Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 574

What Good Is an Unenforceable Climate Deal?

With just a little over a month and a half left to go until the world’s next big climate summit kicks off in Paris, every indication is that we won’t be getting a binding international treaty, much to the chagrin of the green movement. Reuters reports:

For all their efforts to get 200 governments to commit to the toughest possible cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, climate negotiators have all but given up on creating a way to penalize those who fall short. […]

Nick Mabey, chief executive of the E3G think-tank in London, says a Paris deal is likely to be more like international agreements limiting nuclear weapons than accords under the World Trade Organization, which can impose sanctions…A watchword of nuclear non-proliferation – “trust but verify” – could be the basis, he said.

This is hardly surprising. Back in May, Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate chief, told the world that negotiators would be concentrated on hammering out a deal focused on “enabling and facilitating” climate mitigation and adaptation policies, as opposed to (in her words) a “punitive-type” treaty. With one of the most important individuals involved in the push for a Global Climate Treaty essentially admitting defeat months ahead of time, the agreement could be worth less than the paper it will be printed on.

Figueres wasn’t wrong in attempting to deflate expectations this spring. Paris won’t produce a binding agreement and delegates won’t ultimately insist on one, because doing so would alienate important players at the negotiating table, chief among them the United States. It doesn’t seem likely that Congress would ratify any sort of internationally-enforceable deal.That leaves us with a treaty focused more on “good vibes” than lasting policy changes, and, while that approach may be familiar to many greens, it has to be seen as a setback for a modern environmental movement that has invested so much in this quixotic GCT endeavor. The best-case scenario for Paris is the production of a kind of eco-version of the Kellogg-Briand Pact—a fact that’s long been evident but is just now starting to feel real for greens.

Unexpectedly, The Middle East Meltdown Continues

Vladmir Putin isn’t challenging U.S. leadership in the Middle East, President Obama declared in an interview with 60 Minutes filmed on October 6 and broadcast on October 11, “and the fact that [Russia and Iran] had to [send troops to Syria] is not an indication of strength, it’s an indication that their strategy did not work.” In a contentious dialogue that drew repeated, incredulous interjections from interviewer Steve Kroft, the President insisted that those both in the Middle East and Republican Party who questioned his approach wanted to commit “several hundred thousand” U.S. combat troops to “police the region”.

The Commander-in-Chief went on to share that he had always been skeptical of U.S.-backed train-and-equip efforts in Syria. The skepticism seems justified, though the President seems unwilling to acknowledge that many of his critics warned him they would. In a truly shambolic series of darkly comic failures, President Obama’s initiative budgeted $500 million and fielded a few dozen fighters, most of whom were quickly captured or neutralized.Is this a sample of the kind of leadership that poor, bumbling President Putin will never understand? In any case, President Obama cited the Paris climate change accords and the international anti-ISIS coalition as examples of the kind of true leadership that Vlad the Imploder cannot match. “Over time, the community of nations will all get rid of [ISIS]”, the U.S. President intoned, and a “transition”, with buy-in from “key players”, could take care of Syria.Apparently, when people around the world think of President Obama’s approach to Syria, “leadership” should be the first word that pops into mind. “Success”, he wants us to believe, is the second.There is a germ of truth in President Obama’s defense; Vladimir Putin is neither willing nor able to provide the kind of leadership that has marked American policy at its best since World War Two. The United States is an order-building power, working at the construction of an international system in which all nations can prosper and live in peace even as it seeks to protect its own security and advance its own economic interests. In the Soviet days, Moscow was trying to oppose this system with a counter-order based on the state that Lenin built and the economic achievements of Stalin. The counter-order collapsed of its own inefficiency and loathsomeness; today’s Kremlin has found no alternative vision to replace it. Russia today seeks to disrupt, undermine and ultimately dismantle America’s order building will and capacity; President Obama wants to uphold and extend it.This much, President Obama has right. But what President Obama doesn’t acknowledge, or at least didn’t on 60 Minutes, is that while he is a constructive statesman and Putin is a destroyer, Putin is having much more success ripping bits of the order down than Obama is having holding it together. President Obama may be the high school principal and Putin nothing more than a juvenile delinquent, but the school walls are covered with graffiti, the principal is being mocked as a loser by both teachers and students, his car has been egged, and he’s got a “Kick Me” sign taped to his back.The weekend’s news from the Middle East brought yet more evidence that Principal Obama has lost control of the school. The New York Times reported that Iran has test-fired a long-range missile, a move that the strongly pro-Obama Times speculated was in violation of the nuclear agreement’s ban on developing missiles “designed to carry nuclear warheads”—but good luck making that stick. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal told us that Putin seems to be stepping up the deliveries of S-300 surface-to-air missiles that will render Iran’s regional activities—not just its nuclear sites—less vulnerable to outside interference, particularly from the air forces of the Sunni Gulf monarchies—i.e. America’s regional allies. Together with the admitted collapse of Obama’s multi-year effort to train and arm Syrian rebels, Putin’s successful air raids on American backed resistance forces and Assad’s gains on the ground following Putin’s intervention, this was a weekend from Hell for President Obama’s Middle East policy. Yet the President seems undismayed; he has resolved to stay the course. This is the most unsettling news of all.Some of President Obama’s critics accuse him of lacking a strategy for the Middle East. This is far from the truth. From where the President sits, the Administration has a Middle East strategy, and it is just given him a huge success. The Iran nuclear deal, a deal that the President rammed through in defiance of his domestic critics, leaving them helplessly wringing their hands, is, the President believes, a triumph of American order building. Taking the nuclear issue off the table, and opening the door to a different kind of U.S.-Iran relationship will, President Obama believes, lead to a more peaceful region that requires less U.S. presence and power to police.So how is this strategy working? The Iran deal was signed last Bastille Day, July 14, 2015—yet few observers are hailing that event as the kind of turning point the President wants. Post-deal, Iran and Russia are more hostile, and are working together in unprecedented ways to obstruct U.S. interests in the region and undermine U.S. leadership globally, America’s allies are less and not more confident in the value of the alliance, and from Turkey to Libya the forces of chaos are making more visible progress than the forces of order. As Laura Rozen, a journalist generally sympathetic both to President Obama and the Iran deal, said in a tweet:

after Iran deal, it sadly seems to be turning out, the region is hardening on its war path.

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) October 10, 2015

One problem is that while President Obama saw the nuclear deal as an opportunity to bridge divides with Iran, both Russia and Iran saw the negotiation as an opportunity to advance an anti-American agenda. While President Obama and his negotiating team were hunting for compromises and mutually face-saving agreements. Russia was looking for ways to turn the deal into a formula for destabilizing the region at Washington’s expense. Thus Russia insisted at the 11th hour in the negotiations on the lifting of a conventional weapons export ban. And even as President Obama scrambled to dodge Congressional scrutiny of the deal, Iran unhelpfully insisted that U.S. domestic debate consisted a material breach of the deal and rattled its sabers at home.Instead of seeing the deal as the start of a new era of cooperation, Russia and Iran, as the WSJ recently reported, immediately began planning Russia’s entry into the Syrian conflict—without, of course, telling their new friend and partner President Obama what they had in mind. These negotiations, which may even have been taking place while the nuclear deal was being hammered out, were advanced by General Soleimani’s visit to Moscow. In late August, rumors of a major Russian presence in Syria began making their way into the press; by early September, Western outlets confirmed the delivery of equipment and the presence of “advisors”. On September 27, with the Russian presence in Syria open knowledge, President Putin used his U.N. General Assembly speech to call for international support of Assad and a broad anti-ISIS coalition—but then turned around and struck seemingly every rebel group in Syria but ISIS. To add insult to injury, despite extensive U.S. efforts to set up military-to-military communications with Russia (in order to achieve “deconfliction”, i.e. avoid unintentional shooting), the Russians announced the timing of the first strikes by having a general stroll into the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and drop the news that they’d begin within an hour. This is the diplomatic equivalent of kicking sand in the face; it is a studied and deliberate insult. The attacks the general mentioned, presumably not coincidentally, hit U.S.-backed groups particularly hard.Not content with that, Russia announced an intelligence-sharing pact with Iraq, Syria, and Iran and arranged for reconnaissance flyovers of Iraqi airspace (where the U.S. also operates). Iraqi Shi’a lawmakers and militia leaders, seemingly at the instigation of Iran, began calling for direct Russian military involvement in Iraq, claiming that the U.S. had been ineffective in providing assistance. Russian airplanes flying missions in Syria have also violated Turkish—i.e. NATO—airspace, leading to confrontations with Turkish jets.Late last week, the Syrian government announced that a new major offensive, including troops from the Assad regime, Iran, and Hezbollah, backed by Russian airpower, was underway. Now, Iran has nixed further talks with the U.S., begun to push back on the nuclear deal, and announced the conviction of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian of an unspecified crime. Rezaian, held captive by Iran since his arrest in July 2014, famously and controversially was not freed as part of the nuclear deal.It’s still possible, of course, that sometime down the road the nuclear agreement will start to have the kind of soothing impact the President expected. But we aren’t there yet. The very countries President Obama most wanted to conciliate have stepped up a campaign designed to embarrass and humiliate him, even as they frustrate his policy goals.If the deal hasn’t reconciled us to our adversaries, it’s also not doing much for relations with our friends. Even as the deal moved closer to ‘success’, our traditional friends fell into a panic. The Saudis have intervened in Yemen, moved closer to the Muslim Brotherhood and have stepped up their contributions to the kind of radical rebels in Syria that the United States does not want to see armed. Funding flows from the Gulf to radical groups are on the increase, and, alarmed by the specter of a rising Iran and a retreating America, Sunnis across the region are beginning to look with more favor on radical Islamists as their best line of defense against Shia attacks.Meanwhile, the broader region continues to melt down. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister-turned-President that President Obama spoke with more than almost any other head of state in his first term, has become a destructive force within and beyond his frontiers. The leader Obama (and many others) once saw as a model of enlightened, democratic Islamism, has cynically stoked the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and attacked the Kurds in Syria. Hellbent on reversing an early-summer electoral defeat that thwarted his plans to rewrite the Turkish constitution, Erdogan lashing out wherever he can, without reference to Obama’s priorities or plans. President Obama’s Iraq strategy is in as much trouble as his Syria strategy; despite the U.S. help Obama extended, there’s little chance the Iraqi forces will retake Ramadi anytime soon. The country seems to be deepening its links to the Russia-Iran axis, creating a powerful anti-American bloc in the heart of the Middle East.  To complete the grim Iraq picture, riots have broken out in Iraqi Kurdistan over problems. Factionalism has been the traditional bane of the Kurds; a recurrence of infighting would significantly weaken the one group in the region that seems to remain disposed to working with Washington.Further south, a third intifada may be brewing in Israel, Lebanon and Egypt are in a semi-perpetual state of emergency, and the civil war rages in Yemen. And in Europe, the refugee crisis, driven by Syria, is adding additional stress to the already severely strained EU and several local governments—a fact that Putin significantly raised in his UNGA speech. If you want to stop the flow, come talk to Moscow, was the not-so-subtle message.The nuclear deal isn’t the cause of all these woes, but it isn’t the solution to any of them. President Obama has tried to change Russian and Iranian behavior by stroking them: hitting the “Reset” button with Russia, signing a nuclear agreement with Iran. If they were constructive powers, this might work. Given an opportunity to cooperate with the United States on building an international order that took their interests into account, constructive countries and order-oriented leaders would embrace that opportunity.But what if that isn’t what Russia and Iran want? What if their opposition to American order-building efforts runs deep? What do Russia and Iran have to do to teach President Obama that ‘No’ means ‘No’?

