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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
It has become empirically proven, I think, in the US that unaccountable bureaucrats appointed by politicians so attenuates the link between votes and arbitrary, suffocating and even malicious criminal rules, as to make it nugatory: no longer a representative republic, but an administrative tyranny. Under Obama, particularly, agencies acted as though they answer only to the allied political party which appointed them. Add to the installed ideologues droves of political patronage hacks and you get things like a weaponized IRS. The proof: STILL, no one has been held accountable for acts that make the archetype political scandal – “Watergate” – look paltry by comparison. When citizens feel under actual siege by a hostile culture , the anger leads to desperate voting… as in despair. Understandable, perhaps?
“Intra-European fratricide” is the result of a nearly unbroken post-Roman history of Frenchmen and Germans trying to take over the continent. The EU is just the latest iteration of this; just look at who currently dominates. They’ve determined that they can take over much more efficiently through rhetoric rather than force of arms, and the people are waking up to this.
Anybody with an attention span greater than a goldfish’s would note, based on experience, that terrorism can, and has, come from a number of directions.
That is the point of having a State with some sort of institutional (and hopefully popular) memory at its disposal.
Today’s Enemy du jour is all very well and politically convenient and all that, but then there’s history and reality – which make things less straightforward and black and white but arguably more illuminating. If terrorism matters as more than a proxy.
Though I’ll admit goldfish have fewer disturbing thoughts than intelligent human beings, and there are things that recommend their approach to some.
It’s an interesting question, but I wonder if it has ever worked to have a system of bureaucrats appointed by politicians. Or anything appointed by politicians.
In the United States some of us wish we could go back to a system where Senators are chosen by state legislatures rather than direct vote. But there were reasons that people found the old system to be unsatisfactory (not that I am very familiar with the issues of the time).
Our electoral college has turned out to be an excellent way of apportioning votes, but the original plan to elect politicians who would elect a president? I’m skeptical whether that would have worked well.
I have a hard time coming up with success stories in which systems of politicians-appointing-politicians were used, especially after watching the EU. Maybe our system of choosing federal judges? Not sure. Maybe with enough checks and balances it can work.
This may have been said, as I have not been on Ricochet for the last few days, Erdogan now blames the Dutch for Srebrenica what a hypocritical POS the leader of the nation that committed the Armenian genocide blames the Dutch for Srebrinica there is a place in hell waiting for you Erdogan.
I was just listening to Zombie now Sinn Fein want an independance referendum the only thing that can lead to is the trouble restarting again. Europe seems to be entering a new era of violence which will cause shockwaves around the globe.
Claire, you have spoken relatively frequently about the negatives of Brexit and problems precipitating demise of the EU. But at then same time, it appears that the EU is intractably damaged and confounded by the common currency issue. How do you resolve that problem?
If the bureaucrats are permanently employed once appointed, it tends to become a distinction without a difference.
Good question. I’ll make it the subject of a post.
My head is spinning – Thank you for your report. The hopeful feeling I experienced when the Berlin Wall fell is a faded memory.
Well, no. Significant majorities throughout the EU support being in it, actually.
And support for the EU has risen across Europe, including in the UK, since the Brexit vote. It’s grown in five of the six largest member states: the UK, France, Germany, Poland and Italy. The only large state that’s recently seen a fall in support for the EU is Spain. A majority in Britain now say they’d vote to stay in.
And there most certainly are EU citizens: EU citizenship has been a reality since the Maastricht Treaty, which was signed in 1992. Every day, 1.6 million people in Europe commute across European borders just to go to work. Millions upon millions of people have by now built lives, careers, marriages, and families around this legal and political structure and their EU citizenship.
Looks like they should have had that Brexit vote earlier if they wanted it to pass.
It’s obviously time for CB to abandon Europe and return to the order and certainty of life in the US.
Claire,
Polls can be easily manipulated by those holding them and even with the most unbiased polls the track record recently is of inaccuracy compared to actual election results. However, let’s not discuss just the popular emotions of the moment. I would like to ask you a fundamental question.
What rational reason does a citizen of Great Britain, a nation in which they have been able to vote for a parliament with the sole power to legislate for 400 years, have to give up all legislative authority to a body which allows the citizen to vote for a powerless rubber stamp parliament and no vote whatsoever for the executive? What reason aside from the blind trust in the kindness bureaucrats.
Let me make it even more clear. I am asking this question, not in reference to globalism vs. nationalism. If the E.U. parliament had sole power to legislate and the E.U. executive was elected either directly or by a parliamentary majority then my question would be mute. If the E.U. would make these reforms and then make its case without resorting to endlessly complex legalisms destroying all transparency I might even consider supporting it myself. I suspect we would both be waiting for an eternity for these changes.
Finally, I would not advise underestimating Thersa May. She is intent on a course of action and I think she will finish the job.
Regards,
Jim
As the polls booted it big-time going into both the Brexit vote and the US election, what have they changed to make them more reliable now?
They’ve been updated!
You know, I just do not recall writing this.
weird, huh?
Known bug. If you select text in one comment and hit “quote” in another, it messes up the result.
Ah, thank you. Now I feel calmer.
There you go Claire. Guile from Street Fighter lost. I predict Le Pen will falter now as well — but ain’t no one listening to me anyhow.
