own right: “Proud to be Swedish.”

The “invisible girl” felt the Earth’s pain as adults could not, and sent an SOS for them to act on. Instead of looking in the same direction, will they gaze at her finger, and turn the distress call into a feedback loop? Europe alone can’t answer. A breakout east and west, if a way can be found, would allow Greta Thunberg’s fierce urgency of now its true test. •

The post “Our house is burning” appeared first on Inside Story.

By dawn, though, the doubts were setting in, fuelled by the vote’s closeness and its fearful segregations of age, social geography and nation (Scotland and Northern Ireland’s clear Yes to the European Union neutering England and Wales’s slim No). Cameron’s strained bonhomie at 7am outside 10 Downing Street (“Unity at home will secure our influence in Europe. Let’s go to it!”) felt as off as his invocation of the English question on the same spot two years before, which had galvanised support for the pro-independence Scottish National Party.

The morning scrum instantly switched to the Brexit campaign’s rival figureheads, each notably upbeat: first the UKIP leader Nigel Farage, bellowing exultancy (“Britons will not long be denied our freedom!”), then Cameron’s erstwhile Conservative Party colleagues Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, sprinkling emollience with cod-Churchillian gravitas (“We respect and accept the verdict. But for our vision of a new Britain, this is but the end of the beginning!”). In a striking mood again reminiscent of Scotland, the losers were behaving like winners, and vice versa.

By lunchtime on the 24/7 media carousel, the referendum was being treated more as the latest skirmish in Britain’s decades-old European argument than as any sort of conclusion to it. Anti-EU voices were all over the airwaves, saying the verdict was skewed by the remain side’s huge funding lead, rock-solid establishment backing and (after a turnout of 72 per cent in the UK’s non-mandatory voting system) support of just 38 per cent of the total electorate. An English drumbeat — we voted out, the Scots are keeping us in — thudded across phone-in land. It all felt very much like day one of a hard-edged new effort.

The long campaign had itself been nasty. Leavers’ slogans, notably “take back control,” had played to populist and anti-immigration sentiment, whereas the pro-EU camp, welding status quo reassurance to pocketbook alarmism, exuded complacency. A nadir was the brutal murder of a Labour member of parliament, Jo Cox, by a constituent (soon revealed to be a Neo-Nazi) shouting “Britain first!” The collective intake of breath proved all too brief, although some held that the atrocity, a week before the vote, may have stalled the Brexit momentum.

In any event, the referendum’s aftermath brought no sign of a let-up in the scars it had opened, or revealed. Cameron had pleaded for a healing process. Instead, voters’ in–out alignments hardened, to the extent of overtaking the Conservative–Labour split in numbers and valence. More broadly, the event capped social media’s remaking of the political realm in its own image, as a machine for turning citizens into tribalists.

The post-referendum mood soon turned vengeful. As the “hollow victory” headlines stuck to Cameron, his authority frayed. Personal tensions in his government now complicated policy ones. Only a year after unexpected election success had freed the Conservatives from unhappy partnership with the Liberal Democrats, every disagreement was evidence of a second “coalition of chaos.” Cameron, long derided as a lightweight, “essay-crisis” premier who outsourced strategy to his wily chancellor George Osborne, got no credit for his premiership’s 2014–16 hat-trick.

Nor were mitigating factors in the pallid “yes” to Europe much cited. One was the lack of a strong Labour effort, thanks partly to the absence of Jeremy Corbyn from the hustings, Labour’s leader being a lifelong (if now coded) EU opponent. Another was the low-energy contribution of Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalist parties, their leaders reluctant to stand alongside despised adversaries — Cameron, Tories, the UK itself — in any cause. In the event they saved Britain’s position in the EU while accentuating English exceptionalism: a double win.

With surprising suddenness, Cameron looked not just unpopular — he had often been that — but out of time. The smooth operator stood down at the Conservatives’ September conference with a rueful, acclaimed valedictory (hypocrisy still the Tories’ secret weapon) quoting Wellington: “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Regime change inevitably embroiled Osborne, his closest ally, whose apocalyptic warnings of Brexit’s economic impact had earned him particular enmity among leavers.

A pro-Brexit successor was inevitable: inside the Conservative Party as outside, the anti-EU virus was merrily circulating in the very teeth of a process designed to eradicate it. After an operatic leadership campaign, Gove and Johnson formed the new axis of power in party and cabinet. Their improvised pact — echoing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s, this time sealed in Paddington not Islington — envisioned a medium-term shift to a “post-EU” Britain via a ramshackle menu of education and localism, greenery and globalism, trade-centred Anglosphere-ism and Asia-ism.

The mishmash was driven by aptitude more than policy: the punctilious, cerebral Gove, adopted son of an Aberdeen couple, driven by ideas but open to persuasive new ones; and the carefully shambolic Johnson, a self-promoting crowd-pleaser of high schooling and undimmed ambition (who nonetheless, the top job on hold, embraced with gusto his newly minted responsibility for “London and the UK”).

Beyond formally reopening the Brexit file, their serendipitous alliance lacked a modernising core of the kind that had animated Cameron’s decade. Most in the pro-EU professional classes, and many in their own government, were hostile. But in two ways Gove, Johnson and the team around them were lucky.

The first was the Labour opposition, transformed by Corbyn into both a mass party and a sect, impervious to events, plagued by feverish disputes of its own, and continuing to trundle several points behind the Tories even during the latter’s leadership convulsions. The second was the EU itself, whose economic troubles, advancing populisms, political divisions, security weaknesses, and strategic paralysis were becoming unavoidable — and being prominently reported — in the wake of the UK’s choice to stay a member.

All this proved, if hardly yet a strategic opportunity for the “Govement,” at least a messaging one. With predictable cussedness, Brits’ default scepticism about the EU had returned to normal after the referendum. Little appetite existed for a fresh in–out vote. But amid mounting domestic pressures, fierce Europhile criticism, and the Faragist right’s zealotry, Gove’s agile poking of the EU’s flaws had, over the next couple of years, evergreen political utility.

Yet there were downsides for a government with economic priorities and a preference for a longer Brexit game. The referendum’s toxic potions had long brewed into furious fixity, its sides equally absolutist in temperament and vehement in language. Brexiteers, excited by their nearness to nirvana, were bent on an early rerun of the vote; Remainers, appalled at their proximity to the abyss, sought ways of eliminating the risk of an EU departure by constitutional means. Even for those in power there was no immunity from the fervour. Indeed, most were plugged in.

By 2019, a year before a general election is due, British politics is still defined by the 2016 referendum. It entrenched the country’s polarisation along new lines that overrode, if not fully eclipsed, traditional party ones. It accelerated the now insistently febrile cast of Britain’s political life, enabled by social media but itself enabling nothing. And far from answering the UK–EU question “once and for all,” as everyone involved said at the time, it supercharged the question for another electoral cycle at least.

Brexit advocates, encouraged by consistent if small poll leads of around 55 to 45 per cent, are now pressing for a new referendum. Remainers, veering between worry and fury, are building funds and databases. The momentum for a rematch in 2020, perhaps on the same day as the election itself, is growing.

So unfolds one of the zillion-and-one futures that didn’t happen in 2016–19, though it still seems almost more plausible than the future that did — that is — happening: Britain’s political self-implosion, chiefly owed to the staggering ineptitude of Theresa May, though with many others’ complicity. In a strict sense, the UK state’s failure over Brexit is far greater than over Suez, Bloody Sunday, Iraq, Grenfell and Windrush, without diminishing any of these dark episodes of the past seven decades.

This all-consuming three-year quagmire is desolating enough. Yet the above trip down fantasy lane also cautions that, with a near-exact reversal of the 2016 result, Britain’s schism over the EU would have deepened in much the same way. Why so? Because the referendum allowed the schism to become the lead driver of British politics. The campaign sharpened it, the close result solidified it, and the zero policy outcome incentivised it. With a remain choice, Europe’s inescapable crises would have done the same trick.

It’s worth noting that such bitter division represents departure more than continuity in the UK’s history with the European Union, whose main feature was ambivalence: a “living together, apart.” Lukewarm support for membership and underlying suspicion of the body long coexisted, within as well as between people. The ardent on either side, whether professional Europeanists or national populists, were always a minority, though their voices tended to eclipse the noncommittal majority.

In contrast to founders France and Germany, neighbouring Ireland, or ex-communist states such as Latvia and Poland, the stand-offish Brits (especially English) forever saw the EU in transactional rather than existential terms. Encased in their island fortress, conscious of bonds with more distant lands, and holding to a still-potent idea (if often forlorn in practice) of freedom of action, their relationship to the EU was doomed to half-heartedness. The job of British politicians was to use this rooted ambiguity about Europe as a means of curating Britain’s interests, and on the whole they did pretty well.

The referendum, with its newly stark choice, made the balancing act harder. Fervour was in, nuance out. Here, Scotland’s independence vote of 2014 offered a lurid preview of the Brexit one. Both took place as social media was extending its colonisation of politics and journalism. Many in the political class had scrambled on board, embracing a competitive extremism of attitude in search of media share, routinely hyperbolic language, and self-dramatising emotional display. There was, is, no way back.

Brexit’s morass now creeps towards a denouement. Its latest stage began on 29 March, long planned as the UK’s farewell from the EU, when instead the House of Commons for a third time rejected the withdrawal deal agreed with Brussels. This gave various cross-party groups of MPs a second chance to seize the legislative agenda and win acceptance for their own preferred options. On 1 April, they lost four more motions, amounting to twelve so far. Representative, plebiscitary and executive democracy tussle for priority, while the verbose Commons speaker, John Bercow, is nakedly partisan. The next big date, 12 April, might see a long extension of UK membership — or a France-led guillotine. Queen Elizabeth is, for now, above it all.

Without the vacuum at the heart of government, the engines of fracture might have been contained. Now it is too late. Everywhere, division is in charge. The UK is a failing state. Its descent continues, there is no simple fix, and all are losers. •

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The polls suggest that Zelenskiy will then comfortably defeat either the sitting president, Petro Poroshenko, or the charismatic populist and former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, in the 21 April run-off. Anatoliy Hrytsenko, a pro-Western former defence minister, is the only other candidate with a shadow of a chance of getting through the first round.

Zelenskiy is a one-off, his political success the product of his television popularity. He enjoys support — including heavy television exposure — from the prominent oligarch and TV mogul Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who has also given some backing to Tymoshenko, herself a wealthy businesswoman. Prime minister Poroshenko is an oligarch in his own right, and an enemy of Kolomoyskyi. In the latest sensation, he has initiated a lawsuit against Kolomoyskyi alleging that Zelenskiy’s program is being used to spread lies damaging to the honour and dignity of the president. This manoeuvre might yet get him over the line, despite his recent reverses.

With parliamentary elections due in October, the new president will need to find a way of exercising some control over parliament’s deliberations. Poroshenko will be represented by his own party, the Poroshenko Bloc, which, like many Ukrainian parties past and present, is largely an extension of his political persona. Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) is a well-developed party by Ukrainian standards, and has engaged in significant policy development; it tends to lapse into Tymoshenko’s characteristic populist excesses, though, for which it then suffers in the opinion polls. Zelenskiy would come to the job without any existing parliamentary vehicle, but he has formed a party of his own that could expect to gain at least some seats in October.

Although Poroshenko may still find a way to win, a Zelenskiy victory looks likely, with all the uncertainty that such an outcome would bring. He has said, and recently repeated, that he would like to meet as soon as possible with the Russian president Vladimir Putin to discuss bringing the war in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine to an end. Though Zelenskiy is a Russophone from the east of Ukraine, he presents as a pro-Western democrat, and has recruited some able pro-Western and reformist advisers. Putin would no doubt relish the opportunity to bring his dirty tricks department to bear on such a naive novice.

Putin’s central objective is to defeat or destroy Poroshenko. The Russian president’s preferred Ukrainian politicians have been pushed towards the perimeter of public life since Russia seized Crimea and launched its proxy war in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014, and any overtly pro-Russian candidate would have no hope of victory in present circumstances. Much of Russophone southeastern Ukraine is under Russian occupation, meanwhile, and its residents are unable to vote.

Poroshenko has proven to be a formidable military, diplomatic and political opponent. Both Kremlin-preferred alternatives, especially Tymoshenko but also Zelenskiy, have Russian connections that Putin would hope to exploit. Left without a serious horse in the race, he will do whatever he can to eject Poroshenko while taking advantage of any opportunities for further low-risk aggression the election might engender.

Though only days remain before the first round of voting, sudden game-changing developments are still possible, particularly affecting the sitting president. Poroshenko has been damaged recently by a corruption scandal involving a close ally and senior defence official whose son allegedly acquired Russian weapons and sold them to the Ukrainian army at grossly inflated prices. The details of this affair are complex and perhaps less scandalous than they appear, but the alleged actions would be judged a particularly heinous offence in a country where the army had to be largely crowdfunded by the public, at considerable sacrifice, after Russia’s sudden attacks on Crimea and Donbas in 2014–15.

Ukraine’s armed forces were suffering from gross neglect and rampant corruption, a post-Soviet legacy accentuated by the dismal performance of the pro-Russian regime of previous president Viktor Yanukovych. While the neglect has been overcome, corruption in the armed forces, as in other spheres of Ukrainian life, remains a serious problem.

Two dubious court decisions by Ukraine’s notoriously unreconstructed judiciary have also acutely embarrassed the president. One effectively dismissed the respected reformist health minister, Ulana Suprun, thereby clearing the way for the return of corrupt practices the minister had successfully nobbled. The second, by Ukraine’s Constitutional Court no less, struck down a law that required public officials who had mysteriously become wealthy during their terms of office to explain their newfound wealth or risk a custodial sentence.

Both seemingly corrupt decisions were severely criticised by domestic reformers, as well as by foreign diplomats and representatives of organisations that provide crucial financial support to Ukraine. Three leading reformers left Poroshenko’s party in disgust to join Anatoliy Hrytsenko’s presidential campaign, and three reformist presidential candidates closed down their candidacies and subsumed them under Hrytsenko’s campaign.

To make matters worse, Poroshenko (like Tymoshenko) has been accused of vote buying involving government funds. Such practices among well-placed politicians, using what are known euphemistically as “administrative resources,” are still endemic in many post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine and Russia. In Ukraine they are resisted by reformers, voters and media; in Russia they can’t be challenged.

Poroshenko responded vigorously to these setbacks, but some damage had been done. His failure to curb corrupt practices and his growing opposition to reform, and to reformists generally, had already dented his popularity ratings. Within days, new opinion polls pointed to a big swing to Hrytsenko, who lacks charisma but has a reputation for honesty, lifting him into a respectable fourth place. Till then he had seemed too far astern of the leading three candidates to challenge them. Poroshenko, meanwhile, fell behind Tymoshenko, and Zelenskiy maintained his clear lead. After a pause, Poroshenko will probably recover lost ground and be able to use those administrative resources to overtake Tymoshenko and qualify for the run-off.

These events, along with a win in the run-off for Zelenskiy, might seem to point to the strength of pro-Western reform forces and foreshadow the prospect at last for an attack on the scourge of corruption, the main factor impeding Ukraine’s Western integration. But a defeat for Poroshenko will ring alarm bells in Western capitals and delight Moscow; and it is not clear that Zelenskiy or any other candidate can fill his shoes.

Poroshenko has done a very good job in keeping his fragile coalition in place, doubtless making some unedifying but pragmatically useful deals along the way. He has achieved remarkable success in building up the armed forces from less than modest beginnings to become the third-strongest fighting force in Europe, capable of blocking the constant probing of Russia and its proxy militias. He has also been successful on the international stage, acquiring much invaluable experience at the highest levels and maintaining good relations with key Western counterparts, even including the difficult Donald Trump.

And he has almost single-handedly achieved autocephaly (in effect, independence) for the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, by dint of concentrated effort with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul, adroit diplomacy with foreign leaders, notably Erdoğan in Turkey, and effective liaison with the Ukrainian diaspora. Autocephaly has enraged the Kremlin almost as much as Ukraine’s military defiance, because it threatens Russia’s traditionally dominant position in the Orthodox Church in Ukraine and potentially other Orthodox communities in what the Kremlin calls “the Russian World” (Russkii Mir) — any part of the Tsarist–Soviet empire where Russian is spoken by some of the inhabitants.

More generally, autocephaly weakens the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church internationally. After 1917, the Bolsheviks killed priests by the tens of thousands and converted the church into the tame, secret police–dominated instrument of Kremlin policy that it has remained ever since. Like much about Russia, this is a reality poorly understood by the outside world, allowing the church to enjoy more respect in the world than its steeply declining parishioner numbers in Russia proper would justify.

Poroshenko has declared autocephaly a second independence for his country, a far from extravagant boast, particularly seen in a longer-term perspective. But the outlook for the new church remains clouded by the prospect of clashes in parishes disputed between the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine, most of whose administrative structures remain. Russia has threatened to stimulate such unrest. Kiev’s security organs are focused on forestalling any such violence, but doing so over the long haul will not be easy. By one estimate, over a thousand parishes have made the transition to the new Ukrainian church, and the rate of change has been increasing, but that is still less than 10 per cent of the total.

Less judiciously, Poroshenko has also further strengthened the role of the Ukrainian language in education and public life, pushing through an overhaul of language laws to favour Ukrainian over Russian and other minority languages. In the process, he has angered several neighbours whose support Ukraine needs, and made a particular enemy of Hungary, which has repeatedly used its veto in NATO deliberations to block Ukraine’s otherwise increasing cooperation with the alliance. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s policy has been warmly welcomed by his partners in the Kremlin.

Poroshenko has adopted as his central campaign slogan the phrase Armiya, Mova, Vira (armed forces, language, faith) to encapsulate his main achievements. But his failures on corruption and reform have cost him dearly. In November, 80 per cent of respondents to one poll said Ukraine was heading in the wrong direction; another poll found only 10 per cent of respondents had trust in their government.

Despite the fact that he has reportedly put tens of thousands of dollars into supporting national and charitable projects, the mounting success of Poroshenko’s numerous business ventures while in office is clearly galling. Most people in Ukraine have been doing it tough through the years of enforced economic austerity since the Euromaidan, and the sight of their leading politician enjoying ever-increasing wealth is political poison. This alienation makes it harder for the government to lift energy prices, privatise land and make other reforms required in return for financial support from the International Monetary Fund and other Western lenders. Adding to the pressure is the fact that 2019 is a year in which Kiev faces record debt repayments.

But Poroshenko has presided over some very significant national achievements. And they have been carried out without any attempt to convert the country into an autocracy. Since independence, Ukraine has been a rough-and-ready democracy, with regular elections and changes of government. Under Poroshenko it has become much more democratic, despite conspicuous imperfections, including oligarch-controlled television channels that grossly favour the interests of their owners or their business partners. The three presidential frontrunners and pro-Kremlin interests are among the conspicuous beneficiaries of this system.

Poroshenko’s Ukraine is also more democratic than any other former republic of the Soviet Union outside the Baltic states. And on many criteria it may also be more democratic, if much less prosperous and more chaotic, than Hungary or Poland under their present leaderships. The fact that it’s still unclear who will win the presidential election speaks for itself. The contrast with Russia’s stagnant and increasingly repressive regime is eloquent.

The Poroshenko ascendancy has been widely and justly criticised in recent times for one other worrying development: the intrusion into public life of unruly militia formations that are inclined to take matters of civil order into their own hands. They have been implicated in vigilante actions against minorities, notably Roma settlements, sometimes seemingly without any response from the forces of law and order. In the case of units from the notorious Azov Battalion, part of the problem for the government is that this formation played a valiant and crucial role in defending the country against Russian attacks at the outset of the war in Donbas.

During the election campaign, the Ukrainian interior ministry gave two of the more irresponsible Azov units carte blanche to supervise election processes, including vote counting, and to use force at their own discretion, which they did recently in Kiev and Cherkasy, injuring fifteen police officers. Alarmed, the G7 Ambassadors’ Support Group for Ukraine privately told the Ukrainian authorities to put a stop to these scandalous developments. Unfortunately perhaps, that intervention has now become public property, which will give a huge fillip to several of Russia’s standard propaganda themes: that Ukraine is a failed state; that it is run by fascists; and that its presidential elections will be so deeply flawed as to be illegitimate.

Despite their regrettable prominence, hard-right formations have gained very little traction in Ukrainian electoral politics. The political parties closest to them have failed to trouble the scorers in presidential elections or to gain significant representation in parliament. The G7 group has been urging its interlocutors in Kiev to curb the activities of these formations in the short term and consider outlawing them altogether soon after the elections. It has conveyed the message that if the Ukrainian government does not overcome these sorts of problems it will lose Western support.

Such irregularities are not unique to post-Soviet republics. The difference in Ukraine is that they are not stage-managed by an authoritarian regime. Yet much Western commentary on Ukraine overstates the prevalence of hard-right formations and the grip of “nationalism,” the latter being a strange reproach to level at a country that has been under attack for five years, militarily and in every other possible domain, by a neighbour armed to the teeth. Between blows, that neighbour, Russia, has told Ukraine that it is an errant branch of the great Russian nation, and that the Ukrainian nation is a myth. Nationalism, even “hypernationalism,” would seem to be the only healthy response in such circumstances.

Though Ukraine and its largely Moscow-administered travails have rather faded from Australian news coverage, and are less well-covered elsewhere than they used to be, what coverage there is often focuses on the country’s negatives. It is characterised by a marked tendency to naivety and moral equivalence (“Ukraine says that Russia is driving the conflict in Donbas, but Russia denies any involvement”). Often missing is reporting of the corresponding phenomena in Russia itself, where official hypernationalism — whether one terms it far-right or far-left — flourishes and is imposed on the whole nation, and where Neo-Nazi militias are not uncommon.

Five years on from the armed seizure of Crimea, Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine continues, with more than 13,000 dead, 30,000 wounded, well over a million displaced, tens of billions of dollars of losses and damage sustained by the victim nation, and the prospect of further Kremlin-initiated escalation always looming. Last November’s brazenly illegal attack on Ukrainian vessels exercising a legitimate freedom of passage near the Kerch Strait in the Sea of Azov came after many months of systematic trade strangulation carried out by Russia in the region.

While Russian vessels had been harassing Ukrainian cargo ships for months, the sudden use of outright military force on 25 November was unexpected. The attack caused casualties and damage to the vessels, and saw the cavalier confiscation of three more Ukrainian ships (during the Crimean operation in 2014, the Russians had already appropriated at least twelve of Kiev’s seventeen naval vessels). Twenty-four sailors were arrested and taken to Moscow, where they have been imprisoned for an indeterminate period. It was the first time that Russia had overtly deployed military force against Ukraine without any pseudo-justification; nor, of course, was there any prior declaration of hostilities.

This sequence of events was another explicit challenge to the international liberal order, a challenge to which the West has largely failed to react. Both Europe and the United States have responded tepidly. Although Donald Trump has removed several of the key “adults in the room” from his administration, it still contains people who are officially responsible for easing Ukraine’s predicament but feel increasingly constrained. The most senior State Department official in this area, Wess Mitchell, has resigned. Those remaining in the military sphere continue to discuss the prospect of further military assistance to Ukraine (more has been provided under Trump than under Obama), but little has yet been done since Kerch, and time is passing. More serious sanctions, which would have concerned and possibly constrained Moscow, were reportedly under discussion within the administration. But the package finally announced on 15 March was so trivial that the Russian stock market rose in response.

Putin may therefore infer that the time is ripe for a further decisive move against Ukraine and/or possibly elsewhere. His constant boasting about his new doomsday weapons and big build-up of combat-ready conventional forces suggest potential moves. Moscow is attentive to signals and non-signals; and it still has hopes that its man in the White House will be able to deliver a big deal that opens up prospects for better bilateral relations, an easing of sanctions, and perhaps even a strengthening of Russia’s sphere of influence in Eurasia.

The chances of that occurring were less while the shadow of Mueller still hung over President Trump. But now that shadow is apparently dispersing, Trump might see a grand deal with his Kremlin counterpart as feasible, in which case Ukrainian interests could perhaps be traded away for some greater objective. •

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The latest epic week with its vital votes — terms that need a health warning, so drenched in hyperbole has the voyage been — finds a fractious House of Commons again at centre stage. Members of parliament, who rejected by a thumping majority the withdrawal agreement May’s team clinched in November with the European Union, are on Tuesday (12 March) being given a second dollop of the same stew. This one is garnished with Brussels’ reassurance over the contentious issue of the “backstop” preventing a hard border in Ireland, which most MPs see as an infringement of UK sovereignty. Above all, its backers insist that this deal is the only one available. Another government defeat, they say, carries the risk of Brexit not happening at all.

That outcome would distress most Conservative MPS, and relieve most of their Labour counterparts, though significant minorities among each take a contrary view. The more unbending “leavers,” who want a clean break with the EU, and the most ardent “remainers,” who wish to stay inside it, will vote against the deal with conviction. Many regard the prime minister’s word as a stopped clock in any case, and have ceased listening. After endless missteps May’s authority is frazzled, with Brexit seen as but a peak symbol of her wider ineptitude. Even her efforts to turn the Commons tide — which include a hasty new investment fund for deprived Labour-held, pro-Brexit northern English towns — are ill-thought and clumsily delivered. In these circumstances a good number of MPs, served her cold dish once more, will stay loyal to the classic British faith that something (else) will turn up.

If indeed the Commons again snubs the UK–EU agreement, Britain remains on track to leave the EU on 29 March. After Tuesday, the immediate options are narrow but may quickly expand. Horror at the prospect of a “no-deal exit” ensures that on Wednesday it, too, will be rejected. Next comes a vote requesting the EU to extend negotiations for a limited period. Were all twenty-seven EU member states to agree terms, further oven-ready domestic proposals will soon fill the gap: another referendum, a general election, citizens’ assemblies, a “Norway-plus” relationship, a reversal of the Article 50 decision that triggered departure.

Each has its parliamentary advocates, often now aligned in informal cross-party clusters of like-minded MPs who, this week, will try via clever amendments to advance their pet course. This bonding — for example, between Labour’s Yvette Cooper and the Tories’ Nick Boles, both former ministers — is seeded by frustration with the main parties’ leaderships. It also reflects the government’s slender majority since 2017, which has given backbenchers more space and voice, and pressures from constituents and lobbyists to halt Brexit (or, as with the Norway-style solution, reduce its pain). The Independent Group, a proto-party of seven moderate, pro-remain ex-Labour MPs later joined by three ex-Conservatives, wagers that its offer “to reach across outdated divides and build consensus” will find an echo among a fed-up public.

Such cooperation is in principle a welcome reaction to the era’s bitter political schisms. But in trying to stop Brexit, most initiatives inevitably also reinforce them. If compromise alone offers escape from this trap, voting for the UK–EU deal or joining Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway in the European Economic Area are the realistic choices. It’s just possible that after spurning the former this week, the Commons will be given a last chance following the EU summit on 21–22 March and, with backs to the wall, comply.

Soon after, Theresa May might well be gone (and conceivably before, via a Commons vote of confidence then a cabinet revolt). Whatever the timing, her steerage has acted as both amplifier of Brexit’s divisions and self-protector from them. The damage to Britain and its reputation is immeasurable.

A telling index is her favouring of mediocrity over professionalism and independence of mind. Her foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who in Beijing referred to his Chinese wife as Japanese, then praised Slovenia’s “transformation from a Soviet vassal state” (he presumably meant Slovakia) while standing beside his counterpart, Miro Cerar, in Ljubljana; her goofy defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, elevated from the whips’ office, who said Russia should simply “go away and shut up” and lauded British forces’ role in Lithuania (he meant Estonia); her Northern Ireland secretary, Karen Bradley, who stated that killings by British state forces during the conflict there were “not crimes” (untrue in a substantial number of cases). These humiliations are bad enough. Go even a touch deeper, over China and Japan for example, and the picture is far more serious. British statecraft is all at sea.

The focus on political leadership, or its lack, might seem overdone. More fashionable current themes are Britain’s “broken” constitution and electoral system, England’s “imperial nostalgia,” and the “reality” the country faces (the last of these three incessant Brexit clichés denotes “whatever the European Union says, does, rules, and thinks”). Such arguments, though in practice very often tendentious and uber-partisan, have their value.

But what the UK needs now, and has since at least the 2017 election, is a prime minister who speaks to the whole country, promotes the best, sets high standards, and looks ahead. Nothing less can lift Brexitannia from its pitiful state. Without a change of air, light, land, and sound, these years of frenetic stasis will prove the overture of yet more of the same. •

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The shrinking provision of local libraries, post offices, banks, buses and other local services, while unwelcome to both, may affect them unevenly. But they are alike in feeling bound to an economic juggernaut. And whether huddling at the stop or seething on the platform, the same news trickles down from the stratosphere: of consumer rip-offs by energy companies or pension funds, and of unimaginably high salaries and bonuses being paid to the system’s embedded insiders, often far beyond discernible achievement or even in the teeth of failure.

Such experiences, today those of millions, do much to explain the viral spread of the notion that Britain’s capitalist model is broken and in need of thorough repair. Indeed this precise sentiment, give or take the odd word, now joins more demotic views of the Brexit-is-a-mess and all-politicians-are-useless kind as a staple of public dialogue. A pillar of the stratosphere’s liberal-left wing since Will Hutton’s influential The State We’re In came out in 1985, the economy-is-broken viewpoint gained new life in 2008–09 and, as the emergency phase of the financial crisis gave way to the hard grind of retrenchment, took on its current status as the common sense of the age.

Tune out the unremitting Brexit buzz, hard though that is at present, and the most pervasive story being told today is about British capitalism’s failure. Moreover, it’s as likely to be heard from a Conservative politician as a Labour one, from the Financial Times as the Guardian, from a business owner as a trade union leader, or from the archbishop of Canterbury as an Oxford or UCL scholar. It looks and feels like an idea whose time has come, one that even Brexit’s agonies can’t long still. That is both a triumphal endorsement for radicals who long upheld it and a reprimand to centrist and rightist latecomers. And in bridging these divides the fresh consensus also has a potent self-reinforcing effect.

Yet this intellectual and political shift long proved elusive. Even as the brute facts of a post-crash economy churned the everyday social grain, upending lives and narrowing horizons, any leftward move in public attitudes and voting patterns was well hidden. The 2010 election returned the Conservatives to power after thirteen years, albeit in a coalition, and the party went on to win outright in 2015 against a Labour Party whose leader, Ed Miliband, had tacked to the left, explicitly disowning Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s legacy. Jeremy Corbyn, even more deep-dyed red than the cerebral Miliband, then took over, but for two years made no imprint. A renascent anti-capitalism, much heralded in the wake of the financial implosion, looked either stillborn or (the left’s enemies crowed) defunct.

