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Vertigo in Europe
The past few days have seen so much chaos in Europe that I can barely keep up with it. Three critical elections, or sets of elections, ahead: The Dutch go to the polls tomorrow; the Turks will vote on constitutional reform on Sunday; and the two-round French presidential election takes place in April and May.
As you probably heard, last week Erdoğan called the Germans Nazis. The Dutch then barred Turkish ministers from campaigning in favor of their referendum in Rotterdam — Turkish expats can vote in Turkish elections — ostensibly on the grounds that their visit would cause unrest in the days prior to the Dutch election. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoğlu insisted upon causing unrest anyway, daring the Dutch to stop him from coming, which they did, and for emphasis the Dutch sicced the dogs on rioting pro-AKP Turks. Erdoğan then called the Dutch Nazis. Everyone in Turkey and the Netherlands went nuts, which was precisely the point of this whole charade: On the Turkish side, the goal (clearly planned in advance, and announced) was to mobilize their shock troops in the Netherlands, stage those scenes, stir up nationalist passions in Turkey, use these to pass the referendum, and succeed in giving Erdoğan all the power, forever; on the Dutch side, the goal was to persuade the voters that Prime Minister Mark Rutte can be just as tough on Turks as Party-of-One Geert Wilders — though everyone’s a bit worried now that he overshot and just persuaded the Dutch to vote for Wilders.
If this explanation went by too fast for you, Aaron Stein, senior resident fellow of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, offered a running commentary as this unfolded: It should help with the details:
1. Govt X refuses to allow govt Y to hold a rally.
2. Govt Y changes rally location to a consulate, violating its own law.
3. Govt X then refuses to grant landing rights to FM from govt Y.
4. Govt Y calls govt X a Nazi and threatens sanctions.
5. Govt X gets offended.
6. Minister from Govt Y will drive to consulate in Govt X, violating own laws, but circumventing landing rights kerfuffle.
7. Govt X closes the road to consulate.
8.
#TurkeyHolland2017 (Will update as#breaking developments in total insanity continue).9. Minister from Govt Y is driving from Govt Z, which also blocked rally, but allowed Govt Y to break its own law to campaign at consulate.
10. Govt Y also called govt Z a Nazi, but had a phone call to smooth things over
#TurkeyHollandGermany2017.11.
#Breakingupdate! FM from govt Y reminds govt X that, were it not for goodwill from a now dead empire, it would not have tulips!12. Govt Y trolls allied with party behind rally proposals trolling govt x’s president on twitter and, mistakenly, govt F’s president.
13. Govt F’s president has the same name as Govt X, resulting in trolling confusion.
14.
#Breaking: Minister from Govt Y traveling from Govt Z has been stopped by police forces in Govt X.15. Govt X is calling the police blockade a quarantine, not a blockade, as the latter would be an act of war.
16. Confirmed contact along the contact line, RUMINT in govt X says a fine may be coming. Escalation ladder.
17.
#Breaking: Police forces from Govt X escorting govt minister from Y to the border with country Z.18. Quarantine maintained, whilst remembering that adults run these two countries (allegedly).
19. Protests at quarantine line, with tensions now threatening to spark a new front in the
#Tulipcrisis.20. President of country F still being trolled accidentally, threats coming to incorporate the wrong govt into long dead empire.
21. Govt X stops journalists from govt Y’s official agency at the border, betraying values of the union govt Y pretends to want to join.
22. FM from govt Y touches down in govt F for a speech. President of govt F still being trolled accidentally.
23. Govt Y basically kicks out Govt X’s ambassador.
#Tulipcrisis deepens.24. State backed journalists from govt Y defy govt X, back on the quarantine line giving updates.
25. Fog of war. Tweet #22 is partially incorrect. Trolling on-going, but trip to govt F will take place in future.
26. 2nd and 3rd quarantine lines open up in Govt y to protect/pressure Govt X diplomats, now 3 points of escalation in play
#tulipcrisis.27. Minister from Y returns from Z to X and now may be arrested in the latest farce that is the
#tulipcrisis.28. Update to #25. Tweet 22 was accurate
29. And an arrest.
30. Y’s bodyguards disarmed, were carrying without permission from X.
31: This is about a political party rally in a third country, held at a consulate that by law is not allowed to hold political rallies.