How the European Elite Drove the Rise of the Far-Right

Elections, governmental maneuvering, and a fistful of polls released this weekend all showed the far-right on the rise in Europe. In Vienna, the Freedom Party (whom Charles Hawley profiled in these pages last month) won a third of the vote for Mayor, almost toppling 70 years of Social Democrat rule in that city. A Dutch poll showed that the PVV, Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration party, is at its highest popularity since 2004—higher than the current governing party or its junior coalition partner.

And then there’s the situation in Sweden, where the government is teetering on the brink of collapse. Last December, the four major, mainstream Swedish parties made a pact whose central premise was to keep the Sweden Democrats, the anti-immigration populist party that had been surging in polls, out of power no matter what. In order to do so, the center-right had to agree to vote for left-wing agendas in perpetuity. Not surprisingly, their members have finally revolted. The catch is that the Sweden Democrats have in the interval gained in strength, partly by playing the political victimhood card for being kept away from the halls of power, and partly because of the burgeoning migrant crisis. And thus here we are today: the SD really are a dodgy nationalist party with a supremacist and fascist past, and Sweden now has more immigrant minorities than ever. This is not likely to prove a pretty combination.The problem this poses for Sweden is just a sharp example of a dilemma that European leaders have created for themselves all over the Continent. For years, the European elite have presented the immigration question as a binary and moral, rather political, matter: either you were on the side welcoming essentially unrestricted immigration, particularly through asylum claims, or you were a racist. In a move that should have shocked no one, when immigration levels grew, this led to the growth of the far-right: many concerned about the issue felt they had nowhere else to go.As Andrew Stuttaford pointed out yesterday at NRO, there are some signs that centrist politicians—particularly in Germany, where Chancellor Merkel’s poll numbers have taken a big hit, and members of her coalition have noticed—are starting to get the message. But we probably shouldn’t hold our collective breath for a major break soon. The moral framework the left has set up for itself is hard to escape. And considering that hundreds of thousands are still pouring into the Continent, the far-right is likely to continue seeing gains.

Taiwanese Presidential Candidate Visits Japan

Drawing criticism from Beijing, the front-runner in Taiwan’s presidential elections, Tsai Ing-wen, visited Tokyo last week to meet with high-ranking Japanese officials, Focus Taiwan reports:

Upon arrival at Haneda Airport, Tsai was greeted by Taiwan’s representative to Japan Shen Ssu-tsun, a group of her supporters and members of the Japanese media.

Her four-day trip, which she has dubbed a “Taiwan-Japan friendship tour,” is aimed at meeting friends and visiting Taiwanese expatriate communities ahead of Taiwan’s presidential election next January, she said in response to questions by Japanese reporters.Tsai said she also hopes to meet with people in Japan who are familiar with the country’s efforts to cope with the challenges of globalization, and to talk with leaders in the industrial sector about possible cooperation between Taiwan and Japan in economic and industrial areas.

Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party favors formal independence from China; many of its members believe that Taiwan has its own distinct national identity. Presently, both the Chinese and Taiwanese governments consider Taiwan to be a Chinese province. Yet the Taiwanese do not recognize the communist regime as China’s legitimate rulers, and the Chinese do not recognize the Taiwanese government. Despite rare diplomatic meetings with China last year, Taiwan has been strengthening its military relationship with the United States.

The possibility of a stronger relationship between Taipei and Tokyo has important historical background: Japan ruled Taiwan for fifty years between 1895 and 1945. That popular Taiwanese politicians are warming to their old colonial ruler is bad news for Beijing.

The Political Vocabulary of Bernie Sanders

Pundits notwithstanding, Senator Bernie Sanders has a real chance in 2016—not just to derail Hillary Clinton but to be elected President of the United States. He is in the best position to invent himself nationally of any candidate since 2007, when a relatively unknown freshman Senator from Illinois named Barack Obama burst onto the national scene. Like President Obama before him, Sanders’ relative lack of name-recognition gives him a huge advantage over Clinton, who spent two decades inventing herself and suddenly, thanks partly to Sanders, now finds it necessary to reinvent herself, a far more difficult task.

Inventing oneself nationally requires three things: developing a network of both on-the-ground and high-tech operatives across the country; raising the required operating funds; and changing the national conversation. The first two of these are both necessary, but by themselves they are insufficient. For all the Obama campaign’s organizing savvy, technological sophistication, and fund-raising skills, what really delivered the President his victory over Hillary Clinton was his adeptness at changing the national conversation, an adeptness she lacked then and still lacks now.  Sanders has that adeptness; the only question is whether he will utilize it to the fullest.Changing the national conversation is not simply about changing discussions of specific policies. It is about changing the way people think about politics. And because language provides basic categories of thought and communication, changing the national political conversation means no less than changing the national political vocabulary.Obama did it brilliantly in 2007 and 2008. He took a national vocabulary that centered upon negative self-definition and turned it positive.  For decades Americans had defined themselves in terms of what they were against. They were “anti-communist,” then “anti-terrorist,” and of course “anti-big-government.” Obama replaced that with a vocabulary that focused on what people were for, a vocabulary that spoke to hopes rather than fears. That change in the national vocabulary is what got him nominated and twice elected President.Six years after he first took office, however, much of the national political vocabulary, and the conversation issuing from it, has again turned negative. All prospective candidates for 2016, including both Sanders and Clinton, are spending substantial amounts of time on the attack. If anything, the vitriol on the part of Republican leaders is more pronounced than it was in 2008. Obama did change the national political conversation, but the change did not last—and that is what has given Bernie Sanders his greatest opportunity.Traditionally, success in democratic mass politics comes from a judicious combination of two kinds of behavior: obedience and disobedience. Most successful politicians know there are rules it is best to obey, whether they relate to campaign strategy, behavior in debates, or one’s choice of enemies. At the same time, there are situations in which one must not only be, but be seen to be, disobedient. Challenging accepted norms is what makes a politician stand out.  Donald Trump has done well in early polls by openly stoking racial resentment, by refusing routine declarations of party loyalty, and by flouting Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment regarding fellow Republicans. Despite his poll numbers, however, he has not changed the substance of the national conversation.Bernie Sanders already has, and he has done so by using a political vocabulary no other candidate has dared use. He not only uses such taboo “foreign” words as “revolution,” “socialism,” and “class,” but uses them in ways that challenge audiences to ignore the taboos. For example, he asks them to consider that Americans may have something to learn from how other nations, those he calls “democratic socialist,” handle such issues as health care, mandatory paid vacations, and a minimum wage. In a country that prides itself on having invented everything worth inventing and having the best solutions to all problems, using a vocabulary that invites its citizens to take seriously the norms of other nations is already a major foray into linguistic disobedience.But Sanders is going far beyond that. In utilizing a supposedly alien vocabulary, he is challenging Americans to process information differently, to look at their own standard vocabulary through new eyes. He is turning American exceptionalism on its head, asking audiences to look at America’s exceptional approach to health care not as an achievement but as a shortcoming, not as an asset but as a liability. And in tying a corporate-dominated health care system to political and economic domination by what he calls the “billionaire class,” he is violating an even more basic taboo. He is challenging the sacred notion that America is a classless society and calling for a “revolution” against control of government by a wealthy “oligarchy.” Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt attacked “economic royalists” and publicly welcomed the hatred of “organized money” has a major party candidate been so outspoken in attacking class privilege.Most important of all, Sanders is changing the national conversation by taking a unique approach to the issue of negativity itself. While he has been consistent in his anti-corporate stand on policy issues from environmental damage to the tax code to foreign wars, he has been equally consistent in opposing the politics of personal demonization. In so doing, he is not only refocusing the national conversation on issues rather than upon personalities; he has positioned himself brilliantly to respond to what will be the inevitable personal attacks based precisely upon his use of a supposedly alien vocabulary.At the same time, like Obama before him, Sanders has defined himself aggressively in terms of what he is for. He has advanced a positive, itemized agenda with respect to such key issues as single-payer health care, free college tuition, a livable minimum wage, and a host of others. Thus while his audiences leave his rallies knowing in detail what he is against, they likewise leave knowing in equal detail what he is for. He has balanced negative and positive with remarkable adeptness, and burgeoning attendance at his rallies demonstrates that.In so doing, Sanders has already accomplished three things. First, he has mobilized tens of thousands of white middle-class voters who are responding with equal enthusiasm to both the negative and positive aspects of his agenda. Second, he has forced Hillary to emulate as much of his vocabulary as she comfortably can, thereby spotlighting both her increasingly obvious effort at self-reinvention as well as her severe, self-imposed limitations in that regard. And third, he has forced mainstream media to cover him, which despite their obvious biases is a huge net gain in that it replaces tens of millions of dollars that he would otherwise have had to raise simply to get noticed.In short, Bernie Sanders is off to a flying start, and at the heart of his success is his enthusiastic embrace of linguistic disobedience. This is not to say, however, that his momentum will perpetuate itself or that he has done all he need do with respect to breaking linguistic boundaries. His most important tasks are still ahead of him.Of these, none is more obvious or more in need of attention than building a multi-racial coalition. His lifelong support of minority rights notwithstanding, he has started out at a huge deficit in relation to Hillary. While neither of them is black or Hispanic, in this case her name-recognition has given her an enormous advantage. To neutralize that advantage Sanders needs to build visible alliances with credible leaders in minority communities.In this regard, one of his greatest strengths is that he has recognized from the outset that he cannot do so by compromising his linguistic disobedience. That is, he cannot water down his vocabulary in order to reach out to minority groups. On the contrary, he can only do so effectively by showing in detail how minority rights are linked to, and indeed dependent upon, breaking the power of the “oligarchy” of the “billionaire class.” At the same time, as several commentators have observed, there is a huge potential pitfall here. Class does not supersede race in America.  Minority voters need to know that their specific racial justice agendas are included in his agenda; otherwise, Sanders’ appeal will remain limited.He has gotten off to a strong start in this respect with the Hispanic community. In his July 2015 speech to the National Council of La Raza, Sanders scored major points on immigration reform, making effective use of his own experience as the son of a penniless Polish immigrant. Equally important, he was outspoken in linking the lack of educational and employment opportunities for Hispanic youth to his critique of income inequality and control of the economy by the “billionaire class.” As a result, he was interrupted by applause more than twice as often as Hillary and left the podium to a standing ovation.His coalition-building efforts with African-Americans did not begin as smoothly. At the Netroots Nation Conference, when the scheduled proceedings were interrupted by the Black Lives Matter protest, Sanders seemed to think his fifty-year record of support for civil rights would carry him through. It did not. He learned from the experience, however, and his address to the National Urban League two weeks later reads much like his La Raza speech with the specific details adapted to the concerns of black voters. From his critique of police violence toward blacks to his pointing out that African-American homebuyers were the ones hardest hit by the subprime mortgage meltdown, his message was clear: America must