When did that change? A hive of publications, polemics and initiatives to renew economics as a discipline (some student-led) had planted seeds. So indeed had years of pained self-examination by enlightened pro-capitalists, the Financial Times paramount. The Brexit result, ostensibly about Britain’s membership of the European Union, vivified the debate by belatedly amplifying the social distress in “left behind” areas, much as France’s “yellow vests” upsurge is doing today. Corbyn’s meteoric 2017 campaign then made the political breakthrough, with Labour’s close second in vote share making the party’s agenda — including state-led investment, banking and ownership of utilities — a tenable preview of Britain’s future.

By contrast, Theresa May’s hollow victory exposed, among other failings, her inability to offer a plausible argument about Britain’s problems, economic or other. This contrasts with 2010–16, when David Cameron and his influential chancellor George Osborne framed spending cuts as part of a long-term plan in the national interest, and the price of Labour’s excess.

That duopoly collapsed with Brexit, as Cameron abruptly resigned and Osborne was sacked with relish by his cabinet adversary, May, who had emerged from her home office cocoon to take the leadership. Many voters welcomed her quiet style as fitting the confused post-referendum mood, and her pledge to address society’s “burning injustices” by serving those “just about managing” seemed to hint at a break with the strategy of her tarnished predecessors. But her pledges fell short of a clear, costed and eye-catching economic case, a lack that her election fiasco made painfully obvious.

In the equalising conditions of a campaign, it turned out that Corbyn’s Labour did have a coherent tale. It assailed the years of stringency since the banking bailouts (“austerity is not an economic necessity, it is a political choice”) to portray a burdened society groaning for release and pledge that Labour would build an economy that works “for the many, not the few” (the demon Blair’s slogan, but let that pass). If the party was evasive on Brexit, that only helped it seize the domestic ground and highlight Tory schisms on the matter. In giving shape to what people were living through, the story hit a resounding chord.

Corbyn’s feat in taking Labour so near to power discomfited many at the higher end of business and finance. An insurgent left-winger putting a privileged elite on notice was an electrifying new alignment of electoral politics with a restless zeitgeist. It’s also true that London’s anxious City networks had themselves been hosting reports and conferences about what’s wrong with capitalism and what is to be done. In this sense at least, old and new Leninists were already on the same page. But Labour, with shadow chancellor John McDonnell emerging as a key figure, was forcing the pace. In the shadow of his menacing reassurance, the very language of an embattled corporate sector spoke of a pre-emptive re-education program.

A few examples illustrate the point. At a conference of the FT City Network in October 2017, four months after the election, Nigel Rudd of aerospace engineers Meggitt said that capitalism had been “hijacked by the management class” and “made it possible to become seriously rich without taking any financial risks,” concluding: “The general public instinctively resents this and will take revenge on a system that they see as unfair.” Carolyn Fairbairn, head of the Confederation of British Industry, referred to “a fixation on shareholder value at the expense of purpose, and the toxic issues of payment of tax and executive pay” as among capitalism’s “wrong turnings” that “stand in the way of redemption.”

Robert Scannell, ex-chair of Marks & Spencer, said companies’ and investors’ short-term focus meant capitalism had “lost its way,” while Anne Richards, chief executive of fund manager M&G, warned that “we will see capitalism rejected unless it finds a way of fundamentally addressing [current] anxiety.” A “reboot” or at least “evolution” was needed, all agreed.

Justin Welby, the ex–oil industry executive who now runs the Church of England, had just signed off a preliminary report alongside the heads of McKinsey, Siemens UK and twenty-one other luminaries for the centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research, or IPPR, which noted the UK economy’s “deep and longstanding weaknesses.” Their commission, set up after the Brexit vote in mid 2016, concluded its two years’ work with Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy. “The economy is not working for millions of people and needs fundamental reform,” is the core message of its 338 pages. A “rebalancing of economic power” is needed to “redress injustices and inequalities,” which can only be done if “economic justice [is] ‘hard-wired’ into the way the economy works.”

A week later, on 5 September, the archbishop returned to the theme with a visionary speech to the Trades Union Congress, where he chided a low-pay economy “that allocates rewards through power not for labour,” instancing the “economic injustice” and “oppression of the employed” that act to “diminish human dignity and treat labour as mere resource, like capital.” The gig economy and zero-hours contracts were, said Welby, the “reincarnation of an ancient evil.”

He did not name the system, as Rowan Williams, his predecessor as archbishop of Canterbury, had in a 2016 lecture decrying “capitalism’s tendency to reduce everything to commodity and property.” The days are long vanished when the Anglican Church could jokily be referred to as “the Tory party at prayer,” or indeed any business organisation as the Conservatives’ natural ally.

Such top-drawer sources, spicing censure with a degree of contrition, find an echo even among cabinet ministers learning warily to deploy the obligatory “r” word. The lugubrious chancellor Philip Hammond now wants to “reinvigorate capitalism for the digital age,” while David Lidington, speaking to Onward, an optimistic new Tory outfit, goes with the sweep of history to favour a “responsible” version.

Much fiercer is the right-leaning press, where columnists have long charted where and how the British economic approach is failing. The Telegraph’s “campaign for capitalism,” launched in October, heralded more despair than cheerleading in its own pages. A gigantic pay deal at the housing company (or land bank) Persimmon, says business editor Ben Wright, “is the kind of incident that risks bringing the whole system into disrepute,” asking: “Who will save capitalism from the capitalists?” Thanks to “rapacious [corporate] behaviour and egregious executive pay,” says his Daily Mail counterpart Alex Brummer, “capitalism in Britain is making itself a prime target for Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist creed.” Citing wealth inequality, wage stagnation and unaffordable homes as examples of the system’s “crisis,” the Times’s economics editor Philip Aldrick concludes that “the tide has turned against capitalism, and is sweeping in.”

Equally harsh verdicts in left-tilting papers, if from the same end of the social scale, adopt a more professedly bottom-up perspective. The “claim that Britain’s economic model is systemically unjust was recently deemed radical and extreme. Now it is indisputable,” says a Guardian editorial, while rising star Grace Blakeley of the IPPR — the think tank kicking away New Labour dust in its own Corbynite swerve — seeks a policy agenda that “challenges the hegemony of financial capital, revoking its privileges and placing the powers of investment back under democratic control. In doing so, we might just be able to move beyond capitalism altogether.”

From across the spectrum, the critiques overlap in their insistence on justice, their focus on inequality, and their ethical dimension. Reference to power-holders’ supercharged rewards plays a crucial symbolic role, not least when lubricated by evident greed and cronyism. More vivid in the public mind than the mechanics or statistics of the financial crash, such scandals have involved top figures in banks, privatised industries, quangos and companies — recently Persimmon and Carillion (a construction behemoth, liquidated in January with vast liabilities). At a time of widespread hardship, the actions of men such as RBS’s Fred Goodwin and Persimmon’s Jeff Fairburn are lethally effective in discrediting the economic order that encourages them.

There is, of course, latent tension between judging capitalism mainly on grounds of unchecked moral breach and viewing it as systemically flawed. In practical terms the one tends to alteration of culture and behaviour, and at most better regulation, the other (as highlighted in Blakeley’s words) to institutional and legal overhaul. But most genuine change requires both elements. In principle, this remarkable convergence on the defects of the British way might create momentum for a strategic focus on a core of agreed remedies.

For a mix of generic and Brexit-centric reasons, it’s not happening. A leaden prime minister and her drifting administration have neither the imagination nor the tools needed for such a large-minded effort. Brexit’s monopoly of the government’s energy and attention has left essential reform in troubled areas — housing, prisons, transport, health, social care, education, police and crime — ad hoc and under-resourced.

More broadly, the Brexit “mess” — as Peter Mares calls it in his on-the-button survey — is levering the divisions of the referendum into abiding polarisation, sucking any instincts for compromise from the political air. In this winner-takes-all political culture, the tightness of the 2016 vote and the all-round distress since then makes everyone in Britain a loser. The optimism that drives successful change is lacking, even when, as over capitalism, the need for it — and a consensus around much of its substance — is tangible. If this logjam continues, Britain is going to talk itself out of the job before getting started, with only a Geoff Dyer–style book to show for it: Fixing Capitalism for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.

Supporters of Corbyn’s Labour can justly reply: since the party leadership and our campaigning made it a headline issue, leading to the storming advance of 2017, being bothered is clearly our raison d’être. For them, continued economic insecurity vindicates Labour’s wager, and the next election can’t come soon enough, irrespective of Brexit’s turmoil.

The case may skate over the party’s poll ratings (at best, a small lead) and Jeremy’s (a bigger lag), as well as internal divisions and scandals. But it gains credence from the Tories’ neglect of what was once their flagship economic vessel: less capitalism as such — an idea rarely popular, and now in retreat — than a strong market economy with a social purpose. The Tories are competitive when their policy mix casts the individual and national interest into credible shape. Under the secretive May, they have nothing of the kind to sell.

Labour’s own shop window is packed, and the party is staying focused on its sole objective: winning power. What animates its leadership is the view that current uncertainties will produce tactical openings that can be bent to a strategic aim. John McDonnell’s calculation in particular is that Labour, at last in the left’s grip, its economic program popular, has a once-in-a-lifetime chance not just to reach government but to transform society. Through his lens even Brexit fades in gravity beside a crisis of capitalism that must not, at any cost, go to waste.

With the case for economic remodelling now clinched, the test is whether a bullet point version can win at the hustings and from day one be implemented as the people’s will — in effect, by a government of revolutionary democrats. A Corbyn-led administration — though the steely McDonnell is infinitely more plausible as a Robespierre — would banish the ancien régime and succeed Clement Attlee’s and Margaret Thatcher’s as the third genuinely radical government in Britain’s post-1945 history.

That Labour’s diagnosis of the economy’s ills recharged the post-crash debate, and continues to drive it, is already some achievement. The party’s 2017 manifesto (promising more houses, health funding, wealth taxes, student grants, free childcare and more) was in equal measure bold and profligate. McDonnell’s recent upgrade promises to put workers on company boards and grant them a mandatory 10 per cent of equity, and to extend union rights to gig merchants.

McDonnell’s refrain echoes “the worse, the better” of the nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky (both men studied for the priesthood): “The greater the mess we inherit, the more radical we have to be; the greater the need for change, the greater the opportunity we have to create that change.” The implicit admission is that Labour’s inheritance, if it gets so far, will also limit what it can do. McDonnell, whose hobby, listed in Who’s Who, is “generally fermenting the overthrow of capitalism,” knows well Marx’s observation that people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please [or] under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

The space between McDonnell’s pledge and Marx’s caveat gives today’s revolutionary democrats sleepless nights. At vital moments on the way to power, they will need fate (timing, luck, human factors) to smile on them. Another major transnational financial shock, inevitably hammering a vulnerable UK, is in that category. This Labour leadership would view it as ideological vindication and political windfall: a golden chance to make its changes irreversible.

Local tremors are now a daily event. Brexit has at last gone critical, the House of Commons having prised it from Theresa May’s dreary grasp. The possibilities include a Tory coup, another referendum or general election, a no-deal exit, staying in the European Union or a halfway house, party schisms and realignments. All are hostage to the desperate, self-preserving deal that May is trying to get past her party, the Commons and the people. Her late choice to pull a vote scheduled for 11 December, after devoting every sinew to it in face of certain defeat, confirms the vacuum of political judgement and impulsion at the heart of government.

No Brexit outcome can by itself solve Britain’s economic superstress or give it a shot of ideas and energy. But something has to give in both areas. So wretched is May’s version of Brexitannia as permanent limbo that the mere glimmer of a new venture is curative, not on behalf of a particular result but for the lost thrill of a true contest of politics and ideas — free of tumbrils, all being well. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell may yet be coming for us all. •

The post Capitalism in the dock appeared first on Inside Story.

May had been on her feet for an hour but still only part way through her speech because she kept allowing questions from the floor and taking the time to answer them. She maintained an even temper, persistent but polite. Her questioners, if not always exhibiting such a calm demeanour, were also courteous, thanking the honourable prime minister for “giving way” to their interventions. Despite the importance of the topic and the proximity in which members are packed together in the historic chamber, the proceedings were far less vituperative than an ordinary question time in Canberra.

Nevertheless, the fissures running through British politics were immediately apparent. Discontent with the shape of the looming Brexit, or criticism of specific aspects of May’s agreement with the European Union, were voiced from behind and beside her, as well as from the benches opposite. While she also received some friendly questions from loyal supporters, the process appeared random and unpredictable, at least to an observer unfamiliar with the personalities of British politics. Where was the party discipline? Why weren’t MPs staying on message? This was democracy at work and it was messy.

Visiting rarely seen relatives in the following days, I quickly discovered that the Brexit faultlines reach out from Westminster and into lounge rooms. One cousin was all for leaving. Born soon after the end of the war, she hankered for a rejuvenated Commonwealth; restoring trading links with Australia, New Zealand and countries in Africa could, she thought, provide an economic and political alternative to Europe. Her mother, my aunt, has a picture of the Queen on her lounge room wall. Visiting England for the first time in his life, my twenty-year-old son was nonplussed. He sees Australia deeply entwined with Asia, and the Commonwealth as both meaningless and irrelevant.

Another English cousin is a staunch Remainer. He was worried about the economic impact of leaving the EU and warned that a hard Brexit — that is, a break with Europe without the type of agreements brokered by May — would lead to catastrophe.

Interestingly, both cousins agreed that former prime minister David Cameron should never have held a plebiscite in the first place. They shared the view that politicians in a parliamentary democracy are elected to make decisions on behalf of the people and shouldn’t squib hard choices by shifting responsibility back to voters. And yet, as Theresa May struggles to forge a way forward on Brexit, putting the issue back to the people in the form a second referendum has emerged as one possible future scenario.

The vote on the government’s Brexit deal is scheduled for Tuesday London time and parliament looks certain to knock it back. Some advisers are encouraging Theresa May to delay the vote to give the whips more time to secure support. But with more than a hundred members of her own side of politics thought to oppose the bill, that looks like a case of postponing the inevitable.

Writing in the Observer on Sunday, journalist Andrew Rawnsley compared May’s rush to a vote to the suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War: “She has been given ample warnings that the cannon of the hard Brexiters are to the right of her, the cannon of the unreconciled Remainers are to the left, and the cannon of the opposition parties are in front of her.”

Yet Rawnsley believes that May is acting in the national interest by continuing with the vote. Britain is scheduled to leave the EU in just over three months, and “if Mrs May’s deal can’t be got through parliament, that needs to be established as rapidly as possible so that MPs can start trying to navigate towards a non-catastrophic resolution of this nightmare.”

What a “non-catastrophic resolution” might look like is unclear. Numerous options are being canvassed. One involves Theresa May resigning as prime minister. Having suffered a resounding defeat, she will say “I’ve tried my best, now it’s someone else’s turn to attempt to clean up the mess,” or words to that effect. This potentially opens the way for a Brexiteer like former foreign minister Boris Johnson to take office and for Britain to careen towards a “hard” Brexit, in which there are no specific post-EU arrangements in place to manage the cross-border movement of people and goods.

Some commentators see May clinging onto office – after all, who in their right mind would want the poisoned chalice at this moment — and then making a last-ditch dash to Brussels, waving the British parliament’s rejection of her deal in the faces of her Europeans counterparts and pushing them for further concessions.

Cabinet minister Amber Rudd is the latest of those who have suggested the fallback of a Norway-style option if parliament rejects the Brexit bill. This would see Britain remain a member of the single market (the European Economic Area) but not the EU. That has the economic benefit of maintaining the free movement of goods but the political disadvantage of maintaining the free movement of people, and May has made immigration control a “red line” issue in Brexit negotiations.

Another potential outcome is a vote of no-confidence in May’s government resulting in a general election. Since both parties are divided about the issue, it’s not clear that this would fix anything or merely prolong the uncertainty. Then there is the option of a second Brexit referendum, which might solve the problem by returning a Remain vote, but which would be likely to deepen the divisions and sharpen the resentments in British society.

The least likely option would be for May to build a government of national unity, and secure a parliamentary majority for keeping Britain in the EU. An opinion prepared for the European Court of Justice (in response to a case brought by Scottish politicians) argues that Britain can unilaterally revoke the Article 50 withdrawal process and call the whole Brexit thing off without the approval of other EU member states. Politicians would at last be stepping up to the plate of political responsibility, but a big chunk of voters would feel disenfranchised as a result.

The problem is that none of the available choices appears to enjoy a substantial level of support, either inside or outside of parliament. According to a poll on Britain’s Brexit options reported in the Evening Standard, 20 per cent of voters back a new referendum on whether or not Britain should stay in the EU, while roughly similar shares want Britain to leave without a deal in place, or want the government to try and extract further concessions from Brussels. Eleven per cent favour calling off Brexit unilaterally, 10 per cent want a general election and 10 per cent want a referendum to support or reject the deal that Theresa May has struck.

It’s a mess, and regardless of what path is eventually taken, it looks like a majority of voters will be dissatisfied with the outcome. •

The post B-Day, and beyond appeared first on Inside Story.

Her strategy combines an appeal to the national interest with a display of grit. “This isn’t about me. It’s about what’s right for the country,” May told the journalist Sophy Ridge three days later. The prime minister is a shy figure, a poor communicator, uneasy with the public, clunkily repetitive in interviews, at ease only with close allies, but given credit for stamina and a sense of duty. At this desperate juncture, eighteen months after her ratings nosedived in a vacuous general election campaign, she is again straining to align personal brand and political message.

It is a tough sell all round. From May’s side, there are positives: no more EU budget payments or judicial oversight, and ending people’s free movement while avoiding trade friction (“we will take back control of our money, our laws and our borders” is her mantra). That said, the deal entails a transition period from Britain’s departure date of 29 March 2019 until at least 2021, during which the United Kingdom stays inside the EU’s customs union and continues to follow EU rules, thus precluding any trade agreements of its own (which were one of Brexit’s main selling points).

An equally indeterminate backstop, a device to guarantee the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, also grants the EU sinuous wriggle room vis-à-vis the north and the whole UK alike. These parameters will change only with a final EU–UK settlement and a solution to the backstop. That could take a decade. Meanwhile, Britain will have paid a divorce bill of £39 billion (A$69 billion) plus various extra charges, ceding potential leverage along the way.

Whatever else these trade-offs represent, it is not freedom’s dawn. Some critics — and not all of them are ultra-Brexiteers like the antiquarian Conservative backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg — even portray it as vassalage. Jo Johnson, transport minister and ex–Financial Times journalist, left the government on 9 November, describing the exit provisions as “an utterly abject and shameful national humiliation.” But Johnson, unassuming brother of the flamboyant Boris, also describes May’s deal as making Brexit “an utterly self-defeating and pointless exercise.” He echoes widespread calls for a second referendum that takes into account the superiority of the UK’s existing terms within the EU over what May offers outside.

Could May ride her chariot through her opponents’ divided ranks, of which this example is but a taste, deploying the threat of no deal, and its attendant disruption, as a winning card? That is now a topic of fevered speculation — and of number crunching ahead of the scheduled House of Commons vote on 13 December. The government’s working majority of thirteen includes ten MPs from the Democratic Unionist Party, which represents Northern Ireland’s unionist (that is, pro-UK) and Protestant half of the population. Holding the balance of power after the 2017 election, the strongly pro-Brexit DUP struck a rewarding confidence-and-supply bargain with May. The party’s destabilising abstention on finance bill votes on 19–20 November, with more to come, piles more immediate jeopardy on the government than the hyped-up talk of a leadership spill from the Brexiteer right.

In opposing the withdrawal agreement, Arlene Foster’s DUP will be joined by a few dozen of the ideological Brexiteers among Conservative MPs (315 of the Commons’s 650). Also headed to the no lobby, for a different reason — they want to keep open the chance of staying in the EU — are veteran Europhiles such as the bombastic Kenneth Clarke and the scholastic Dominic Grieve, as well as Jo Johnson. And a few of Scotland’s thirteen Tory MPs share the fishing industry’s dismay at the deal and worry that the backstop will reboot Scotland’s independence cause. True, some MPs in all those categories might be amenable to whips’ flattery, bribery or blackmail, or they might lose their nerve or change their mind. Even then, extracting the required Commons majority of 318 (adjusting for seven Sinn Féin boycotters and other quirks) from the Tory benches alone is impossible.

That spotlights Labour, whose more workaday Brexit splits mean these tend to be overlooked. The party has plotted an artful course among the government’s travails, positing six notional tests before it endorses any government pact with the EU, while being noncommittal about a second referendum (which most of its members support). Many on the Corbynite left, following Jeremy himself, now downplay their lifelong antipathy to the EU, leaving just seven rigorous Brexiteers among Labour’s 257 MPs. More pragmatic Brexit supporters — the impressive Caroline Flint, for example — prefer May’s plan to an uncoordinated exit, which the party’s 2017 manifesto pledged to oppose.

The largest Labour group, pro-EU and Corbyn-sceptic, sees May’s deal as an obstacle to larger strategic aims. Its core members, such as the eternal coming man Chuka Umunna, are now working not just for a “people’s vote” on EU membership (as if the first one was not) but towards a new centre-left formation that could fill this putative gap in the political market. Prince-over-the-water David Miliband, lost leader Tony Blair and the outstanding Times columnist Philip Collins, author of Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics, are names associated with this project, if that’s not too strong a word.

This Labour spectrum offers thin pickings for any May love-bombing. And the rest of the opposition, the Scottish National Party’s thirty-five MPs, Plaid Cymru’s four, and the Greens’ one, offers none at all. What cannot be ruled out is a potential two-step against a background of business tremors, a currency plunge and a media onslaught: that is, a Commons debate and vote where everyone lets it all hang out and most say no, then a follow-up brimful of self-important gravitas where, to the sound of sirens, enough say yes. “Maybe we need a bit more volatility to get us to a deal,” says J.P. Morgan’s Iain Stealey, a view elsewhere given hand-over-mouth. In the end, fear could be May’s best hope.

Until the decisive moment, getting Commons approval for the deal is whips’ work. But May is already on the front line with both her party and, via broadcasters, the public. More assured and less robotic in interviews than in that dreadful election campaign, which still casts a long shadow, her utterances nonetheless run the gamut from A (grinding platitude) to B (homily, of the “I believe, with every fibre of my being…” type). The want of imagination, or the craft to simulate it, in a country so badly in need of it is lamentable.

Will May win these audiences, or rather (for such is the maximal aim) ensure their glum acceptance of her transaction? The early signs are mixed. A closed Q&A session with Tory constituency stalwarts, where questions to the leader had been screened, reportedly did not solicit any actual enthusiasm, though a London business conference on 19 November went well for her: doubtless another trade-off she would accept.

Polls give the withdrawal agreement a negative verdict, while showing a high quotient of don’t-knows and never-heard-of-its: from 15 to 27 per cent back it, 40 to 51 per cent don’t. Adding other Brexit options — renegotiation, extending the departure date, another referendum, no deal, a legal ruling, a general election — reveals only dispiriting fragmentation. Clever, end-of-tether Tories and think-tanks such as Open Europe debate a knight’s move to a Norway- or Canada-style relationship with the EU (or in parliamentarian Nick Boles’s case, Norway-to-Canada). If EU membership was a raw binary in 2016’s ugly referendum campaign, Brexit has become a game of multidimensional chess that never ends and no one can win.

A halcyon Brexit was always a mirage. Long evaporated are any illusions that departure from the EU would be easy or costless. The deal on the table, at least for the moment, blurs the other supposed choices and amplifies the difficulties in their way. A second referendum, for example, needs a new question or list of preferences, new legislation, and new broadcasting and funding rules — and input from an exasperated EU. Where is the political basis for any of this to be found?

Britain’s new normal is not merely zero consensus but, among very many, zero desire to find one. May’s second-best hope lies in this morass. She visits the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker on 21 November to discuss the (non-binding) eight-pager on future ties. EU leaders will be preparing to “finalise and formalise” the two documents at a special summit, also in Brussels, four days later. Tweaks might yet be made to the former to allow her to claim a vital late concession and give fuel to her domestic push. Like Corbyn, to whom she has an unappreciated resemblance, May is a punchbag who has a knack of turning that to advantage.

In practice, May is seeking to be the beneficiary of all the fragmentation. Her lengthy record of unforced errors — alienating half the population, fixing the exit timetable without a plan, blowing an election, misleading colleagues, and more — certainly makes her foremost, though very far from alone, among its architects. If the Brexit process is a failure of governance, she was at the controls throughout. Not only Theresa May’s but also the country’s borrowed time is getting shorter. Britain needs to be very lucky in its next prime minister. •

The post Britain goes bung appeared first on Inside Story.

“It’s amazing,” reflects Adnan, drawing deeply on a cigarette. “Everyone goes to the town centre and smokes and drinks coffee until four in the morning. Aleppo has basically returned to normal — except for the buildings, that is.” He adds the qualification with a grimace.

“You know,” says Aliya, “my family thought about emigrating to Canada because of the conflict but decided against it. Alone, without our family, friends or our city, we would die silently from within.” Her words echo the sentiments of another Iraqi, whose background is Jewish. “My parents still live in Iraq,” she had told me. “It’s tough, but they can’t bear to leave. Each year during the invasion when they were forced out of the country, we would have a reunion, drink a toast, and say ‘next year in Baghdad,’” turning the traditional Passover toast on its head.

Adnan, Aliya and I survey the neat line of prefabricated houses with small gardens and children’s play equipment, which have been erected to house refugees in this prosperous Berlin suburb. “In Syria, this would be impossible,” says Adnan. “The government wouldn’t allow it. For refugees there is only terror and tents, if that, and mud.”

This camp accommodates around 600 of the nearly 1.2 million refugees Germany has received since the onslaught on opposition strongholds by Syria’s Assad regime and the ongoing turmoil in Iraq. If the boxy white houses are somewhat uniform, they are at least clean, comfortable and well insulated. Each has its own cooking facilities and access to a common playground, a colourful nursery for infants, and a homework room packed with beanbags, pictures and games for older children.

Communal cooking facilities allow for socialising within the camp and for inviting German neighbours and local residents to meet refugees and asylum seekers not only from Syria and Iraq but also from Afghanistan, parts of Central Asia, Mali and Chad.

“We were very worried when the Berlin government gave us this land,” says the camp manager, a young German man with a degree in history and politics. “It is in a very conservative area that voted for the right-wing nationalist Alternative für Deutschland party at the last elections. But surprisingly there haven’t been any complaints. I went to a local residents’ meeting recently and heard that people were surprised, with all the refugees in Germany, how nothing much had changed. Some of them have even started visiting us here and giving extra German-language lessons as volunteers.”

Apart from a few mothers doing some washing, having German lessons or minding toddlers, the camp is largely empty. I ask where everyone is. “All the children are in local schools,” I am told, “and many of the men and woman have jobs.” Despite the fact that the area is fenced off and there’s an attendant at the gate, this is no prison. People can come and go, friends can visit, and it is legal to earn an income outside the camp.

The care, commitment and consideration of the young camp manager — who had bent rules and massaged budgets in order to build a stable sense of community and engagement with locals — also suggests a deeper resolve. “They still feel it, even now and even this generation,” a French aid worker now living in Berlin had told me earlier. “In progressive Berlin, the German past casts a long shadow.”

As if hearing this comment, the manager looks up at the ornate and grandly oppressive brick building, with its columns and triumphal archways, in whose grounds the refugees now live. “This used to be the headquarters of the imperial army under the Kaisers,” he says. “Then it belonged to the general staff during the Third Reich and housed an SS unit. I like the fact that this building, with this past, is now a place to welcome refugees.”

Yet the commitment to a more humane way of managing complex problems goes further than an appreciation for historical irony. In what Australians might see as a moment of jaw-dropping enlightenment, the German Institute for Foreign Affairs in Bonn funded the camp manager to go to Iraq to assist with the humanitarian response to the Mosul offensive. This was in order, as the camp manager says in flawless, accentless English, “to develop empathy and to understand better the context from which many of our refugees come.”

He spent three months managing refugee camps in Northern Iraq, and that was followed up with a visit to Berlin by the Iraqi doctor to assist in developing cross-cultural understanding in the camp and with the wider community. “It amazes them when I say I’ve been there,” he says, “and helps with social cohesion here.”

Not that the camp is a paradise. Refugees sharing accommodation at close quarters don’t always get on, and not everyone has a job in vibrant but economically straitened Berlin. For those who do, the work is often informal and at times illegal. Many are still traumatised from the experience of war and forced migration, and some struggle to adapt to a new country and to learn its language. There are only two social workers in the camp, and they manage everything from supporting psychologically damaged parents and children to guiding refugees through the complexities of the German welfare system. Some refugees have been referred to the police for involvement in criminal activities, and there have been child protection concerns.

With growing anti-immigrant sentiment and consequent budget cuts, the camp has funding for only another six months. More refugees are being deported to Afghanistan and other places now deemed safe, and there are demands to close the facility. Meanwhile, the pressure for “integration” has intensified since the time when Germans lined the streets outside train stations and applauded newly arrived refugees fleeing conflict, and a local football team, Hertha Berlin, flew flags at its matches saying “Refugees Welcome.”

“For some, integration means not speaking Arabic, wearing headdress or being Muslim,” says the camp manager. “But for us, we just try to teach people enough German to get by and to have an understanding of how things work here.”

Acknowledging a perceived political reality that a more open policy doesn’t have wide popular support, Robert Manne and others have argued for what he sees as a more pragmatic but still sympathetic approach to refugees in Australia. But although there are signs of a gradual shift in public opinion, it seems unlikely that the major parties will significantly relax their policies. At the very least, the German example shows that for those currently incarcerated, a simple, humane and much cheaper alternative is within reach.

As I checked into my Berlin hotel, the receptionist takes a look at my passport. “Australia,” she observes, and I brace myself for the usual conversation about hot weather and kangaroos. But she continues: “If we treated refugees like you do, they’d call us Nazis.”

There are certainly deeply concerning echoes in Australia’s treatment of refugees — which is also linked to the lingering influence of the frontier wars and the White Australia policy. But if the past can be a prison, it can also suggest alternatives. Many who are anxious about refugees and their impact on Australia might be surprised — like their conservative German counterparts — when “nothing much” about their daily lives changes. •

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Further east, the Ottoman Empire — recently an ally but for centuries a challenger of Habsburg authority in central Europe — had also collapsed, not without help from the Australian Light Horse. Like its Habsburg counterpart, it broke into several new political entities, with consequences that are still playing out today.

On the day of the armistice between the Western powers and Germany, the last Habsburg emperor, Karl I, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and King of Bohemia, among many titles, “renounce[d] all part in conducting the business of the State.” Suddenly, a dynastic empire that had dominated much of central and eastern Europe for 600 years was no more. Karl was exiled to Switzerland in 1919, from where he made two failed attempts to reclaim the Hungarian crown before being sent by the Allies to Madeira, where he died soon after, aged thirty-five.