32. Minister is still in her car, raising prospect of being towed to Z.
33. Won’t be towed. Moved to a new vehicle and headed back to Z
34. RUMINT. Lek River Shield being discussed.
35. Minister from Y back in Z after X escorted her with cars and a helicopter.
(I think Aaron at that point he remembered he had research to do, and gave up.) Anyway, it got worse from there.
EU and NATO officials have been pleading for calm. Uninspired by these importunings, the Turkish government barred the Dutch ambassador, closed Turkish airspace to official Dutch flights, and called the Dutch Nazis a few more times for good measure.
Meanwhile the Turkish foreign minister visited Metz, in France, to campaign, where he called the Netherlands “the capital of fascism.” As far as I know — French journalists aren’t exactly jonesing to go to Metz, it’s middle of nowhere, so there wasn’t much reporting about what actually happened — the visit otherwise passed without incident. But it set off a round of pre-election competition among the French presidential candidates and pundits to see who could deplore in the most arduous and melodramatic terms the decision to let Cavusoğlu into France in the first place. A leading entry, from Nicolas Dupont-Aignan of Figaro:
I am ashamed of France today. I am ashamed that our government, our President of the Republic, is organizing a political meeting for a Turkish dictator who despises the Europeans, who threatens us and who treats Madame Merkel like a Nazi. I do not accept our treating a friendly country like Nazis, it is indecent. That France lies down in this way is pitiful.* This is the long continuation of a policy of national resignation. Away with Monsieur Hollande, urgently!**
*He said “se couche,” which can also means “get in bed,” so the phrase had a somewhat sexual implication. Tricky to translate.
**Mind you, Monsieur Hollande isn’t running.
Some quick thoughts. First, may I direct you to an excellent explainer on the Turkish referendum in question, which is now quite a bit more likely to pass? That outcome could not be less in the interests of anyone in Europe (not least the Turks themselves), so the lack of strategic foresight in the Netherlands is notable.
Second, let’s reflect on the way we arrived at this impasse. From 2002-2010, the Netherlands was the single largest source of foreign direct investment in Turkey, making it by far the largest source of FDI per capita. But these massive inflows of FDI played an extremely significant role in allowing Erdoğan to consolidate power. Few asked, back then, whether this was an outcome to be desired. That it wasn’t — and that it was an obvious strategic catastrophe for Europe in the making — was pretty clear to anyone paying attention.
During the same period, American and European politicians and pundits, the Dutch in particular, offered lavish support and encouragement to AKP, insisting Turkey was “liberalizing.” Now it was, in the sense that it became much more welcoming of FDI. Otherwise, it was not. To the contrary. The warning signs were ignored in a miasma of greed, wishful thinking, and intellectual laziness. If you don’t believe me when I say, “This was predictable long ago, but it was impossible to get anyone to pay attention,” check out my desperate attempts to get anyone’s attention, right here on Ricochet. And if you think this international incident is about anything other than Turkish and Dutch domestic politics and their simultaneous races to the populist bottom, ask yourself why no one raised any objections then to that democracy-destroying constitutional referendum — or to the Turkish politicians who campaigned for it in Europe back then.
(ITYSYFF interlude over.)
But this isn’t even the biggest story that broke in the past few days. A hard Brexit is on: The UK plans to trigger Article 50 imminently. This has prompted Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to announce she’ll seek another Scottish independence referendum, this on the grounds that Britain is dragging Scotland out of the EU against its will and on terms it doesn’t want.
A horrified Theresa May reproached Sturgeon and her party: “The tunnel vision that the SNP has shown today is deeply regrettable. It sets Scotland on a course for more uncertainty and division, creating huge uncertainty,” she admonished.
So let’s recap: The British argument is that they must leave the EU to regain their sovereignty, but Scotland must remain in the UK lest it set Scotland on a course for division and uncertainty.
It doesn’t add up, alas, and everyone knows it.