simultaneously address . . . structural and institutional racism . . . while at the same time we vigorously attack the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality which is making the very rich much richer while everyone else – especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community, and working-class whites – are becoming poorer.

If the intersection of class and race stands as Sanders’ most immediate challenge, the third group, working-class whites, presents what may ultimately be one of his most important opportunities. As Robert Reich observes, “For decades Republicans have exploited the economic frustrations of the white working and middle class to drive a wedge between races, channeling those frustrations into bigotry and resentment.” There is a huge chasm of racial resentment programmed into Tea Party rhetoric, and it is because of Sanders’ willingness to address the issue of class that he is uniquely positioned to bridge it. Can an expatriate Brooklyn-born Jewish self-styled “socialist” reach out to Tea Party adherents? To revive an already aging mantra, yes, he can; but his choice of vocabulary will be crucial. Bridging that chasm will be the ultimate test of Bernie Sanders’ linguistic disobedience.

He has already taken an important first step in that direction. In his La Raza speech, the closing statement that literally brought the crowd to its feet was when he called for “a country that works for all our people, and we do it when we stand together, and we do not allow people to divide us, divide us, divide us.” In acknowledging and calling out divisive vocabulary on the part of the “billionaire class,” Sanders has put the issue of language front and center. But it is not merely the vocabulary of racial resentment he needs to address. Once again, the key issue is the intersection of race and class, and in order to address that intersection Sanders needs to go straight to the heart of American political vocabulary.Of all the linguistic conventions that characterize American political discourse, none have been more powerful, or had a more crippling effect on political communication, than the twin dualities of “left vs. right” and “liberal vs. conservative.” Politicians and media alike seem unable to think without reference to them. Policies as well as people are routinely classified according to these dualities. And these classifications, these labels, once applied, not only become part of public discourse; they become essential to the way voters think. A Bernie Sanders is labeled the quintessential “leftist liberal” while the typical Tea Party adherent is labeled “rightist conservative.” Given that most Americans relate to these as polar opposites, how is the former to communicate with the latter?There is only one way to do it, and it requires the most linguistically disobedient strategy of all. These dominant dualities cannot be ignored; they are omnipresent as the foundation stones of American political discourse. If Sanders is to reach out effectively across the racial and political chasm, he needs to take on those dualities directly. He needs to confront them, address them, and show how they have been used to keep Americans divided and to keep people with common interests from communicating with each other.Up to now he has not done so, preferring instead to identify with the “progressive” label, which in recent years has re-emerged as an acceptable mainstream alternative to the “liberal” label. In so doing, however, Sanders has denied himself a key tool in advancing his own argument with respect to divisive vocabulary.Nowhere has divisive labeling had more profound consequences than among working and middle-class Americans.  Early in 2012, a panel of MSNBC commentators agreed that if Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party ever communicated with each other, it would be the beginning of the end for corporate domination of the American economy. That is, if they could get beyond divisive labels they would discover how much they had in common and take common action to address their concerns. What the commentators missed was that what kept the two groups from making contact was precisely the divisive vocabulary to which they had been subjected ever since their respective movements began. Occupy Wall Street has since faded from the scene but the issue of divisive vocabulary remains, and exposing that vocabulary now becomes one of Sanders’ most important opportunities.At the heart of the matter are the assumptions embedded in the twin dualities with respect to the role of government in American life. For decades, Americans have been trained to believe that “liberal” equals “left” equals “more government involvement” in the economy, while “conservative” equals “right” equals “less government involvement.” As Robert Reich and others have pointed out, the racial connection comes from the added Republican message that “more government involvement” really means taking money from hard-working whites and giving it to non-working non-whites.In short, the message is that “leftist liberals” use government to victimize working whites for the benefit of undeserving racial minorities. In the economically stressful environment of recent years it has been a very effective form of divisive linguistic training, especially given the easily identifiable target of a supposedly “left-liberal” African-American president. Most important, the message is that only “rightist conservatives” can protect working whites from this systematic victimization, and that they will do so by opposing and ending the “left-liberal” government programs upon which that victimization is based.During the 2012 presidential election cycle this training was reinforced by Republican usage of such words as “entitlements” and “redistribution.” The former had originally been used literally to refer to programs like Social Security and Medicare, to which seniors became entitled by paying into them during their working years. Republicans now reversed that usage and began using the word to imply an unearned government giveaway, thereby suggesting that an “entitlement” was a payment to which people felt they were entitled when in reality they were not entitled to it at all. Here again, the racial dimension was added by applying the term “entitlement” to programs such as food stamps, which many working and middle-class whites assumed were of disproportional benefit to non-whites.At the same time, the term “redistribution” became Republican shorthand for “left-liberal” government programs that took from working whites and gave to non-working non-whites. Two of Mitt Romney’s key mantras were that President Obama preferred “entitlements” to “opportunity” while also believing that the proper role of government was to “redistribute” wealth from those who had earned it to those who had not. Reflecting both mantras was a placard, ubiquitous at Tea Party rallies, that read, “You Are Not Entitled To What I Earn.”While Romney failed to unseat Obama, his usage of terms nonetheless passed into the mainstream of American political vocabulary, so much so that even supposedly neutral media now routinely use the terms “entitlements” and “redistribution” the same way he did. Media usage thus reinforces identification of these terms with “left-liberal” programs that take from working whites for the disproportional benefit of non-working non-whites. That is the linguistic situation Sanders faces in reaching out to Tea Party adherents and to the millions of white working voters who utilize that same vocabulary in that same way.Again, Sanders has made a start. Without specifically attacking Republican vocabulary, he has consistently pointed out that the “billionaire class” wishes to end both Social Security and Medicare, and that this will negatively affect working people of all races. What he has not done, and where his greatest opportunity lies, is to show how that vocabulary, as accepted and transmitted by the media, supports the “billionaire class” in that effort by depicting entitlements as giveaways. This, more than anything else, is what Sanders needs to do to show working whites how that vocabulary operates to camouflage reality, to divide working people on the basis of race, and thereby convince working whites to vote against their own interests.In this, Sanders can build upon a precedent set by the man he hopes to succeed. One of the memorable moments of the 2012 campaign was when President Obama counterattacked against Romney’s usage of the word “redistribution.” What Romney’s platform amounted to, the President declared, was an effort to use the power of government to take from the poor and give to the rich. It was “Robin Hood in reverse,” or “Romneyhood.” The effect of the counterattack was immediate and electric. Sanders needs to build upon this strategy but to take it much further. He must deal not only with specific words but with the entire issue of divisive vocabulary. That is the only way to get to the heart of what keeps working people divided on the basis of race and thereby keeps them from launching what he calls a united “political revolution.”Sanders’ strategy, like Obama’s, should include both exposure and counterattack. Just as he needs to expose the way in which the “billionaire class” has deliberately turned the word “entitlement” inside out, he needs to counterattack by spotlighting the enormous advantages to which the “billionaire class” itself feels entitled in the political arena. He should be pointing out that members of that class feel entitled to spend unlimited amounts of secret money to buy elections; entitled to control top positions in the most important government departments, including Treasury, Justice, State, Interior, and several others; entitled to legislation that allows them to pollute the environment without regard to long-term effects; entitled to huge government subsidies to ship jobs abroad and to pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. And, of course, they feel entitled to have working people bail them out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars when they crash the economy and bankrupt millions of those same working people. In short, Sanders needs to show that even while the “billionaire class” uses the word “entitlement” to divide working people against each other, that same “billionaire class” feels entitled to massive government assistance to which they are not in fact entitled.Again, building upon Obama’s 2012 precedent, he needs to do the same for the word “redistribution.” Here Sanders has also made a start in arguing that 99 percent of the new wealth created since 2008 has gone to the top one percent of the population. This is redistribution, but as Obama pointed out, it is redistribution upward, not downward. Far from having begun subsequent to the last recession, this process has been happening since the 1980s but has greatly accelerated since that recession. Most important, it is happening not because of a lack of government involvement in the economy but because of massive government assistance to the largest and most powerful corporations, including banks. In short, Sanders needs to do the same for the word “redistribution” as for the word “entitlements.” He needs to show how both have been used to divide working people against each other, and how it is the “billionaire class” that depends on massive government intervention to redistribute wealth upward rather than downward.Once he does that, Sanders needs to address the most fundamentally divisive vocabulary of all, namely the twin dualities of “left vs. right” and “liberal vs. conservative.” Because these dualities are so deeply ingrained in the national vocabulary, addressing them will be his most challenging task, but it will also be the most important thing he can do to change the national political conversation.Again, he has a ready-made starting point arising from his own voting record on the most important single Congressional vote of the past decade, namely the bank bailouts of 2008. He voted against them, but so did dozens of Republicans. Given that Sanders is routinely labeled “leftist-liberal,” does that mean that all those Republicans who likewise voted against the bailouts were really “closet leftist liberals”? Or that Sanders himself is really a “closet rightist conservative”? Or, given that government involvement in the economy is routinely labeled “liberal,” does that mean that President George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who demanded the bailouts, as well as the bankers who benefited from them, were really “closet liberals”?This conspicuous lack of labeling is not a side issue or merely an interesting omission; it is symptomatic of a fundamental problem with contemporary American political vocabulary. In the most important government intervention of the new century, which redistributed hundreds of billions upward, the dualities of “left vs. right” and “liberal vs. conservative” were never applied, not by those who supported the bailouts or  those who opposed them or by the media that covered them. Nor were bailouts labeled “entitlements” or “redistribution.”Like the dog that didn’t bark, this lack of labeling is evidence of a singularly important phenomenon. The standard labels, including the standard dualities of contemporary American politics, were not used and indeed could not be used, for purposes of neutral, value-free classification. Nor did those usually labeled “leftist liberals” and those usually labeled “rightist conservatives” oppose the bailouts for different reasons; they opposed them for the same reason, namely that they opposed the use of government to redistribute over $700 billion upwards. Despite this, however, years later the labels still operate to divide people, to obscure this commonality of perspective and thereby keep working Americans from communicating with each other.The overarching economic reality of American life is that wealth is being redistributed upward, not through the workings of a free market but through a variety of government mechanisms to which the recipients of that redistribution feel entitled. Standard political vocabulary legitimizes that redistribution and at the same time camouflages it by defining working Americans in opposition to each other and thus turning them against each other.That is what Bernie Sanders needs to unmask. In unmasking it, he will change the national conversation most profoundly and perhaps permanently. And that, in turn, is his best chance of being nominated and elected President of the United States.