What makes you say that any citizen has ever been asked to give up “all legislative authority” to what I assume you mean is the EU parliament? That’s just not the way the EU works. And it particularly isn’t the way British law works: In a key case called HS2 Action Alliance Ltd v Secretary of State for Transport, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected that idea:
As for what positive, rational reasons a UK citizen would have to be in the EU, there are many: freedom of movement, for example, throughout the EU. That’s the difference between being able to live and work only in Florida and being able to live and work anywhere in the United States. That’s a huge increase in lifetime economic opportunities. Free movement of services: You can open businesses anywhere you want throughout Europe. Free movement of goods: a massive, tariff-free export market for any producer. Free movement of capital: The City of London has grown phenomenally wealthy thanks to this.
Diplomatically, the advantage of being part of the EU is that the UK is a small country. It’s population is about 70 million people. The population of China is 1.4 billion. The individual EU countries are relatively powerless, diplomatically, on their own. But together they’re a powerful negotiating bloc, one that not only has a better chance of negotiating favorable economic deals for its citizens, but of defending a Western conception of human rights.
And finally, like the United States, Britain has never been able to isolate itself from the Continent’s wars; the EU is ultimately a peace project. Inside the EU, Britain would have had a powerful voice in shaping it to best serve that purpose; outside, it leaves the EU unbalanced, dominated by Germany, and less likely to serve that aim. This is why Churchill called for a United States of Europe, in which he envisioned Britain playing a key role. This was his argument for it, in 1946:
I don’t see any reason to think the circumstances that led him to that judgment have changed. The EU is in dire need of reform, to be sure, and I have confidence this will happen, because everyone knows it. But I see no reason to abandon a necessary project, one that’s done much to contribute to the long peace of the past 70 years — an exceptional period in this continent’s bloody history, and not to be taken for granted.
How kind of you to allow Britain to retain its quaint legal precedents while we wait for reform.
Oddly enough, at present over 50% of the laws in force in Britain have been handed down from the E.U. Of course, presently the E.U. Parliament is a rubber stamp and the Executive isn’t elected by the people. Thus, momentarily, there is no democracy in Europe. One mustn’t be too impatient about these things. Surely in good time, all will become right. Can’t imagine what got into the Americans in 1776. How impolite they were.
Regards,
Jim
Someone needs to tell the ruling class in Brussels, who even after the British said, “Enough!” still haven’t gotten the message. There will never be a United States of Europe.
My fear is that some people’s idea of reform is like that of reformer Yuri Andropov in the early 1980s: root out the black market corruption and force everyone to be happy, well-adjusted, and obedient under the guiding hand of the welfare-police state.
(Andropov was Putin’s mentor, btw, and Russian movies are busy trying to puff up his reputation as a reformer. BTW(2), Mrs R and I are currently watching the following docudrama. It’s actually pretty good, although the timeline and other parts are twisted somewhat to puff up Andropov’s role as a good guy reformer. It’s very watchable, unlike some of the docudrama attempts to rehabilitate Lavrenty Beria’s reputation.)
https://youtu.be/tPC3mQ7K6KE
(I hope this isn’t seen as going off on a tangent. I can’t think of the EU without thinking of the USSR bureaucracy or that of hellholes like Sweden.)
[Edit: fixed the YouTube URL.]
There’s a reason for it, and the similarities are the reason I am so confident that further integration is dead. The former Warsaw Pact countries, to say nothing of the former Soviet Republics, only gained independence a mere 25 years ago (give or take.) I can’t imagine a scenario where they would sign it away again so quickly.
The question isn’t whether they like the EU as it currently exists, or whether they prefer the EU to uncertainty, it’s whether they consider themselves Europeans as opposed to Poles, Czechs, Germans, etc. and whether they want to surrender their lawmaking authority to Brussels. I can almost guarantee those propositions will be less popular, but the Eurocrats don’t want those questions to be asked.
Somehow simply wanting independence for your own country has become a “far-right” position.
Just not true. Not factual. Not true in any way. Wherever you got that statistic, it’s fake.
Claire,
Here is a very nuanced analysis of how to count laws. I’m sure you’ll approve of the multifaceted modalities mentioned here.
UK law: What proportion is influenced by the EU?
Whole sectors of the UK economy are already heavily directly influenced by E.U. law. Although, some other sectors for the moment are only affected in a minor way this should give anyone who thinks fundamentally about this quite a chill. The UK citizen has no method of expressing distaste for any E.U. policy. An E.U. environmental policy could destroy the industry that they are employed in tomorrow. The E.U. policy could be based on completely false data. There is no recourse legislatively. There will be no voting for an Executive who could reign in a runaway bureaucracy. Worse yet, the E.U. could start passing legislation tomorrow that dictated policies for welfare, social security, education, criminal law, family law, and the NHS. The deeper the whole society becomes locked into the E.U. framework the harder it will be to protest or even question any of it.
A runaway E.U. is a Super-Administrative State with no real checks or balances that can be traced back to the citizens. That is No Democracy. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, “The British citizen labors to earn bread and the E.U. bureaucrat eats it”. This is slow enslavement. No tanks, no storm troopers, just relentless propaganda. The Sirens of the E.U. luring the citizen to give up their sovereign democratic rights that have taken so long to win.
If the E.U. is benign then why isn’t Mr. Juncker standing for election by the vote of 500 million people? If the E.U. is benign then why can’t the E.U. Parliament pass laws by themselves? To have a legislature that has no power to pass a law is an absurdity on its face.
When Pelosi said, “We’ll pass the law and then find out what’s in it.” She spoke for every Administrative State parasite in America and around the world. Just 2600 pages of law producing 100,000 pages of regulation that was and is a grotesque destructive monstrosity.
Regards,
Jim