Then it got worse: Sinn Fein then announced that it too wanted a referendum on Northern Ireland leaving the UK, this “as soon as possible.” Now, Scotland will be (reasonably) fine either way, if impoverished and diminished, but Northern Ireland is apt to pay the price of Brexit in blood. “The Ulstermen,” as a friend who doesn’t wish to be quoted wrote on Facebook yesterday, “will lose their minds. Everything that was supposedly over will reignite.” He’s right.
Spain, meanwhile, tried and banned from politics the former head of Catalonia from public office for staging an informal referendum on independence. “The case,” reports France24, “comes as separatist political parties in Catalonia, a wealthy region with its own language and distinct culture, are pushing to hold another vote on breaking away from Spain in September.”
(Is anyone seeing yet why I don’t welcome the fracturing of Europe or believe its dissolution will achieve the happy and peaceful end state its advocates claim? It’s okay if you don’t. Just file these thoughts away for future reference.)
Meanwhile, in a surprisingly little-noted news item, the Russian Duma is proposing a law to give citizenship to ethnic Russians the world around based on the “right of the soil,” as they put it (or as I understand it, from Google Translate). If you’re a blood kin of a Russian or speak Russian, you too can be a Russian! Those of you whose minds tend to dwell unpleasantly on historic precedent can easily imagine where that might go. And the British intelligence services called an emergency summit with Britain’s political parties to warn them they’re at risk of the next general election being disrupted by Russian cyber-attacks.
Russian cyber-attacks on Europe continued apace.
What else? Yesterday, Hungarian President János Áder, an ally of Reigning Authoritarian Loon Viktor Orbán, was re-elected. By a large majority.
And what else? Oh yes, the French election went full-on anti-Semitic, albeit only for a day, though that was enough to make quite a number of us here truly ill:
That stuff, those ideas, these images, just will not die. And they’re reborn in chaos, so let’s hope this all settles down after these elections, and hope for the election of politicians who don’t themselves long for more chaos.
Anyway, that’s the news. (tl;dr: No statesmen, no foresight, no vision, no adults in charge, everything spinning apart.) All I can say is that if the world keeps dragging itself toward hell so effortfully, it will probably succeed in getting there.
I sure hope everyone sobers up.
Published in General
I think the hard question about Turkey is how much influence we preserve by having the IN NATO. I assume there are weapons sales. There are obviously bases (though we have to beg to use them strategically, I know). And I would guess we still have strong personal ties in the military hierarchy. How much of that can we use for good? And how much of it do we lose if we abandon our NATO alliance with them? As an aside, how much does it shake the rest of the alliance if Turkey is abandoned and what are the consequences of that? I don’t know the answers to these question, but they’re important and not simple.
We had a similar problem here in the United States. It took two big wars to establish the principle that it was OK for the United States to break away from England but that the individual states couldn’t break away from the United States. But I don’t think it would have been better to moosh everything together into a totalitarian one-world government, which is where this leads if you go to the other extreme. The world is a messy place.
Yeah, I’m still not getting it. The boy-band fervour of the metropolitan elites puts me off, of course, but he does seem to combine the less appealing qualities of Tony Blair, Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau. And I’m not sure of the practical usefulness of just calling a spade a spade (or a Putin a monster) if there is no plan, will or desire to actually do anything about it.
Admittedly he gets lots of points for not being Le Pen or Hamon, but shouldn’t there be something there?
Wars between great powers cannot be a thing of the past. Humans do not work that way. They may not be total wars, since wiping each other out will be deadly. It is a pity we don’t have colonies for proxy wars.
Centralization may make sense for France and other countries with a napoleonic legal code and tradition, and a civil service as schooled as the French, but the break up of the EU is not the break up of Europe and the break up or loosening of centralization in the UK isn’t necessarily a crisis as long as there is open trade among the parts and agreement on national security issues, or coordination through NATO or an Atlantic alliance. The EC was just fine, better and more stable and healthier than the EU wasn’t it? The optimum size for private goods markets is the whole world and close proximities but the optimum size for public or collective goods depends entirely on the good itself. If the US Federal government ceased being a regulatory and nanny state so that the States did these things on their own or, better yet in most cases, not at all, it wouldn’t be a break up it would be a decentralization. That would be good for us. Would that not be true for other common law countries? The most important reasons for centralization is national security and to defend against micro protectionism. I’m not sure that more autonomous European nations would be weaker and less decisive in their foreign and defense policy than this rolling fiction of the EU’s.