China Edges Closer to North Korea

It appears that Xi Jinping has sent something of a love letter to Kim Jong-un. The New York Times:

Relations between China and North Korea showed some signs on Saturday of thawing after a deep chill, as President Xi Jinping of China sent a warm note to the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and sent one of his most senior officials to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of Mr. Kim’s ruling party.

The official, Liu Yunshan, stood next to Mr. Kim during much of an elaborate military parade in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and the two chatted frequently. Mr. Liu, a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Politburo, is the highest-ranking Chinese official to visit the North since Mr. Kim rose to power in late 2011.

The internal debate in China over the value of its alliance with North Korea seems to be ending for now on—for the Norks a happy note. South Korea and Japan won’t be happy, but China isn’t happy with them.

The North Koreans are the world’s least satisfactory ally. They are terrible economic partners, flat out embarrassing on human rights, and their nuclear policies and aggressive rhetoric both alarm and infuriate their neighbors. That China is sticking with Pyongyang despite all this is a strong signal that China feels that it doesn’t have many options.

Václav, We Never Knew Ye

Havel: A Life

Michael Žantovský    Grove Press, 2014, 512 pp., $30

Václav Havel, the dissident playwright who became the last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic, was loved and admired more than understood. His admirers squeezed him into boxes that did not quite fit him. An absurd playwright in the tradition of Ionesco and Becket, Havel would have appreciated the irony of ending up as the main character in somebody else’s funeral.