The collapse of empires is invariably accompanied by calamities: the sack of Rome, the partition of India, the routing of the French at Dien Bien Phu, the chaos in the former Soviet Union. In this case, Hungary was invaded by Romania and lost large amounts of territory, including the homeland of the ethnic Hungarian population of Transylvania. Bratislava, which had been the Hungarian capital when Hungary was largely occupied by the Ottomans, became part of Czechoslovakia; Polish and Ukrainian armies battled over Galicia and its very Habsburgian capital, Lviv. A brief and brutal communist regime appeared in Hungary in 1919. Despite efforts to assure minority rights and prevent “unmixing,” large numbers of displaced people were on the move.

The day after Karl’s renunciation, the rump of the German-speaking population declared the creation of the German-Austrian Republic, covering just over a tenth of the prewar population of the empire and an eighth of its territory. The German-speaking majority in South Tyrol went to Italy; fresh borders with Yugoslavia were decided by plebiscites; and the new country was cutting off from its food basket, Hungary, its industrial heartlands in Bohemia and Silesia, and its access to the sea at Trieste. Where once South Slav, North Slav and German settlements chequered the Danubian plains, many now found themselves as minorities in foreign countries. The large German-speaking populations in Silesia and the Czech lands fell outside the new borders, sowing the seeds for crises twenty years later.

In those days, Vienna had a population of two million, greater than today. It was an imperial capital of palaces, museums and theatres, with a massive bureaucracy but no emperor and no empire. Today’s telephone book still shows how cosmopolitan the city had become. After the traumas of loss of international reach, and after partnering in another monstrous imperial fantasy, the city has recovered to again be perhaps the most liveable city in the world.

But today all is not well in Austria. Since elections last year the country has been led by a coalition of conservatives and the extreme right under the charismatic young conservative leader, Sebastian Kurz. Over the past sixty years Austria has been generous to waves of refugees from Soviet dominated Eastern Europe, the collapse of Yugoslavia, and the conflicts in the Middle East.  But there is growing concern that the numbers are unsustainable. Media discusses the “Australian solution.” Tapping anti-immigrant populism, Austria now increasingly aligns with those challenging European integration and promoting identity checks within the once virtually borderless Schengen community.

Having once lived in Vienna for several years, this northern summer I visited with a particular goal in mind: to find out how Austria was marking the centenary of the end of the empire. I went armed with a copy of Australian scholar Tim Bonyhady’s Good Living Street, a richly perceptive account of the fortunes of his Viennese family, the Gallias, through the war and the collapse of the empire, in Vienna and then, after they were driven out by the Nazi regime, in Australia.

Wohllebengasse (Good Living Street) is much as it was when the Gallias built their handsome five-storey apartment block there in 1912. Just up the street is the Belvedere Palace, which in 1903 was turned into the home of the Moderne Galerie, an imperial institution celebrating Austria’s turn-of-the-century artistic explosion. Still prominently displayed is the painting donated “anonymously” by the Gallia family, Giovanni Segantini’s haunting The Evil Mothers. With that donation, the Gallia family’s standing in Vienna’s cultural circles was sealed, and an imperial title followed.

My search for reflections on the end of the empire was not fruitful. Although some have identified a new surge of interest in the Habsburg experience, Austria seems far more comfortable with the cultural dimension, preferring to leave the still-sensitive social and geopolitical issues to others. The focus is neither the end of the Great War nor the lessons to be learned from the empire; rather, it is the centenary of the deaths of the artist Gustav Klimt, the designer Koloman Moser, the architect Otto Wagner, and Klimt’s protégé Egon Schiele, the latter from the 1918 war-related Spanish flu that killed as many as the war itself.

The Belvedere’s summer exhibition was Klimt ist nicht das Ende (“Klimt is not the end” — or, as the museum rather less pointedly translated it, “Beyond Klimt”), continuing its exploitation of the Klimt mania that has grown wildly since the 1960s. In fact, the Belvedere has turned The Kiss into a rock star of art.

Also unable to resist the temptation is the once staid imperial Kunsthistorisches Museum, or Art History Museum. In 1890, Klimt was commissioned to produce paintings for the museum’s imposing central dome, and this year a Stairway to Klimt has been built to allow the visitor to come eye to eye with those works. It doesn’t end there: to boost interest in little-visited parts of the museum, Klimt’s Nuda Veritas now adorns the Greek and Roman gallery!

It is a similar story at the nearby and richly endowed Leopold Museum, where the lead exhibition is Gustav Klimt: Artist of the Century, and at the once quiet Café Griensteidl, which has become Café Klimt. But when I came across Klimt’s grave while looking for the Gallia family crypt in the Hietzing Cemetery, it was remarkably modest for such a flamboyant cultural icon.

While Habsburg rule was relatively enlightened and tolerant during the nineteenth century, dissent and reaction mounted in the lead-up to war. Faced with the stresses of fighting on four fronts, the centre could not hold: the empire ran aground on its inability to resolve the “nationalities question.” Emperor Karl sought to satisfy the tenth of the fourteen points advanced by US president Woodrow Wilson to guarantee postwar peace and justice. “The peoples of Austria-Hungary,” it read, “whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.” By mid 1918, though, Wilson and the Allies had been persuaded that nothing short of full sovereignty would allow that autonomous development.

Yet the empire might offer lessons for current efforts to protect multinational institutions in Europe. Its armed forces were genuinely multinational, not unlike NATO; the population’s spiritual needs were tended to by chaplains, rabbis and imams. In attempting to forge a multinational “commonwealth,” Europe is again buffeted by nationality issues — the most spectacular of which is Brexit — especially in countries once part of the Habsburg Empire, which are railing against the loss of autonomy, the inefficiencies of bloated bureaucracies and the challenge of refugee flows. Austria and others should be looking beyond Klimt to understand what allowed the Habsburgs to rule so long, and how the European Union can avoid a similar disintegration. •

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This tribe of conservatives ranks Western civilisation above human connectivity as the motor of human history, and in doing so threatens universities with a cult-like nostalgia for the past. It ignores the real drivers of industrialisation and democracy in favour of an invented cultural tradition that reached its high point in European justifications for imperialism from the mid eighteenth century on.

Most commentary on the conservative push for the study of Western civilisation in universities has focused on the Ramsay Centre’s ambitions and corresponding fears about a loss of academic autonomy. Few have argued that it simply represents a bad way to understand history and the changes that have transformed human societies across the globe. We should be wary of politicians dressing themselves as historical guardians.

Even if we could agree on the geographical boundaries of the “West,” their argument would be no stronger. It is not Western civilisation (however we define it) that has made us what we are today, but the interconnectivity of the world’s many communities.

Indeed, the countries that today make up the European subcontinent (or what could also be called the western peninsula of Eurasia) have always drawn on peoples, ideas and technologies not only from the Mediterranean (especially Greece, Phoenicia and Rome) but also from West Asia (agriculture and religion), South Asia (mathematics) and East Asia (the magnetic compass, papermaking, cast iron, gunpowder, rocketry, paper money and so on). Even the much-vaunted evolution of democracy in England after 1215 owed as much to the power traditions of Germanic tribes as it did to the learned values of Eastern Mediterranean and West Asian cities like Athens.

This is not to deny the achievements of individuals and their societies on the European subcontinent. It is simply to make the point that even if European peoples acted in concert — which they rarely did — they certainly never acted alone. And they knew it. Few among them were ever able to use that knowledge to capture for themselves the wealth and resources of giants such as India and China or the sparsely populated Americas.

It wasn’t the poets, novelists and philosophers that conservatives would like to place at the centre of a narrative of Western civilisation who made European countries and their offshoots vibrant, transformative and somehow similar. While I don’t wish to suggest that these philosophers and others were without influence, it’s important to remember that they were reflecting on the challenges that confronted their very different societies. If we want to understand history, we would do better to understand what drove the changes (or continuity) that these commentators reacted to.

Britain provides a useful example. In the eighteenth century, it began the long and uncertain process of change that we now call industrialisation. This did not occur because of the learning in its elitist universities or because Britain had kept the beacon of Western civilisation alight. What did help was the fact that London had become the centre of a growing textile export sector, and that with this growth came rising wages and a population boom.

It also helped that Britain possessed vast quantities of readily available coal to fuel mechanisation. Commercial skills and energy helped industrial processes to reduce the impact of high wages on British competitiveness and drive the expansion of its growing cotton industry. So, too, did Britain’s ruthless domination of rival manufacturing centres such as India and its exploitation of slavery to grow its own supplies of cotton.

This transformation was in many respects a British phenomenon. Nonetheless, some west European countries were among the early emulators, not because they shared a “civilisation” with Britain but because being close by meant that they keenly felt the geopolitical and economic consequences of British success.

By the mid nineteenth century, even more distant countries like Japan and the United States became emulators. What we now call modernity has never been bounded by concepts of race or culture. Instead, industrial change dangled huge short-term benefits before different communities — hence its attractiveness — but in the long term it could never guarantee perpetual wealth, nor the stability and power transforming societies hungered for.

Not for the first time, societies became bounded by tyrannies that spread death and destruction in their quests for glory and domination. For countries caught in the web of imperialism, there existed no similar freedom to respond. They were imprisoned within an inglorious vortex of servitude.

The slow emergence of democratic forms in some European and North American countries reveals a similar truth. Ultimately such partial political reconstructions owed less to something called “Western civilisation” than they did to the struggles of peoples transformed by population growth and urbanisation, and by economic and technological change, and to their ability to frustrate the traditional forces they confronted. Indeed, with war and depression in the early twentieth century, most of these experiments within Europe withered.

Conservatives may not be alone in how they perceive change across time and space, but they do add a particularly tribal identity to the conversation. They see a world in change and rail against it. They view with disdain the way universities have democratised their learning and teaching, often with the help of new technologies. They contemplate the internationalisation of universities with suspicion. Consequently, they nostalgically promise instead to restore primacy to philosophy and classics and to return to the tutorial model of their philosophical alma mater, Oxford.

Let us remember, Australia has been here before. In the 1990s, La Trobe University taught a Bachelor of Western Traditions on one of its campuses. Its leader received research funding from mining companies, and the course kept its distance from the BA disciplines in order to maintain its purity and mission.

These modern reinventions of “the West” play no useful role in today’s global world. They give rise to cults that fail to generate an open understanding of history with all its complex global interconnections and struggles. There is but one human race and its civilisation has long been global. This does not mean that it is an equal world where everyone is the same. But it does mean we should shun efforts to privilege one reconstructed identity and deny our common humanity and long history of learning from each other.

Long ago, the economic historian Andre Gunder Frank argued that if you tried to understand the world by using only a European street lamp, you wouldn’t receive a great deal of illumination. More recently, philosopher and Reith lecturer Kwame Anthony Appiah has described our very modern idea of Western civilisation as an unhelpful myth. There is no Western essence. Instead culture is mobile and created by intermixture. It is vibrant and messy, and global. And its values are constantly tested and changing.

Hence, we should resist those who, like the dining voyeurs of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, seek to drag universities to the end of the universe where — with each visit — the horrible truth of thwarting their vision for purity and supremacy is revealed, over and over again. •

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But that isn’t the end of the story. Eight years ago, the Sweden Democrats entered parliament with 5.7 per cent of the vote. This time, they tripled that figure to 17.5 per cent. Not a major earthquake, but a significant tremor. What will happen eight years from now, in the general elections of 2026?

The answer might hinge on how the other parties handle the complicated parliamentary situation. The current prime minister, Social Democrat Stefan Löfven, will most likely resign in a few days, although his party only lost a few percentage points and still received 28.3 per cent of votes — not a bad result for a governing social democratic party in today´s Europe. Löfven’s coalition partner, the Greens, fared worse, receiving only 4.4 per cent.

What the rise is the Sweden Democrats has done is break down the old system, which saw two alliances competing for power. One of those alliances, on the centre-left, included the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left party. The other, the centre-right, took in the Moderates, the Liberals, the Centre Party and the Christian Democrats.

Neither of the alliances now has a majority. The centre-left won 144 seats and the centre-right 143, leaving the Sweden Democrats, on 62, with the balance of power. It can choose to vote with either of the two, and thereby stop the other one from governing.

The new-found power of the Sweden Democrats extends to government finances. The new administration will need to get more votes for its proposed budget than the votes attracted by any counterproposal. With one seat fewer than the centre-left, a centre-right government would need to be reasonably sure that the Sweden Democrats would vote for its budget. A centre-left government will worry that the Sweden Democrats might vote for the centre-right’s alternative budget.

To avoid giving this xenophobic party this much influence during the previous parliament, the four centre-right parties that make up the Alliance for Sweden — the Moderate Party, the Centre Party, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats, with a combined 40.3 per cent of the vote — chose not to oppose the government’s budget or support a vote of no-confidence in the prime minister. During this year’s election campaign, the Alliance made clear that it will not be so generous during the coming term.

So, what happens next?

The speaker of parliament plays a key role by assigning to one of the main contenders the task of trying to form a government. (Sweden does not have a president, and the king has only a ceremonial role.) A key factor here is Sweden’s constitutional principle of “negative parliamentarism,” according to which a new prime minister doesn’t need majority support in parliament to be elected. It is enough that no majority exists in opposition to the speaker’s proposal.

Most likely, the first attempt to form a government will be made by Ulf Kristersson, leader of the liberal-conservative Moderate Party. The Moderates lost many seats in the election, but they are still the biggest party in Alliance for Sweden. The problem for Kristersson is that the Sweden Democrats have declared they will vote against such a government if one of its four parties, the Centre Party, refuses to give up its pro-immigration stance.

This will test promises made during the campaign. Will the Moderates choose the same path as their sister parties in Denmark and Norway, and cooperate with a right-wing, xenophobic party? In Sweden, where the Sweden Democrats have their roots in the Neo-Nazi movement, this issue is even more controversial. Kristersson has declared he will not cooperate with the party, but will he keep his promise?

The Centre and Liberal Parties will also have to show their cards. Both parties have said they won’t take part in a government dependent on the Sweden Democrats.

The Social Democrats, meanwhile, who are trying to convince the Centre Party and the Liberals to join a new governing coalition, might need to decide whether to join or support a centrist government instead, even if they don’t get the post of prime minister. In other words, they are facing the difficult choice of whether to compromise in order to stop the Sweden Democrats from gaining influence, or to go into opposition and advocate policies that increase their appeal to working-class voters.

With the speaker having four opportunities to propose a new prime minister to parliament, this political game might well go on until November. If none of these attempts is successful, there will be a new election — a prospect only the Sweden Democrats are openly welcoming.

Perhaps Liberal Party leader Jan Björklund is right in saying that hands will only be revealed when the fourth and final effort is made to form a government. Perhaps Björklund himself, or Centre Party leader Annie Lööf, could then repeat what Liberal leader Ola Ullsten did in 1978 — form a one-party government that has only a small number of seats but is able to manoeuvre bills through the Riksdag by negotiating with different parties. Or, less likely, perhaps the Alliance for Sweden will form a government sooner but then face great difficulty in getting through its budget.

Not surprisingly, speculation is intense. But the focus on the many possible permutations risks obscuring broader and more important issues.

The most fundamental question is whether the shift to the right in Swedish politics is permanent. Together, Alliance for Sweden and the Sweden Democrats received 60 per cent of votes. A clear majority exists in parliament for legislative changes that would weaken trade unions and reduce wages.

For now, though, the Swedish welfare model retains strong support. But what will happen after four or eight years of uncertainty and a series of watered-down compromises that don’t solve growing problems of economic inequality and cultural segregation?

Sweden is a wealthy nation, but it faces deepening challenges, including the need for increased welfare spending to match a rapidly growing population. Whichever parties participate, the next government is likely to be a weak one. There is also a risk that political compromises will hinder adequate investments in social cohesion. Support for the Sweden Democrats might then rise, with already vulnerable groups feeling threatened by the increasing healthcare and housing needs of immigrants. For their part, these immigrants are doing much of the low-paid work and often face discrimination.

The election might have been a backlash against the centre-left parties in government, but the Swedish model is certainly not dead. Judged internationally, the country’s trade unions are still strong, with the high level of membership among blue-collar and white-collar workers a decisive factor in maintaining the Swedish social model. The success of the Left Party — up from 5.7 per cent in 2014 to 8.0 per cent this month — is also notable: although this former Communist Party has been outside government, it has been able to influence policy through cooperation on the budget.

Will the labour movement be able to offer more attractive proposals for blue-collar workers and others on low incomes throughout Sweden? In an article for Inside Story eight years ago I argued that Social Democrats must reconnect with their core voters and not merely target middle-class voters in major cities.

Today, after one in every four organised blue-collar worker voted for the Sweden Democrats, the need to reconnect seems even more vital. But the insight has to be transformed into a policy shift by the leadership of the Social Democrats, without losing sight of why Sweden’s inclusiveness and ability to adapt to new circumstances has been so successful. In economic policy, for example, the blue-collar trade union confederation has for a long time been arguing for more public investment, but that conflicts with the current government’s priority of maintaining a budget surplus in order to reduce what is already a low official debt.

How the labour movement and other progressive forces deal with current challenges will decide the outcome of the next election. And that will play a key role in determining whether right-wing populism continues to grow. •

The post Nordic numbers appeared first on Inside Story.

The hashtag is an initiative of Ali Can, an activist whose parents came to Germany as Kurdish refugees in 1995. Can runs seminars about cultural diversity and was one of the founders, in 2016, of an association called Interkultureller Frieden, or Intercultural Peace. The same year he set up the Hotline für besorgte Bürger for people to express their concerns about migrants, asylum seekers or Muslims, or ask questions about integration and multiculturalism. The hotline encourages calls from who vote for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

#MeTwo was inspired by #MeToo; the “two” aims to draw attention to the fact that migrants can have two identities, such as German and Turkish, or German and Kurdish. When Can posted a video message on 27 July asking people to share their experience of racism by using the hashtag, his inspiration was German footballer Mesut Özil’s announcement that he would never again play for Germany.

Özil’s declaration — made in a long English-language statement posted on Twitter and Facebook in three instalments, three hours apart — has prompted fiery debate and lots of soul searching. Much of the latter was the result of Özil’s claim to have been the target of racist slurs. Among those he identified as racists was none other than Reinhard Grindel, the head of the German Football Federation, the world’s largest sports association.

In an earlier life, Grindel was a member of parliament for the Christian Democrats; at the time, he attracted attention on account of his hardline opposition to cultural diversity. Under the #MeTwo hashtag, a Die Linke member of parliament, Sevim Dagdelen, reported that Grindel had once told her that she was an example of failed integration.

In order to explain Özil’s resignation from the German football team and the extraordinary response to it, we need to go back to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Few expected the young and relatively inexperienced German team to be in the running for the title, but they defied expectations by reaching the semi-final (which they lost to Spain). Football aficionados were surprised not only by the decisiveness of the German wins in the first two knockout rounds (first against England, then against Argentina) but also by the speed, elegance and intelligence of the football they played. Five of the players singled out for praise had come of age since the previous World Cup: defender Jérôme Boateng, forward Thomas Müller and midfielders Toni Kroos, Sami Khedira and Mesut Özil. Between them, they had previously played only twenty-six international level matches.

The team for the 2010 World Cup stood out for two reasons. At the time, all played in the Bundesliga, Germany’s premier league, which suggested that this was a home-grown German team rather than a team of international stars with German passports. Three of the four shooting stars had a migrant background: Boateng is the son of a German mother and a Ghanaian father, Khedira has a German mother and a Tunisian father, and Özil’s paternal grandparents migrated to Germany from Turkey when his father was two years old. And all three were born in Germany: in Berlin (Boateng), Stuttgart (Khedira) and Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr Valley. Only Khedira has two passports, but the others too could have opted to make themselves available for their fathers’ (or, in Özil’s case, grandfather’s) countries. (In fact, Boateng’s half-brother Kevin-Prince once played for Ghana’s national team.)

Later in 2010, in Berlin, Germany played Turkey in a qualifier for the European Championship. Supporters of the Turkish team, many of them German-born or long-term German residents, abused Özil for choosing to play for the German side rather than for Turkey. The booing didn’t seem to faze him; his performance was one of the reasons for the German team’s three–nil victory. After the match, German chancellor (and football tragic) Angela Merkel congratulated Özil in the team’s dressing room. The encounter resulted in the first of a series of photos showing the German chancellor with Özil — hugging him, shaking his hand, and often beaming in his company. The following month, Özil won a prestigious Bambi award in the “integration” category.

Sociologists Andreas Zick, Andreas Hövermann and Michael Müller of the University of Bielefeld found that diversity in Germany had become more widely accepted during the 2010 World Cup, and that racist attitudes had declined. They titled their study “The Özil Effect,” highlighting the role Mesut Özil had played as the personification of a new, more tolerant, less nationalistic, multicultural Germany.

Singled out: German chancellor Angela Merkel congratulates Mesut Özil after Germany’s win over Argentina at the 2014 World Cup finals in Rio de Janeiro. Jean Catuffe/Getty Images

I suspect the Özil effect could also be observed during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The German team, which included a core of players who had come onto the scene four years earlier, defeated the host team seven–one in a dazzling semi-final and then won the tournament by defeating Argentina. One of the iconic images of Germany’s victory in Brazil shows Angela Merkel in the team’s dressing room, surrounded by the players, including a bare-chested Özil draped in the German flag.

Unlike in 2010 and 2014, Germany was one of the favourites to win this year’s World Cup, but the team bowed out ignominiously after the group phase. The losses against Mexico and South Korea, and the narrow and unconvincing victory over Sweden, stand for Germany’s worst performance in the history of the World Cup. Never before had the country been eliminated that early.

Özil, who had been singled out as a key contributor to the win in 2014 and the German team’s impressive performance four years earlier, was now held responsible for Germany’s early exit. While it’s true that he played in both games that Germany lost but not in its win against Sweden, the criticism has been unfair. He was not playing more poorly than the rest of the team; in fact, it has been shown that he was more effective than his teammates. But those blaming Özil for Germany’s poor showing in Russia didn’t have only his performance on the football pitch in mind.

For Özil’s detractors, the origins of Germany’s disastrous performance can be traced back to a photo published on 14 May. It shows Özil, together with Emre Can and Ilkay Gündogan, two other footballers of Turkish cultural background who have played for Germany, in the company of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The trio, all of whom make their living in the English Premier League, had met Erdoğan at his request in London. It was less than six weeks from the Turkish presidential and parliamentary elections, and Erdoğan was on the campaign trail (which took him also to European countries with a large Turkish diaspora).

At the meeting, Gündogan presented Erdoğan with a football jersey with the handwritten inscription, in Turkish, “For my revered president, sincerely.” Erdoğan’s AKP party later published four photos of the encounter on Twitter. Suddenly, something Özil had posted the day before made sense: he had tweeted a photo showing just him and the two other footballers, titled “In good company this evening…,” with a winking face emoji and the German and Turkish flags.

The next day, Reinhard Grindel released a statement in which he criticised the players, saying that the Football Federation “of course respects the special situation of our players with a migratory background” but that it also “stands for values which are not sufficiently recognised by Mr Erdogan.” In the German media, Özil in particular was lambasted for allowing the Turkish autocrat to pose with him, and thereby indirectly supporting Erdoğan’s bid for re-election. Some commentators and far-right politicians demanded that the offending players be excluded from the German team, but on 15 May, German coach Joachim Löw nominated both Özil and Gündogan for the World Cup in Russia.

Five days after the publication of the photos, the Football Federation brokered a meeting between Özil, Gündogan and German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Photos of the three men were published in all major German newspapers, as if they were an antidote for the Erdoğan pictures.

The Football Federation had clearly hoped that the meeting and photo opportunity with Steinmeier would be the end of the matter, but the controversy over the photo with Erdoğan didn’t die down. While Gündogan tried to explain himself in interviews and on social media, Özil remained silent. This wasn’t surprising; even at the best of times, Özil is reluctant to talk to journalists. During friendly matches against Austria and Saudi Arabia, some German fans booed the two players.

For her part, Angela Merkel spoke out in support of Özil and Gündogan; ever the pragmatist, she pointed out on 10 June that “we need them so that we can do well [in Russia].” Not long after, she visited the German team’s training camp in Austria, and met in private with Özil and Gündogan.

In early July, ten days after the German team was eliminated from the World Cup, Grindel said in an interview that he expected Özil to explain himself. Both Grindel and the team’s manager, former German player Oliver Bierhoff, made statements that could be interpreted as blaming Özil for Germany’s poor showing in Russia. Others were more direct; Bayern Munich boss Uli Hoeneß said that Özil was hiding his unsatisfactory performance behind the Erdoğan picture and that “for years he has played only rubbish.”

By that stage, editorialists and other commentators largely agreed that Özil was at best naïve when he posed for a photo with the Turkish president. Even people who otherwise supported him have been baffled by his decision to meet with Erdoğan during the Turkish election campaign. Ali Can, for example, suggested that Özil lacked “diplomatic awareness.” But public opinion was divided over whether Özil was entitled to meet whomever he wanted to. Public opinion was also divided over the question of who was to blame for the German performance in Russia, and for the fact that the controversy over the photo overshadowed the team’s preparations, if not the World Cup itself.

The Football Federation’s hope that the controversy would die down, remained unfulfilled. It again dominated headlines after Özil informed his 23.2 million Twitter followers and 30.9 million Facebook fans that he had decided not to play again for Germany. Seemingly confirming the views of those who had argued he was naïve, Özil defended meeting Erdoğan: “For me, having a picture with President Erdogan wasn’t about politics or elections, it was about me respecting the highest office of my family’s country. My job is a football player and not a politician, and our meeting was not an endorsement of any policies.”

Özil also wrote in detail about the racist abuse he had suffered as a result of the Erdoğan photo. He reserved his strongest criticism for Grindel: “I will no longer stand for being a scapegoat for [Grindel’s] incompetence and ability to do his job properly… In the eyes of Grindel and his supporters, I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose. This is because despite paying taxes in Germany, donating facilities to German schools and winning the World Cup with Germany in 2014, I am still not accepted into society. I am treated as being ‘different.’”

Footballers who supposedly don’t look German have long been the targets of racism in German. In his wonderful book Heimaterde, which recounts his travels through a culturally diverse contemporary Germany, Lucas Vogelsang tells the story of Jimmy Hartwig, the son of an Afro-American GI and a German woman. Hartwig played in the Bundesliga, and twice for the German national team, in the 1970s and 1980s, and endured much abuse. Things have improved since those days, and most clubs now take a tough line if supporters racially abuse players.

In the public arena, too, racist slurs are seemingly less readily tolerated than they used to be. In 2016, Alexander Gauland, then deputy chair of AfD, said that “the people” like Jérôme Boateng “as a football player. But they don’t want to have a Boateng as their neighbour.” The remarks were roundly condemned — even by then AfD leader Frauke Petry, who apologised on behalf of her party — and for a short time they even affected the AfD’s showing in the polls. It seemed that Gauland had crossed a red line.

But shortly afterwards, Petry herself continued Gauland’s general line of attack. She told journalists that it was “a shame” that Mesut Özil never sang the national anthem when it was played ahead of international matches. She also objected to his posting photos on social media that showed him making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and wondered whether this “publicly celebrated trip” was also intended to be a political statement.

And when the German team failed to win the 2016 European Championship, having been the clear favourite, another prominent AfD politician, Beatrix von Storch, suggested that the team’s performance was due to the fact that not all its players were German.

While Gauland’s initial comment drew lots of criticism, subsequent similar statements have not prompted as much outrage. The more often players like Özil and Boateng were publicly attacked on account of their cultural background, colour of skin or religion, the more difficult it seemed to become to show solidarity, and the more acceptable such attacks then appeared.

Insinuations that Germany was eliminated from the tournament in Russia because of Özil should have been as scandalous as Gauland’s remarks about Boateng two years earlier, but they seemed to have become part of a new normality.

The response to Özil’s resignation from the national team dominated Germany’s media for more than a week. Angela Merkel has so far not commented on Özil’s claims of endemic German racism, but at least she had the grace to say that she regards him highly, that he is a great footballer and that she respects his decision to resign from the national team.

Özil’s former teammates have been less generous. Only Jérôme Boateng has spoken out in support of his abi, or brother, Mesut. Thomas Müller has demanded that the matter be put to rest, because “there is no racism in the German national team,” as if anybody had made such a claim.

A week ago, the team’s captain, goalkeeper Manuel Neuer said that he had not previously commented on the issue because he hadn’t been asked for his opinion and because he did not want to pass value judgements — only to do just that. He suggested that the German team must include only players “who are really proud to play for the national team, and who give everything for the opportunity to play for their country,” thereby not so subtly implying that Özil, who was notorious for not joining in when the national anthem was sung before matches, should have been excluded.

German coach Joachim Löw has kept his job despite the German team’s embarrassing performance in Russia. He is known to have long believed that Özil is a footballing genius, and had been one of his most loyal supporters, even when Özil didn’t play well. In 2012, when Germany failed to make the final of the European Championship, Löw angrily responded to critics who suggested that the failure of Özil and others to sing the national anthem was symptomatic of a lack of commitment. “It’s nice to sing the anthem,” Löw said. “But doing so is not evidence of quality, and [not singing it] does not prove that somebody is unwilling to fight.” But this time, Löw too has remained silent.

For Özil, the matter now seems to be closed. He has said what he felt needed to be said. He will continue to play football — not for Germany, but for his English club Arsenal. In a recent match against Paris Saint-Germain, Arsenal’s new manager Unai Emery appointed Özil the team’s captain. This is an indication that in England Özil has the public support that Löw and most of his former German teammates are denying him.

Özil will also remain German — after all, Germany is the country where he was born and grew up, the country that he represented ninety-two times as a player, and the only country of which he is a citizen. He will remain Turkish, because Turkey is the country of his parents and grandparents. But Özil’s identity cannot be divided between two neat categories, “German” and “Turkish.” One of his recent tweets is titled “Welcome to my city” and includes video clips that show him walking through London. He is a global citizen with a global following: worldwide, only four other footballers have a larger social media following than his.

In Germany, the debate about what Özil did and didn’t do has been overtaken by necessary, long overdue discussions about racism, about integration and about German identity. These discussions were prompted by Özil’s decision to talk publicly about his experiences, but they focus on everyday racism rather than the racism experienced by celebrities or the racism of leading AfD politicians. Racism is not a uniquely German problem, but it is a problem of Germany — rather than of a few obnoxious far-right figures.

The fact that the AfD, whose representatives are often openly racist, have the support of about 15 per cent of the electorate is only one facet of that problem. Another is that people who could not be accused of being racist — Thomas Müller and Joachim Löw, for example — don’t speak up when somebody close to them is vilified. And perhaps the biggest problem is that the 85 per cent of Germans who don’t vote for the AfD have done too little to stop racist attitudes and xenophobic sentiments from becoming more respectable.