I’m getting a severe migraine. Like I just had a huge rasberry slurpy and used a double straw to drink it too fast.
Regards,
Jim
Today’s WSJ has an opinion piece from writer Leon de Winter: The Dutch find Welfare and Immigration Make Uneasy Mix.
Key points:
Dewinter omits: “Among the jobs the native Dutch would not and will not do is to have children at a rate that would keep their population at a sustainable level. The only segments of Dutch society that have a total birth rate above replacement level are Turkish and Moroccan immigrants and their children. Native Dutch are leaving; skilled European immigration is insufficient to sustain Dutch culture.”
Today’s Polishing the Deck Chairs on the Titanic award goes to de Winter.
Why would it work? That much power in the hands of a few over a whole continent? It’s not working now, even in its current state. Comment 26 – Bryan Stephens makes sense – they haven’t learned from their past mistakes and are repeating them. Choosing a better direction / government system, a system that works has to keep working in good times and bad – agree. But they aren’t one country – their history, culture, governing preferences, economies are all different. Linked together, one fails – spreads to two and then dominoes. If the goal was a United Europe so it couldn’t be attacked again, I’m not sure it could defend itself even now. And they have all the other problems that “unity” brought. Throw in unmonitored corruption, and it’s worse.
Putin IS a monster. Don’t ever let yourself believe otherwise. Russia’s economy is only fuel and arms-dealing. Once the Black Sea Fleet gets access to the Bosphorous– the world is doomed.
Trump will be able to frack Russia’s economy pretty well. Let’s hope he uses the power wisely.
Peace in Northern Ireland came precisely because both sides compromised their sovereignty – being within the frame of the EU made that easier to achieve. If the U in UK meant anything that should have been a factor in Brexit, and for many people I suspect it wasn’t.
Also: peace in Ulster meant less Irish suffering but also fewer British soldiers killed, fewer bombs in the London Underground, less money wasted on policing neighbours who thought they were in different countries – the Troubles were not all ‘over there’ – they deeply impacted the UK.
None of this directly addresses the issue of rights, but rather responsibilities.
Ok Clair you are being disgenerousness on the Scottish vote. You don’t see any issues with people abusing their power and when they don’t like a result repeat until we get the results they want then never vote on the issue again. We have seen this over and over again when it comes to the EU. Keep holding elections or ignore them until the result of more consolidated power is achieved. Brexit is the first successful major vote that is in the opposite direction of power consolidation since the break-up of the USSR. You can’t hold an election every few years to completely change your system of goverment just because you don’t like the previous result, that is why I am against it. However the same can’t be said for the Northern Ireland vote. They have not voted before so I don’t see any issues holding the vote to join Ireland if they rest of Ireland want them.
Plus the SNP are a bunch of hypocrite. They claim its about Scottish self rules but they will have way more power over their own laws being part of the British Parliament than they ever will in the EU Parliament. All they want is to get in on the action with being one of the elite’s that helps set’s up a communist dictatorship to run all of Europa without having to worry about any of those pesky voters.
Glad to have read this on a day I wasn’t already as depressed as usual. If I recall correctly, a good bit of today was presciently foreshadowed by Claire in “Menace in Europe.” Even if there are “sober” near-term political outcomes as Claire hopes, and Europeans refrain from civil (and un-civil) wars, it is difficult to conjure a hopeful future for an entire continent which has been voting with its genes (refraining from having children) for its own extinction for several generations already. A shrinking European population coupled with withering – abandonment, actually – of foundational beliefs is already baked into the brioche, regardless of present populism or future immigration. And, as Claire suggests in the subtitle of “Menace in Europe,” the implications for the US are not insignificant. The same decadent ethos has overtaken about half the population here and the present sense of relief (of some) may well be short-lived. Vertigo can be contagious.
My burden brings all the boys to Rudyard.
are…. are you hitting on me?