When Havel died at the end of 2011, he left no final instructions. The politicians were at a loss for ideas. In the ensuing scramble, an historian in an obscure military museum suggested a reenactment of the 1937 funeral of Czechoslovakia’s founder and first President, Tomas G. Masaryk, and so it was: The casket of the artist who pretended to suffer from a mental illness to avoid military service was hauled on a gun carriage serving as a hearse and carried to Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral. Havel would have appreciated the theatricality as well as the absurdity. The government then proceeded to bestow his name not a theater or a school or a library but on Prague’s international airport. Havel became associated with “international,” so, naturally, one Czech satirist proposed that a galaxy or at least an exoplanet be named after Havel; if he can be international, why not altogether cosmic?The international great and mighty came to the funeral, by invitation only. Outside the Cathedral, Czechs cosmic and otherwise gathered. Among them stood the daughter of Pavel Landovský, Havel’s favorite actor (perhaps best known internationally for playing the farmer with the pet pig in the movie The Unbearable Lightness of Being), and the daughter of Jan Lopatka, co-founder with Havel of the samizdat publishing house Edice Expedice who edited and published the first edition of Havel’s letters from prison, Letters to Olga. As the two recognized each other and started to converse, an elderly lady of the type who collaborated with the regime before 1989 reprimanded them for disturbing her as she was watching the celebrities and listening to the mass on a screen outside. For all the right reasons, Landovská screamed.Walking in central Prague at the time reminded me of England after the death of Lady Diana Spencer: People in sorrow for myriad private reasons seized the opportunity to express grief publicly. Others liked the temporary feeling of belonging to something greater and more significant than themselves, here in the form of history and community united by grief.Havel was a puzzling public figure, difficult to place into traditional categories. As President, he refused to lead or join a political party. Later, he publicly supported the Czech Green Party. In international affairs he was an idealist. He supported anti-Communist leaders such as the Dalai Lama, whom other democratic leaders have shunned for fear of alienating China. Havel was a staunch supporter of humanitarian intervention, from Yugoslavia to Iraq. Philosophically, he considered human rights to be absolute and constitutive of being human, yet he expressed these convictions within the conceptual framework of the notoriously anti-humanistic philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He was primarily an artist, yet he will be remembered mostly as a politician if not a political theorist.Michael Žantovský, who knew him well, speaks in five voices in his biography of Havel. First speaks the trained clinical psychologist who lays Havel on a metaphorical couch to diagnose and analyze. Second intones the Reuters journalist who carried Havel’s personal belongings when he was released from prison in May 1989 and became his press spokesperson and adviser during his presidency of Czechoslovakia. In this voice Žantovský is an armor bearer who protects his master’s reputation for posterity. Third to speak is the former Czech Ambassador to the United States and Israel, and the current Czech Ambassador to the United Kingdom. But this voice is mute on the two most significant contemporary debates about Havel’s political legacy: the “Havelian” idealist foreign policy and the Czech party-political system. Yet while the diplomatic Žantovský attempts to smooth over internal Czech conflicts and glosses over embarrassing details, the armor bearer Žantovský defends Havel’s side while the clinician leaks embarrassing details from the analysis. The fourth voice is that of Žantovský the man of letters, a noted literary translator to Czech from English and Hebrew, a wordsmith who offers literary analysis of Havel’s plays and impresses the reader with the literary quality of his writing in his second language, English. Fifth and finally comes the voice of a very Czech Žantovský who pokes ironic fun at the pretentions of the previous four “intellectuals” and that other intellectual nominally in charge of the biography: its subject, Havel.Invasions, Theatres, Coffee Houses, and SexŽantovský’s research for this biography benefitted much from interviewing people who knew and worked with Havel. It benefitted, too, from studying some of the documents archived in the Havel presidential library in Prague that Žantovský is due to lead after retiring from the diplomatic service this year.We learn that Havel was the grandson of a self-made real-estate magnate. An uncle was a founder of the Czech film studios. He spent World War II in the family estate in a village with a nanny, a maid, a cook, and in the company of his mother and younger brother, Ivan. After the war Havel was sent to boarding school in a castle where future film director Miloš Forman was the head boy. The school was disbanded in 1950, two years after the Communist takeover, and Havel’s path to further education was blocked by his class origins.But since Communism triumphed in Czechoslovakia only in 1948, it had only five years to operate before Stalin died. That turned out to be enough time for the elimination of all alternative political and social elites and for the purging of the Communist Party of Jews, but not enough time for the Party to get around to eliminating the artists, as in the Soviet Union. The connections of the Havel family to artists it supported when it was wealthy lasted into the new era and gave the aspiring young Václav access to leading Czech thinkers and artists who sat at Café Slavia, across from the National Theater on the right bank of the Vltava River. Havel met there his philosophical and artistic mentors and also his future wife Olga.Havel’s theatrical career started during his compulsory two years of military service in an auxiliary engineering brigade. He directed an amateur performance of a sentimental play by Kohout about a soldier who goes AWOL to visit his pregnant wife. Irony is the Czech cultural knee-jerk reaction to sentimentality, and so Havel wrote a spoof of it about a soldier who falls asleep on guard duty, whose friend uses his rifle to shoot an intruder but gives him credit for this valiant act. The play made it to the finals of the Army Youth Creativity Competition in Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad). When the authorities realized they were being treated to a subtle satire on military discipline, they subjected Havel to disciplinary proceedings. He got off lightly in this first brush with authority: He was convicted only of authoring an unrealistic plot since, as everybody knew, socialist soldiers could never fall asleep during guard duty.Havel’s breakthrough came in 1963, when his play The Garden Party became a hit in Prague and was then translated and performed internationally. The success of his second play, The Memorandum, about an attempt to replace natural language with a bureaucratically sanctioned artificial language established him at home and abroad as a world-class leading Czech playwright, all before he was thirty. Klaus Juncker of the German publishing house Rowohlt promoted him abroad and Havel was able to travel for productions of his plays in Germany, Austria, England, and, in 1968, New York.Clearly, Havel was incredibly lucky in the timing of his career debut that coincided with the beginning of the liberalization of the Sixties. Had Havel matured a few years earlier or later, his plays could not have been performed and he would have lived in obscurity. As Žantovský puts it, “it would be hard to grasp the evolution of the Stalinist monolith of the fifties through the Potemkin village of the seventies into the walking dead of the eighties without the seismic anomaly of sixties. . . . [T]he sixties was a period of global fermentation, with the two sides of the Cold War joined in an uneasy two-step, exchanging ideas, nightmares and body fluids.”It would then go without saying (except that so many people have become suddenly so young) that the liberalization of the Prague Spring was first and foremost a cultural one. It spawned the golden age of Czech cinema, independent theater, and the fiction of authors like Škvorecký, Hrabal, Kohout, Vaculík, and Kundera. Czechs and Slovaks could not choose their government and political system, but they could publicly ridicule them. In Central Europe, done well, the second can be more fun than the first.In that line of Sixties’ work Havel made his lifelong political and personal alliances and rivalries. He met his future lead actor, Pavel Landovský, “a Rabelaisian force of nature with gargantuan tastes” who “hustled and brawled his way through the Byzantine maze of the Communist system that Havel was trying to out-think and outsmart.” In 1965 Havel made his first political speech to the writers union calling for rehabilitation of modernist non-Communist writers. He also joined then the editorial board of the first and only non-Communist journal, Tvář, and participated in the struggles over its existence and within its editorial board.Havel’s role in the Prague Spring was minor; he was not a Communist and so could not become a reformed one. He called for multiparty democracy. After the Soviet invasion, Havel took part in the brief debate in 1969 about 1968, before censorship brought it to an early conclusion. Against Milan Kundera and the philosopher Karel Kosík, Havel argued that 1968 was a closed chapter in history because socialism with a human face never had much of a future even without the invasion. Havel recalled the first half of the 1970s as “shapeless fog.” He was barred from publishing and his plays could not be performed. Yet his plays continued to be performed abroad, and they gave him an independent income and a high standard of living in the Communist context. He spent most of the time in the house he and Olga bought in the village of Hrádeček writing and engaging in the decadent sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll lifestyle of the times. Hrádeček continued to be Havel’s refuge for writing and entertaining his close friends until his death. An endearing anecdote told by Žantovský is of a meeting of seven philosophers in Havel’s country house in the 1980s. When one of Havel’s lovers came downstairs, the seven philosophers broke out in song, “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s home from work we go.”Havel exited the “fog” in his protest letter to Czechoslovak President Gustav Husak in 1975. The presidential office returned the letter and pretended to ignore its author. But then following a legal “private” performance of Havel’s new version of the Beggar’s Opera in front of 300 people, performers and members of the audience lost jobs and even their driver’s licenses. The regime sought to isolate Havel by turning him “toxic.” Havel reacted by building a coalition of regime opponents. The philosopher Ladislav Hejdánek compared Havel to carbon, an element “able to link with others to create compounds of irresistible strength.”Indeed, Havel’s considerable social skills allowed him to link people who otherwise would have had nothing in common: renowned artists and intellectuals like himself with the underground art and culture scene, reformed Communists with religious opponents of the regime, Trotskyites with conservatives. The result was Charter 77, united in demanding the implementation of the final act of the Helsinki Covenant on Human Rights from 1975 and the release from prison of the members of the underground rock band Plastic People of the Universe. Havel’s international fame and connections helped the Charter to win the support of a who’s who of the art and letters world in the late 1970s, from Samuel Beckett to Saul Bellow and Leonard Bernstein. It mattered enough for the regime to unleash a wave of repression against the Charter’s signatories.Eventually, the Communist regime ensured Havel’s leadership by jailing him for more than four years. During his first period of incarceration, though, Havel agreed to sign a letter asking for pardon, promising to abstain from involvement in public affairs in the future. Havel considered it to be his lowest point morally. The regime made the letter public when they released him to humiliate and discredit him. Havel concluded from the incident that he would never again make compromises by justifying them as means to moral ends when dealing with the totalitarian regime.Philosophers would say that he abandoned consequentialism in favor of deontology, stopped measuring the ethical value of actions by guessing their results and instead followed absolute moral duties. Žantovský, however, psychologizes rather than philosophizes. He reasons that Havel suffered from severe depression compounded with “Stockholm Syndrome.” He quotes from the prison psychologists’ assessment of Havel with approval: “highly intelligent, extroverted personality, self-reliant, with an imaginative inner life, ambitious, perhaps insecure … anxious … sensitive to the approval and disapproval of others, emotionally detached but dependent.” Žantovský’s psychological analysis reaches its limit when he ascribes Havel’s phenomenological reflections on Being in his Letters to Olga, inspired by Heidegger and Levinas, to the effects of monotony and reduced sensory input in prison. As if to reassure the patient, Žantovský adds that the mystical visions stopped when the conditions that gave rise to them passed. Philosophy may not be the cure, but there may be a cure to philosophy.Elsewhere, Žantovský recognizes the significance for Havel of the “memory of Being” but neglects to mention that Havel invented the term to contrast Heidegger’s “forgetfulness of Being.” While Heidegger pessimistically concluded that we are doomed to alienation and inauthenticity in the modern age, Havel optimistically suggested that in remembering our Being we may return to it.1Havel’s love life allowed Žantovský to put him on his couch for longer sessions. Havel was, let us say, more of a “Kennedy” than a “Reagan” when it came to women. Žantovský does not spare the reader many details. The fault lies with Žantovský’s analysis of—whom else?—Havel’s overbearing mother. Havel searched all his life for strong dominant women, but when he found them, he attempted to escape. Havel’s wife Olga was an impressive person in her own right, a Czech “Eleanor Roosevelt,” active in samizdat publishing, aid to the families of other imprisoned dissidents, and, after the revolution, in philanthropy. Žantovský describes Havel’s relationship to Olga as that of “a needy petulant child in need of approval.”But Havel’s sexual mores were not exceptional in his social milieu. Havel’s old friend Karol Sidon, the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the Czech Republic, stepped down last year after separating from his third wife for a woman whom he met at a class for converts to Judaism and shared numbers with the rabbi: He was 72 and she was 27. But I am not well qualified to review this topic, largely due to my own strategic mistake. When I moved from Washington, DC, to Prague in the early 1990s I was single and I knew that Czechs liked philosophers. I had also read the Prague epilogue to Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Trilogy. So soon after arriving I went to a lecture at Charles University, and then I did something I would have never dared to do in Washington: I approached the most beautiful student in the hall and introduced myself as a Jewish intellectual, which, given the place and time, worked like magic. The problem with the strategy of starting from the top is that there are only two places to go from there: down, or to the town hall. Hence I have gained no knowledge in the process that can help me review Havel’s love life.When Havel arrived at the presidential office on New Year’s Day 1990, Žantovský tells us, “not only was there no staff, but also the place was locked and it took some time to secure the keys. All that was awaiting him was a delegation of presidential office staffers eager to offer a welcome, report on the establishment of the Prague Castle Civic Forum, and assure Havel of their Loyalty and revolutionary zeal. They did so with all the warmth, spontaneity, and perspiring brows of al-Qaeda’s hostages.” Havel’s team was better suited to run a theater than a state.But eventually they found a lawyer and an economist to join the team. Havel immediately made several correct but difficult decisions. He instituted a general amnesty of 23,000 of the 31,000 prisoners in Czechoslovak jails; he was willing to let some bad people go free in order to quickly, and hence justly, free many more innocents. Havel’s first foreign trip was to Germany, the historical enemy with the strongest grievances against Czechoslovakia for expelling three million Sudeten Germans after World War II. But Havel knew that, without reconciliation with Germany, there could be no integration with Western Europe. Žantovský retells the famous stories about Havel’s address to a Joint Session of Congress in February 1990 (which he translated simultaneously) that concluded with a lesson in phenomenology: “Consciousness precedes Being.” At a reception in the Czechoslovak embassy a Native American tribe presented Havel with a Peace Pipe. When Havel travelled next to Moscow to meet with Gorbachev, he suggested they smoke together that peace pipe. Artistically tactless fellow that he is, Gorbachev replied that he did not smoke.A Tale of Two VáclavsŽantovský the diplomat is right to note that the rivalry between the first and second Presidents of the Czech Republic has been exaggerated. Václav Klaus as Prime Minister until 1997 needed Havel’s international prestige to advance the interests of the Czech Republic abroad. Since there was no clean, smooth, and painless way of transforming the economy, Havel was content to leave that responsibility to Klaus, who was also uniquely qualified to serve as a lightning rod for protest. Unlike Havel, Klaus could be decisive, enacting necessary economic policies that he knew could cause pain and would fall short of moral perfection.Especially at the beginning of the economic transition, Klaus’s decisions were crucial: Against the objections of some of the 1968 reformers he blocked attempts to experiment with a third way between communism and capitalism. As he put it, the “third way” would lead to the Third World. He eliminated market distortions in the form of subsidies and made the Czech crown convertible. In the longer term, his objection to the Czech adoption of the euro proved correct. Once the Slovaks elected in 1992 a populist nationalist government that demanded sincerely or as bargaining position to secede, he did not try to stand in their way and did not offer concessions that would have slowed down the transition and increased corruption. He was also right to provocatively make libertarian public statements because they attracted foreign direct investment, the surest way to develop the post-communist economy.Political reality was, alas, entirely different, and did not admit of real libertarianism. The primary goal of the economic policies of the Klaus governments was Keynesian full employment, not restructuring. For example, under Communism, mothers had a right to two years of paid maternity leave. Klaus doubled it to four years. Under Communism, like elsewhere, children spent 12 years in school. Klaus extended it to 13; some now graduate from high school when they are almost twenty. He also made it easier to retire earlier than under Communism. But above all, unemployment as low as 2 percent was achieved by preventing creative destruction. Until 1997 no Czech enterprise went bankrupt. This was not just a matter of the absence of legal framework for bankruptcy, but the deliberate use of the government-owned banks to subsidize failing enterprises in the guise of loans that defaulted.These policies were designed to cushion the transition pains. The Czech government faced the unprecedented task of privatizing a