The German team’s next match, against World Cup–holder France, takes place on 6 September. That will be an opportunity to once again talk football. Enough has been said about Özil’s lack of judgement in May, and about his more recent disappointment and anger, but much remains to be said about Özil as one of the most talented footballers of his generation. What better opportunity to reminisce about Özil’s magic when watching a German team that no longer includes him. Much might also be said then about the joy of watching a talented and culturally diverse national team. From a German point of view, it is unfortunate that that team will be France’s Les Bleus rather than the German Nationalmannschaft. ●

The post “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose” appeared first on Inside Story.

Why did that moment, on 29 June, turn viral? Dyer’s vehemence and the Edward Lear-ish flavour were a good mix, but the fuse was the nerve he hit. Without taking sides on the ins and outs, he captured what millions feel Brexit now to be: not an issue or choice, but a swamp without end.

It looked deceptively simpler two years ago, thanks to the binary referendum question (abridged, “should the UK stay in or quit the EU?”) and slogans (“Take Back Control,” “Stronger In”). Then came the slim vote to leave, by 51.9 to 48.1 per cent — the most vexing of all possible outcomes, combining maximum disruption with, on the losing side, peak frustration, suspicion and demands for a rerun. After an ugly campaign, not even the winners were happy. There was but one lodestar: the people’s will. Follow that, and how much could go wrong?

Pretty much everything, as it happened. Constitutionally, parliament found the plebiscite hard to digest. Politically, a new prime minister, Theresa May, failed to build consensus, chose a formal exit date (29 March 2019) without a plan, then lost her party’s majority in a snap election. Emotionally, “leave” and “remain” tribes dug in to their respective trenches. Diplomatically, talks with the EU on terms of withdrawal veered from chary to sour. Administratively, bloated Brexit sucked time and energy from other vital areas. Strategically, a want of planning deprived it of inner momentum. Internationally, the United Kingdom’s confusion and drift invited ridicule. Lexically, an arcane new vocabulary suffused higher discussion. Psychologically, the country became stuck — the very opposite of what was sold.

Brexit’s original sin was that so few, in their heart, expected it to happen. Each side clung to it as the dream or nightmare of its imagining. Thus neither put in the detailed work to prepare for it. Voted for, it was from day one a shapeshifting orphan given the run of the house, as if a character in Spirited Away. Responsible ownership by a temporarily unified political class might have domesticated it — but that was always a fantasy beyond even Miyazaki’s jewel. In any case that error of conception was fateful. Without definitive form, Brexit moved ever further from many people’s grasp or attention.

Central to the estrangement was linguistic hyperinflation. Across politics and media, its foes routinely defined the Brexit outcome — even as the UK was still inside the EU — as catastrophe, disaster, chaos, meltdown, shambles, car crash or nightmare (ad infinitum), and its supporters as racists sunk in imperial nostalgia. Its fevered advocates, with nothing practical yet to boast of, saw the anti-Brexit camp as spoilers, saboteurs, traitors, enemies of the people, or — in May’s notorious phrase — citizens of nowhere. Though many argued coolly across divides, and numerous think tanks were channels of reason, such noisy labelling further corroded the public realm.

As the referendum’s second anniversary passed, and a heatwave descended, there was no clear way out of the limbo. Several options were touted: a follow-up referendum (which its proponents call “a people’s vote”), another general election, a new parliamentary coalition or centrist party to build a majority for a new course, an agreement with the European Union to extend the departure date beyond 2019. The last especially stirs leavers’ fear and remainers’ hope that the European Union is, like the Hotel California or Royston Vasey, a place you can never leave.

But under the baking sun — as Trump prepared to land, Putin’s Novichok took a life, and World Cup optimism gave respite — a new phase in the Brexit process arrived to test every scenario. It began on 6 July at Chequers, the country residence of British prime ministers, when the cabinet met to mull the government’s negotiating position to the European Union on Britain’s departure.

Drafted by Theresa May’s influential adviser Oliver Robbins and finalised by her inner circle, the 104-page document is an odd hybrid whose expository tone is at odds with its concessions and contortions, while overall it lacks cohesion and detail. For starters, it embraces “a common rule-book” (in practice, EU regulation) on goods and agricultural trade, state aid and competition; is ambiguous on trade policy and services; is evasive on freedom of movement; offers little on Ireland’s border, a major obstacle to any deal; and volunteers as tariff collector for EU-destined goods entering via the United Kingdom, in order to solve a problem of its own devising.

Would it fly? That the text’s disingenuous officialese cloaks a retreat from May’s earlier stark “no-deal-is-better-than-a-bad-deal” rhetoric, and is driven by expediency without a conceptual framework, is cruelly plain. That raised the stakes for the away-day, an advance briefing for which verged on intimidation. This is leader Theresa’s path, was the message; “collective responsibility will be asserted at the end of the day”; “those who can’t face making the right decision for the country” will immediately forfeit their government car, so you’ll find “taxi cards in the foyer” to help you home; a “select number of narcissistic cabinet ministers” may find their “spots taken by a talented new generation of MPs who will sweep them away.” When a cabinet majority endorsed the document, it seemed that a weak person’s bullying had worked. That balmy Friday evening, the instant takeaway was a rare May triumph.

The story flipped as weekend resignations began: head of the main Brexit department and nominal chief negotiator David Davis, foreign secretary Boris Johnson, a tranche of lesser ministers, two Conservative Party officials. The party’s grassroots were not amused, and wider polls unfavourable. Even staunch remainers such as Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson scorned the plan, now embodied in a government white paper, as the worst of all worlds. “This Brexit is just mush… The practical upshot is to tie us to Europe over large parts of economic life, without a say in its rules,” wrote Blair in a forensic lost leader’s statement.

But opponents had unlike agendas. Davis claimed that his more exacting paper had been replaced by Robbins’s, and that May had let slip a pre-Chequers stitch-up with Angela Merkel. The tarnished Johnson, after an inglorious spell in office, held to his “global Britain” schtick. Michael Gove, Liam Fox, Dominic Raab (Davis’s replacement), and others favouring a cleaner break with Europe stayed in cabinet. The traps were not yet sprung.

Action moved now to a febrile House of Commons, where a perilously small government majority is exposed to backbench ploys. Tory factions — up to fifteen hard remainers, and a few dozen leaver ultras led by the lordly (and Johnson-backing) Jacob Rees-Mogg — vied in laying down rival amendments to a trade bill that would, if passed, bend Chequers to their side and bind May in EU negotiations. Four Brexiteer revisions, accepted by the government to prevent the bill’s derailment, provoked Rees-Mogg’s arch-rival Anna Soubry to say he “is running Britain.” Tory MPs traded insults across the green benches. Two needle-eye votes saw a senior MP break a pair, seemingly in cahoots with the Conservative chief whip. Four pro-Brexit Labour rebels saved the government from defeat. The government tried, and failed, to call a recess a week before it was due. One incendiary row followed another.

A post-Chequers plunge in the Tories’ numbers and May’s own ratings adds to the jitters. Some MPs called for a vote on May’s leadership, the number confidential but evidently still less than the forty-eight needed for a contest. Many MPs are paralysed by shared fears: of where May is taking them, of potential splits, of their pro-Brexit constituents, of an early election, most of all of a Jeremy Corbyn–led Labour government. Labour’s deliberate vagueness — take pot shots at Tories rather than sides on Brexit, could be its motto — flummoxes its pro-EU base. The policy has a cynical appeal, but it makes nothing happen.

Britain’s pity is that the same is true of Theresa May. Her tenacity in office earns credit and sympathy, but it is not allied to imagination or persuasive skills. Or, arguably, emotional intelligence, which today equally amounts to a requirement of the job. Over Brexit, her fortified office and unhealthy dependence on key aides replicates exactly the situation before her election flop in 2017 — right down to her outsourcing of the Conservative manifesto to close adviser Nick Timothy, whose text was vouchsafed to the cabinet on the day of its launch.

The prime minister’s nationwide tour to sell the Chequers fix also echoes the election and prefigures a repeat of its blowback. Among Gateshead factory workers on 23 July, the Times’s Patrick Kidd says, her “question-and-answer session had all the energy and excitement of a nervous librarian reading the phone book to a conference of narcoleptics.” The people “terrify her. And she, in return, cannot connect with them.”

All this is old news. Nothing has changed, as May’s most cringeworthy moment on last year’s campaign trail had it. If party and voters are indeed already certain that Chequers is a dud, May is the last person to convert them. Her “machinery of government” statement on 24 July, announcing her direct control of the Brexit talks along with civil servant Robbins, and explicitly relegating minister Raab, is of the same tin-eared piece.

This surfeit of local drama is the latest shadow over Brexit’s impending deadlines. European Union summits in October and December are supposed to wrap up the withdrawal deal and future EU–UK trading relationship, before approval by the European parliament and the twenty-seven member states. Britain’s turmoil puts that schedule in jeopardy, but also begins to exert rare pressure on EU negotiators.

Rare, because London’s political theatrics during the Brexit process have fuelled confidence in Brussels — HQ of the European Commission, which runs the European Union — that it would get much the better of the withdrawal terms. Continuing uncertainty at this stage means Brussels must now judge how far Britain can be pushed without risking a late breakdown. In a gauche attempt to bypass the Commission, May’s ministers are also being despatched to sell the white paper to their EU equivalents. (The translations of its executive summary into twenty-two European languages are being mocked for their illiteracy, which too is all of a piece.) Michel Barnier, the chief EU negotiator, derided the UK’s diplomatic effrontery in his meeting with Raab on 26 July, just as he had reacted to the document itself with trademark hauteur (his motto should be the Turkish insult: you must give what we don’t want).

Yet to make a Brexit deal feasible, Europe will also have to be flexible. That would be a historic first. But if it were to come on the basis of the Chequers plan it would be to no avail, for even a modified version of that incoherent proposal will never pass a House of Commons vote. The next stage could bring into play other emergency options that May previously dropped: Norway-style membership of the European Economic Area only, or a Canada-style free-trade agreement “plus plus plus” (Davis’s preference). A savvy British approach, if that is still conceivable, might even seek to cherrypick — the word gives Barnier apoplexy — elements from the EU’s thirty-plus free-trade agreements, and ask: if South Korea and Mexico, why not us? To unbowed Brexiteers the question would have the collateral benefit of smoking out Barnier and the European Commission’s all-powerful Martin Selmayr, whose theology requires Britain to be seen to suffer for its impertinence, not least pour décourager les autres.

Alternatively, there is the possibility of the United Kingdom leaving with no deal at all — one the two sides are now, for the first time, raising openly and preparing for. Realism without panic is the British motto here, hoping the terms won’t be reversed. In principle Britain would then default to World Trade Organization rules and tariffs, at a cost of widespread economic disruption. Any reserve supplies of that hyperinflated language might then come in useful, especially if the financial markets put a horribly exposed currency in their sights. But one of many Brexit paradoxes is that not preparing seriously for a no-deal outcome has cramped Britain’s negotiating leverage. Similarly, Raab’s suggestion that Britain’s £39 billion (A$70 billion) divorce payment is conditional on progress in other areas might well have been deployed earlier as an effort to quicken pulses.

A more strategic and holistic view of the European Union, nowhere visible in the British government’s crabbed, defensive approach to Brexit, might also concentrate minds. Its own predicaments, ably dissected by analysts such as Ivan Krastev, Ulrike Guérot, Carnegie Europe’s Stefan Lehne, Chris Bickerton, Ian Kearns, and the Financial Times’s Wolfgang Münchau, are also a mad riddle. Among them are security, immigration, populism, regional division, eurozone policy and structural reform. But here is another paradox, or maybe not at all: Brexit is way down the list; Britain is so over already. As Münchau writes in the latest issue of Prospect, “The leaders of the EU are officially disappointed that Britain is headed for the door; secretly they will be relieved when it goes. In fact, the EU does not really want Brexit to be reversed.”

The larger point here is that these two woeful years, completing a post-crash decade, have created a fluid new milieu for the now disassembling EU–UK relationship. Deal or no deal, each entity is on the move, separately embarked on a disputatious mystery tour, strategically bereft, internally strained, in want of leadership, a plaything of global forces. The four decades of “living together, apart” are also over. Britain, mainly England, initiated the break, but the European Union has been first to internalise it.

This new milieu generates one more paradox: within the EU–UK distancing capped by Brexit, there is also unsought kinship. Ivan Krastev’s judgement, speaking to the geostrategic setting in the context of Trump’s visit to Europe — “The gravest risk the EU faces is to be the guardian of a status quo that has ceased to exist” — works for the UK too. So does his injunction: “The Europeans must also discover that while their unity is important, it can also help to be a little unpredictable themselves.”

Adjust the perspective and Brexit is child’s play turned grandiose by mandarins and mediocrities on both sides, incapable of descending to the level of events. They can’t be expected to solve the mad riddle. That leaves the British people. After two grim years it won’t be easy, but if you’re going to trust anyone it had best be them. ●

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What’s to blame for the rising death toll? Three explanations are commonly given: the obstruction and criminalisation of private search-and-rescue missions, the absence of a concerted European effort to rescue migrants at sea, and the policies of the new government in Rome. Italy has closed its ports not only to search-and-rescue ships operated by non-government organisations but also — albeit only temporarily — to commercial vessels that pick up migrants, and navy ships engaged in the European Union’s Operation Sophia, whose ships have patrolled the Mediterranean since 2015, mainly to combat people smuggling. Earlier this month, Italy’s new far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini even threatened to prevent the Diciotti, an Italian coastguard vessel, from disembarking sixty-seven migrants at a Sicilian port.

The central Mediterranean route has arguably become more perilous since Salvini, the hard-line federal secretary of the Lega Nord, was sworn in as deputy prime minister and interior minister on 1 June. Lega Nord campaigned strongly on an anti-immigration and anti-migrant platform during the election, and the openly xenophobic Salvini is determined to fulfil its campaign promises. Within days of his appointment, he announced the closure of Italy’s ports, arguing that Italy had long enough carried the can for its European partners.

But it would be wrong to solely blame Italy’s new government. Other European countries have been every bit as anxious to reduce the number of irregular migrants arriving at Europe’s southern borders, and Malta has also gone as far as closing its ports to ships operated by NGOs. If it were up to the Austrian government, Europe’s external borders would be impenetrable even for people fleeing war or persecution — which is especially significant because Austria assumed the European Union’s rotating presidency on 1 July and is in a position to set the EU’s agenda, if only for six months.

Italy itself was a most reluctant recipient of rescued migrants well before the Lega became responsible for the government’s policies. It has been clamping down on private search-and-rescue missions since July 2017, when it demanded that NGOs operating in the central Mediterranean sign a code of conduct requiring them, for example, to “receive on board… upon request by the competent National Authorities, judicial police officers for information and evidence gathering with a view to conducting investigations related to migrant smuggling and/or trafficking in human beings.” All this is a very long way from Operation Mare Nostrum, the Italian government’s response to two mass drownings near Lampedusa in October 2013, which resulted in the rescue of some 100,000 migrants over a twelve-month period.

In fact, an excellent recent report by Forensic Oceanography, which is highly critical of Italian and European policies and practices in the central Mediterranean, is titled “Mare Clausum,” closed sea, in reference to exceptional practices in the Middle Ages that challenged the Mare Nostrum approach that had endured since the Roman empire.

The swearing in of the new Italian government — a coalition between the former regionalist, right-wing Lega Nord and the new-right populist (and ostensibly anti-establishment) Movimento 5 Stelle, or Five Star — has nevertheless marked the beginning of a new chapter in Europe’s approach to irregular migrants.

That became obvious on 10 June, when the Aquarius, a former German coastguard vessel jointly operated by the German–Italian–French–Swiss NGO SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, was barred from entering an Italian port. On 9 and 10 June, the ship had rescued 629 migrants in international waters off the Libyan coast in an operation coordinated by Italy’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre.

Although Malta’s prime minister initially tweeted that Salvini’s instructions “manifestly go against international rules,” his government followed the Italian lead and denied the ship’s request to dock at a Maltese port. In the end, the Spanish government allowed the Aquarius to enter the port of Valencia. Because the ship was kept waiting in the waters between Italy and Malta and then took several days to reach the Spanish coast, a full week passed between the migrants’ rescue and their eventual disembarkation. The Aquarius has not yet returned to the search-and-rescue zone near the Libyan coast, and is currently in Marseille. Its operators say it will eventually resume its role, but they are hesitant to give the go-ahead, because they are afraid not only of a repeat of the recent odyssey but also of worse scenarios, including a confiscation of the ship.

Their misgivings are well founded. Later in June, the Lifeline, a ship operated by the German NGO Mission Lifeline, with 234 rescued migrants on board, was also denied access to an Italian port and, initially, also prevented from docking at Valetta in Malta. Only when eight European countries — Malta, France, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium — agreed to accept passengers whose asylum claims were successful did the Maltese government relent. But the Maltese authorities have since seized the Lifeline and initiated legal proceedings against its captain. A few days later, they also detained the ship and aeroplane operated by another German NGO, Sea Watch. It is probably no accident that Sea Watch, Mission Lifeline, SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières were among the NGOs that refused to sign the Italian code of conduct last year.

Of the eight NGOs conducting search-and-rescue missions in the central Mediterranean last year, only one is currently active, the Spanish organisation Proactiva Open Arms. Italian authorities impounded its ship, the Open Arms, in March, accusing its crew of people smuggling, but an Italian court ordered its release a month later. When the Open Arms rescued sixty migrants in June, Malta and Italy once again closed their ports. On 2 July, the ship was finally able to dock in Barcelona.

When the Open Arms next returned to international waters, near the Libyan coast, it came across a woman clinging to the wreckage of a destroyed rubber boat, and two bodies. She reported that she had been left behind when the Libyan coastguard had rescued the boat’s other passengers and that a passing cargo ship had not stopped to help her. The Open Arms has since taken the survivor and the bodies to the Spanish island of Majorca.

While Proactiva’s claims have been contested by Salvini, and by the Libyan authorities and a German TV journalist on board the Libyan coastguard vessel, the harrowing images posted by the NGO have directed critical attention to the role assigned to Libya. The European Union and Italy have provided the Libyan government with generous funding, training and ships to establish a coastguard that the Europeans expect to prevent migrants from leaving Libya and to take back those who are — depending on one’s perspective — caught or rescued within Libyan territorial waters. Rescue operations near the Libyan coast, which were coordinated until recently by the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in Rome, are now led by the Libyans themselves. The (European) architects of this new arrangement want all migrants rescued near Libya — including those picked up in international waters and not rescued by the Libyans themselves — to be disembarked at a Libyan port.

That is highly problematic for two reasons. First, lavish European funding notwithstanding, the Libyan coastguard doesn’t yet have the capacity to patrol along the entire Libyan coastline and coordinate complex search-and-rescue operations involving commercial ships, European naval vessels and ships operated by NGOs. It also has to be mindful of not treading on the toes of powerful militias that control sections of the coast.

Second, and more importantly, the migrants who decide to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean do so not least because Libya is unsafe. Most of them have had first-hand experience of Libyan prisons or detention centres, where migrants are locked up and mistreated to extort money from their relatives back home or in Europe. Torture and rape are common. The human rights violations experienced by migrants have been documented in numerous recent reports by Human Rights Watch and similar organisations. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the High Commissioner for Human Rights have also highlighted the cruelties inflicted on irregular migrants in Libya.

As a Refugees International field report from June 2017 observed, “Some of the refugees and migrants interviewed by RI in Italy said they had been working in Libya and had not planned to travel to Europe. However, they made the journey to Italy to escape the violence in Libya.” The same organisation produced another report in April, after the European Union had become more reliant on the Libyan authorities to prevent migrants from leaving for Europe, finding that “European engagement has failed to significantly improve the situation.”

An Amnesty International report, also from last year, had this to say:

Refugees and migrants are routinely exposed to human rights violations committed by Libyan officials and security forces and abuses at the hands of armed groups and criminal gangs, who are often working in close cooperation and to mutual financial advantage. They suffer torture and other ill-treatment and arbitrary detention in appalling conditions, extortion, forced labour and killings at the hands of Libyan officials, militias and smugglers. In a lawless country, refugees and migrants have become a resource to be exploited — a commodity around which an entire industry has grown.

Even the German foreign office has raised concerns about the human rights situation in Libya. In a report partially leaked early last year, most of which has since been made public under freedom of information legislation, German diplomats pointed to “authentic” evidence of the torture, rape and routine executions of migrants and described “conditions similar to those in concentration camps.” This hasn’t stopped the German government from backing European attempts to outsource border controls to the Libyan regime.

It is in Germany that the criminalisation of private search-and-rescue missions has resonated particularly loudly. That’s partly because at least four of the ships that operated in the Mediterranean last year were funded entirely by German organisations, and partly because support for search-and-rescue missions is perceived as a commitment to an alternative Europe — one that is neither afraid of strangers nor anxious to seal its external borders.

Support for search-and-rescue operations is also seen as a way of symbolically snubbing the far right, which has grown in strength not least because its leaders have blamed refugees and asylum seekers for all ills. The Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, Germany’s largest opposition party, has long tried to equate private search-and-rescue missions with people-smuggling networks. While AfD politicians speak of “so-called refugees” and “so-called rescuers,” and label the latter criminals, their supporters sometimes go one step further. At a far-right Pegida protest in Dresden last month, prominent Pegida activist Siegfried Däbritz referred to the local NGO Mission Lifeline, whose ship was at the time trying to find a port to disembark the 234 people it had rescued: “You must have heard what’s happened to our beloved Dresden human-smuggling organisation,” whereupon the crowd chanted: “Absaufen! Absaufen!” (Drown! Drown!).

Last week I attended two panel discussions about search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean. The first followed the screening of the documentary Iuventa in a Berlin cinema. This fascinating Italian–German co-production tells the story of a group of young people, most of them Germans in their teens and early twenties, who formed the NGO Jugend Rettet (Youths Saving Lives) in mid 2015 to raise money for a private search-and-rescue mission and raise awareness about the humanitarian catastrophe happening in the Mediterranean. With the help of crowdfunding they bought and fitted out a Dutch fishing trawler, christened it Iuventa, and used it to rescue some 14,000 migrants trying to reach Europe from Libya. The Italian authorities seized the ship in August 2017, claiming that it had been used to ferry illegal migrants to Italy and that its crew was colluding with people smugglers. (Jugend Rettet had refused to sign the code of conduct I mentioned earlier.) Attempts to procure the Iuventa’s release through the Italian courts have failed.

The previous day, some 200 mainly young people had turned up to listen to a Greens member of parliament, a lawyer and a representative of SOS Méditerranée at a forum hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is aligned with the Greens. Here, too, the discussion focused on the question, “What next?” On both occasions, the mood in the audience was ambivalent. There was a lot of pessimism about the prospects for human rights in a Europe run by the likes of Salvini, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, where far-right populist movements seem to dictate the political agenda. How much worse could it possibly get? (After the film screening, an Australian doctor who had sailed on the Iuventa pointed out that Europe’s current policies vis-à-vis irregular migrants were almost as bad as Australia’s — which suggests that in Europe we haven’t hit rock bottom yet.)

But I was also surprised by the level of optimism about civil society’s capacity to effect a change of policies. Perhaps this makes sense in a country that would not have coped with the arrival of over a million asylum seekers in 2015 and 2016 if civil society had not come to the rescue of government agencies evidently out of their depth. But some of that optimism was also informed by the sudden surge of public support for private search-and-rescue operations.

In late June, when the Lifeline could not find a port to land at, a group of activists formed the Bündnis Seebrücke (Alliance Sea Bridge). Organisers expected 800 people to come to its first rally in Berlin on 7 July — 12,000 turned up. Since then, the Seebrücke movement has spread across the country, and even to smaller towns. On Friday last week, 1000 people demonstrated in Bonn and 800 in Kiel; on Saturday, 700 protested in Düsseldorf, 250 in Augsburg, 500 in Stuttgart and 2000 in Bielefeld. Given that it’s the height of summer, these are significant numbers. Rallies in Hannover, Dresden, Koblenz, Münster, Hamburg, Kaiserslautern, Aachen and numerous smaller towns are planned for next weekend.

“It ought to be possible to mobilise not 12,000 or 20,000, but half a million people in support of the search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean,” a member of the audience said after the screening of Iuventa. At the event hosted by the Böll Foundation, a woman remarked that the momentum of the Seebrücke movement reminded her of the early days of the peace movement in the 1980s. No doubt such statements reflect wishful thinking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Seebrücke demonstrations turned out to be more than a one-off and overall modest articulation of discontent.

As in the days of the peace movement, the comparatively uncontroversial demand to save lives in the Mediterranean could bring together people whose politics have otherwise little in common: left-wing activists and the churches, for instance. In fact, while the largest Bündnis Seebrücke rally so far attracted 12,000 supporters, a certain well-known Vatican-based proponent of search-and-rescue missions had a live audience of 25,000 last Sunday when he drew attention to recent shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and demanded “respect for the rights and dignity of all.” (Incidentally, the Pope could yet play a role. A representative of the Council of German Protestant Churches, which has co-funded the Sea Watch plane grounded by the Maltese authorities, has raised the possibility of the Vatican, a sovereign state, requesting the release of the plane.)

In any case, the opportunity to support an evidently good cause, which, according to a recent opinion poll, has the support of three-quarters of Germans, is providing a welcome focus for those troubled by the rapid rise of the far right and the Merkel government’s attempts to distance itself from the Willkommenskultur that marked the public response to refugees and asylum seekers in 2015.

The supporters of search-and-rescue operations are not only incensed by the far right. On 12 July the respectable liberal weekly Die Zeit published two articles under the heading “Oder soll man es lassen?” (Or should one refrain from doing it?). The subheading explained that the paper wanted to discuss whether it is “legitimate” for private organisations to rescue refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean. One of two articles published under the headline was highly critical of NGOs such as Mission Lifeline and Sea Watch. But the author’s arguments were not perceived to be the problem; rather, it was the weekly’s question about whether it was legitimate to save lives.

Die Zeit’s unreserved front-page apology a week later, and the loud and unanimous condemnation of an inappropriate question by all other liberal media outlets — from the news magazine Der Spiegel to the Munich-based national daily Süddeutsche Zeitung — obscured two phenomena. First, many Europeans, including many Germans, do think and say what the unfortunate headline suggested as one possible option, namely that irregular migrants trying to reach Europe by boat should be left to drown, if only to deter others from attempting the same journey.

Second, although the issue is incredibly simple it should not be oversimplified. The SOS Méditerranée representative at the panel discussion hosted by the Böll Foundation put it well. For her, she said, it doesn’t matter why somebody decides to embark on the journey to Europe; once they have done so, and risk drowning, she has the moral obligation to rescue them if she can. What also makes the issue simple is the fact that the main claims put forward by critics of rescue missions — namely that there is a causal link between the number of people who leave Libya and the number of NGOs operating off the Libyan coast, and that the NGOs are effectively providing a “taxi service” for the smugglers — are false. The available evidence — detailed in a contribution to Oxford University’s Border Criminologies blog published last year, for example — strongly suggests that NGOs’ search-and-rescue missions do not constitute a pull factor. There is also no evidence for collusion between smugglers and rescuers.

But the matter is nevertheless complex, because there is no evident causal link between the likelihood of rescue at sea and the number of casualties. Migrants continued to drown in large numbers during Operation Mare Nostrum. Fewer migrants have drowned in the first three weeks of July than in the first three weeks of June, when three ships run by NGOs were still patrolling the waters off the Libyan coast.

To be fair, the NGOs operating in the Mediterranean did not set out simply to rescue as many people as they could; for most of them, these operations were only part of a larger agenda. They wanted to shame the European Union into establishing a well-funded search-and-rescue agency. They failed. But that still leaves the question of whether it ought to be the responsibility of the European Union and its individual member states to ensure that nobody drowns in the Mediterranean.

The NGOs also wanted to spotlight the human tragedy unfolding in the Mediterranean. They largely failed in that, as well. “We rescued 27,000 people, and nobody paid attention,” a woman from SOS Méditerranée observed during one of the panel discussions. Given the current level of attention, at least in Germany and Spain, it will be interesting to see how closely Europeans follow the journey of SOS Méditerranée’s Aquarius when it embarks on a new rescue mission in coming weeks.

Spotlights, and an audience that pays attention to what they illuminate, are much needed. But the focus on what is happening in the Mediterranean sometimes suggests that the main issue is the lack of a safe passage from the African coast to Europe. Much less attention is paid to what is happening, out of sight, in Libya and Algeria.

While Salvini’s policies are undoubtedly informed by racism, or at least the attempt to appeal to racist elements in the Italian electorate, he has a point. For many years, Italy was left in the lurch. With the notable exception of the current Spanish prime minister, the European politicians who recently complained about Salvini’s heartlessness have been reluctant to accommodate irregular migrants rescued in the Mediterranean and to establish whether they are owed protection. Both the idea that Italy is the main culprit, and the suggestion that irregular migration to Europe could be stopped if only migrants could be prevented from departing Libya are naive.

Libya is only one part of a larger picture. Smugglers vary the products they offer if conditions change. As the chance to be rescued close to the Libyan coast and not to be returned to Libya decreases, the boats chosen by smugglers are likely to be better able to cover longer distances. The Italian government’s announcement that it would not let migrants rescued in the central Mediterranean land has led to an increase in departures from Morocco and arrivals in Spain. For June 2018, the Missing Migrants project counted 6926 migrant arrivals in the western Mediterranean (three times as many as last year), compared with 10,297 in the central Mediterranean (two-fifths of last year’s figure).

Finally, it’s important to remember that the commitment to rescuing a fellow human being who is drowning is only one relevant moral response. Another has to do with the underlying reasons why people feel compelled to leave their homes and risk their lives in an attempt to reach Europe. An exhibition showing currently at the German Historical Museum in Berlin highlights the importance of the sea for Europe, from the Greek colonisation some 2800 years ago to today. The comparatively small part of the exhibition that deals with today’s migration across the Mediterranean has the appearance of a belated addition. This is regrettable, because a history museum would have been the right place to explain today’s irregular migration in the context of a longer history that includes, for example, slavery, the exploitation of natural resources, unfair terms of trade, the sale of arms and the support of murderous regimes. Such a history could prompt discussions about moral obligations that exist well before a person is about to drown. ●

The post Waving, but also drowning appeared first on Inside Story.

According to his mother, Sentina, a retired nurse, Mr Bristol had spent a year trying to prove he was not an illegal immigrant. A lawyer’s letter with good news about his case arrived too late. After his funeral on 18 May, his mother said that she believed Theresa May should resign: “She’s ruling the whole country and to behave so negatively towards black people, foreigners, I think it’s very, very disgusting and disgraceful.”