Take up the White Man’s burden, The savage wars of peace
Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease
And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought
Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought
I can see you’re on it, You want me to teach
the techniques that freaks these boys
It can’t be bought
Just know, thieves get caught
Watch if you’re smart
The Turkish and Moroccan origin population in the Netherlands is somewhere between 6 and 10%. I’ve seen 2008 data indicating subreplacement total fertility for these populations, 2008 data indicating above replacement TFRs, and claims made that in the last few years the trend that produced ISIS has led to higher fertility and younger female age for the first baby. My curiosity was piqued because based on my quick scan, birth demographics for the last 7 years or so are hard to get at though I haven’t spent enough time trying to know if my impression is correct.
But if you ran the rest of the Dutch population assuming TFR was 1.7% (ideally adjusting for the Turkish and Moroccan population, and assuming that their TFR is 2.3, and population is between 6% and 10% of the Dutch population, you’d probably have best and worse case scenarios. It sounds to me as though Erdogan is trying to push the Turks in the Netherlands to higher fertility and younger first child; culture is the most important determinant in the critical birthrate. Mosques, barracks… somebody once quoted something about that in a speech.
In one sense, yes, because in the most primitive of emotional ways, “home” for me is wherever my Daddy is. And my mom, of course, no longer lives in the house in Seattle I’d always thought of as “home.” (It never stops feeling weird and surprising to me that she’s not still there, padding about the kitchen in her slippers and folding the laundry.)
I feel very “at home” in France in that day-to-day life is familiar to me; my homing beacon is now set to my neighborhood here, which took a while after I left Istanbul. But now, if I leave France, I look forward to coming “home” to my cats and my books, my own kitchen and my bathroom with all my stuff where I can find it, etc …
But I’ve felt the change in the mood in France. Paris has always been a city that attracted people from around the world, but it’s become palpably smaller, more inward-looking, in recent years. I do sense around me the growth of the sentiment that people like me — immigrants, expats, foreigners — don’t belong, that we should all “go home.” This inescapably means I have to keep an emotional distance. I can’t fully trust this country not to turn on me and tell me, “This isn’t your home.” So it isn’t my home.
America will always be home in a deep way no other place could be. My childhood memories, my native language, my identity — those are all American. But above all, “home” is America from about 1976 to, say, 1989. Every way it’s changed since then seems strange. So the America of my childhood and young adulthood, above all, is home. But it’s a home I can’t visit. It’s inside me, instead.
Claire, are you trying to tell us the French are, of all things, moody?
I would laugh at this but alas the ennui of my immense intellect has rendered such qualitative and jejune emotions useless. Now all I can do is frown, sigh, and blow smoke rings.
My bad. Just trying to cheer up the thread.
Play me out boys!
They most certainly did. Living in England then was my first experience of living in a country where terrorism felt like a real risk. (Even though the US had by then experienced plenty of it, it somehow it felt much more remote and impossible. I suppose because I’d never known anyone who’d been personally affected by it.) Once an undetonated bomb was found behind the books in the biggest bookstore in Oxford. I and everyone else I knew had walked right past it many a time, because it had been there for a while. Since no one was hurt, it barely made the news, but it was the first time I’d really though, “Wow. It was just luck that people who were trying to kill me didn’t succeed.” The effect on ordinary people of the Deal Barracks bombing, especially, was huge. During that time I dated for a while a lieutenant in the British Navy. That attack affected everyone, but of course those in the military and their families were the biggest target. It changed the way they had to live, in their own country. In England then the idea that the UK could break up was literally unthinkable, in the sense that I never once heard anyone mention this as a possibility, and I’m sure if I said, “This could happen within our lifetimes” I’d have been dismissed as a loon. The only debate was about how much violence should be used to suppress the IRA. (I was often told it could be suppressed immediately, but that it would be indecent and un-British to do just whack them all without a trial.) There was never any debate about whether they should just wave goodbye to Ulster. Ideas can go from “ridiculous” to “mainstream” very quickly, I’ve learned, much faster than I’d have dreamt at the time.