whole economy. Communist Poland had maintained a private agricultural sector and Hungary had allowed small private businesses, but in the Czech lands everything was owned by the state. Economists assume that in a free market the initial distribution of properties is not important. Irrespective of who gets what initially, once free market mechanisms are allowed to do their magic, properties will naturally tend to be owned by those who can derive the optimal utility from them because they would offer higher prices for purchasing them from those who derive lower utility. In Western Europe and North America initial appropriations often resulted from violence and guile rather than labor, yet over time the outcome has been prosperity.If so, the question of how to privatize was essentially political. From an economic perspective it did not matter if properties were distributed by lottery or, as one Klaus loyalist suggested, by “turning off the lights.” The challenge was to “throw property deeds out of helicopters” in a way that would be politically acceptable. Now, the most efficient and profitable method for privatization would have been to simply sell everything to the highest bidders. It would have also provided the Czech and Slovak governments with the highest revenue. But that was not politically acceptable because, after Communism, only foreigners would have had the kind of capital necessary for buying the large firms, and they could have outbid locals for the small ones as well. Since many of these foreigners would have spoken German, that was simply a non-starter.So what happened? Small businesses like shops, hotels, and restaurants were sold to Czechs. As Žantovský explains, the buyers were mostly former Communist functionaries and black marketers because they were the only ones who had the capital to participate even in this “small privatization.” However, since the small businesses were left then to sink or swim, it achieved the kind of results the economists hoped for.Beyond the “small privatization,” some identifiable properties like real estate were restored to their pre-Communist Czech owners. (Germans and Jews were excluded by setting 1948 as the restitution base line, after the Holocaust and the expulsion of three million Sudeten Germans in 1946.) But the main method Klaus and his advisers chose to create private property was through the distribution of vouchers. All Czech adults received vouchers they could use to bid for shares in privatized industries. This method promised to create private ownership immediately, spread it evenly so capitalism would become acceptable in an egalitarian nation, and make the politicians enacting it popular.This Milton Friedman-inspired transition model would have been successful had a few background assumption been satisfied: Had there been the rule of law, had owners been able to control managers, and had the government then allowed creative destruction to weed out failing firms. But none of these assumptions were in fact satisfied. In continuity with Communism, ownership mattered little because managers rather than owners controlled the properties. So in the name of the owners, the managers sold the assets of the firms they managed to themselves for a song, and then approached the state-owned banks for loans to cover the losses. Since there were no bankruptcies, managers kept receiving loans and kept defaulting on them.Klaus’s government decided then that the problem with its voucher scheme was that it distributed ownership too broadly, so it attempted to concentrate ownership by allowing investment funds to manage the vouchers for ordinary citizens and invest them. Since many of these funds were owned by Czech banks that were in turn owned by the government, Czech privatization ended up being a method for the government to sell part of its industry to itself, the sort of plot Havel might have come up with in one of his absurd plays. Other investment funds, most notably the largest one, Harvard Investment, owned by Harvard MBA Victor Kožený, did what managers in industry did: stripped the assets, moved the proceeds abroad, and then collapsed the fund.Meanwhile, the politicians internalized the message that it does not matter how property is generated, and so decided that initial appropriation might as well include them. They then sold state properties to friends and family for fractions of their value or charged commissions on privatized properties. The political result has been the general recognition that Czech capitalism was born in sin.Worse than political sin was economic dysfunction. The constant infusion of capital from the state to zombie businesses that could not go bankrupt threatened to instead bankrupt the entire state. So, in 1997, Havel participated in bringing down Klaus’s government. Žantovský the bearer of arms denies that Havel was involved due to his bad health, but this is unlikely. Minister of Interior at the time and the main anti-Klaus “rebel,” Jiří Ruml was a former Charter 77 spokesperson; he would not have acted without coordinating with Havel, who seemed ready and unsurprised.A year later, the Social Democratic government with Klaus’s party support enacted some of the necessary restructuring reforms by selling the banks to foreign banks like Japan’s Nomura, and later the Skoda car factory to Volkswagen, currently the largest employer. This did not end corruption or create the rule of law, but it did allow sufficient restructuring of the market to generate healthy economic growth—a least until the global recession hit the country in 2009.Klaus, in de facto coalition with the Social Democrats led by Miloš Zeman and with Havel as an isolated President with influence only on foreign policy, moved on with his ideology, attempting to win populist support with nationalism, sometimes of the extreme variety. When Havel left the presidency after the constitutional two terms, he considered his greatest achievements to be the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, Czech admission to NATO and the Czech joining of the European Union that happened shortly after the end of his term in office.Klaus was then elected by a slim margin to succeed Havel as President. Klaus’s agenda for the next ten years (2003–12) centered on opposition to the European Union, support for Putin’s Russia, and denial of man-made climate change (the main domestic source of energy in the Czech Republic is coal). Still, Klaus’s international libertarian credentials somehow survived his policies and domestic ideology, and upon the end of his presidency he moved to Washington, DC, to become a senior member of the CATO Institute. He was then sent packing once the institute discovered, after twenty very active years, that Klaus was as much of a libertarian as Putin.The Partying President and Political Parties In Žantovský’s opinion, Havel’s biggest mistake was his refusal to lead a political party. Without a political party, especially during his decade as Czech President, Havel had nobody to represent him in parliament. In domestic affairs he was reduced to ineffective expressions of moral indignation, which made him appear more like a preacher than a President. In my opinion, the problem has been constitutional more than personal.Democratic Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic never quite stabilized the role of the President in their constitutions. Since democratic Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic have had a proportional representation with a threshold electoral system, the president has always faced a fragmented parliament and coalition governments. All Czechoslovak and Czech Presidents have been charismatic politicians with a personal claim for being popular “tribunes” that they used to assume real power when coalitions fragmented to appoint a technocratic government of their loyalists until the political parties got their act together. The founding President of Czechoslovakia, the philosopher T. G. Masaryk, who was also not a member of a political party, did it several times. As noted, Havel did it despite Klaus’ protests. But in his turn, Klaus did the same. In 2009, the Czech Republic assumed the revolving six-month presidency of the European Union, so the anti-European Klaus collapsed the government with the help of the opposition Social Democrats. The politicians needed then to agree on a technocratic caretaker government. The country still held the presidency of the European Union, so they needed a polyglot technocrat, fluent in several European languages. The global economy was at the depth of the recession, so they needed a Prime Minister who understood the economy and had superior quantitative skills. Still, the politicians sought somebody so uncharismatic that, even if he developed a taste for high politics, he would be uncompetitive at the polls. So, mazel tov!:The Czech Republic got its first Jewish Prime Minister, Jan Fischer, previously the president of the state Statistical Office. Current President Miloš Zeman was the first to be elected directly in 2013. He used his new powers almost immediately when the police leaked that the Prime Minister’s lover and head of his office used the secret service to spy on his wife while they were going through a divorce. He appointed a government of his loyalists in the second half of 2013.In this context, Havel’s “anti-politics” fit the Czech constitution and historical tradition. If George Washington avoided becoming a party member because he was concerned about the self-destruction of the Roman Republic though partisanship, Havel was concerned about the Party as an institution that allowed people to relieve themselves of personal responsibility by creating an unaccountable, anonymous bureaucracy. The denouement of the Czech party system after a quarter century of liberal democracy proved that Havel’s fears were not unfounded.As in other post-totalitarian countries like West Germany and Austria, Czech post-totalitarian mass political parties connected to their electorates through patronage rather than policies and ideologies. Other democracies started like this too, as Francis Fukuyama argues in his most recent book.2 Though there was a formal ideological distinction between the two main Czech parties, the Civic Democrats and the Social Democrats, their policies were quite similar. They differed mainly in regard to which private interests they patronized. Compared to the corporatist patronage systems of Germany and Austria, the Czech system was staffed with marauding rather than stationary political bandits, to borrow Mancur Olson’s distinction. Most politicians did not expect or intend to stay in politics for long, so they attempted to derive the highest utility from politics in the shortest time. Unlike in Germany and Austria too, political corruption has not been limited by the rule of law. In continuity with Communist practice, politicians have been above the law. The patronage system has also not been as extensive as in Germany and Austria. Add to that the effects of the recession and the result has been the rise of populism.Membership in populist parties is limited to the leader and a handful of trusted deputies. The leader brings in the votes and appoints non-party members to offices so they are entirely dependent and have no constituency of their own. There have been several incarnations of extreme but marginal populist parties in the Czech Republic, often led by characters who looked like Batman villains. The latest such character is Tomio Okamura, a travel agent with a Japanese father and Czech mother who grew up in Japan and acquired there expertise in racism. He claimed to have made his money from Japanese tourism to the Czech Republic, which was somewhat incredible, since one rarely sees any Japanese tourists in Prague. Actually, he used his political career to raid the party coffers by hiring himself as a consultant with the money the party got from the state. The party ideology advocated direct democracy and opposition to Islam and immigration, a particularly pathetic ideology in a country with negligible numbers of Muslim immigrants. Anti-racist activists organized a kebab-eating day in protest. More recently, they started an ironic civic movement against water from Mars, opposing Mars-ist indoctrination in schools, calling for a boycott of Mars bars, and spreading the “Truth” in the form of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Havel would have been amused, no doubt.The much larger and politically more significant populist party is ANO, the second-largest party in the Czech parliament. It is led by Adrej Babiš, the second wealthiest Czech, who is Minister of Finance and owner of the nation’s two quality newspapers. Apart from opposition to corruption and support for reinstating capital punishment, ANO has no program or ideology. Its oligarch leader, Trump-style, is currently the most popular Czech politician. He promises to run the country as he does his company, and in the meantime appoints his executives to positions in the government and civil service.After decades of corruption from the established parties and upstart politicians, the average Czech reasons that since Babiš is so rich ($2.7 billion according to Forbes) he does not need to steal. Yet as Minister of Finance and the owner of few hundred companies there are few decisions he can make that do not affect his personal wealth. EU and U.S. leaders try to ignore his existence.The rise of these populist parties is the result of the corruption of the conventional political parties and the emergence of Czech oligarchs. True, much worse examples of populism can be found in Western Europe today. Arguably, Babiš is Berlusconi without the orgies, or Trump without the hot air. Still, the failure of the post-Communist Czech party system caused the rise of populism in a society where democracy is not entrenched yet and establishment of the rule of law has still a long way to go.The Dalai Lama or PutinHavel’s foreign policy achievements undermined themselves. NATO membership assured the Czechs that Russia is not threatening them. As EU members they did not feel obliged to coordinate their foreign policy with the EU. Klaus had valid criticisms of the unaccountability, inefficiency, and bureaucratization of the EU. But his opposition to the EU was aligned with a Russian foreign policy that aimed to fragment Europe so that Russia could deal with each weak country separately, and charge different prices for Russian energy according to each country’s degree of obedience and dependence. Klaus’ successor, first as Prime Minister and currently as President, Miloš Zeman, continues Klaus’s pro-Russian policies. Zeman’s election campaign was partly financed by Russia’s Lukoil. It seems like both Presidents reached a kind of Faustian pact with Putin. Still, Havel’s prestige and appointees in the Czech Foreign office prevented a radical shift in Czech foreign policy, at least until recently.The current Czech government, a coalition of the Social Democrats with the populist ANO party, is attempting to reassess Havel’s tradition in foreign policy, characterized by support for the Atlantic alliance and idealist support for anti-totalitarian dissidents from Tibet to Cuba. A new geopolitical alliance with Russia and China could fit Czech economic interests, or at least the interests of some of the more influential oligarchs and politicians. So if there is a major change, its sources run below the surface.Ordinary Czechs are unlikely to object. NATO membership was supposed to be a one-sided protection of the Czechs, so many were quite shocked when a few days after becoming NATO members they found themselves, at least on paper, at war with Serbia. The American political retreat from Europe under the current administration has not helped the survival of Havel’s foreign policy either. The Czechs were incredibly lucky when they had two American Secretaries of State with a sentimental interest in them. As President Clinton put it, the Czech Republic was the only country with two representatives in the UN during Madeleine Albright’s tenure there (though Havel addressed her during their first meeting as Mrs. Fulbright). Condoleezza Rice studied under Albright’s father and in her Ph.D. dissertation compared the Soviet Union with Czechoslovakia But U.S. policy towards the Czech Republic since 2008 has been apolitical. The U.S. Ambassador to Prague has been tasked with improving trade, promoting the bid of Westinghouse for building new atomic reactors in Temelín against Russian counterbids, and promoting LGBT rights (which is quite redundant because, according to the Pew Research Center, only 14 percent of Czech find homosexuality unacceptable, in comparison with 37 percent percent of Americans). In Central Europe, should the United States ever allow a political vacuum, it is certain that Russia will fill it.Most recently, the Czech government realized that it was shooting itself in the foot when it publicly questioned Havel’s legacy. Without Havel, dead or alive, there is little of interest for the world in the Czech Republic. In the future, if Czech governments attempt to push Czech foreign policy in a more realist, or pro-Russian, direction they will have to do so under the guise of reinterpreting his tradition rather than abandoning it. Only President Zeman still attempts publicly to break with the European Union’s policies and rebalance Czech foreign policy in a more pro-Kremlin direction. He was the only EU head of state to go to Moscow for the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II despite an EU boycott and a public row with the U.S. Ambassador in Prague, Andrew Schapiro.Twenty years ago, when Zeman was the head of the opposition Social Democrats, he came to the university where I was teaching in Olomouc. At breakfast he had as many shots of liquor and cigarettes as sips of coffee. One of the students asked him about his drinking. He replied: “Teetotaler, I am not. But I am not an alcoholic either.” Decades of this lifestyle have taken their toll on this Falstaffian figure. On radio, in support of Putin’s imprisonment of the members of Pussy Riot, and probably under the influence, he explored the considerable depth of the Czech language in suggesting various possible translations of the name of the band to Czech. This is Havel’s successor: Bohemian to be sure, but no artist.For my generation of young, now middle-aged Americans who arrived in Prague in the early 1990s—estimates vary between 20,000 and 40,000—Havel was a symbol more than a reality. He stood for the victory of consciousness as well as conscience, for the political relevance of intellectuals, philosophy, and art, and for the potential significance of high culture in a commercial world dominated by technically sophisticated kitsch. The physical geography of the Czech Republic, the baroque aesthetic of the towns and the beauty of Prague, and the glorious cultural history and literature fitted it all well. Reality, cultural as well as political, could not have lived up to the symbolism, especially after half a century of adapting to totalitarian regimes.Havel was a symbol, not a representation, of his nation. His own self-evaluation was far more critical and severe than that of others. His last play which he filmed after the presidency, Leaving, is about a politician, Chancellor Rieger, who leaves office and has to vacate his official home. Pace Žantovský’s claims to the contrary, the play is clearly about his period as President and is unsparing in its honesty. I have never encountered anything remotely this self-critical by an ex-politician. Consider what Moses could have written about his experiences in power: Yes, he resisted Pharaoh and led his people out of bondage, but what, really, could he show for forty years of leadership? Wandering in the desert, economic stagnation, constant popular dissatisfaction with his leadership, and populist leaders advocating realist foreign policy and a return to Egypt. His people returned to the discredited former ideology and in moral indignation he threw the Ten Commandments at them. Still, the Mosaic tradition survived and defined a nation. Whether they like it or not, the Czechs are the nation of Havel. What they need to work out, with the help of biographies like this one, is what that means.