Dexter Bristol was one of the hundreds of black people of Caribbean origin — all of them resident in Britain for decades — whose lives have been turned upside down by bureaucratic officiousness rooted in government policy and laced with malice. Some have been deprived of their right to remain, others prevented from re-entering Britain after family trips to the region, and more of them harassed into an exhausting limbo.

Since the overriding motive of the policy was to cut immigration numbers rather than achieve justice for individuals and families, shaming publicity and political costs were always a risk. The cost came on 29 April, with the departure of home secretary Amber Rudd, which also exposed her predecessor in that job, Theresa May, to harsh criticism — while also, it soon became clear, confirming the prime minister’s knack for absorbing humiliation without falling over.

Both had already offered apologies for the hardship imposed on these members of the so-called “Windrush generation,” a reference to the Empire Windrush, a converted troopship that brought a big contingent of West Indians to London in June 1948 and became a metonym for the entirety of the postwar arrivals. The government also promised citizenship status and financial compensation, which in some cases were hurriedly given. But no scandal of this magnitude is amenable to a neat fix. Not just because of its size, but also because it touches the neuralgic point of Britain’s current psyche where borders, race, history, nationhood and now Brexit meet.

Among these generic drivers, Brexit, or more exactly the United Kingdom’s late-period membership of the European Union, has a specific role. If the country’s departure from the European Union long seemed scarcely plausible, even less conceivable was a future in which black British people would be treated with such systematic callousness. Flawed planning and tunnel thinking in one case, a surplus of cynicism and lack of political courage in the other, were foremost in making them possible. But the two outcomes are also connected: first by a long chain of indirect responsibility and then, since 2004, by the interaction of two shaping themes of England’s post-1945 history — immigration and Europe.

“We felt less than we are”

Before tracing this connection, it is worth noting what is at stake for a few of the people whose rights have been challenged or denied. Exact numbers are still wanting, though new home secretary Sajid Javid told a House of Commons committee on 16 May that an examination of 8000 records yields the estimate that sixty-three people who entered Britain before 1973 (a significant date, as will be seen) could have been wrongfully deported: “It’s not a final number, it could change, because the work on those records in ongoing.”

What those affected have undergone is in each case unique. But the common features indicate the coercive mentality at work in the home office. Stories like Dexter Bristol’s, each linked to the ten independent Caribbean states whose history and Britain’s were interwoven by colonial power and race slavery, give only a glimpse of the stresses that dealing with this overloaded department can entail: in documents demanded, communication delayed, steep financial costs charged for everything at every step, and mental burdens imposed. Here are three more of the reported cases.

Jessica Eugene came from Dominica to east London in 1970 aged ten, was given indefinite right to remain, and has never since left Britain. She supported four children by taking many jobs, but in March was sacked from her receptionist job at a charity giving support to migrants, after being unable to prove her right to work. “This is a terrible situation but I have to deal with it,” she said.

Ruth Williams travelled from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 1959, and now has cancer. Her son Mozi Haynes, in his mid thirties, had two applications to stay in Britain rejected after the breakdown of his marriage to an EU national, which had given him a right of residence. He was about to leave to avoid the “shame” of deportation, meaning he could not look after his mother, when a last-minute reprieve arrived. “It was really a hostile, hostile situation where we felt less than we are,” said Ms Williams.

Paulette Wilson arrived from Jamaica in the late 1960s as a ten-year-old. Her working life includes serving in a House of Commons canteen. In 2015 she was told that she was in the country illegally. After two years seeking to prove her right to stay, then a week in the Yarl’s Wood removal centre, imminent deportation was averted thanks to support from her daughter, a charity and her member of parliament. “It’s just upsetting to think that an ordinary person like me could go through something like that,” she said. “What about all the other people who were sent away before my case became big?”

Javid told the committee that 4482 of the 11,500 calls to a home office helpline have been marked as potential cases. With 1482 appointments made, 526 people have received documents confirming their status. The Windrush imbroglio has a long way to run.

“A really hostile environment”

Such family traumas, gradually coalescing, had hidden in plain sight for months. Many were tracked in meticulous and humane reports by the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman, and though they were also mentioned elsewhere the broader issue was slow to gain real traction. When at last it burst into the open as a single many-sided story, the moment fortuitously aligned with three events in which the echoes of Britain’s modern experience of immigration, racism and post-empire would be inescapable.

The issue permeated the summit, or CHOGM, which brought heads of government from the body’s fifty-three members to London on 16–20 April. Its last day coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of a notorious speech by the Conservative shadow minister Enoch Powell, whose lurid foretelling of black immigrant supremacy — all the more malign for its strewing of classical allusions — unleashed rival firestorms of acclamation and protest in 1968.

Powell was instantly banished from the shadow cabinet of opposition leader Edward Heath, but his calculated incitement would for decades overshadow public debate on immigration and “race relations.” The defensive liberal consensus survived, but failed to regenerate in ways it might otherwise have.

Two days after CHOGM ended and the speech had been nervously debated, leaders — royal, religious, civic, police, political — packed into central London’s lovely St Martin-in-the-Fields church. This gathering marked the passing of twenty-five years since a grim incident that took a half-decade to acquire larger significance: the random murder at a bus-stop in southeast London of eighteen-year-old Stephen Lawrence, a black student, by a gang of white males. The naked racism of the stabbing was compounded by a delinquent police reaction whose slow exposure led to the pivotal Macpherson report and institutional reforms. Among other such killings and official negligence elsewhere, the senseless loss of an ambitious youngster who planned to be an architect grew to represent a society’s determination to change.

By this point, “Windrush” was on every front page, with more shocking details by the hour. Several Caribbean representatives at the CHOGM were notably more restrained in their criticism than the situation warranted. But May was directly in the frame over her crafting as home secretary of “a really hostile environment for illegal immigration.” In that job she was a draconian stopper, closer, spoiler and capper. In pursuit of targets, as Sussex University’s Erica Consterdine points out, the burden of proof of status shifted to harassed individuals and civic institutions.

In effect, the Caribbean victims of May’s and Rudd’s strategy had been made illegal, using methods alarmingly evocative of the kind of dark instincts that were around in 1968 or 1992. As their stories of persecution filled the media, the long-planned events intended to mark Britain’s social progress — intended at the CHOGM to connote Brexit’s dream of “global Britain” — fell between flat and surreal. Jonathan Prosser observed a piratical impulse: “That this situation was ever allowed to emerge points to a lack of respect for those who have worked hard their whole lives to make a meaningful contribution, and perpetuates a view of an uncaring, dastardly persona, cut-throat in its logic, and swaggering with a superiority complex.”

It took another week for Rudd to go, and even then on a technicality: her erroneous statement to a parliamentary committee that her department did not operate precise targets for illegal immigrants’ removal from the country. Her replacement, Sajid Javid, whose upbringing in a Pakistani immigrant family was the foundation of a successful career in finance, is a free-marketeer whose convictions were tested in his previous jobs at energy and housing. His powerful early remarks on the scandal — it could be my mum, dad, uncle or me forced out of Britain, he said in an interview published on the day of Rudd’s resignation — reinforced the symbolism of his appointment with a definite signal that the tawdry language surrounding immigration policy, and in time the policy itself, will change.

The Windrush convulsion will also need time to work itself out, however. The reckoning will inevitably call into renewed question not just the pitiless recent milieu, but also the longer history of postwar immigration, its successive legal regimes, and the place within it of Caribbean, and wider Commonwealth, incomers. All of these overlapping elements have helped create the current situation.

FROM CONTINGENCY TO HISTORY

A saga that ended in cruelty began in contingency. Labour’s government of 1945–51, facing major tasks of reconstruction amid a domestic labour shortage, is often said to have regarded loyal West Indians as suitable workers in transport, mines, and the incipient National Health Service. It’s a customary, indeed central, component of a now quasi-national arrival myth, that the passengers of the Empire Windrush were invitees, called to rebuild the mother country.

This post hoc rationalisation, as so often in this saga, underestimates the agency of the people at its centre. In fact, when the vessel left Jamaica with a thousand passengers, half of them self-supporting West Indians, their bold initiative alarmed London politicians. George Isaacs, minister of labour, speaking as the ship was mid ocean, said he didn’t know who sent those aboard: “The arrival of these substantial numbers of men under no organised arrangements is bound to result in difficulty and disappointment.”

Some parliamentarians expressed disquiet. But that it should be stopped was not an option. The “sons of Empire,” as London’s Evening Standard greeted them, were not in a legal sense immigrants. The United Kingdom’s borders were open to what the British Nationality Act of 1948 would define anew as “citizens of the UK and colonies” or “Commonwealth citizens.” The act, passed just a month after the Empire Windrush’s arrival, made no distinction between the terms. Anyone who qualified was eligible to enter, live, work and bring family into the United Kingdom.

By the time they sailed into Tilbury docks on 21 June 1948, and the next day entered a grey London of gaping bombsites, a war-tested control system — mandatory identity cards, all-round rationing — had recovered its mettle. The newcomers were sorted and shunted, basic provision arranged. Local councillors and church people helped. Those lacking contacts were placed in a cavernous, deep shelter in the south London district of Clapham. From there the nearest labour exchange was Brixton, also the natural place to haul suitcases and look for rooms. The seeds of an unimagined transition, from raffish late Victorian suburb to the informal capital of black Britain, were planted.

This wasn’t a story from nowhere, though it could feel that way on both sides. Many of the West Indians had served in wartime Britain and then gone home — indeed 500 of the recently demobbed had been on the Empire Windrush on its outward trip from London.

Black people, including those of more direct African descent, had long lived in or passed through British cities, not least the ports of Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow and Liverpool that the Atlantic slave trade had made prosperous. But in affective terms, if not those of history, those factors now counted for little. In the absence of explicit leadership or sense of commonality among the hosts, the latest encounter kept its distance.

The political kerfuffle around the Empire Windrush, and cheery newsreel footage of its disembarkation on 22 June, gave the event a flash of publicity. Only much later would these bestow totemic status. There were low-key events and a memorial booklet on the fortieth anniversary, though only in 1998 — just after Tony Blair’s New Labour was elected — did things accelerate. A multi-voiced book published that year, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, accompanied by a BBC2 series, was a landmark. This rich panorama, edited by the writer Mike Phillips and his broadcaster brother Trevor Phillips, fixed the era, central to their own family’s experience, as formative of a “mosaic” of Britain’s modern history.

In June, an array of official and independent events is scheduled to mark the seventieth anniversary, all now given extra piquancy by the state’s treatment of the Windrush generation’s children. If all Britain’s history wars — see also Brexit, statues, the Great War, India and empire as a whole — pack a topical punch, this is among the lowest.

THE AMBIGUITIES OF ARRIVAL

For many years, as flows from the Caribbean became commonplace, the arrival of Empire Windrush was recalled as seldom as the names of the ships that came in its wake: Orbita, Reina del Pacifico, Georgic. The local economy’s ebb and flow, transmitted in letters home from those already settled, influenced both numbers and destinations. There were 330,000 West Indians in Britain by 1962, a tenfold increase since 1948. Fellow islanders gravitated to particular London districts (Jamaicans in Brixton/Clapham, Trinidadians in Notting Hill, Dominicans in Paddington), a tendency replicated as people began to find work outside the capital. At the same time, emigration itself fertilised a sense of Caribbeanness, to which the BBC’s influential program Caribbean Voices gave literary shape.

The ambiguities of arrival cast their influence down the years. West Indians, around three-quarters of them men, adjusted to a cold country with determination and stoicism. To most in the majority society, they were at best an afterthought. The hosts’ repertoire could include practised indifference and casual hostility, although English decency and punctiliousness were also part of a rendezvous more complex than is usually allowed. Into the early 1950s, a sense of the provisional hovered over their presence. But halfway through what was to prove a long Conservative restoration (1951–64), a loosening air brought the recent arrivals under more exacting scrutiny.

Postwar austerity and control had given way to a post-rationing consumer economy with restless new freedoms. The Suez disaster of 1956 had crystallised doubts about Britain’s global status and highlighted the lure of “third world” nationalisms. By then, continuing the great dominion exodus of almost two centuries, almost two million of its citizens had emigrated since 1945. Seeds of cultural and political discontent blew in the wind. Several of Britain’s stay-at-home tribes, looking to make sense of the unsettlement, found it variously reflected in their image of the growing population of West Indians.

Anxious liberals roamed east London collecting evidence of “the coloured problem” and wrote up their findings in earnest pamphlets and books. Newspapers depicted a shady world of loose morals. Trade unions cast a suspicious eye on putative job-takers or wage-undercutters. Left-wing radicals alighted on comrades in social progress, literary ones discovered partners in cultural renewal. Most sinisterly, far-right activists viewed West Indians through a degraded ideological lens as racial inferiors, sexual threats, and corrupters of white purity.

The activists’ dream was that such prejudices, latent in many citizens, could be activated in violent assault and ultimately help to (in a viral slogan of the period and later) “keep Britain white.” It was burnished by ugly interracial clashes in the East Midlands industrial city of Nottingham in August 1958, sparked by sexual jealousies, the first such major manifestation of the decade. These were eclipsed a week later by a series of assaults on Caribbean men in west London’s Notting Hill, which made the area a focus for Britain’s prewar fascist leader Oswald Mosley and his acolytes. In May 1959 an Antiguan carpenter, Kelso Cochrane, was stabbed to death there by a gang of white men, an unsolved crime regarded as Britain’s first racial murder — at least since 1919, when riotous attacks involving multinational groups of black and white workers led to five deaths in seven dockland areas.

Beyond a policing response, official thinking increasingly turned to legal restriction of immigration levels as a policy tool. That created an incentive for Caribbeans to move before the shutters came down. A spurt brought 49,650 in 1960 and 66,300 in 1961, big increases on 27,550 in 1955. This was reversed by the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962, which regulated entry of those Commonwealth citizens born or resident outside the United Kingdom who didn’t have a British passport. A requirement for employment vouchers was among the new measures. In subsequent years, annual entry of West Indians fell towards and then below 10,000, many of them children of family members already domiciled in Britain — many, half a century on, to be caught in a bureaucratic net. The downward turn continued as the islands gained independence: Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago in 1962, Barbados and Guyana in 1966, eight others in the 1970s–80s.

Britain’s stop–go economy, pained imperial retreat, and cautious turn towards Europe kept in play the instincts of the 1962 act. The shift was as much psychological as geopolitical. It is in the nature of empires to be multicultural; in retreat, borders metamorphose from freedom’s symbol into barriers. Narrowing horizons were the consequence, and the logical remedy was proactive efforts towards the civic integration and substantive equality of those already inside the gates. In the absence of such efforts, the near inevitable result would be to perpetuate their marginalisation.

“WOULD IT BE RESPECTABLE?”

The 1962 act, applying to the whole Commonwealth with its 600 million people, left unaffected the reality that those with British passports could still enter the country if they wished or felt compelled to do so. Harold Wilson’s Labour government, elected in late 1964, considerably tightened its regulations in such areas as employment vouchers, health checks, and powers to repatriate. It also passed two Race Relations Acts, in 1965 and 1968, prohibiting discrimination in public life. But the new model of internal reform plus more restrictive borders was little prepared for the crises in newly independent Kenya and Uganda in 1967 and 1971, when large Indian-origin minorities faced persecution. A third round of legislation followed.

Wilson’s cabinet rushed a bill into law in early 1968 that controlled the entry of Commonwealth citizens without close family ties to Britain, facilitating the exclusion of 200,000 Kenyan Asians who had chosen to stay British when colonial rule ended. (“Would it be respectable to take the whole thing through in one day,” Richard Crossman, leader of the House of Commons, wondered in his diary, “in a matter which would be dismissed as unconstitutional in any country with a written constitution?”) Edward Heath’s Conservatives tightened the “right to abode” in the Immigration Act 1971, but amid vocal opposition it also set up a Uganda Resettlement Board that allowed 28,000 Ugandan Asians, almost half the total, to settle in the United Kingdom.

Margaret Thatcher’s British Nationality Act 1981 brought a fourth makeshift, slotting Britain’s far-flung citizens into three new categories. The 3.5 million people of Hong Kong belonging to one category, “British Dependent Territories,” became pawns in her negotiations with China, with the status fiercely resisted by Emily Lau and other principled democrats. The handover of the territory in 1997 without an offer of full citizenship was another desertion that symbolised, more than any other event, the end of empire.

When the fifth generation of nationality laws appeared in the early 2000s, it was significant that alongside the strategy of “managed migration,” asylum was the foremost theme. With it came a new lexicon, as spats over asylum seekers, border controls, work permits, induction centres, residence tests, exporting borders, and above all numbers spanned the Tony Blair decade, toppling ministers along the way.

The sixth generation turned further inward. A provision of the 1971 act had granted indefinite leave to remain to Commonwealth citizens who arrived before 1973. In principle, that would cover the children of the Windrush generation today. In practice, the UK state’s long arm was well able to reach across decades and take away what it had given. Such was the import of Theresa May’s immigration acts of 2014 and 2016, which imposed strict requirements to prove residency rights and obliged employers, educators and care services to check the immigration status of people in their charge. These measures, applied with punitive fervour to people such as Dexter Bristol and Paulette Wilson, could make compliance impossible. They became a means to exclude people of West Indian roots who had lived in Britain for more or less continuous periods from the late 1950s onwards.

Here, that long chain of indirect responsibility breaks the surface. Wilson’s and Heath’s contrasting choices had testified to two of its links: the power of the executive in the British political system, and the contradictions of national citizenship in a state becoming notionally post-imperial. These factors are also highly relevant in the Brexit debate, where arguments about parliamentary versus popular sovereignty interact with those over the now uncertain future status of EU citizens in the United Kingdom.

In fact, one way to understand the Windrush disgrace is to see it as a much-delayed contact between two parallel histories, each at times tortuous and circuitous, that Britain lived through in the post-1945 decades: a retreat from empire and an approach to Europe. Or, to put it another way, from one warped promise of global citizenship to what turned out to be a successor.

REPLENISHING THE ENGLISH EARTH

During these decades, with one exception, “immigration” had come to connote non-Europeans. At first they came from the empire-becoming-Commonwealth, and their citizenship status was little remarked. South Asians, from doctors to sailors, had long settled in Britain; after India’s independence, Sikhs, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans from particular localities came to work in England’s textile towns, factories, transport nodes and restaurants, the next generation creating a kaleidoscopic “British Asian” reality. Chinese, Australians, apartheid-era South Africans and Africans from postcolonial Ghana and Nigeria also made their imprint. (By 2011, the number of black Africans had exceeded Caribbeans.) Chileans in 1973, and Vietnamese rescued at sea from 1978, many of Chinese ethnicity, were a precursor of flights from war or repression by Colombians, Somalis, Iranians, Iraqis, Kurds, Algerians, Libyans and more.

Europeans in Britain after 1945 were at one remove from the vaunted imperial family. Many had been refugees from Nazism or war veterans who could not or did not want to return to ravaged, and soon Stalinoid, homelands. Many of the sixty-five Polish women and children (and one man) who joined the Empire Windrush on its Mexico stopover — at best a footnote in its myth — had endured Stalin’s Siberian gulag. Later strife brought a younger generation (Hungary’s 1956, Czechoslovakia’s 1968, Poland’s 1981) and, in the case of Bosnia and Kosovo’s 1990s, new contingents. Britain also shared some of the northern European states’ experience as a receiver of emigrants from the continent’s south driven more by opportunity than politics: Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Italians, Portuguese, Maltese. But if these currents produced a few studies and memoirs, they were always a minor key in Britain’s immigration discourse as a whole.

The exception was the Irish, whose longstanding and pervading presence, routinely shadowed by doltish native prejudice, earned them a rare insider–outsider status. In the early 1960s, a million Irish-born people lived in Britain. The neighbourly relationship across the Irish Sea, occasionally jolted during Northern Ireland’s conflict, was softened by the common travel area, established in 1922, which guarantees mutual rights in all areas, including to vote. The Irish thus uniquely straddle Britain’s “immigration” and “Europe” stories. It’s appropriate then that the most outstanding recent book on immigration to Britain is the Irish historian Clair Wills’s Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, published in 2017. Equally fitting is that no state is more perturbed by the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, nor more active in trying to minimise its effect on the island’s north–south border, than the Irish Republic.

In the process, substantial tension has developed between Dublin and London. The Brexit vote, and the government’s subsequent incoherence, bears the major responsibility. But the characteristic Brussels pose of adamantine legalism and imperious disdain has helped undermine the bilateral relationship. On its own account, Ireland’s long-awaited switch of leadership from the emollient Enda Kenny to Leo Varadkar in June 2017 also shifted Dublin’s stance towards the British government and pan-Ireland affairs. Brussels had been a useful backstop in the 1998 agreement that sealed the northern conflict. Its conduct in the Brexit negotiations has exacerbated the Ireland–United Kingdom fallout, just as its obduracy on freedom of movement was a boon to the Brexiteers.

When Edward Heath fulfilled a lifelong ambition by taking the United Kingdom into the then European Economic Community in 1973, the EEC’s founding commitment to “ever closer union” and its economic ambitions were yet to cohere. Over the next thirty-five years, a series of treaties conjoined them. From the early 1990s the rebranded European Union’s single market put fourfold mobility (of capital, labour, goods and services) at its heart, a process continued after 1989 with a series of enlargements. But as the European Union grew from fifteen to twenty-eight states by 2010, existing members sought to ease the transition by delaying free movement of workers from the accession countries.

The major expansion, in May 2004, would bring ten states, seven from the former Soviet bloc, into the European Union. Only Britain, Ireland and Sweden ignored the provision and opened their borders from the start. This was myopia rather than generosity on London’s part: it expected between 5000 and 13,000 prospective workers each year for a decade. In fact, the restrictions in other EU states thrust Poles and Slovaks, Balts and Hungarians towards Britain — otherwise, in most cases, not their primary choice — and Ireland, thus spurring the latter’s evolution into an immigration country.

In the first year, 2004–05, over 50,000 nationals from other EU states arrived in Britain, and the annual total soon rose to more than 100,000. For the year to the Brexit vote, it was 189,000. By 2016, 3.5 million people born elsewhere in the European Union were living in Britain (almost a million of them Polish); as a proportion of all arrivals, they had risen from 13 per cent in 2003 to 43 per cent. Again, for the first time in England since 1945, the “Europe” story was becoming hitched to the “immigration” one.

ENGLAND VS EUROLAND

European settlement, like West Indian and Asian (and others) before it, was changing the face of Britain in ways both tangible and still to unfold. In many ways, this latest big flow of people enhanced ordinary human happiness. Over a dozen years from 2004, the new arrivals fanned out to every corner, where they domiciled, set up businesses, made friends, married, had kids, went back and forth, kept their heads above water, got promoted, became hyphenated.

Britain, and mainly England, had turned into a multifarious society rather as it had “conquered and peopled half the world,” namely “in a fit of absence of mind.” So far, the sequel seemed to be working pretty well, although in February 2006 the Labour MP John Denham wrote a memo alerting Tony Blair and colleagues to a squeezing of public services and wages following the arrival of 14,000 east-central European migrants in Southampton, the south-coast English city he represented.

Most studies charted the EU arrivals’ overall impact on public finances as narrowly positive, ahead of the fiscal contribution of non-EU migrants, and of benefit to economic activity as a whole. Regional or temporal pressures were placed on facilities and livelihoods, and assessments of the effect on quality of life could also be mixed. But the context was becoming as important as the content, for amid plenty of serious debate each fresh report was being launched into an increasingly polarised and distrustful world.

This febrile climate, newly amplified by social media, fed on multiple discontents: the financial morass of 2007–09 and the shrivelling of incomes, careers, horizons and savings that ensued, institutional abuses large and trivial, political ennui. Separately, immigration and Europe had often figured as areas of public concern. Now, as the “Polish plumber” stereotype succeeded the (often Muslim) “bogus asylum seeker” of the early 2000s, social frustrations found a political outlet in rising support for the retro-nativist United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, and even the far-right British National Party, or BNP.

UKIP, whose founding purpose was to get Britain out of Europe, took almost a million votes in the 2010 general election that brought a Conservative-led coalition to power, and 3.8 million in 2015. It finished third, second and first in Britain’s elections to the European parliament between 2004 and 2014, gaining 3.5 million votes in the last. In the first two, the BNP scooped nearly a million votes. While only a minority of these voters were hardcore, backing for reduced immigration was widespread. The new prime minister, David Cameron, a Conservative moderniser, had called UKIP a party of “fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists, mostly,” but also sought to outflank it with a dual strategy: a new deal with the European Union, extracting favours over economics and sovereignty as well as immigration, then a referendum on membership to clinch the renegotiated partnership.

Cameron wanted to cut net immigration — which reached 332,000 in 2015 — to “tens of thousands.” The dynamics of migration as they operated on Britain’s open, rule-bound economy made that impossible, though the right mix of policies might alter trends over a whole electoral cycle and more. Any efforts would in any case also have to focus on movement from outside the European Union, where London had putative control but was in effect also constrained by those same dynamics.

Britain’s routinely abrasive tone towards the European Union, and the latter’s exasperation at London’s unclubbability, would always be likely to complicate any new deal. The timing was also off. “EU27”–United Kingdom talks, and the equally important bilateral ones, came on track in 2015–16, at the very moment when combined emergencies were pushing a million-plus refugees and migrants from Syria, the Middle East and north Africa towards Europe. In chaotic circumstances, a divided European Union informally suspended its key regulations governing immigration and cross-border travel. But where Cameron’s weak hand was concerned, Angela Merkel and other European leaders made the principle of intra-EU movement a red line. Several other factors would intervene to shorten the odds on a referendum upset. But with only meagre, face-saving concessions to take to British voters in June 2016, Cameron’s Brexit gamble was lost.

When she took office in its aftermath, Theresa May, who had overseen immigration and related policy in Cameron’s government, reaffirmed the “tens of thousands” aim. Almost two years on, the net immigration rate is trending downwards (244,000 in the year to September 2017), with non-EU now forming the larger component. A slowing economy, migrants’ return or relocation, corporate departures, and a fall in student numbers are doing the job, leading to recruitment difficulties in food, health, manufacturing, finance and other sectors: all not quite what the doctor ordered. To add to the post-Brexit twists, attitudes towards immigration as tracked by opinion polls are softening.

Windrush rematerialised against this background, this time as dystopia. When the 1948 original began to be remembered at all, its Ealing-esque, Passport to Tilbury touches added a dose of whimsy. Today, the only comfort in the government’s readiness to punish Britons of Caribbean origin for its own failures over immigration — and for its impotence over Europe — lies in the shocked public reaction.

A TRAPPED TRANSITION

In most circumstances, the home office’s covert squeeze on a particular group of citizens would have guaranteed the prime minister’s resignation alongside Amber Rudd’s. The fact that Theresa May survives, as she did in June 2017 when an electoral upset was followed by the Grenfell housing-block fire, can be taken as more evidence that the acknowledged rules of politics are in abeyance.

Immediate responsibility for that situation belongs to the Brexit-induced political stasis, which consumes most of the available energy and attention while leaving the rest to the Conservatives’ cold calculation. A change of party leader is risky and would not guarantee a better deal with the European Union, they believe; cabinet divisions over the issue make any contest fraught; the party and May herself are still competitive in the polls; her bland perseverance still earns her reluctant backing; the next election could be four years away. For the moment, then — perhaps until the Tories ignite over Brexit — inertia rules.

A by-product of this lack of momentum is that the Windrush affair now becomes a matter of catch up and patch up by the same home office, a politically sensitive department with a severe trust deficit. Despite the outrage raising a host of issues — immigration policy, staff and data management, public ethics, race and class prejudice, institutional memory, the state–citizen relationship — it meets a lack of capacity for strategic thinking in government and of the tools to address underlying causes. Instead of essential future-proofing, the cost of the shortfall is measured in endless reparation by a state increasingly cornered by past negligence.

While government stagnates, and the Labour opposition festers, many — like the country itself — live in a political limbo. If that is nothing compared to the plight of members of the Windrush generation whose very existences have been put on hold, it is also part of the current impasse. For some residents of limboland, this confirms a hard truth: the people are better than their rulers, but these rulers are still more tolerable than the only current alternative.

After all, politicians and officials are not the only actors. The people are also calculating the odds. Just as they did at the Brexit referendum, itself the outcome of the interplay of immigration and Europe in post-2004 England, they are again trying to wrest the least worst from an impossible situation. But in suspending their larger judgement in face of the Brexit process and the condition of the Labour Party, they also allow Windrush, Grenfell and other injustices to be contained.

In this new stage of trapped transition, the long chain of indirect responsibility from 1945 to 2016 and beyond now touches everyone. Its main themes at both ends — immigration and empire, Europe and Brexit — have come together. The stakes are raised all round.

However the Windrush/Grenfell accounting and Brexit ends, Britain will remain a country whose social compact and global links are intertwined. In the coming period, the people’s own trade-offs over Brexit and domestic politics are bound to shift and their choices open. At that point, the true character of these uncompromising times will begin to be revealed. ●

The post How citizens became aliens appeared first on Inside Story.

This is an extremely ambitious book. Part 1, which comprises its first quarter, sets out Maçães’s political treatise, while Part 2 — the remainder of the book — aims to examine how these political ideas look in practice, through what he calls “a geopolitical travelogue across Eurasia.” Over the course of a year, he travelled from west to east, exploring the Caucasus, Central Asia, China, Russia and Turkey, and these chapters are the result.

An initial moment of confusion comes with the title. In much of the literature on the region, “Eurasia” refers to the countries of Central Asia. So you could be forgiven for picking up this book, as I did, thinking it would deal with the political development of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Maçães’s Eurasia is the entire Europe–Asia supercontinent, stretching from the European Union right through to China. His fundamental point is that it is no longer possible to look at Asia and Europe as two distinct continents, and that components of the central landmass are growing closer together politically and culturally as a result of the narrowing gap between the “traditional” (Asia) and the “modern” (Europe).

Maçães begins by tracing the origins of the political divide between Europe and Asia, which he dates to roughly 1453 and the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. He treats Europe as an idea rather than a place, gradually expanding, like Christendom, across the globe. This very Eurocentric view, however valid, ignores the very different histories of the colonised. At the crux of Maçães’s argument is the idea that Europe and Asia evolved not so much as distinctive places but as distinctive conceptions of civilisation — a fundamental divide that is in the process of being broken down by “the fast embrace of modernity outside Europe.” This idea has some force, but the two concepts — of Europe and Asia as civilisations and as places — are often in conflict, and Maçães never fully resolves the tension.

Although Part 1 is comparatively short, it is extremely dense and theoretical. In Part 2, however, Maçães seeks to test his theory by observing Eurasia’s people, places and politics. In doing so, he reveals himself to be a gifted storyteller and saves the book from being just another dry treatise. His descriptions of the people and places he encounters, along with an ability to tie these micro-level nuances to greater political realities, make these sections a joy to read. It is also refreshing to see an analyst take his ideas out of the realm of political theory and into the world, which probably reflects Maçães’s background as a politician.