Cato Rand (View Comment):
Yeah, on a scale of 1-10 in “serious diplomatic crises,” with 1 being maybe the Salmon fight with Canada in 1997 and 10 being the Cuban Missile Crisis, I’d say this is about a 3.5 or a 4. It could just settle down, but it could also trigger some really awful outcomes — we could easily get to a 6-7 at this rate by the end of the week, though I’m hoping the election today dampens down the passion. Reportedly in NATO HQ they’re talking about Suez:
Several times a year, probably, but not on any given day.
If it stopped there and were achieved peacefully, like the separation of the Czechs and the Slovaks, no. But that kind of divorce is as rare in politics as a painless divorce in marriage: It happens, but it’s sure not the most common scenario. Once this process is touched off, my worry is that the evidence of all of European history suggests we could quickly get something closer to the breakup of Yugoslavia. And even if it doesn’t descend into savagery, the cost — economic and human — will be huge. Europe’s ethnicities and nationalities are a very well-mixed salad; look what’s happening now to the European citizens who moved to the UK in entirely good faith, lawfully, who married, had families, made lives and careers for themselves, and now have no other home: it’s possible they’ll in the end be allowed to stay, but they’ve suddenly had this all called into question; they’re in an agonizing situation. As are their families. British citizens in the EU likewise made careers, homes, families for themselves in the EU, entirely lawfully, and now they have no idea what’s to become of their lives. The EU citizens in Britain now have no democratic representation: No one has an incentive anymore to protect their interests. This would be true across the EU, wherever it was broken up, at this point.
And many of the areas with the strongest “independence” movements are the most ethnically and politically divided (and have long been). The histories of violence in these places don’t give us much rational cause to presume separation would be achieved peacefully or would stay peaceful, with the rights of minorities and those who didn’t wish to separate adequately protected. A short list of potential separatist flashpoints: Greeks in Albania, Bornholm in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, the Basques, the Bretons, Corsica (that will be bloody for sure), Trieste, the Åland Swedes in Finland, Occitans (sounds impossible, I know, but the breakup of the UK sounded just as impossible not long ago), Flanders in Belgium, Walloons in Belgium, the Republika Srpska (blood all over the place, for sure), Croatians in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Istrians in Croatia (and a few other ethnicities I can’t remember or spell), Moravia, Czech Silesians, Franconia and Schleswig-Holstein, the Friulians — okay, now people are laughing, but you shouldn’t: Think how many micro-states we’ve already got in Europe, and how recently Germany and Italy were consolidated into nations from places that had no larger identity beyond the city or region. And remember that a dialect is just a language with an army: we’ve got a lot of actual languages without armies (for now) here — Sardinia, Sicily, South Tyrol, the Serbs in Kosovo and the Gora region, Russians in Latvia, Limburgs in the Netherlands, Upper Silesia, some regions in Hungary that I can’t remember how to spell, Vojvodina, Hungarians in Slovakia, Aragon and Andalusia, the Canary Islands, Valencia, Danes in Sweden, Wales, Orkney and Shetland … and there are more, I’m sure, that I’m not remembering. People seem to think this process has a natural endpoint in stable, familiar, and democratic state entities, forgetting how new and how artificial those entities are, historically speaking, how recent the introduction of liberal democracy here really is, how many of Europe’s borders have been revised and revised again by war, and how much ethnic mingling there’s really been.
Yes, that’s my biggest concern. If you want to conquer Europe, the best strategy is to divide it.
Yes, and we’ve also got Californians saying the same thing, and Texans, but I think they’re wrong to believe that they’d be better off on their own. The EU has, indeed, like our federal government, screwed up badly in a number of arenas, leading to this sentiment. I don’t think anyone would argue. But the EU was designed to be a solution to the problem of intra-European fratricide, a problem that characterizes its history, rather than being an exception to it. That problem had only grown more lethal in each successive iteration.
The EU, it seems to me, for all its flaws, is the only idea that really makes sense to solve that problem. I’m not sure that it can succeed: There’s a great deal, too, working against its practicality and feasibility, as everyone knows. But improving it — based on what we’ve learned from its recent failures — seems a better idea to me than “burn it all to the ground and let the chips fall where they may.”