1For readers interested in Havel’s philosophy I shamelessly recommend my own book: The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence: From Patočka to Havel, Pittsburgh University Press, 2000.

2Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014.

Repentance in South Africa, Forgiveness in Texas

Sometimes, there’s good news in the world, too: The Mail and Guardian profiles Adriaan Vlok, who was involved in overseeing South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime and now lives a life of charity and penance after repenting from his actions. More:

Now a 77-year-old widower, Vlok seeks redemption from his past by opening his house as a refuge for the vulnerable and distributing food to poor black families.

In the late 1980s, he was responsible for covert bombing operations that targeted church buildings and trade union headquarters, and he even tried to kill an anti-apartheid priest by poisoning his underwear […]Today, Vlok lives in the suburbs of Pretoria in a modest house that he shares with a black man who repairs furniture in the garage, a former convict who killed his own wife, and a white family which was homeless.Without any escort or protection, he drives a few miles to the township of Olievenhoutbosch with his car loaded with trays of food donated by local supermarkets and bakeries.There, the man who once sent in the riot police distributes pies, sandwiches and cakes to hungry families, a children’s daycare centre and a disabled charity.

And another story came to our attention this week that shows the other side of the repentance process: forgiveness. The Washington Post tells the story of a widow who came to forgive the man who murdered her husband. Juan Martin Garcia, the convicted murderer, received the death penalty for his crime and was executed on this past Tuesday. In his last moments, he asked for the widow’s forgiveness and she gave it:

This time, Garcia didn’t make any excuses. And Ana Solano didn’t equivocate.

As the convict apologized for killing her husband, she and her daughter sobbed and said that they loved Garcia.As pentobarbital flowed into the inmate’s veins, Garcia winced, shook his head, gurgled and then stopped moving, according to the AP. Meanwhile, Ana Solano and her daughter raised their arms in apparent prayer in a nearby witness room.Afterward, Ana left no doubt that she had come to oppose the execution. Even murderers deserve to live so that they can teach others to avoid their mistakes, she said. “It’s about God,” she told the AP. “It’s about Jesus.”

In the true history of the world, stories like these matter infinitely more than most of the empty pursuit of power, reputation, and wealth that the media normally follows. These events should open us to possibilities: All human beings share something with Vlok and with his victims. At one and the same time, we have participated in injustice and cruelty. We have injured others by trampling on their sacred dignity and humanity…and we’ve also been the victims of the injustice, unfairness, and cruelty of others.

So what should, what can, we do? We need to repent like Vlok, which is more than just saying “I’m sorry.” It is about trying to repair and atone, even when that’s impossible in full and even when others don’t accept our sincerity. It’s part of repairing the damage you’ve done to yourself as much as the damage you have done to others, and it’s part of the healing process. But at the same time that we have to repent, we must also forgive. The two are related. We’ve all been sinned against; we’ve all sinned against others. It’s a recognition of shared humanity that causes us to seek forgiveness—and that also enables us, at least a little, to begin to forgive.Repenting and forgiving are difficult and painful—and necessary to a fully lived human life.

Can a Climate Deal Happen Without a Climate Fund?

The developing world isn’t going to like this. The World Bank’s climate change envoy came out against the setting up of a climate slush fund for world’s poorer nations. The Guardian reports:

“I hope there is not a number [on climate finance] for beyond 2020 at Paris. I understand the need of developed countries to ensure that finance is going to those countries but that is not it, [said World Bank special envoy on climate change Rachel Kyte]”

She accused governments at the Copenhagen meeting of making up a symbolic number in the closing days of the talks, just to try to get a last-minute deal.“The $100bn was picked out of the air at Copenhagen,” she argued. “If you think about the global economy and the challenge for finance ministers in developed countries, I’m not sure that an abstract number like $100bn is helpful. It is not a meaningful number to a country managing its economy.”

Kyte is criticizing one of the only things the last major climate conference—in Copenhagen six years ago—actually produced. She implies that the $100 billion target set at that summit was an arbitrary goal and cautions against following up with a similar commitment in Paris this December.

But the climate funds’ problems extend beyond concerns over whether or not the nice, round target number was “picked out of the air.” The bigger issue is this: the fund remains wholly un-funded. The developed world has proved remarkably reticent to actually commit money, and with Congress holding America’s pursestrings it’s unlikely Washington is going to take the lead here.And that’s bad news for the Paris talks more broadly. The key schism at those discussions will be between the rich and poor countries of the world, with the latter seeking (monetary) assurances from the former as a prerequisite for signing on to any kind of deal that might place green goals ahead of economic growth. Kyte’s criticisms of the climate fund and her hope that Paris moves away from that policy will make the developing world extremely nervous, and if delegates take it to heart there’s a good chance the summit won’t produce a deal.

Under Pressure

Each age has its own fears. Much like the specter of climate change haunts the imagination of many today, and the arms race kept people sleepless in the 1980s, the ‘population bomb’ was the doomsday scenario of choice in the 1970s. Clever people like Norman Borlaug, Aldous Huxley, Richard Dawkins and Arthur Koestler all dreaded the day when humanity would outgrow its subsistence base and the Malthusian mechanisms of war, famine and pestilence would come into play.