Yet, while he is clearly a talented writer, his style is wildly inconsistent. At its best, his writing has echoes of writers like Christopher Kremmer and Ahmed Rashid, who have produced complex, eminently readable books on Central Asia. In between, however, he reverts to a dry, bureaucratic style that is hard going for the reader. The book’s central chapters are devoted to examinations of the Caucasus, China, Russia, Turkey and the European Union, and each chapter oscillates between engaging on-the-ground stories and much less lively explanations of what he is witnessing. Only late in the book, in the section on Turkey, does Maçães achieve some balance in style. If this approach were applied more consistently throughout the book, it would be far more accessible.

For me, though, the deeper problem is that Maçães’s definition of Eurasia is both too broad and too narrow: too broad in the sense that it tries to fit all of Europe and a large chunk of Asia into a single political theory, too narrow because it excludes everything else. Maritime Asia, for example, including South Korea and Japan, barely rates a mention, except in the context of Chinese sea power in the Indian Ocean. This could possibly be justified by arguing that the book’s scope is continental, but this fails to explain the omission of the subcontinent, and especially India and Pakistan. Maçães limits his study of Central Asia to the former Soviet republics, which consequently excludes Afghanistan and South Asia. Despite its considerable influence in Afghanistan and its growing interest in Central Asia, India is only discussed in a maritime context as part of broader Indian Ocean politics.

Any lines drawn in a study such as this will necessarily be arbitrary, of course, but it seems odd to be promoting a theory of continental interconnectedness while failing to properly take account of the fastest-growing continental Asian powers. Similarly, discussion of the Middle East — a region that, tellingly, is known outside the Anglosphere as West Asia — ends with Turkey and Iran and excludes the Arab world.

Maçães is a meticulous researcher and brings a unique perspective. It’s true that The Dawn of Eurasia is marketed by the publisher as “serious non-fiction” rather than an academic text, but the book seems to be trying too hard to be all things to all people. Consequently, it is probably not academically focused enough for those with a deep interest in the region. Apart from passing references to Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” and Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations,” and a brief nod to the British geographer Halford Mackinder, Maçães doesn’t really engage with the academic literature on the region. He also makes a number of broad assumptions, such as this passing commentary on the role of India, that he then fails to interrogate:

Given their size and proximity, China and India are bound to develop the world’s largest trading relationship, and this will have to be based on gigantic infrastructure plans along the Indian Ocean coastline. Likewise, if the next few decades witness a naval conflict between China and the United States, that conflict will more likely be centred in the Indian Ocean than the Pacific, thanks to its greater strategic importance, and in that case India and the Indian navy will be a decisive factor.

Conversely, the book has a touch too much theory for those looking for an engaging discussion of life on the ground in Eurasia, or those who don’t have the time or inclination to wade through the denser parts. The fact that it is laid out like an academic book — starting with a seventy-page articulation of a theoretical argument before getting into the more interesting, practical aspects of the issue — is likely to turn off many in this group. The audience the book would therefore probably appeal to most is Maçães’s peers — politicians, diplomats, think-tank analysts, and those in government who make and apply foreign policy.

For this group, Maçães advances a number of interesting ideas, and his final chapter on the European Union, which is clearly his area of expertise, is certainly instructive. In particular, he notes the overall lack of understanding of Asia — and specifically China — in Europe, and vice versa. “In general,” he writes, “knowledge of European politics in China and Chinese politics in Europe is very poor, and the respective political cultures stand further apart than those of China and the United States.” This will come as no surprise to Asia specialists from Australia or the United States who have worked in Europe, but it could do with greater emphasis given that the focus of the book is on the growing integration of Europe and Asia.

Maçães also downplays the importance of the recent political changes in the United States, though in his epilogue he makes a disquieting observation about US foreign policy under President Trump: “If… American foreign policy comes to embrace a strong concept of national sovereignty, unbound by international rules and institutions, a measure of ideological convergence with Russia and China will have developed.” While an exploration of this idea is outside the scope of this book, it would certainly be interesting to see it developed further.

As a cover-to-cover read, The Dawn of Eurasia’s inconsistencies of style and overly broad scope can be frustrating. But it is well worth dipping into for its astute on-the-ground observations. And as a book that seeks to improve European understanding of Asia (and vice versa), it is to be welcomed. ●

The post Europe heads east, Asia heads west appeared first on Inside Story.

Until last week, that is. With the large expulsions of Russian spies, for the first time in years, the Western alliance began to resemble something worthy of the name in its dealings with Russia. What brought that about? And for how long will the unity be maintained?

Russia’s aggression had peaked again in the run-up to the March presidential election. Putin, scarcely bothering to campaign, had delayed his annual address (poslanie) to both houses of parliament until 1 March to serve as a pre-election gambit. When it was eventually delivered, most of the speech was devoted to implausible calls for economic reform, rapid growth and a swift rise in living standards. But its closing section turned to more colourful military matters. In particular, Putin promised new, game-changing nuclear weapons capable of breaching America’s missile defence shield, a favourite bugbear of Russian propaganda.

Up to this point, the elite audience had seemed somewhat bored. After all, the promises of prosperity were aimed not at them but at the voting masses. But the military triumphalism and the slick video accompaniments — one depicting warheads raining down on the United States — evoked delighted animation.

It was an example of that longstanding staple of Kremlin propaganda, nuclear intimidation — a gauntlet flung down to the United States to engage in a new arms race or perhaps even capitulate to a new world order fashioned to Russia’s requirements. The West had been warned more than once, Putin declared, but it didn’t want to listen and believed it could contain Russia. “Listen to us now!” he concluded ominously, to thunderous applause.

From Moscow’s viewpoint, the response from Washington was disappointingly muted, even dismissive. Donald Trump, as is usual when he is faced by hostile Russian behaviour, said nothing. But officials and commentators pointed out that the Kremlin already had a huge nuclear arsenal quite capable of overwhelming US anti-ballistic missile installations. Others suggested that the new weapons were mostly works in progress, on show mainly for domestic consumption.

Even some independent Russian bloggers found the audience’s reaction distasteful. But the audience’s delight reflected a strong feeling in Putin’s listeners that now, at last, they were paying the West back for the intolerable humiliations it had inflicted on them in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Since its seizure of Crimea and violent subversion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, Russia’s “hybrid warfare” — intrusive overflights, snap exercises, military build-ups close to target borders, hostile propaganda, underhand meddling in democratic elections, and efforts to exploit faultlines within target countries, especially where there are sizeable Russian minorities or pro-Russian parties — has been directed against a growing number of European countries, and occasionally countries further afield, like the United States and Japan.

Russian aggression towards the United States has been constrained somewhat by the United States’ formidable strength, but also recently by the hope that President Trump would deliver on his oft-repeated calls for warm and cooperative relations. Putin’s decision to use videos depicting a shower of missiles landing in Trump’s second home state of Florida was a sharp divergence from his usual cautious handling of his “asset” in the White House. Perhaps he was keen not just to get out the vote domestically and frighten Western populations, but also to remind Trump that it was time to speak respectfully and constructively with Russia about all outstanding points of contention. If so, it seems to have been a timely message, because Trump soon seemed to be proposing precisely that.

Within a few days of his nuclear threats, though, Putin presented the West with another sinister message, when Sergei Skripal, a former senior official of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence organisation, and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned in the English city of Salisbury. Skripal had been recruited by British intelligence in the 1990s but was later unmasked and sentenced to a thirteen-year prison sentence in 2006. Pardoned by president Dimitri Medvedev in 2010, and then included in an East–West spy-swap arrangement (typically asymmetrical — four for ten, in Russia’s favour), he chose to retire in Britain.

While it took some time for the British authorities to establish exactly what the poison was, the symptoms and the circumstances pointed strongly towards another ostentatious assassination operation by Russia on sovereign British territory. The Litvinenko case from 2006 quickly came to almost everybody’s mind. One or two ministers might have jumped the gun slightly, but prime minister Theresa May was careful not to rush to judgement publicly. She made it clear from the outset, however, that if the government’s extreme concerns about the event were borne out, Britain would respond vigorously.

On 12 March, May announced that investigations had revealed a military-grade nerve agent of a type known colloquially as Novichok (“newcomer”), developed exclusively by the Soviet Union. Together with the evidence of past attacks conducted on British soil (fourteen cases, some of them distinctly suspicious, are under re-examination), it seemed “highly likely” that Russia was responsible. Either agents of the Russian state had been involved, she said, or the Russian authorities had lost control of their weapon stocks. Whichever was the case, Russia was and should be held responsible. She gave Russia a day to provide a full clarification of the circumstances, or action would follow.

From the outset, the Russian response had been angry and aggressive. The usual blizzard of flat denials, obfuscations and confected conspiracy theories was launched through Russia’s formidable propaganda apparatus. Western media began to give wide coverage to these alternative facts and theories, probably unaware of their origins. Contrarians, Putinists and instant experts — of which Australia has an imposing rollcall — stepped into the fray.

After the ultimatum, the official Russian tone became sharper. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova declared indignantly that no one gives Russia ultimatums. Did Britain not realise, after President Putin’s address, that this was courting a devastating military response? Instead of offering any useful information of their own, Russian officials demanded, as they routinely do in such cases, that Britain supply all its evidence to them, presumably so that Russia could scrutinise British state secrets and intelligence methods and prepare fresh waves of propaganda. This was manifestly not the response of an innocent party, unjustly accused.

On the same day that Theresa May delivered her demand for an explanation, another Russian political exile, Nikolai Glushkov, was found dead in his London home. It soon became apparent that he had been murdered. Glushkov, a former Aeroflot senior executive and political opponent of Putin, had been granted political asylum in Britain after repeated convictions in Russia. He had close links with the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, another London political exile, who died in suspicious circumstances in 2013. As became apparent from his post-mortem, the manner of Glushkov’s death — “compression to the neck” — bore a close similarity to Berezovsky’s, which was initially taken by police to be suicide, though the inquest recorded an open finding. Glushkov’s murder was entrusted — as the Skripal case had been — to Britain’s counterterrorism police.

With admirable restraint, the police have been maintaining that “there is nothing to suggest any link” with the Skripal case. But two assassination operations on Russian exiles within a week in England might seem to the rest of us to be further confirmation of many things we thought we already knew. Carrying out “wet jobs” abroad has been one of the great and more durable of Bolshevik/KGB traditions over the past century, and one to which Putin himself paid public tribute in his annual Q&A session in 2010, the year Skripal was allowed to depart to Britain. ‘Traitors will kick the bucket,” he said. “Trust me. Those people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.”

Various explanations for the Skripal case are on offer. Russian officials and propagandists have suggested variously that the Czech Republic, Sweden, the United States or Britain itself may be responsible. The idea that the United States or Britain itself may have sprinkled nerve agent around the streets of Salisbury to incriminate Russia may strike the Western mind as implausible, even self-discrediting, but this is the way Putin and his circle appear to think, for it is precisely the sort of thing they might do themselves. The provokatsia — staging a fake event to disadvantage adversaries or even provide a justification for attacking them in some way — is a standing operating procedure in the KGB Stalinist traditions in which many of them are steeped. Putin’s discreet but very effective promotion of that tradition and of Stalin’s persona is one of his most striking achievements.

To a considerable extent, Putin’s rise to power and popularity is built on Moscow’s brutal war in Chechnya, which involved huge civilian casualties, including of ethnic Russian residents. An important casus belli in that war were the so-called apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, which killed nearly 300 and injured more than 1000 people, creating a strong desire among Russians for vengeance against the presumed Chechen perpetrators. These events have been extensively probed by researchers, some of whom (including Aleksandr Litvinenko) have subsequently died unexpectedly. Their view has been that the bombings were a giant provokatsia conducted by Russia’s security agencies. The FSB, Russia’s principal security agency, was clearly involved in one such incident, but its role was explained away as a training exercise and further official enquiries halted.

Among the competing explanations, the overwhelmingly obvious one is that this is another act of revenge by, and a grim warning from, those agencies. Skripal’s daughter had been active on social media in Moscow, occasionally criticising Putin in fairly forceful language, so she was possibly targeted too. In fact, both of the other two members of Skripal’s family have died recently, a suspicious circumstance in itself. More generally, this gruesome attack is a clear warning to all the regime’s enemies that they are not safe anywhere, and particularly not in Britain, despite the fact that members of the Russian elite like to launder money, educate offspring and spend time there.

The second possibility in Theresa May’s ultimatum, that the Russians may have lost control of their weapon, or shared it in some way, opens up other possibilities for which Russia should not be absolved of responsibility. Until Moscow chooses to throw some genuine light on the subject, its reputation for murder and mendacious propaganda should incline us to settle for vengeance and intimidation as the most likely motives.

The question of why the attack occurred now is also of interest. Putin has argued, as have his apologists, that its proximity to the presidential vote was damaging to his chances of securing a good result, and that this is evidence enough that the regime wasn’t involved. Yet the claimed turnout figure and the vote for Putin were high regardless of the attack, and the characteristic falsification of results was enough to guard against any late turbulence.

In any case, the Skripal case was spun to remind Putin’s constituents that Russia is under siege from the West, and that Britain’s outrageous aggression should be forcefully rejected. A minority would not accept that message, but most consumers of state-controlled media appear willing. And, sadly, a majority of voters would probably also endorse the idea that traitors should be murdered wherever necessary. Russians seem again to be very malleable in their opinions. After two decades of Putinism, polling shows that the regime can quickly engineer hostile attitudes towards the United States, Ukraine or other targets.

The lead-up to the election precipitated much discussion about whether Putin would inevitably be a lame duck during his new presidential term, which the constitution prescribes must be his last. If he retains his present dominant position, it will be easy for him to manipulate the constitution in any way he chooses. But the stagnant economy and emerging clouds on the external horizon could conceivably impose a finite stamp on his tenure of office over the next few years, forcing him to eschew any constitutional games and gracefully withdraw when his term ends.

It’s hard to imagine that he would relish leaving office entirely of his own accord, or even feel that he could take the risk of doing so without finding a successor who would protect him, a role he himself once performed for Boris Yeltsin. He would be very conscious, for starters, that whoever takes over might at the very least trash his reputation (as he has done Yeltsin’s).

Putin’s nervous yet lethargic attitude to this latest presidential voting ritual seemed to suggest that he has no intention of going through such an undignified process again if he can help it. The Kremlin’s licensed buffoon-cum-presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who sometimes offers the inside story on Russia’s political future, and the head of Putin’s flagship propaganda outlet RT, Margarita Simonyan, have both hinted broadly that this will be the last such presidential contest.

Simonyan even referred obsequiously to Putin as “our vozhd” (roughly, “our great leader”), a term closely identified with the personality cult that surrounded Stalin. To the Anglo-Saxon ear, “Führer” has many of the same connotations of absolute power and terror as well as mawkish adoration. In the Stalinist postwar years in Warsaw, a Polish primary schoolgirl of my acquaintance was required to memorise in Russian and recite before a large audience a paean of praise entitled “Yunost’ Vozhdya” (The Youth of the Great Leader). The words were certainly not dedicated to the Polish satrap of the time, Boleslaw Bierut. Simonyan’s evocation of Stalinist nostalgia would have deeply dismayed many, but she seems to have been implying, above all, that Putin should not need to undergo any more elections.

It is widely speculated that next time round Putin will follow the example of his good friend and strategic partner Xi Jinping and become paramount leader, for life, at the head of a Chinese-style state council. The consequences of these two parallel power grabs are not in the long-term interests of either of these increasingly bellicose countries, much less those who have to share the planet with them.

These and other recent developments have fuelled much intriguing discussion of the prospects for politics and policy during Putin’s next term. Apart from official pronouncements, neither Russian nor Western commentators are optimistic, mainly foreseeing economic stagnation and increasing international tensions. “Increasing tensions” is the Anglo-Saxon euphemism for increased Russian aggression, particularly though not only in cyberspace.

Two interesting discussants have been Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, and Yevgenia Albats, the courageous and independent Moscow political scientist.

Wood sees Russia entering a phase of potential destabilisation. Putin’s era is approaching an end, economic stagnation is likely to continue, and a further decline in living standards is a realistic possibility. The military and the security services will continue to have privileged access to resources at the expense of health, education and infrastructure; rampant corruption will continue unchecked, to the anger of the population. Though repressive, the system is chaotic, and state institutions are in decay, which will make any future reform efforts the more difficult.

Putin himself, in Wood’s view, has little interest in serious economic reform. His regime’s central preoccupation is remaining in power, and from that point of view Putin rightly regards serious economic reforms as a risk. Most of the regional governmental structures are impoverished, yet they are being made to bear the burden of funding services for which the central government does not adequately recompense them; and Putin is restricting their autonomy and undermining the ethnic identities of some regions. Putin’s focus on Russia’s quest for great power status has propped up his popularity, but may not continue to do so.

Wood focuses on the evolution of domestic policies and politics, but makes pertinent points about Russia’s external policies. Some of Putin’s recent actions, notably the Skripal case, should serve as a warning to the West to be vigilant about “the real nature of the present Kremlin.” The West should bear in mind that its standing with any post-Putin political actors is likely to depend on the stance it has taken towards the regime’s domestic abuses of human rights.

Wood seems to hint at the possibility that Putin’s dysfunctional next six years could lead to some kind of discontinuity in Russia’s development, which just might offer a fresh start, a new Gorbachev–Yeltsin moment, but hopefully not one so blighted by low energy prices and mass economic disruption. This sketchy summary of some of its themes does not do justice to Wood’s observations, which contain much subtlety and good sense on a wide range of issues, with many apt encapsulations, forceful opinions and moments of mordant, undiplomatic humour.

In her excellent essay, Yevgenia Albats focuses on the way in which siloviki (“bureaucrats in epaulettes”), and especially the mindset of the FSB, have suffused the post-communist political system since early in Yeltsin’s time. Though the FSB’s predecessor organisations exerted a strong and baleful influence in Soviet times, they were subject to control by the Communist Party, and often suffered severe purging and massive executions. It is only now for the first time that the political police have escaped all control, as Albats puts it, and “have become power itself, its essence and its being.” And that pervasive influence has become much more pronounced since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012.

Former KGB personnel have heavily infiltrated most non-security elite organisations. Albats stresses that people never leave the KGB, they remain KGB operatives forever, and their families imbibe the same culture and enjoy the same preferential career paths, whether in the security services, or in banking, business or administration. This has left a deep imprint on the structures and policies of the regime that will not be easy to eradicate. She offers this eloquent characterisation of the political culture involved:

The conspiracy-orientated mindset, a search for internal and external enemies, secrecy as a way of running a public office, a disregard for human rights, a disbelief in people’s ability for self-governance and protest, revanchism — all these characterise the current Russian nomenklatura.

Albats tries valiantly, but less compellingly than in her diagnosis of the illness, to find reasons for seeing some prospect of Russia’s recovering from the deep KGB infection of its public life. She suggests hopefully that perhaps the conflicting business interests of siloviki will give rise to greater tensions among them, reducing the security services’ capacity to dominate society; or possibly, the younger generations of the KGB jeunesse dorée who are now moving into top jobs and receiving foreign educations and experience will bring a greater element of sophistication and humanity to bear on public life in Russia.

But the overall tone of most of the discussion of the Putinist future is pessimistic across the board. The next six years will indeed be hazardous for Putin, and while this might conceivably bring about a radical change for the better, it is perhaps more likely to lead to some new catastrophe. Putin is increasingly focused on his own security. The National Guard, with its 400,000 troops led by the former head of Putin’s personal security detail, is directly beholden to him, and he has shown in Chechnya, very probably in the apartment bombings, in the other North Caucasus regions, in Ukraine, in the numerous killings by “unknown assailants” of inconvenient dissidents, and most recently in Syria, that he is capable of massive crimes and brutal repression. He has an obsessive fear of “colour revolutions,” and he would see any discontent that appeared to threaten him as a Western-organised conspiracy and a grave threat not just to himself but also to the country.

In the last few years, the Western strategic community has come painfully and reluctantly to the beginnings of an understanding of just what a dedicated, skilful, unscrupulous and dangerous adversary they have in Putin. It’s possible that Western leaders will finally be so mobilised by events like the Skripal operation that they will conclude they must combine their forces and undertake strong and sustained counter-measures against Russia. After the unprecedented wave of sentiment and solidarity in support of that unexpected heroine Theresa May, such a moment may have come. But optimism on that score may be premature.

Despite the current surge of solidarity and apparent determination, the Western response so far has had some dismaying moments. After the voting ritual and the Skripal incident, EU Commission president Jean Claude Juncker tweeted to Putin: “Congratulations on your re-election. I have always argued that positive relations between the EU and Russia are crucial to the security of our continent… Our common objective should be to re-establish a cooperative pan-European security order.”

That objective is Russia’s objective, not that of the West, which is trying to preserve the current post-1990 security order rather than rewrite it. What Moscow wants is a new Yalta-like arrangement whereby Russia re-establishes its “sphere of privileged interests.” We have innumerable examples of how it has been pursuing that objective, with recruitment of potential allies in the enemy camp a vital element in the mix.

While the majority of EU–NATO members signed on to the UK-led response, doubtless with varying degrees of commitment and enthusiasm, nine did not. Even Germany, which has played a leading role in this effort, is clinging tenaciously to the Nord Stream 2 agreement with Russia, despite the opposition to it of the overwhelming majority of EU members and the evident damage it will inflict on Ukraine and other East European countries. German foreign minister Heiko Maas initially declared the Skripal episode to be an exclusively bilateral matter for Britain. He was evidently rolled on this issue, but that sentiment is widely shared in influential German circles. Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Austria, Hungary (despite its expulsion of one member of the Russian embassy staff) and others have often shown sympathy for Russian attitudes and behaviour; and much more could be said about the strength of support for Russia in many European countries.

The scene in the United States is even more worrying. President Trump began in similar style to Juncker, phoning Putin to congratulate him on his election victory, despite the urging of advisers. He also ignored their efforts to have him condemn the poisoning of Skripal, his main public reaction on that score being to call for the leakers of the advice to be found and punished.

But then, when push came to shove, as has often happened, the president’s words were belied by the actions of his administration. Washington came out with by far the largest contribution to the tally of expelled “diplomats,” in addition to closing down the Russian consulate in Seattle. This facility seems to have been a hotbed of military and technological espionage against important US naval installations and high-tech and cyber companies like Boeing and Microsoft.

Trump has recently appointed John Bolton, a fiery hawk on Russia as on everything else, to replace H.R. McMaster as his national security advisor. Compared to the firm but more measured McMaster, Bolton seems a mixed blessing. Even many of those who wish most fervently for a strong and sustained policy towards Russia will feel distinctly nervous about this choice. President Trump’s future trajectory on Russian matters remains cloudy. The one thing we can be sure of is his determination to sack anyone he can who he thinks wants to pursue the issue of the numerous contacts he and some of his close associates have had with Russia.

Russia’s aggression towards Britain continues, with further expulsions of British diplomats bringing the total to fifty identified intelligence operatives along with the closing of the British Council — all in response to Britain’s removal of twenty-three Russian intelligence operatives. As the British ambassador commented, it should be remembered that the British expulsions were a response to what looked very like an assassination attempt using an illegal chemical weapon on the sovereign territory of the United Kingdom that Russia has declined to explain.

It will be interesting to see how many of Britain’s allies respond vigorously to this grossly asymmetrical retaliation. Most are likely to be reluctant to repeat their gestures of solidarity, and that will enable Russia to use its customary divide-and-rule tactics in the hope of leaving Britain isolated.

Meanwhile, in Russia itself, local disasters and fiascos continue, fuelled by massive corruption and incompetence. In the town of Volokolamsk (population 23,000, 130 kilometres from Moscow), toxic fumes leaking profusely from a nearby waste dump have led to the hospitalisation of scores of children, and demonstrations that have lasted for weeks. Fifty-seven children were hospitalised on 21 March alone. On 29 March, the district leader finally announced a state of emergency, and plans are at last afoot to evacuate mothers with infants. Earlier, though, the local authorities had refused to close the dump despite numerous complaints.

The tragic fire in the Siberian city of Kemerovo highlighted similar failures of governance and official resistance to protests, but with more tragic results. More than forty children were killed in a fire in a retail and entertainment complex in a building clearly not fit for purpose. Locals are deeply sceptical of the official death tally of sixty-four dead and more than sixty injured. The local governor, Aman Tuleyev, an ex-communist in the job for more than twenty years, told Putin the demonstrators were trouble-makers and “vultures,” and in a classic kiss-up, kick-down manoeuvre, apologised to Putin rather than to the families for the tragedy that had occurred on his watch.

Tuleyev’s two deputies went further: one said the demonstrators were all oppositionists, many of them drunk, who were only trying to discredit the authorities; the other, Sergei Tsivilyov, a wealthy coal oligarch, accused a demonstrator of self-promotion, to which the demonstrator replied that he had lost all his family in the blaze. When faced with appalling breaches of safety regulations, Tuleyev finally resigned. His deputy, Tsivilyov, was rewarded by Putin with the governorship. Tsivilyov owns 70 per cent of his big coal-mining firm, with the other 30 per cent belonging to oligarch Gennadi Timchenko, thought by the US Treasury, among many other Western institutions, to be one of the custodians of Putin’s vast personal wealth.

Two senior Moscow officials also made noteworthy contributions. During a talk-show, Yelena Mizulina, a hardline legislator, offered her “condolences and support to our leader” and described the Kemerovo events as a “stab in the back” for Putin. The human rights ombudswoman, Natalya Moskalkova, accused the demonstrators of using any possible chance to destabilise the situation “to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of their ‘sponsors’” (read: the West).

In Russia, fire disasters in dodgy buildings are even more common than air crashes. There were 10,068 fire deaths in 2014 alone, compared with 3275 in the United States, which has over twice Russia’s population. And in a country where living standards have fallen steeply over four years, events of this kind, illustrating corruption, incompetence and official contempt for the rulers’ unfortunate subjects, could conceivably become a catalyst for a major outburst of popular discontent.

To a significant degree, incidents like these are a consequence of the lack of glasnost (freedom of speech, the first element of Gorbachev’s legacy that Putin closed down) and the unaccountability of local bosses (another of Putin’s achievements). With, or even without, the involvement of a galvanising figure like the opposition’s Alexei Navalny, the resentment might spread, potentially making even the consistently high poll ratings for the Great Leader look unreliable. A major turning point of the kind that occurred more than once in Russia’s twentieth century cannot be entirely ruled out. But with his vast and expanding security empire at his finger-tips, Putin’s chances of forestalling one would have to be rated highly. ●

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Social democratic or socialist parties emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as a political expression of working-class interests, identity and culture. They were influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by Marxism. Many, although not all, were affiliated with the Second International, an organisation of socialist and labour parties founded in 1889. Socialist or social-democratic platforms usually contained a mixture of industrial and political demands. Some parties — such as those in Sweden, Norway, Britain and Australia — had formal trade union affiliates. We usually call these labour parties.

Social democratic parties were divided between revolutionaries — notably the Bolsheviks who formed a wing of the Russian Social Democrats — and those committed to an evolutionary and constitutional road. The differences between these two strategies were especially sharp in the years after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In Germany, struggles between communists and social democrats helped give the Nazis their chance to seize power in 1933. In other Western countries, too, large communist parties competed successfully for working-class support with moderate socialists or social democrats into the 1980s.

Social democracy’s golden age is usually considered the period of the economic boom that followed the second world war. Its promised land was Europe. Social democratic parties didn’t rule for long periods in every instance, but the policies associated with social democracy, such as the mixed economy and the welfare state, came into their own. During these decades — which Eric Hobsbawm calls capitalism’s “golden age” — inequality declined in Western countries and ordinary people could enjoy a level of material comfort, economic stability and personal security that stood in stark contrast to the world of 1914–1945.

The historian Tony Judt reminded us that this achievement was a product of unusual historical circumstances. The genocides, expulsions and migrations of the second world war and the years immediately before and after created a postwar European order in which states were unusually ethnically homogeneous. Social democratic policies, which depend on high levels of trust, have tended to do best in such societies. While we tend to think of social democracy and the welfare state as benign and generous, Judt wondered whether there might be “something inherently selfish” in them: economic and social rights that were happily extended to citizens could seem an imposition when they were claimed by “outsiders.”

This is just one of the issues for social democracy discussed in this timely collection of essays. Mass immigration, more ethnically and religiously diverse communities, and refugee flows are all identified as pressures on social democracy. In reality, of course, these kinds of challenges — along with perhaps the most serious of all, the economic dislocation caused by the global financial crisis — are not a problem only for social democracy. The decline of trust in democracy across the world is undermining established parties of both left and right and, some might add, the stability and legitimacy of democracy itself.

If we are witnessing in phenomena such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump a global retreat from the liberal rationalist politics that have been taken for granted as the standard model for developed countries since the end of the cold war, social democracy was always likely to be the biggest loser. Of all the mainstream Western political traditions, it had the most faith that the state could be used constructively to promote as well as reconcile the demands of economic growth and social justice within a system of popular consent. If voters are losing their faith in the capacity of state institutions to protect and enhance their wellbeing, and are turning to more expressive forms of political engagement — for instance, to what is often now called “populism” — social democracy has very few weapons at its disposal for countering this challenge. It does not “emote” well.

As several chapters in the book suggest, social democrats themselves must bear a large portion of the blame for their recent decline. The adoption of “Third Way” market-driven politics in Europe in the 1990s — and in Australia and New Zealand a decade earlier — was electorally successful in the short term but disastrous in the medium and long term. As Chris Pierson writes in “The End of Revisionism?” the peace that centre-left parties made with finance capital “bought them a ‘one-off’ vote bonanza — and, for a time, an economic increment that they were able to spend on expanding public services — but only at the expense of further long-term decline.” Pierson quotes Harold Macmillan’s comment on the Thatcher governments’ privatisations — he described them as “selling off the family silver,” something you can only do once.

In an Australian context at least, the term “social democracy” isn’t a neutral descriptor: rather, it signifies the accommodations that the Labor Party has made with capitalism. More research on this point would be valuable, but my hunch is that “social democracy” was not a term much favoured in and around Labor before the 1990s. A young Bob Carr was ahead of the pack with his 1977 booklet Social Democracy and Australian Labor, in which he argued that the party should look more closely at the ideas and achievements of European social democrats. Here as elsewhere, the use of the term represented an effort to carve out a space that was neither an old-fashioned labourism that conjured men in blue singlets and smoke-filled union halls, nor a full-blown socialism that still looked to nationalisation of industry. “Social democracy” was a warm, fuzzy term that, as in its European context, could stretch across the class divide, promising a social order at once more equal and more prosperous, in which no one would lose out.