It’s certainly not a more unreasonable idea than India, which has even more languages, cultures, and religions. No one looks at India and thinks, “The way to solve this country’s problems is to break it up into its component language groups and ethnicities.” (Or rather, quite a few people have — Khalistan seemed like a great idea to some — but they’ve been a curse to India’s growth and stability.)
Well, if you’re gonna worry — do it with good music is what I always say:
And now we ride the circus wheel / With your dark brother wrapped in white
Says it was good to be alive / But now he rides a comet’s flame
And won’t be coming back again / The Earth looks better from a star
That’s right above from where you are / He didn’t mean to make you cry
With sparks that ring and bullets fly / On empty rings around your heart
The world just screams and falls apart
But now we must pick up every piece
Of the life we used to love
Just to keep ourselves
At least enough to carry on
And here’s where your mother sleeps / And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentations in the sheets / Where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore
And it’s so sad to see the world agree / That they’d rather see their faces fill with flies
All when I’d want to keep white roses in their eyes
A low bar, Madame.
The difference between India and Kakania is that in India the people have a vote that matters – however corrupt the system and however difficult it is to take the trash out of the bar. That gives them a common destiny, if you will, and “makes” the nation.
That vote, imho, is what makes India “more or less” stable while the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke into its component parts. They arguably had a Catholic cultural underpinning and a common colonial history the way India has a Hindu commonality and the Raj, so it is something other than cultural and historical things in common.
The question is: does a European’s vote for the European Parliament matter in the same way an Indian’s vote for the Lok Sabha does? Clearly not – and Europe will not move towards being a nation, the way in India has, till it does.
Which is fine. Maybe they don’t want to be? What they have is good enough – though question: are they really ruled by unaccountable bureaucrats, or are the bureaucrats appointed by elected politicians? It seems like an important distinction.
And the EU betrayed that purpose by expanding too wide and going too deep. Ninety percent – perhaps 99% – of the solution was provided with the original grouping of France, (West) Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. In 1952.
Intra-African, -American, -Asian and -Oceanian fratricide pretty much characterizes the history of those continents, too.
What also helps me for worrying is examining the inverse of our predictions and realizing we can find reasons to panic no matter what. First off, like I said in that Malcolm X piece — the most vehement critiques on race or background are often by those who have a mixed ancestry or cultural upbringing within. Wilders may just flop — and hard — which would be disastrous for other populist campaigns around Europe.
Nationalist candidates are opportunists who borrow tomorrow’s victories and think they’ll set up trade with similar leaders. A Dutch refusal of Geert would slow or possibly stop that European pendulum as trade options would look significantly dimmer against a marginally diminished but emboldened by anger EU. Leaving the US dangling in both waters it made hostile by attacking trade partnerships.
Emphasis added.
The irony here is that, as a woman and a Jew, you spend so much time denying the impact and danger of the Islamization of France while speculating that you will be the victim of French nationalism.
Ever thought that such obsessive denial might encourage the French nationalism you fear?
Ever thought that it might also encourage France to sacrifice you to those Muslims?
There is an old saying to the effect that Europe will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust. The Holocaust put the moral standing of all European countries in question. In the intervening years, Europeans have been trying to regain their moral standing by knocking the Jews’ down.
Indulging Islamist fantasies about Jews helps the Europeans kill three birds with one stone. Via self-deceit of the Europeans, it knocks down the moral standing of the Jews; it also helps complete the Final Solution so that the Judenrein Europeans will not even have to worry about remembering the Holocaust in context; and it delays the ultimate conflict between Islam and Judenrein Europe.
Certainly those in London on 7 July 2005 won’t forget the real risk of terrorism.
So the lesson of the NI peace process is that the terrorists have won.
This phrase is part of the problem. There are no EU citizens, and the no longer disguised attempt to create them is why the current unrest is taking place. The French want to be French. The Germans want to be German. The Czechs want to be Czech. And so on, and so on. If anything will lead to war in Europe, it is the attempt to ignore and/or suppress this.
Actually, if you want to conquer Europe just tell the governments it’s to keep the peace, and they’ll sign their sovereignty away without a fight. LePen, Wilders, Farage, Grillo, etc. were just the first to realize they were being conquered.