This bleak scenario has, of course, been debunked by progress. Changes in how we farm, how we produce and how we live has made most societies capable of absorbing larger populations, but not all. The 2002 UN-sponsored Arab Development Report pointed out the “At about 15 per cent, average unemployment across Arab countries is among the highest rates in the developing world.” High birth rates in Arab countries mean that the median age in the Middle East is only 22 years, compared to a global average of 28 years. This has resulted in millions of poorly educated youngsters entering the work force each year with few prospect of finding meaningful employment.The “lost generation” is key to understanding recent developments in the Middle East, and the current refugee crisis. In Europe the autumn of 2015 has been marked by a political crisis spurred by the influx of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers. Concerns that economic migrants could be entering EU posing as refugees have been raised after Syria issued 10,000 passports in just one month through its embassy in Jordan. The European public mood has swung wildly from idealistic fervor to sheer panic as the number of migrants has accelerated. Germany is expected to receive one million applications for asylum this year. If all asylum seekers settled in one place, they would make up the country’s third largest city, larger than Munich.While activists see this solely as a question of compassion, cooler heads see a contradictory picture. If every asylum seeker who manages to slip through Europe’s porous borders were to be granted the right to stay, millions of immigrants would likely arrive in Europe where anti-immigration sentiments were running high even before the recent influx.Immigration is the most divisive issue in Europe today. Faced with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war or in search of a better life, Europe’s leaders stand paralyzed before a self-contradictory public opinion. If we for a moment put the most hyper-ventilating scenarios aside, we see that the pieces are lined up for a battle over authority, the like of which Europe has not seen since the creation of the EU in 1993.Most will agree with Danish historian and editor Bo Lidegaard’s dictum: «No society can sustain limitless immigration». But how much is too much? This is the core of the dispute. Since European countries curbed work migration in the 1970s, asylum has become one of the few ways for undereducated non-Europeans to settle in Europe. The demand for asylum is governed by conditions in countries of origin and not, necessarily, by the recipient countries’ needs.In the popular mind the typical asylum seeker is fleeing the civil war in Syria, but according to figures released by Eurostat on September 16, only 20 per cent of recent asylum seekers to the EU are Syrians. Those who advocate for higher fences should remember that millions of people would qualify for asylum in Europe, if only they manage to get past the border controls set up to keep them out. There are some 60 million refugees in the world and an unknown number of millions of people who in other ways are likely to qualify for asylum given recent rulings of Europe’s supranational courts and the asylum practices of countries such as Germany, Sweden and Norway.According to Oxford University professor Paul Collier, author of the book Exodus, about 40 percent of people in the developing world would emigrate if only developed countries would take them. Adding to the challenge, Europe lacks a functioning system to differentiate between economic migrants and legitimate refugees. Repatriation for those denied asylum often prove difficult, given that many of them come from countries with poor systems of governance. As a result many who do not qualify for asylum are allowed to stay, increasing the incentive for others to attempt the journey to Europe.Europe accounts for 7 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s wealth creation. Europe accounts for half the world’s welfare spending and receives 80 percent of asylum applications in the world. European states have sought to redress this imbalance by restricting access to the places that people can apply for asylum. This policy has created a perverse situation in which people cast off in unseaworthy vessels in the hope of being rescued by European vessels patrolling the southern shores of the Mediterranean. An estimated 23,000 people so far have drowned on this perilous voyage.This profoundly immoral system has now collapsed. Unfortunately, the voters, governments, and institutions that together must find a solution share almost no common ground. First, there is a gap between national governments and EU institutions. The latter do not seem to have any discernable ceiling when it comes to immigration and have thus far seemed more concerned with expanding their own powers than stemming the flow of migrants. That said, there is no evidence to support claims sometimes voiced in Eurosceptic quarters that uncontrolled migration is part of a sinister ploy to prepare the ground for a post-national Europe.The EU response to the refugee crisis has been trailing events. The EU is paralyzed by a “consensus-expectations gap”; that is, between what the Union had been talked up to do and what it is actually able to deliver in terms of agreed policies. Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has invested much prestige in a proposal to grant Brussels the authority to distribute asylum seekers among the Union’s member states based on a common formula. Granting the Commission the right to determine who settles in the country would mean handing the EU a large chunk of the member state’s remaining sovereignty.The proposal was floated and sunk back in June, only to resurface in early September and sink again before, in late September, the EU used the “nuclear option” of qualified majority voting (QMV) to distribute 120 000 migrants. This was forced through against the bitter opposition of several states. The voting mechanism, common for less-controversial measures, had never before been used for something as contentious as immigration. This was a decisive move, but short sighted. 120 000 is but a small share of the asylum seekers in the EU and QMV cannot be made the modus operandi without sparking an open sovereignty contest between the institutions and the member states.EU institutions are now locked in a defensive struggle to keep the EU’s treaty base from unraveling. The Schengen Agreement, which grants passport-free travel between 22 of the EU 28 countries plus Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, is under intense pressure. Schengen was built on the promise that internal borders would be disbanded while external borders would be guarded. This promise was not kept. Frontex, the EU body for monitoring Schengen’s outer borders, had a mini-budget of just 55.3 million euros for 2014, which indicates that border security was not a priority. The absence of passport controls means that a migrant who has managed to gain a foothold (in a literal sense) in a Schengen country has open access to all the countries—not in theory, of course, but in practice.In early September, tens of thousands of asylum seekers every week began arriving Germany, their preferred destination. Chancellor Merkel, who had been praised in glowing terms by The Economist for her open arms approach to asylum, panicked and temporarily shut down train links with Austria. Germany had reached its immigration limit. On September 14 Austria, fearing to become the end destination of asylum seekers on their way to Germany, made use of the emergency exit clause of the Schengen Agreement and re-imposed border controls. Six EU countries promptly followed suit.The reason that the Schengen regime is under pressure has to do with the relationship among the nation-states that make up the EU. The so-called Dublin II agreement was meant to guarantee that asylum seekers would be registered and fingerprinted in their first country of arrival in the EU, and that asylum seekers could be returned to the country where they were first registered. Due to anti-immigrant sentiments in many European states, this has been the norm. The burdens of asylum migration were therefore distributed unevenly, to southern Europe’s disadvantage.The southern countries generally have strict asylum policies. As one moves toward the northwest, the asylum climate gradually gets milder. There are indeed “international obligations” when it comes to asylum, but the states themselves interpret what these obligations entail. Therefore Sweden with a population of 9 million granted asylum to 33,025 applicants in 2014, while the corresponding figure for Poland, with its population of 38 million, was 740. Since different countries have different asylum practices, the same asylum application might be accepted one country but rejected in another. All states prioritize asylum seekers who are physically on their territory.Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, and Croatia thus have strong incentives to allow migrants free passage without fingerprinting them. The Dublin Agreements have been abrogated for years, but over the summer of 2015 transit countries stopped even pretending to enforce it. This explains why Europe north of the Alps is now experiencing an influx similar to that of the south. The dream of a borderless Europe is now marred by beggar-thy-neighbor policies in which countries funnel asylum seekers on to the next frontier. This eats away at the mutual trust that is the source of the EU’s strength. Mutual suspicions flourish, making consensus even more difficult to attain than during the euro crisis.September 14 was also the day of the long-delayed meeting where the EU’s Justice and Interior Ministers, were to agree on a common response to the crisis. On the table were proposals for common asylum practices among member states. That was never likely to happen. A common asylum system is almost unthinkable in light of the open arms of Sweden and Germany and the restrictive asylum practices of 17 of the 28 member states. Another proposal was to open EU reception centers outside Europe where asylum applications could be processed, thus stopping the deadly boat migration. This was also shelved, as it would likely have resulted in large numbers of valid asylum claims without any corresponding willingness among member states to welcome the applicants. Predictably, the meeting was a failure.2015 will likely see a doubling of the record 626,000 asylum applications from the year before. In the absence of collective leadership, such figures are set to become the new norm. That brings us to the relationship between the governing and the governed.Within the nation-state, four considerations collide. The first is, paradoxically, democracy. This is rooted in the idea that the popular will, as expressed in elections, matters. Public opinion in the European countries reached its pain threshold on immigration some time ago. Pew Research Center’s European measurement from 2014 showed that on average only 7 percent of respondents in Europe’s six largest countries were favorable to increased migration. This is at odds with the rule of law. States must also live up to their international obligations. These obligations include the EU’s freedom of movement, the UN Refugee Convention, and the EU’s common asylum rules.National identity is a third factor. Due to their large numbers, the recent wave of immigrants will be difficult and costly to integrate. Today’s immigration practice exceeds most states’ ability to integrate, which creates friction between old and new citizens. A final factor is that liberal states are market economies that depend on the free flow of goods, services, and labor. The freer the better, history seems to teach us. The problem is that there is little demand for low-skilled labor in Europe today. It is also questionable whether Europe needs more people to cope with the economic conditions created by an ageing population.We see that the four principles are pulling the nation state in different directions. While representative democracy and the nation suggest restrictive immigration policies, the rule of law points in the opposite direction, and economic considerations could go both ways. This explains some of the paradoxes in the immigration debate. In times of prosperity, when the economy delivers growth and supranational governance is uncontroversial, the trend will be in the direction of more open borders. In times of adversity, the principles of national identity and democracy tend to come to the fore. During the economic slowdown of the 1970s, most European states stopped work migration from developing countries. Today, however, empathic and legalistic arguments have trumped all other considerations.Opposition to immigration was until relatively recently considered heresy among Europe’s grey elites. That has changed, but primarily on a rhetorical level. Politicians promise to “take immigration seriously” but, confusingly to most people, this has not yet resulted in fewer immigrants. British Prime Minister David Cameron may serve as an example: In 2010, he promised to reduce net immigration “from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands.” The figures for 2014 were the highest on record: 330,000.This is partly because voters want something as impossible as fried snow: They want a restrictive immigration policy, but they also want to help the desperate people on their television screens. Asylum immigration to welfare states is a costly affair. In Norway every non-Western immigrant carries a future net cost commitment of 4.1 million Norwegian kroner, equivalent to half a million US dollars, according to Statistics Norway in 2012. Paying for these increased costs will likely require higher taxes or cuts in social benefits. That is already happening. In 2013 the Netherlands, a pioneer when it comes to large-scale third world immigration, announced the end of its welfare state.Mass immigration is also a democratic challenge since reduced immigration is an issue that the voters, according to Eurobarometer’s spring survey for 2015, claim to give remarkably high priority. One must perhaps forgive voters for concluding that their governments cannot or will represent them on this point. The result is a widespread feeling of powerlessness. Many ask who will defend them against the negative effects of globalization. This, in turn, helps explain the rise of radical parties and political agitation outside electoral channels all over Europe.Europe is experiencing a steadily growing influx of asylum seekers that is partly caused by political developments outside of Europe, but also partly brought on by liberal asylum policies in Europe. Rich Arab Gulf states are not experiencing a refugee crisis because they do not offer asylum in the way that Europe does. It is neither admirable nor commendable, but it is a fact. According to World Bank figures, Saudi Arabia accepted 559 asylum seekers in the period 2010–14. Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Oman are equally restrictive.It is therefore misleading to talk about the resettling of the boat refugees as a ‘joint effort by the international community’, as is the common refrain among those favoring liberal asylum policies. Besides, the phrase leaves one with the impression that there are a finite number of asylum seekers to be distributed, while all indications are that the more one grants asylum, the more one encourages others to apply. The easiest way to reduce asylum immigration is to narrow the criteria for asylum, but rulings by the European courts appear to have broken the key in the lock on this score.The struggle over authority over migration is poisoning European politics. In the gap between self-interested European institutions, governments that are unwilling or unable, and panicky voters the record numbers of migrants will likely continue until something breaks. No one can know what will be gained, and what will be lost in the struggle that lies ahead. It is possible that crisis will be a springboard to a federal Europe, but this would likely entail a more authoritarian Union. More likely Europe’s nation states will wallow in impotent acrimony as border fences spring up. Or perhaps voters will force a new political paradigm to replace the one that has created a crisis it is incapable of solving.There is no natural law that guarantees any political party privileged access to power. The new right parties could yet grow much larger, as could the old left. The Swedish nationalist party, Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) may prove a harbinger in this regard. Despite being considered untouchables by the political establishment, the party is forging ahead in the polls. Currently at 27.3 percent, it is the country’s largest party. The party’s rise is stoked by the country’s migration policies, the most liberal in Europe. In other states the parties of the New Right could grow to a size where they no longer can be ignored, as the old left has done in Greece. The New Right may take over the presidency in France; its parties may become the largest ones in Denmark and the Netherlands.This would pose a severe threat to West European politics, a system in which a center left and a center right party alternate in forming government with ritual regularity. Few governments in Europe will be able to feel electorally secure when the initial euphoria abates and the full consequences of their leaders’ response to the refugee crisis become apparent to the voters. In short, the current crisis will not be the end of Europe, nor will it likely be the end of the EU, but it may spell the end of the postwar political order in Europe.