The embrace of the term by British Labour Party breakaways led by David Owen early in the Thatcher era strengthened the idea that it represented a moderate, cerebral alternative to socialism. Subsequently, labour-movement interest in the Scandinavian social and industrial model also legitimised the idea of “social democracy” as a basis for Labor Party ideology in Australia. In a 1982 essay written for the Labor Essays series, Leonie Sandercock distinguished between “social democracy,” a reformism that “poses no threat at all to the fundamental structures of capitalism and all its systemic inequalities,” and “democratic socialism” — her preference — which treated “present reforms as intermediate demands and as a prefiguration of socialism” and rested on economic planning and controls, industrial democracy and an expanding public sector.

The essays in Why the Left Loses draw attention to three themes that help explain the ordeals of social democracy in the recent past: institutions, individuals and ideas. There are chapters dealing with the Anglosphere — Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia — as well as Germany, Sweden, Spain and France. The pattern of the decline of socialist, social-democratic or labour parties is distinctive to each country, and dependent on a range of local factors.

In Britain, argue Rob Manwaring and Matt Beach, the Labour Party and labour movement no longer constitute “a broad church in terms of social values” but “a handful of disputatious political sects.” The nexus on which the party rests — the relationship between leader, union movement, parliamentary party and rank-and-file — seems “at a critical breaking point.” And while Brexit had underlined the lack of any shared vision of Britain’s future among Labour’s core constituency, the party has so far been unable to move beyond the paradox of the New Labour legacy. The paradox is that a relatively coherent and electorally successful formula was unable to survive the global financial crisis, and no subsequent Labour leader has been able to build a viable narrative since. The authors, while suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn’s radicalism has been exaggerated — that he represents a conservative impulse seeking to reassert Labour’s pre-Blairite social-democratic ideals and policies — also seem sceptical that he can find a way through the party’s problems.

In the British case — at least outside Scotland — the challenge to the established centre left has occurred via a struggle for control of the Labour Party that the Corbynites have been winning. Elsewhere, other factors have intervened to ensure that the pressures on social democracy have played out differently. Under Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system, as David McGrane’s essay reveals, the prevalence of competing parties leaning to the left — the Liberals, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois — meant that electors who wanted to get rid of the long-serving Conservative government faced a hard choice. In 2015, the result was a turn to the Liberals and a halt to the promising New Democratic Party advance of recent years. Justin Trudeau’s charisma combined with a Liberal proposal for deficit financing to produce an attractive mix for voters wanting an alternative to the Conservatives.

The combination of voting system, charismatic leadership and rejection of neoliberalism also helped New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern over the line as a minority government in 2017. NZ Labour’s post–Helen Clark ordeals, and their happy ending, are recounted in a chapter by Grant Duncan, whose basic thrust had clearly been determined long before Labour’s surprise victory. The left doesn’t always lose.

The theme in most of the chapters is that an embrace of the market stored up later problems for social democrats, undermining their efforts since the global financial crisis to argue that the state should be used to reduce inequality. Carol Johnson suggests that this is true of Labor’s Hawke–Keating legacy; the failures of Rudd and Gillard become not simply those of leadership but the result of “longer-term ideational and structural dilemmas and problems.” One might add that the pattern at the federal level in Australia has generally been for voters to turn to Labor when institutions have seemed to require radical recalibration — the 1940s and the 1980s being obvious instances, and 2007–13 perhaps a peculiar misfire. When the task has been managing prosperity, Australians have been more comfortable with conservative governments.

At the state level, on the other hand, where macroeconomic management is less significant than service delivery, Labor has generally dominated over the past thirty years, and has performed considerably better there than at the federal level since 1910. Rob Manwaring indicates in his chapter on state Labor governments that the particular responsibilities of the sub-national level in Australia — especially in health and education — play to Labor’s perceived strengths. Yet the hollowing out of state Labor parties and the over-emphasis on the profile and power of the leader might be undermining Labor’s position. Certainly, Labor victories in Victoria and Queensland in the recent past have been narrow compared with the landslides of the Bracks and Beattie eras.

It is in Europe, long social democracy’s happy hunting ground, that electoral decline seems most obvious. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party’s share of the vote at the 2017 election was a little over a fifth, down from an unimpressive quarter in 2013. Its form of “executive pragmatism,” argues Uwe Jun, “offers no coherent, centre-left strategic vision” capable of grappling with challenges such as globalisation, migration and technological change. As in the case of Kevin Rudd in Australia and Gordon Brown in Britain, it received no dividend from voters for its finance minister Peer Steinbrück’s success, as part of the grand coalition, in dealing with the global financial crisis. (As I write, it has just been announced that the SPD will again join a grand coalition, provided its rank-and-file votes in favour. But this will only underline the lack of clear differentiation between it and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.)

When social democracy is struggling in Sweden, you know the problem is serious, although the party’s vote there of 31 per cent in the 2014 election was still enough to allow the Social Democrats to form a government. As in Germany and France, though, the Social Democrats are losing traditional supporters to both the centre-right and the far-right. Claes Belfrage and Mikko Kuisma stress the difficulties that financialisation poses to social democracy: “debt-led and asset-based consumption,” home remortgaging to support spending, the big-city “housing bubble,” the “speculative ethos,” and the power of “the four big banks.” (Sound familiar?) The authors conclude that this “new Swedish model” sets up “a losing game” for the Social Democratic Party until the model itself is called into more serious question.

In Spain and France, the socialists are in considerably more difficulty. Paul Kennedy reports that the vote of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, which has dominated that country’s post-Franco politics, more than halved between 2008 and 2016. It has been outflanked on the left by a populist party, Podemos, which, like Corbyn Labour, has been successful in attracting the young. In a country with 20 per cent unemployment, their prospects are particularly bleak. In Greece, of course, a radical left-wing party, Syriza, overtook and replaced the notably corrupt Greek Socialist Party entirely. Meanwhile, as Sophie Di Francesco-Mayot points out, in France’s most recent presidential elections, the Parti Socialiste candidate managed a paltry 6.36 per cent. Neither the traditional centre-right nor centre-left candidates made the final run-off, which was won by the independent Emmanuel Macron over the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen — part of whose success lies in her co-option of both traditional socialist policies and voters.

So, what is to be done? René Cuperus calls for “a return to social democratic values, roots and principles.” But a return by whom? The parties themselves, who in the 1980s and 1990s abandoned the traditional ideals of social democracy for an embrace of market liberalism? Or voters who, when offered the somewhat dubious wares of these battle-weary parties, are finding alternatives elsewhere? There is no easy way around the dilemma discussed by Kennedy and Manwaring in the book’s final chapter: voters have been willing to give populists of both left and right a leeway that they refuse to concede social democrats.

And what of Australia? Bill Shorten and Labor have been mighty fortunate that the Coalition is so hopelessly divided. If Malcolm Turnbull had been able to move his party to the political centre, like Angela Merkel has, and thereby pick up more support from those who ended up voting for Labor or the Greens at the 2016 election, Labor would be in dire trouble. That might well make the seemingly uneventful 2016 federal election one of the more significant in our history, as the moment when the failure of Turnbull to tame the Coalition’s right wing yielded a barely deserved dividend for the left.

Why the Left Loses makes a convincing case for the global character of the crisis of social democracy, as well as placing the current crisis in historical and comparative perspective. While many of the transformations of recent years are unprecedented, social democracy has in the past managed to adapt to major social transformation. Revisionism is in its genes. As one of the leading scholars in this field, Sheri Berman, comments in her foreword, it is how the centre left responds to the challenges, rather than the challenges themselves, that will ultimately decide whether social democracy is headed for oblivion. •

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A decade later his sublime novel, Towards the End of the Morning, gently skewered Fleet Street’s vanishing customs. The heart of Britain’s newspaper industry, Frayn would write from the vast retrospect of 2005, “was coming towards the end not just of the morning, but of the afternoon as well, and the shades of night were gathering fast.”

Fleet Street has indeed become a place of ghosts. But they turned out to be, if not exactly friendly, then possessed of dark humour. Newspapers survive as print–digital hybrids, the entangling often contrary enough to recall Bob Dylan’s line, “there’s no success like failure.” And in some ineffable way, the tail wags the body of these strange creatures. If it’s still hard to imagine a London newsstand without the Guardian or the Daily Mail — those enemies-in-arms with soaraway website traffic — that’s surely because their singular political and cultural weight is intertwined with their existence as a material artefact.

It was a time of innovation: three years later a move to sleek offices in King’s Place delivered a cool upgrade to match the product.

The experience of the Independent, which went digital-only in 2016, is negative confirmation. No one regards it as a real newspaper any more, as opposed to a news website (itself a kind description). Once gone, there is no way back. Back in 1967, “a few terminal cases were still coughing their last in odd corners,” writes Frayn: the trade-union backed Daily Herald, “being slowly strangled by its [trade union] affiliation,” and “the poor old News Chronicle, the decent Liberal paper that everyone liked but no one read.” In 1947, these publications had sold 2.1 million and 1.6 million copies to the Manchester Guardian’s 126,000.

Today the Guardian is selling only a third above that number. Yet that printed edition can justly pose as indispensable to the brand’s huge digital reach on three continents. The newspaper switches to tabloid on 15 January. In a sense, that might be a “Small Tremor in King’s Cross, Not Many Care” story. But the paper’s online reach amplifies it into a tale of how a regional newspaper went national, got bigger, changed its spots, and is now going for broke by touching base with its roots.

The Guardian’s change of format is only the second in the history of Britain’s main liberal newspaper, founded in 1821 as the Manchester Guardian. In February 1998, under Peter Preston, the broadsheet had a new masthead and contained G2, a new tabloid section. In September 2005, it chose not to emulate the ex-broadsheet Independent and Times and instead adopted the slim Berliner (or midi) size of European papers such as Paris’s Le Monde and Rome’s La Repubblica. That move was soon followed by its reluctant Sunday stablemate the Observer, founded in 1791, which the Guardian had bought in 1993.

The smart Berliner design, coming ten years into Alan Rusbridger’s long editorship, ticked many boxes. It gave new distinction to a newspaper proud of its freestanding ownership and ethos, took printing in-house, and offered a welcome patina of European modernity to its centre-left readership. It was a time of innovation: three years later a move to sleek offices in King’s Place — a ten-minute walk from its home since 1976, a tired sixties block on Farringdon Road — delivered a cool upgrade to match the product.

Troubled transition: the Guardian’s previous editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger. Alastair Grant/AP Photo

By then the Berliner look and clean Egyptian typeface were conjoined to an expanding online presence, with the launch under Georgina Henry of the “Comment Is Free” opinion section and the web-first posting of selected news. In editorial terms, the redesign was an act of strategic optimism amid the whirlwind that the paper had earned new spurs in tracking: globalisation’s peak, post-9/11 wars, London’s 7/7 bombings, Tony Blair’s faltering hegemony. Its print sales on 12 September 2001 were the highest in its history, as were its page views on 7 July 2005.

The newspaper’s early adventures with the worldwide web had given it an edge and a bank of expertise. Led by Ian Katz, its news, sport and jobs websites had fused as Guardian Unlimited in 1999, and grown from three million to ten million unique users by 2005. A decade later, its free-to-read content — now with customised editions in the United States and Australia — was reaching 155 million unique browsers (the term it now prefers) per month. It has 7.7 million Facebook likes and 6.9 million Twitter followers. This Berliner-era Guardian has proved its own editorial mettle, from the financial crisis of 2007–09 via the phone-hacking scandal of 2009–11 to Brexit and Trump. And it became a pioneer of collaborative data journalism in tracking docu-dumps from WikiLeaks/Julian Assange (2010–11), Edward Snowden (2013), and the Panama/Paradise tax havens (2016–17), and many other big stories.

Over the same period, the paper’s mainstay income from display and classified advertising plunged and daily print sales continued to fall. From a historic peak of almost half a million in 1987, and a still strong 428,000 in 1997, they dropped to 337,000 in 2005 but remained above 300,000 as late as 2010. From there the tapering was abrupt: in December 2017 the number was 146,766. People over sixty-five accounted for 28 per cent, those over forty-five for 58.8 per cent. London is the Guardian’s redoubt: 38.6 per cent of its 2016–17 sales were there, against 20.8 per cent in England’s north and only 4.2 per cent in Scotland.

A third of buyers are now subscribers saving on the £2 (A$3.50) weekday price, augmented since 2014 by a new category of members who pay for masterclasses in photography, novel-writing, data visualisation, flirting, and more. Regular paying supporters, including members, now reportedly number 750,000. Such revenue streams, along with grants for specialist coverage — including from the Bill & Melinda Gates, Rockefeller, and Skoll foundations — helped hoist digital income in 2016–17 to £94.1 million (A$164 million). “More people are paying for Guardian journalism than ever before,” says the Guardian Media Group, or GMG, the company that runs the newspaper.

The GMG is now entering the last phase of an ambitious three-year plan, launched in January 2016, to stabilise its finances after a decade of heavy losses. After the financial crash, these ran to £90 million (A$157 million) in 2008–09, fell to £30.9 million (A$53.2 million) in 2012–13, back up to £68.7 million (A$120 million) in 2015–16. The deficits were made bearable only by revenue from Trader Media Group, engine of the GMG’s portfolio. The company sold its majority stake in Trader in 2014, raising £619 million (A$1 billion), creating a huge endowment to safeguard its future. It was a replay of history. The floating of the Reuters news agency in 1984 had been a windfall for its Fleet Street investors, with the Guardian’s share of £28 million (in today’s money, £87 million, or A$151 million) enabling it to settle all its mortgages and debts.

Figures like these make the Guardian a case study in media-wide trends that it pioneered and championed even as they worked against its own interests as a newspaper. The Berliner format was a bravura innovation whose content was made freely available online, making for a print–online hybrid whose proliferating digital branches far outgrew a withered trunk.

The paper’s domestic competitors, the Times and Telegraph especially, were always in the Guardian’s digital slipstream. These two papers, and the Financial Times, experimented with metered payments in the early 2010s, in each case leading to a subscription model with insiderish benefits. The expensive FT, £2.70 (A$4.60) for a weekday paper copy, now has over 700,000 subscribers, its reputation for quality reinforced by critical, in-depth coverage of Brexit. Alongside the Guardian in staying free of cyber-charge was the fellow centre-left Independent, saved from closure by the Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev in 2010 and shunted online after six years as his expensive bauble.

The venerable Times, bought by Rupert Murdoch in 1981 and often aggressively priced, began a paywall in 2010 after its sales, at 508,000, had also entered a long downward curve. A recent bounce to 450,000 (boosted by around 80,000 free bulk copies, a figure-boosting technique the Guardian now disdains) may owe something to footloose ex-buyers of the Independent, which was notionally selling 55,000 a day when it stopped printing in 2016. The Guardian, whose cover price is 30p (50c) more than the Times’s, seems not to have benefited. More germane is that the smart, low-priced tabloid i, an Independent spin-off with 260,000-plus sales since 2012, has quietly cornered the growing market for bite-sized news.

All newspapers had entered the rapids well before 2005, even if their layers of insulation still muffled the sound. What distinguishes the Guardian’s story in the years between its two redesigns is the cunning-of-history element. It saw and reported the dangers but felt itself above them. It sought to become a global contender while neglecting its own roots. Its switch on 15 January is less a wager on the future than a concession to its inevitable diminishment. Britain in a nutshell, it might be said.

Against that fatalistic view is one that stresses agency and opportunity in the context of unavoidably acute financial constraints. At the centre of the GMG plan is the Guardian’s aim to increase reader revenues, expand internationally, and build “a far deeper set of relationships with our audience” — all while reducing the paper’s outgoings by a fifth.

The strategy is co-led by the GMG’s chief executive David Pemsel and editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, who launched the Australian operation and edited the subsequently troubled US one. Viner succeeded Rusbridger in March 2015, after the result of a staff vote was endorsed by the Scott Trust, set up in 1936 to protect the Guardian’s financial and editorial independence. The transition became a rift when Rusbridger was obliged to give up his expected chairmanship of the trust, thus severing connection with the newspaper. He now heads an Oxford college and chairs the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

The fumbled passing of the editorial torch accentuated the sense of a publication in flux. Senior staff left, including two applicants for the top job: chief website editor Janine Gibson (Rusbridger’s favoured successor) for BuzzFeed, and digital-strategy director Wolfgang Blau for Condé Nast. Another applicant, Emily Bell, media editor until 2010 when she moved to Columbia’s Center for Digital Journalism, remains non-executive director of the Scott Trust (which in 2008 had turned itself into a limited company). The final choice was between Viner and Ian Katz, who had left in 2013 to become editor of BBC2’s Newsnight and now heads programming at Channel 4.

New mission: Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner. PA Images/Alamy

With Rusbridger’s departure, strategic options expanded. Among them was a cost-saving return to Manchester, which the paper, having dropped the northwest English city from its masthead in 1959, quit in stages for London in the early 1960s. The end of that association had long been a source of bittersweet lament, without its actual revival ever seeming a realistic possibility.

In the event, the tabloid decision had more business logic than the quasi-nostalgic Berliner one. It enabled sharing of printing facilities owned by Trinity Mirror, publisher of a red-top daily and two Sunday titles. The GMG had sold twenty-two regional titles, including the Manchester Evening News, to Trinity in 2010, raising Ј44.8 million (A$78 million), the great bulk in release from a hefty tabloid print contract. The Berliner-only presses the Guardian had built in Manchester and east London, which cost Ј113 million (A$200 million) in today’s money, will now be scrapped. That adds fifty to the 300-plus redundancies already made.

Almost three years after the regime change, the Guardian is still between eras. Depicting retrenchment as a great leap forward makes the best of a complex situation. The approach also plays to the evangelism that lies at the core of the newspaper’s self-understanding, and which found in the internet a perfect contemporary match. From the start the Guardian’s singular relationship with the web — in the latter’s potent Silicon Valley guise as a liberator with ethics — had a soulmates feel. The traces of that origin continue to inform the Guardian’s editorial thinking, as revealed in Rusbridger’s and Viner’s several public lectures and essays on the future of their newspaper and of journalism. These are well worth reading in full.

“As for digital, I am with the utopians,” Rusbridger told a Sydney audience gathered for the Andrew Olle lecture in 2010. The unowned and barely regulated digital space “brings with it an entirely new idea of what journalism is,” which for the Guardian means “an open and collaborative one.” In his Hugh Cudlipp lecture earlier that year, named after the Daily Mirror editor in its halcyon 1950s, he had argued against paywalls and for a newspaper “open to the rest of the web” and becoming “as influential in Beijing and Washington as in Paris or Delhi.”

Viner’s own A.N. Smith lecture in Melbourne in 2013, as editor-in-chief of the new Guardian Australia, was as emphatic about the potential of the “open web” to be “a huge democratic space,” enabling “a fundamental redrawing of journalists’ relationship with our audience.” But a 2016 essay on “how technology disrupted the truth” observes that social media “has swallowed the news” and supplanted the “old idea of a wide-open web.” And the tone of her ambitious new “mission for journalism in a time of crisis” — published in mid November, two months before the newspaper’s resizing — is one of extreme urgency.

The “utopian mood of the early 2000s did not anticipate all that technology would enable”: surveillance as “the business model of the digital age”; Facebook becoming a wealthy behemoth “by replacing editors with algorithms”; the spoliation of “[our] digital town squares” by bullies, misogynists and racists. All this, part of a wider crisis in public life, requires a journalism that champions the public interest; sees readers as collaborators; listens, understands, diversifies; is trustworthy, rigorous, fair; “uses clarity and imagination to build hope.”

Viner’s evangelising prospectus is remarkable in its sweep. It defines the “relationship with our readers” as “not transactional: it is about sharing a sense of purpose and a commitment to understand and illuminate our times.” Her offer is threefold: “high-quality journalism, rooted in the facts,” “our progressive perspective” and a shared belief “that Guardian journalism should have the biggest possible impact and try to change the world for the better.” In effect, the text positions readers as co-protagonists in a life-or-death campaign.

Yet the business pressures underpinning this joint enterprise go unmentioned in a 6000-word essay. That may seem immaterial: few reading the piece can be unaware of at least the broad outlines of the Guardian’s situation. Central is the fact that readers — whether supporters, members, subscribers, donors, or mere everyday purchasers — are ever more the newspaper’s lifeblood. To survive, it must squeeze them close. Viner avoids the topic. In this respect her stirring vision of the future also serves to displace the internal problems that have led the Guardian to this point, and bear directly on its new course.

As significant, Viner weaves her outline of the newspaper’s expansive goals into its two centuries’ experience. This emphasis on the value and relevance of the Guardian’s past is a striking departure from the preceding reign of technocentric neophilia. With equal rigour, the theme of advancing hope also works carefully to screen the Guardian’s troubles from view.

Every Guardian editor, and Viner is only the eleventh in the newspaper’s 197 years, works in the shadow of C.P. Scott, who held the post from 1872 to 1929. This patrician figure was a conscientious reformer, a Unitarian — or rational dissenter — like the paper’s Manchester founders, an advocate in many just causes who also served for ten years as a Liberal member of parliament. Appointed by his cousin, the owner of the paper, he steered the moderate Whig newspaper along the same course for over a decade before converting it into a voice of progressive social liberalism.

C.P. Scott’s example — on his death, Manchester “paid him a remarkable tribute: on a cold winter morning, huge numbers turned out to offer their last respects in what became an unofficial, unorchestrated, state funeral,” says the University of Adelaide’s Trevor Wilson — imbues his name with an aura of piety. Viner’s salute has the rare distinction of placing him in the context of the newspaper’s larger canvas.

The story is well, if selectively, told: how the St Peter’s Fields cull of protesters by sabre-wielding hussars in 1819 eventually led John Edward Taylor and his colleagues to found the Manchester Guardian as an apostle of “sincere and undeviating attachment to rational liberty,” how the paper was sublimated to the city’s free-trader cotton merchants in the Victorian mid-century, how its true spirit was recovered by Scott and his offspring. While noting its occasional “missteps,” such as its backing the Conservatives in the 1951 election, Viner avows a noble lineage:

Our moral conviction, as exemplified by Taylor and codified by Scott, rests on a faith that people long to understand the world they’re in, and to create a better one. We believe in the value of the public sphere; that there is such a thing as the public interest, and the common good; that we are all of equal worth; that the world should be free and fair.

This programmatic view of the Guardian’s golden thread, geared to the present, is naturally open to question as history. Where Viner rightly credits John Edward Taylor and the London Times, it was James Wroe of the Manchester Observer whose inspired subediting branded the carnage at St Peter’s Fields as the “Peterloo Massacre” (Taylor, less radical, abjured both terms) and it was Wroe whose pamphlet series, with its “faithful narrative of the events,” spread throughout the land. The republican Richard Carlile and others played a role. She dates the paper’s “drift from the political ideals that had inspired its founding” to 1844, but already in the 1820s–30s it was scorned by agitators for insufficient radicalism, such as opposition to strikes. From the very outset, the Manchester Guardian was being outflanked on its left.

Jumping a century, A.P. Wadsworth’s reluctant endorsement of Churchill in 1951 as “the lesser evil” was also a judgement on the Labour minister Aneurin Bevan’s fierce rhetoric, the “hate-gospellers of his entourage,” and the soft pro-Sovietism in his wing of the party. A want of imagination aside, Viner’s retrospective disagreement with Wadsworth’s exercise of editorial freedom has the whiff of a red line that elsewhere she is eager to disown.

Such examples are important not just for their own sake but also because too tight a corralling of the past might cramp judgements in the present. The pincer movement in Viner’s manifesto — on the Guardian’s past and its readers — plants a doubt. Will the impact of her missionary journalism, in the context of a mutualised project, threaten the newspaper’s editorial independence?

That is not to detract from the manifesto’s seriousness, sincerity, even anguish — and refreshingly un-Guardian-like absence of knowing, in-crowd detachment. These merits far outweigh its over-crowdsourced, mustn’t-forget-the-kitchen-sink feel. “What is the meaning and purpose of our work? Who are we, fundamentally?” Viner has the courage to ask. At this odd juncture, however — somewhere between long dark night and new dawn — the Guardian’s divided soul is not yet open to true introspection.

Viner’s piercing self-questions might usefully reach to another in the same spirit: “where do we belong?” Of all newspapers, the Guardian, which would always be marked by the transition from Manchester to London, might at least be expected to consider it. Migration, exile, displacement, cultural borders, identity dilemmas, dual loyalties: these, after all, are the newspaper’s foremost themes. Yet the Guardian has never tried to put its own experience here to “beneficial account,” a phrase that Viner is fond of quoting from its founding, 1821 prospectus.

That document’s appeal to “the friends of freedom in this neighbourhood” is a reminder of how much the nonconformist John Edward Taylor and friends were bonded by ideals and by place. It’s easy to overlook the fact that Peterloo was also an intimately local event, pulsating through Lancashire’s towns and villages. The Manchester Guardian’s national status and international influence were won over decades from a foundation of civic and regional attachments, all capacious enough to accommodate the others.

With the move to London, such layers thinned and were not easily replicated. The new Guardian knuckled down and looked ahead, as it had to. The newspaper’s dislocation attracted the easy jibe, handy in north and south alike, that it was a roots-betraying interloper. From various directions — sentimental northernism, populist anti-Londonism, knockabout anti-leftism — the newspaper was typecast as the house journal of an out-of-touch, we-know-best, anti-patriotic, metropolitan (formerly “Hampstead liberal”) elite.

Such formulaic charges have a low-rent currency that trades as much in abrasive Fleet Street rivalry as social prejudice. Alone, the Guardian’s brilliant journalism and the best of its commentary would make them look ridiculous. Regrettably, the newspaper’s tolerance for the smug, indignant and hectoring gives them credence. That manner is a long way from C.P. Scott’s centenary leader: “The voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard. Comment also is justly subject to a self-imposed restraint.”

The strangeness of this moment is that it’s so hard to tell whether the tabloid Guardian will be entering a new morning or joining those clogmakers. A radical change justified by the sweeping invitation to a bright future, taken with reference to an honoured past, where no one, including the people in charge, knows what will happen. The Guardian is on the same page as Brexit. These really are interesting times. ●

The post The Guardian goes for broke appeared first on Inside Story.

In this new catharsis over power and sex there was an echo of the Julia Gillard misogyny speech that raced around the world. Once more the engine is a tech-facilitated viral cascade, and the fuel is women’s agency. The Financial Times’s Gillian Tett adds Trump to its triggers and hints that business might be the next bastion. The Weinstein revelations evidently unlocked some blend of fury, memory, solidarity and responsibility in many women. Past and present were coming together to make a claim on the future. Could this moment become a watershed?

In Britain, as elsewhere, film insiders’ testimony opened a gap for others to leap through. Some spoke anonymously or referred to incidents years before. But the outpouring of voices bypassed domestic politics. Early efforts to join the uproar, such as a demand to revoke Weinstein’s CBE, an official honour, looked trivial against the raw daily reports of abuse and humiliation emerging from other sectors of society. There seemed a risk that Britain’s governing class might escape the ignominy of some VIPs in cinema and theatre.

There was a certain logic in the fears. So much was already not happening: a Brexit morass, a clogged parliament, inert opinion polls. The party conferences had just climaxed in Theresa May’s farcical speech to the Conservative faithful, whose highlights were a rasping cough, a wobbly stage set and a stuntman’s delivery of a P45 (job-leaving notice). It gave credence to a view formed by her disastrous election campaign: that the prime minister had lost authority, and was now — a famous remark about a Tory predecessor — “in office, but not in power.”

This febrile stasis was also producing more outrage — British politics’ daily currency — than could reasonably be consumed. Perhaps it would shelter the elect from the tumult outside the gates? In the event, no. Although it took more than three weeks to breach them, the delayed impact was no less of a hurricane. Over a few frenetic days, parties were shamed, parliament embroiled, the defence minister felled. And the latest file marked urgent was tossed into Theresa May’s inbox.

On this matter close to her heart, May was uncommonly decisive. She also benefited from a broad political consensus. All parties represented in parliament convened in Downing Street on 6 November and agreed to establish an independent grievance and adjudication system. A month later, there is a glimmer of serious procedural reform at Westminster. So maladroit for so long, May might this time prove to have been the right prime minister at the right time.

For their part, Conservative and Labour central offices were accused of neglect and failures of care. The parties’ federative nature operated as both constraint on power and pretext for inaction. Each promised to examine newly opened cases and tighten existing policy on members’ conduct. At an emergency meeting of the party’s executive on 31 October, Labour appointed a “specialist panel to review complaints.” Four days later, after input from legal and HR experts, the Tories announced a mandatory new code of conduct for all their elected officials.

Authorities in both chambers of parliament began with strong statements of principle and followed up with blander endorsement of the outline scheme. The House of Commons Commission acknowledged “the various overlapping policies and practices dealing with harassment and bullying as it affects the House service” and agreed to “streamline” these, while a House of Lords Commission meeting on 6 November discussed and “took note” of the process under way.

The first political impact of the post-Weinstein ferment came as a direct hit on the Palace of Westminster. It had dug from the dross of the age: years-old sexist and racist messages sent in 2002–04 by Jared O’Mara, a Labour MP elected in June. So far, so familiar: relentless hate-filled cyber-attacks on female MPs and journalists had been a live issue since 2015, producing a flurry of reports but little by way of restraining action. O’Mara resigned his membership of the House of Commons women and equalities committee on the same day, 23 October, before news of recent comments led to his suspension from the party.

Then a spreadsheet containing “sex pest” hearsay on thirty-six colleagues (“handsy in taxis” and the like) was leaked from a WhatsApp group of Tory whips. Some stood up. Mark Garnier, a trade minister, admitted to telling his assistant Caroline Edmondson to buy two vibrators while he waited outside a Soho sex shop. Stephen Crabb, a former minister, confessed to sexting a job interviewee, a nineteen-year-old woman. Charlie Elphicke, an MP, was suspended and referred to the police over “serious allegations.” Damian Green, the PM’s deputy and confidante, was accused by a journalist, Kate Maltby, of sexual advances, and reminded of a dormant claim of having pornography on his Commons computer, allegedly found in 2008 during a controversial raid by police investigating an unrelated leak.

On 28 October, Theresa May asked the Commons speaker, John Bercow, to initiate a binding code of conduct for MPs. Women in politics at other levels — councillors, constituency workers, members and activists — seized the opportunity to speak out about their mistreatment. Many recollections, often reported only locally, were of groping, squeezing, insinuating remarks, and explicit images or requests, resulting in distress and humiliation. Power was a pervasive factor. Lacking it and being abused by it was bad enough. But frequently there was the sense too of facing it once more when reporting a violation, and of having nowhere to turn.

Bex Bailey’s is the gravest experience. A nineteen-year-old Labour organiser in 2011 who was raped by a party functionary, she was fobbed off when reporting the attack internally two years later. The party has now appointed Karon Monaghan, a senior lawyer and employment specialist, to investigate and recommend improved procedures for dealing with complaints.

Early November brought a surge. A male Tory whip, Christopher Pincher, resigned after complaints of sexual advances by two younger men, party activist Alex Story and former Labour MP Tom Blenkinsop. Elsewhere the common factor tended to be a senior male and younger, professionally less secure female. Kelvin Hopkins, a Labour MP in his mid-seventies, was suspended on 3 November after revelations of lewd text messages sent in 2015 to Ava Etemadzadeh, a twenty-three-year-old activist, and of unwanted amorous notes over twenty years to fellow Labour MP Kerry McCarthy. Another Labour MP already under investigation, Ivan Lewis, was suspended on 23 November after being reported for touching the leg of a nineteen-year-old woman, and inviting her to his house, at a Labour event.

The defence secretary Michael Fallon’s exit on 1 November began with a more-in-amusement-than-anger recollection by radio host Julia Hartley-Brewer. He had placed a hand on her knee at a dinner in 2002. He resigned after hearing that another incident from the same period was about to be revealed. Jane Merrick, in 2003 a twenty-nine-year-old reporter with the Daily Mail, outed Fallon as the MP who had lunged at and kissed her on the mouth while they returned from lunch to the House of Commons. “I am taking back control,” said Merrick, in the pithiest utterance so far.

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, speaking at a prearranged London event hours after Fallon went, captured the mood of these intense days. “The way in which [the scandal] has manifested itself is with sexual impropriety, misconduct and in some cases assault. But it isn’t actually about sex. It’s about power. It’s always about power. We, as elected representatives, have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.”

Edinburgh and Cardiff were also embroiled in the “sexual harassment scandal,” the tag eventually arrived at. Scotland’s childcare minister, Mark McDonald, a Scottish National Party MP, left office on 4 November under the shadow of allegedly inappropriate behaviour towards female colleagues. Eleven days later, Scottish Labour’s interim and deputy leader Alex Rowley resigned both posts, having been accused by his former partner of sending abusive messages over three years. The Labour communities and children minister in Wales, Carl Sergeant, had been sacked on 3 November after alleged incidents with women. Sergeant committed suicide days later, sparking ire at Wales’s first minister, Carwyn Jones, over the curt dismissal and reputed cabinet bullying. Three official inquiries are now under way.

A fresh week began with Theresa May’s meeting with other party and parliamentary leaders. The new process they agreed will cover all staff at Westminster, in principle giving MPs and non-MPs equal status in respect of everyday conduct. This would be a real departure. Kathryn Hudson, commissioner of parliamentary standards, was previously stymied by MPs in her effort to make them more accountable for alleged harassment, reports the Telegraph’s political correspondent, Laura Hughes. A cross-party working group is charged with implementation, and now taking advice from specialists, including the academics Sarah Childs and Helen Mott, before finalising the details in December.

There has been substantial reform in parliament since 2009–10, when a huge row over expenses brought enduring disrepute and ridicule. Commons committees have been strengthened, and Bercow has led a behind-the-scenes opening to the public. Women have gained more access to and visibility in the Commons, including as advisers and journalists. There are now 208 women MPs out of 650, an increase from 125 in 2010 and the highest ever. But the latest change, if in line with these trends, is different in character. Its outside-in impulse and inclusive logic might be an unsettling test for that nebulous but real thing, an institution’s cast of mind.

Even as Westminster discussed new rules, the first real signs of a rebalancing arrived. Carl Sergeant’s suicide was when everyone paused for breath. The moment had been presaged by the usual “moral panic” columns from faux-contrarian male bores, but also insightful ones from freethinkers, prominently women. Among many examples, Anne Perkins gave a wise history lesson, Lara Prendergast sensed a new sexual reformation, and Melissa Kite overturned the restaurant tables.

A distinct concern was of puritan overreach. The Times’s Janice Turner, in a column published on 4 November, supports a new code for all parties and says “the dinosaurs must evolve or die,” but insists that situations are often nuanced, complicated, grey. “I both applaud the young women who are kicking down the citadels and feel concern that, in the present climate, hitherto unblemished careers will end over a text or a knee. I am both delighted that women have seized the moral power and anxious that they use it responsibly and humanely. (I fear suicides.)”

A related worry was that media frenzy and punitive overreach might stymie natural justice. The police’s evidence-light investigations of senior politicians and army personnel — or, in the case of Edward Heath, a deceased ex–prime minister — over alleged sexual abuse is just one baleful precedent. Shocking too, because false charges, expensive pursuits and incessant media glare left real crimes untouched and drew resources from atrocious sexual predators living in plain sight, such as the BBC presenter Jimmy Savile.

Justice in its application is always particular. Under scrutiny are deeply private, sometimes contested episodes, difficult and painful for victims to disclose or talk about, where material evidence is often scarce. Understanding and assessing requires emotional intelligence as well as professional skill. Moreover, almost every allegation is muddied, especially on social media, by an admix of malicious politicised gossip and cynical false trails. These have to be navigated where they cannot be ignored.

All this can be said of any place where abuse occurs or is alleged. The incidents reported show how widely these places vary. Many occur far from the London parliament. But it’s appropriate that the Palace of Westminster is the political and symbolic centre of the rumpus. With its rookery of passages and cubicles, its dungeon of wires and cables, it is a gothic peril: crumbling, it is a fire hazard in dire need of structural restoration and renewal. Several proposals, with varying schedule and cost implications, are in vogue or in limbo. Most fundamental of all, the monarchical idea of absolute sovereignty runs deep in its fabric and its psychology — and radiates out to the wider political culture.

Laura Hughes describes the Commons membership as “650 small businesses, none with an HR department.” It is a honeycomb of ardent, stressed young aides and older members, person and politico alike, as well as researchers and other staff. The adrenaline of power and the fear of banishment live side by side. This hothouse workplace is also awash with alcohol, having ten bars where its denizens are free to meet and mingle. “Perfect conditions for a sex scandal,” writes Olivia Utley, a former parliamentary researcher.

Clear rules on acceptable behaviour, inclusive and transparent, without discrimination as to status, would be a step in the right direction for everyone. They might even catch on elsewhere. “What matters as much as changes in Westminster,” concludes Janice Turner, “are women, newly emboldened, knocking on HR department doors across the land” in “a recalibration of power between men and women in the workplace.”

That would encompass other levels of governance such as local councils. Women’s accounts of harassment there struggle to be heard amid the national din. They reinforce the case for mandatory, high-standard and thorough training programs, with a strong legal and educational component, as a matter of course in most institutions and sectors.

Longer-term social as well as political shifts in Britain may still favour that outcome. The slow lessening of large gender imbalances in public life is one. More immediately, political and media contingencies will shape what happens next in Britain over sexual bullying. The scarcest resource in both areas now is attention, focused and distributed alike. Notable here is the story’s veering between extremes: not only had coverage ebbed by mid November as other topics came to seize the agenda, but deluge quickly became near drought.

In politics, Brexit is unrelenting, its latest cliffhanger date a European Union summit on 14–15 December, following a break-not-make one on 4 December, also in Brussels. A debt-laden economy is flatlining, with the chancellor Philip Hammond’s budget on 22 November promising no early lift. Budgets are squeezed as demands mount over health, housing, education, social care and security. The messy cabinet departure of trade minister Priti Patel, and a row over chief whip Gavin Williamson’s replacement of Fallon gave the PM another pummel.

May is sustained mainly by Tory fears of the party’s implosion if she goes — and of a Jeremy Corbyn–led Labour taking Britain sharply leftwards. Governance in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is variously lacking, the latter now also Brexit’s cynosure. There is an everyday, energy-devouring swamp of culture wars. And now a royal wedding, with a culture skirmish all of its own.

In media, the dynamics that unleashed the post-Weinstein torrent continue to drive the global merry-go-round. The connective, even emancipatory potential of a “digital information cascade” is shown by the scandal’s percussive effects in the United States. But political–media velocity, with its thrusting force and proclivity to discard, is now also an estranging, despotic and absurd droit du seigneur. Walter Gate, scandals correspondent of Private Eye, skewers this last aspect in the satirical fortnightly’s 14 November edition: “Reports say a scandal that rocked the nation, laying bare the rotten core of the British establishment and which was splashed all over the newspapers has now been superseded three minutes later by (contd p 94).”

Gillian Tett is surely correct: “[Nobody] is going to put this genie back into the bottle any time soon; or stem the rightful anger of so many young women (and young men) who have wearily, silently suffered for years… Executives be warned: cascades have power.” Weinstein to Westminster may yet be a blockbuster with an upbeat ending. Before the music stops and the lights fade, there will be a lot of work to do. ●

The post From cascade to citadel appeared first on Inside Story.

For decades, life went well. The second world war had left the country devastated and poverty widespread, but Italy generated a sustained economic boom, marrying its design and engineering skills to make it one of the world’s great manufacturing countries. By 1990, the International Monetary Fund estimates, Italy had overtaken Britain and France in GDP per head, and was more or less level with Australia and Germany. Outside the Mezzogiorno, Italy’s Deep South, where crime gangs ruled, unemployment was low and investment was high. They were the years of la dolce vita.

More than that: while the division between north and south was stark, Italy was a land of one people, united by common values: a universal Catholicism, strong family ties, a love of fast cars, soccer, espressos and vino, and a strict gender division that led its women to develop their superb casalinga (home-made) cuisine. Italian food and drink was imitated all over the world, and for most Italians, it was a pretty good place to live.

The long boom saw Italy in a demographic sweet spot: plenty of young and middle-aged workers, relatively few retirees. Now, the reverse is true.

Italian politics was like a soap opera, but it didn’t matter. Constant internal machinations and coups meant that governments usually lasted less than a year: between 1945 and 2001, a total of fifty-seven governments held office. Yet, as some observed, there was really only one government — officially led by a Christian Democrat or one of that party’s allies — and the bureaucracy ran the show. The alternative political force, the Communist Party, was democratic and bore no allegiance to the Soviet Union. In Rome, it was always in opposition, but in regions, and in cities like Bologna, it ran governments often admired as clean and creative.

Fast forward twenty-five years, and Italy is no longer such a good place to live. Economically, it has suffered a quarter-century of stagnation. Many of the industries built up in the postwar period have closed their doors, priced out by lower-wage rivals in China or Eastern Europe. A falling population has reduced construction activity. No Western country, not even Greece, has seen less economic growth for so long. According to the IMF, Italian GDP per head last year was barely higher than it was twenty years ago.

Unemployment is 11.2 per cent nationally, and 20 per cent in the south. Those figures are slowly improving as Europe’s recovery gains momentum, but almost three million Italians are still unemployed, and many others have had to accept part-time work. And when the country as a whole is no better off than twenty years ago, millions of its people have inevitably become worse off.

There are some good reasons for that. Germany and Italy enjoyed similar growth during the postwar boom, but diverged sharply after 1990. Germany specialised in heavy engineering — cars, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and machinery and equipment of all kinds — which have proved remarkably resilient to Chinese competition. Italy’s manufacturing strength was in clothing and textiles, and that couldn’t last. Its fashion houses still have their designers and head offices in Italy, but the labour-intensive manufacturing is done elsewhere.

The long boom saw Italy in a demographic sweet spot: plenty of young and middle-aged workers, relatively few retirees. Now, the reverse is true. Last year, excluding temporary residents, 609,000 Italians died but only 404,000 new ones were born. Women on average bear only 1.4 children in their lifetimes, reflecting the fact that, despite some blurring of traditional gender roles, Italy remains a relatively unattractive place to be a mother. Its population is now the second oldest in the European Union, and its pension bill the second highest.

During the good years, German governments paid their way, whereas Italian governments kept growth high by running up debt: in the five years to 1992, mostly good years, the combined deficit of all levels of government averaged 10.7 per cent of GDP. That couldn’t go on indefinitely. By 1992, the net debt of Italian governments had topped 100 per cent of GDP, easily the highest in the Western world. Profligacy had to give way to austerity, and that has hurt.

The Five Star Movement’s moment of glory came when thirty-nine-year-old Virginia Raggi (above) was elected mayor of Rome in 2016. Alessandro Di Meo/ANSA/AP

With the Christian Democrats discredited by massive corruption scandals, the left dropped the Communist Party tag, and entered government in coalition with centrist parties, to try to turn the ship around. On the right, Italy’s biggest media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, filled the vacuum by entering politics at the head of his own party, Forza Italia (Go Italy!), and swept into power in 2001. He became Italy’s most durable leader since Mussolini, serving nine years in two terms; parliamentary immunity allowed him to avoid prison for tax fraud, and in power he relaxed austerity, enjoyed himself immensely, amused Italians and the world, but provided no economic leadership.

The statistics make for grim reading. Within Western Europe, only Portugal has fewer workers in IT, no country has fewer university graduates, and not even Portugal invests less in research and development. University enrolments have risen sharply in recent years, but largely because youth unemployment is 35 per cent. Italy has not put in place the building blocks of a cutting-edge, innovative economy.

Italian workers are well-paid; the union movement remains strong, and resistance to change is high. That helps explain why much of the job growth is now part-time — and why so many Italians are unemployed. Unemployment varies hugely across Italy as you move south: in the June quarter, it ranged from 3.3 per cent in the German-speaking south Tyrol and 6.1 per cent in the industrial heartland of Lombardy (Milan), to 10.7 per cent in Lazio (Rome) and 22.1 per cent in Sicily. But the 11.2 per cent national figure is almost twice as high as a decade ago.

Italy and Greece are the last European countries to see a real recovery; even Spain’s GDP per head is back to pre-crisis levels. The IMF estimates that Italy’s GDP per head last year was still 10.8 per cent lower than in 2007. One in four Italians say they can’t afford at least one of the nine key measures — keeping up with the rent and utility bills, having a mobile phone, car and washing machine, effective heating, and so on — seen as defining European living standards. This is the only country in Western Europe where house prices are still falling.

Income rankings can be misleading — on GDP per head, Western countries are often as close as cyclists in a peloton — but since 1990 Italy has been overtaken by Japan, Britain, France, Korea, Taiwan, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Iceland and Malta. That is quite a list. The country that a generation ago was one of the richest in Europe has fallen way behind the peloton it used to ride with, and the IMF projects that in coming years it will be overtaken by Spain, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and even Lithuania.

Part of the problem is the sharp division between Italy’s north (and centre) and the south. It’s a division with deep historical roots. At the start of the fourteenth century, historians tell us, Italy was the richest country in Europe, with a dozen cities bigger than London. But of these forerunners of the modern world, only Palermo was in the south. Historically, you read, migration to the south came from North Africa, while migration to the north was from Germany and central Europe. The gap formed a millennium ago has never been bridged.

Even now, northern Italy, from Bologna to the Alps, is part of Europe’s peloton of high-income countries. The European Union’s statistical agency, Eurostat, estimates that GDP per head in that half of Italy is only slightly below that of Germany and Sweden. But people in the north are almost twice as well-off as those living in the southern third of the country: in Naples, Bari, Sicily, Sardinia, Calabria and Abruzzo.

This is a much sharper division than that between east and west Germany, a gap that was highlighted last month when the far-right Alternative for Germany won the second-highest vote in the east. And Italy’s divide remains entrenched despite decades of government efforts to attract (or force) investment to the south. (Central Italy, by and large, lines up with the north. Living standards in Tuscany and Lazio are close to those in the north, while in the smaller provinces of Umbria and Marche, they’re more like the south.)

As Italy has come under more pressure, the gap has widened. Young people have left the south, where youth unemployment is more than 50 per cent, and headed north to find work. Since 2002, the north and the centre have added 1.8 million jobs; the south has lost 188,000. In the decade to June, the unemployment rate roughly doubled throughout Italy. But in the north, it rose from 3.5 per cent to 6.8 per cent; in the centre, from 5.1 per cent to 10 per cent; and in the south, from 10.9 per cent in 2007 to 19.6 per cent.

The bad economic times are one cause of Italy’s malaise. But another is that Italians no longer have their country to themselves.

Unwanted migrants have found their way into Italy for decades. But in this decade that flow has become a flood, as several million real or economic refugees paid people smugglers to ferry them across the Mediterranean. Italy was on the front line: in the three years to 2016, 506,000 uninvited people arrived by boat. As the route via Turkey and Greece closed off, the seas from North Africa to Sicily became the main route for people smugglers and their clients. In the first six months of this year, 80,000 more arrived, until the Italian, Libyan and Tunisian governments took action to stop the boats.

Many of the new arrivals head ultimately to Germany, but others have settled all across Italy. Italian authorities have rejected more than 60 per cent of the claims for refugee status processed to date, ruling that the applicants were not fleeing persecution or danger, but simply seeking a better life. But sending the rejects back to Africa is more easily said than done. By the end of 2015, Italy already had more than 1.1 million temporary residents from Africa and the Middle East — and that did not include clandestine migrants who have not sought state support.

Many African and Middle Eastern migrants, of course, were invited to come, or accepted as genuine refugees: you meet them all over Italy, working in all kinds of jobs and, from what I saw, doing well. But many arrived without the skills to find work in Italy’s very tight labour market. Some of them turn to crime, form street gangs, beg on the streets, or disfigure Italy’s built heritage with graffiti. And because they’re black, or Arab, they stand out. When police charged a twenty-year-old African last month with raping a young teacher at his migrant centre, it was front-page news and the nation was horrified: you open your door to these people, and look what they do!

The mood in Italy has changed sharply. The island of Lampedusa, between Sicily and Tunisia, which made world headlines in 2013 by welcoming the first boatloads of refugees, is now demanding that the Italian government stop the boats. The youth-based Five Star Movement, which once supported the arrivals, has swung around to an anti-migration stance. So has the right-wing coalition, still dominated by the eighty-one-year-old Berlusconi, even though he himself has been barred from office after finally being convicted of tax fraud.

Even the centre-left government, which once sent out navy patrols to help the boats land, has reversed course. Non-government organisations played a crucial role in ensuring the boats a safe passage; but now the Italian government has required them to sign up to a code of conduct ensuring that they do not encourage more boats, and Libya has banned them from its waters. The effect was dramatic: the number of arrivals in August was just 3914, down from 21,294 in August 2016.

The centre-left’s current leader, Paolo Gentiloni, has won European support, in theory, for a plan to rebuild Libya with billions of dollars of aid money — in return for Libya’s doing its best to stop the boats. Maybe it will happen, maybe not; we’ve seen this movie before. One of the surprising things about Italy’s five million temporary residents is that very few of them come from war-torn countries: most of those from Africa and the Middle East come not from Libya or Syria, but from Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Nigeria and Ghana. At first sight, it is hard to see that they can be other than economic migrants.

Even more of them, almost half, come from eastern Europe. Italy hosts almost 1.2 million Romanians, about 5 per cent of that country’s population. It has 450,000 Albanians — 15 per cent of Albania’s population — 235,000 from Ukraine and 135,000 from Moldova. The Romanians speak a language related to Italian and, as EU citizens, they have the right to live there, but these numbers are extraordinarily large, and they don’t include the hundreds of thousands — 178,000 in 2015 alone — who have already taken out Italian citizenship.

Australia is a migrant country, in which mass immigration has mostly worked well. Our policy was gradually liberalised, over decades, creating an extraordinary success story in integration. But Italy until recently was a more or less monocultural society, and many Italians would like it to be that way again. In the long term, the arrival of so many uninvited migrants may work for it, by offsetting what would otherwise have been a steep decline in the population and the workforce. But with three million unemployed, Italy does not need those workers right now. It is another factor in Italy’s malaise.

One more factor is the bizarre nature of Italian politics — a game now played by three sides, or arguably three and a half sides, and under rules that keep changing.

Berlusconi was finally unseated by an internal revolt in 2011. A caretaker government took over and, at the 2013 elections, his coalition of the right was narrowly pipped by a coalition of the left led by what is now called the Democratic Party. But the election was almost stolen by the Five Star Movement — a populist, youth-driven, mostly leftist network created by the ebullient tousle-haired comedian Beppe Grillo. The left won 29.6 per cent of the vote, the right 29.2, and the Grillini 25.6 per cent. Under the rules of the time, the left was awarded a narrow majority of seats; with a slight change in the votes, though, any of them could have ended up running Italy.

Four years later, with an election expected in February, any of them still could. The left is in government, and therefore the right has the wind in its sails. But the economy is improving at last, so the left also has hopes. And while Grillo’s team is going through its own turmoil after the veteran comedian named thirty-one-year-old Luigi de Maio as its candidate to be the next prime minister, it is close enough to snatch victory if the winds shift.

Since 2013, each side has risen and fallen. The Democrats’ first prime minister, Enrico Letta, was overthrown after just ten months by his party’s ambitious secretary, Matteo Renzi. Often described as the Tony Blair of Italian politics — to Australian eyes, he also has something of Paul Keating — Renzi has joined Berlusconi and Grillo as a dominant figure of Italian politics. He quickly set about trying to reach bipartisan agreements with Berlusconi to get reforms through the conservative-controlled Senate, with surprising success. His star rose, and the Democrats won a smashing victory at the 2015 European elections, making him a hero of a European left that was used to losing.

But Renzi oozed arrogance, and didn’t mind offending people — including the voters. His popularity dimmed, and the party’s thin majority disappeared as various leftists broke free, while keeping him in office. Politically, in the end, he died by his own hand: he called a referendum to neuter the power of the Senate, and pledged to resign if it were defeated. And last December, defeated it was. Renzi had no choice but to do as he had promised, and the urbane Paolo Gentiloni, his foreign minister, became the new PM.

The Five Star Movement had its moment of glory at the 2016 local elections when thirty-nine-year-old Virginia Raggi was elected mayor of Rome, and thirty-three-year-old Chiara Appendino, mayor of Turin. But this year it won nothing, while the right won sixteen of the twenty-five biggest cities contested. The polls suggest that if Italy were to vote now, the most likely outcome would be a minority government of the fractious coalition between Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the formerly separatist Northern League, which now wants greater regional autonomy instead, and the Brothers of Italy, which is something like an Italian DLP, and has its strength in the south.

A poll last month for the newspaper la Repubblica reported that the coalition shared 31.6 per cent of the vote, the Five Star Movement 28.1 per cent and the ruling Democrats just 26.8 per cent. Three separate leftist groupings had 8.2 per cent between them, a centre-right party that supports the centre-left government — remember, this is Italian politics — had 2 per cent, and others 3.3 per cent.

Italy used to have a strict system of proportional representation, but so many minor parties won a share of power that the big parties agreed to modify it by giving whoever comes first a heap of bonus seats to create a workable majority. That’s why the Democrats won a majority in 2013 with just 29.6 per cent of the vote.

But no one else liked that outcome, including the Constitutional Court, which ordered the politicians to try again. And under new rules announced two weeks ago after a deal between left and right, only 64 per cent of the seats in the lower house will be decided by the votes. The rest will be allocated to the biggest parties under a formula too complicated for me to understand. But the gist of it is that a party or coalition will need to poll 35 per cent to win a majority.

The right likes the new system because they are clearly on top, with some polls showing them already close to 35 per cent. The left likes it because, with growth and employment rising, the budget unexpectedly back in balance, and Prime Minister Gentiloni rated Italy’s most popular politician, they think their support will grow — especially if they can negotiate a deal with some of the splinter groups on the left. Beppe Grillo and his movement don’t like it, but then, they rarely like anything the government does.

One wild card in the pack is Renzi. Still only forty-two, his retirement from politics did not last long. By March, he was back in the key post of party secretary, and the same poll that found Gentiloni to be easily Italy’s most popular politician also found that, come the election, most Democrat voters want Renzi to replace him as their candidate for prime minister. And that is clearly what Renzi wants too.

A second wild card is the tussle for leadership of the coalition. Forza Italia has never recovered its former strength, and some polls show the Northern League has more support. Matteo Salvini, who has steered the party on a more moderate course after defeating its founder Umberto Bossi to win the leadership in 2013, says he expects to be the next prime minister, while Berlusconi hopes to lure back the president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, to take the job.

One of the curiosities of Italian politics is that of its three dominant figures, Berlusconi and Grillo are banned from being prime minister because of their brushes with the law, while Renzi is able and willing to be PM but is not even in cabinet. None of them is popular with the electorate as a whole.

Renzi’s recent book Avanti (Forward) suggests that, if elected, he would continue on the path of globally oriented economic reform to try to shake up the Italian economy. The Northern League’s priority is to hand back taxes and powers to the regions, reducing the subsidies the north pays to the south — which is anathema to its coalition partner, the Brothers of Italy. The broader direction of a conservative government, let alone one run by the Five Stars, is anyone’s guess.

Italy is still one of the loveliest and most civilised of countries. It’s the world’s fifth-biggest tourist destination, after France, the United States, China and Spain. For those in full-time jobs, life is still good: stylish, tasty, well-paid and lived out in a sunny climate, against a beautiful background of cities and countryside. But more and more Italians are not living that life, and they want it back. •

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What a difference a year can make. Juncker’s 2017 State of the European Union speech was oozing with optimism, patting the European Commission — and, by implication, Juncker himself — on the back for “staying the course.” Referring to the bleak outlook in 2016, the wily centre-right politician from Luxembourg said that the EU had faced a choice this time last year. “Either come together around a positive European agenda or each retreat into our own corners” — code for the clash between those who want greater political unity and those who want the EU to dial back any talk of further integration.

To bolster his argument that the bloc was out of the rut and into the groove, Juncker turned to the good economic tidings. We are five years into an economic recovery, he said, with EU growth of 2 per cent outstripping that of the United States over the past two years. Eight million jobs have been created since the start of this Commission’s mandate in 2014.

What the speech didn’t mention was that Juncker’s strut was about more than just numbers. First, there were the decisive victories of pro-EU forces in both the Netherlands and France earlier this year, which gave the bloc a much-needed shot in the arm; second, the unflinching solidarity of its remaining twenty-seven members in the face of Brexit negotiations has left Britain outmanoeuvred and outclassed. Call it schadenfreude if you prefer — the president’s upbeat disposition is what it is.

But it was the final part of Juncker’s speech, a paean for greater European integration, that was roundly dismissed by the British media as an operation in kite-flying. Always quick to point out what everyone knows, British journalists told us that most of the plan Juncker outlined before parliament was unlikely to get off the drawing board, with dismissive comments by Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte (“I’m not such a romantic”) held up as evidence that national capitals have little appetite for greater integration.

Yet surely kite-flying is the name of the game for a president of the European Commission — particularly when addressing the parliament, an institution that has made an art form out of placing big-picture, pan-European ideas into the never-going-to-happen basket. Everyone knows that the institution that calls the shots is the Council of the EU, representing the national governments of member states, and it isn’t about to hand over more powers to the Commission simply because Juncker got up on the right side of the bed.

Yes, the president’s vision for greater integration may never come to pass — but who cares? What matters is that he has decided to fly this particular kite now, to mark what he sees as a turning point in EU history. Officials in Brussels bristle when English-language media suggest that everything the Commission does is somehow in response to Brexit — the EU has moved on, they assure us. Yet the spring in Juncker’s step at this year’s SOTEU speech (yes, it’s an acronym) is also a recognition of the fact that the bloc’s most recalcitrant player — the one member state that would always push back against any real or perceived mission creep on the part of Brussels — is about to leave the building. This speech was upbeat in part also because it was the first time that Juncker got to turn his gaze to the EU27 — that’s all members except Britain.

Juncker was daring national capitals to think big, to imagine a Europe in which genuine integration could be achieved. Leaders should think beyond the current arrangements, in which cross-border impediments to trade and investment remain in place and national governments continue to pick winners, even as their public statements advocate the importance of removing those impediments.

That the EU27 was the target of Juncker’s speech would also explain why the Commission president used the opportunity to announce the start of trade talks with Australia and New Zealand. “Over the last year, partners across the globe are lining up at our door to conclude trade agreements with us,” Juncker said, before name-checking Australia and adding that he was hopeful that “all of these agreements” would be finalised by the end of his mandate — that’s 31 October 2019.

It’s an ambitious target, although revelations in recent days that the EU is prepared to decouple talks with Australia and New Zealand on a trade deal from a more politically sensitive investment protection agreement suggests the Commission wants to move fast. But, again, it’s about the politics, not just the substance. Why would Juncker use valuable real estate in his speech to mention a possible deal with countries on the other side of the world? Well, because he can. The EU can negotiate trade deals with any country it wants to, whereas Britain will have to wait at least until March 2019, when it leaves the bloc, before it can start dealing with Australia — and that’s assuming its hands don’t remain tied by a transitional trade arrangement with the EU.

What Juncker was telling us was that Boris Johnson, Britain’s foreign secretary, is free to travel the world promising to sign trade deals and reboot the British empire in all its glory once Brexit has taken effect. But until then, he can’t enter into formal negotiations — nor would any country want to, given that the nature of Britain’s post-Brexit trade arrangement with the EU has yet to be clarified. Any talk of the EU’s future trade and investment relationship with Britain will remain on the backburner until the British engage with Brussels on the three issues topping the EU’s agenda: the payment of outstanding liabilities; the future of the land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland; and the rights of both EU citizens living in Britain and British citizens living in the EU.

There’s another point which the kite-flying arguments levelled against Juncker appear to gloss over. The fact that national capitals reject any call for “more Europe” at the expense of member-state sovereignty doesn’t mean that the process of centralising power isn’t continuing, one small and often unreported step at a time. Just last week, an energy reporter working for my news service wrote an article about how proposed EU investment laws would give the Commission a role in overseeing problematic foreign acquisitions of key energy infrastructure. This could see Brussels wedge itself into considerations of European energy security — an area that national governments have long insisted should remain their prerogative.

This is how the EU rolls. Just think of the EU’s foreign affairs department, the European External Action Service, which continues to grow in influence, even though foreign affairs remains the closely guarded domain of national governments. Don’t let the big statements and kite-flying distract you: Europe is centralising, no matter what national leaders say about Juncker’s speech. Security threats, geopolitical considerations in Ukraine and pressure on European energy supplies started to push EU members to consider setting aside reservations about the loss of national sovereignty. Even defence, the last policy bastion of the old European nation-state, is taking on super-national dimensions as southern EU countries grapple with the impact of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants and demand help from Brussels.

So, Juncker’s vision thing is also an attempt to articulate a big picture around a centralising drive that is already under way. “For me, Europe is more than just a single market,” he told the assembly — ignoring, for once, the heckling of the UK Independence Party parliamentarians. “More than money, more than the euro. It is about the values.”

Defining those values won’t be easy — and many of Juncker’s social-democratic motherhood statements, the call for a “union of equality” and the warning that “there can be no second-class workers,” may be met with some scepticism, particularly in northern Europe. Yet you’ve got to admire the chutzpah of a politician laying out such a bold vision when just a year ago the EU was on life support. “Helmut Kohl and Jacques Delors taught me that Europe only moves forward when it is bold,” Juncker said, referring to the former German chancellor and the former French president of the European Commission. “So, let’s throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the harbour. And catch the trade winds in our sails.” •

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