Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 596

Who Bargains with the Bargainers?

The union which represents Vermont government employees, the Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA), is getting a little taste of its own medicine. You see, it turns out that VSEA staff have their own union, the Staff Alliance, to help 16 non-executive employees bargain with the VSEA. The two unions are entangled in a dispute that could be headed to court, according to the Vermont Press Bureau:

Adam Norton, president of Staff Alliance and a strategic analyst with VSEA dealing with bargaining and legislative strategy, said the dispute is over the process of resolving the original grievance. He also declined to provide specifics about the original grievance.

The process calls on employees to first take a grievance to a supervisor for resolution. If that does not work, the grievance is taken to Howard as the executive director. The next step involves a hearing with the VSEA president serving as a hearing officer.Norton said Staff Alliance is disputing that the management team can appeal the ruling of VSEA President Shelley Martin — a ruling to which Staff Alliance is agreeable, he said.“I wouldn’t say (the ruling is) totally in our favor, but certainly management’s perspective is they don’t like the ruling,” he said.If management tries to appeal Martin’s decision, Staff Alliance may sue in Washington County Superior Court, according to Norton.

You have to give it to them. These deep blue union leaders from the Green Mountain State point out a weighty philosophical question: who collectively bargains with the collective bargainers?

Insane Asylum

I happened to be in Germany when the current refugee/asylum crisis struck. Indeed, for about a week I was in Berlin, the capital, in the Kreutzberg section of town, which happens to be about as multicultural as any thirty square block area in Germany. I did a “brown bag” seminar, as they are called, at the Aspen Institute, and also lucked into a fairly long meeting with an old friend who now works as a special assistant to the German President, Joachim Gauck. All anyone wanted to talk about, really, was the refugee crisis, and the first feeling that came to the fore was how proud—indeed astonishingly so—everyone was at the outpouring of welcome encouragement, volunteerism, and outright nobility on display in Munich and elsewhere around (most of) the country. Even columnists in Handelsblatt were blushing with pride.

Sober souls, my old friend among them in the 1994 “disappearing” black office building right next to Bellevueschloss, the President’s sprawling office complex, are counting mounting costs and waiting for the next shoe to drop. They know it will, even as they share in the wonderment that refugees far away in the Middle East could think of Germany as a country of hope. Few people say it out loud, but it’s the image of Germans welcoming “others” on in-bound trains from the east—from Hungary, very telegenically, when I was there—that arrests their attention. What a contrast with the pictures of other Germans in an earlier time shipping “others” to the east, on out-bound trains, to places like Treblinka and Auschwitz.Germans say they have an identity problem, and so they do. It’s mainly because they believe it to be so, in other words. But there are also reasons beyond self-perception. This is neither the time nor place to go into why this is, but certainly what has happened in recent days has transformed the question of Germans’ self-image. It hasn’t answered the question, but it has rephrased it in what most take to be a felicitous way. It goes something like this: We may not know exactly who we are, but whoever we are, we’re better people that we have feared we might be. We believed we could change. Now we see, at an unexpected moment of testing, that we have changed. The earth no long shakes under our feet as much as it did even a month ago.That is the sense of things, as I observed it, and it seems to me, further, to be infusing in the German elite a greater sense of self-confidence and willingness to lead within European affairs—at least for the time being. It has certainly transformed Chancellor Merkel from an austerity scold to someone with what we could call, for lack of a better phrase, abundant moral capital in a part of the world that values such a thing far more than it does other virtues of leadership.What sort of sound is that other shoe going to make when it finally does drop? Truth be told, the German leadership—and the EU leadership as well, with Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg in the lead—are planting the seeds for long-term agony. That agony will comes in three forms: the economics of the welfare state; the self-blinding politics of multiculturalism; and security.As to this third matter, DNI General James Clapper’s warning earlier this week, that this surge of Arabs into Europe is a security nightmare in the making, is surely correct. I tried to express this at a dinner in Warsaw on Tuesday evening, with an assortment of Poles, Germans, Norwegians, Brits, a Ukrainian, and some miscellaneous others present. I predicted that within five years Poland will be forced to erect passport control at airports for incoming European flights. (In case you are not aware, there are none now. We flew from Berlin to Warsaw by way of Munich, and when one lands there is simply no passport control at all—meaning that any non-EU national who can get into Germany and pay for a ticket to get to Poland can indeed fly to Poland without anyone so much as asking his name or how long he intends to stay.) They all said I was wrong, but just a few days ago look what the Danes did: They basically sealed the border to rail and road traffic from Germany. And they are right to do it. If only a tenth of one percent of these Arabs are or are turned toward salafi-based political violence for any number of reasons we can all think of, then Germany will have a problem that will shred its esteemed privacy laws to bits, whether Germans like it or not.I confess do not understand Juncker’s thinking. With the Schengen Zone in effect, what is to keep arriving refugees in the place to which they are originally assigned—assuming for a moment that some form of his share-the-burden scheme is agreed to? After a year or a month or even a few days they can pick themselves up and come to Berlin, can’t they? Or Paris? Even if they are not supposed to, they will do it anyway—and who is going to stop them now? What Germans, in the mood the country is now in, are willing to shove them on a train against their will heading back east? (Imagine what those photos would look like . . . some ass will surely airbrush “Arbeit macht frei” into the pictures.) Why would a Syrian family want to stay in Poland, where everyone quietly hates them, when they can come to Berlin, where nearly everyone, in public anyway, professes to love them?Meanwhile, the moral hazard problem is getting entirely out of control. The word is out in Syria, and Iraq, and Lebanon, and among Palestinians in various places: They see the pictures, they send the men, then comes family reunification, and the next thing you know, in as little as a year or so, there are five million Levantine Arabs clotting about in German cities.I do not wish to delve into the economic side of the story. The numbers are too soft in every sense, and I am not very good at the bean-counting business. I will only note that many Germans seem to think that the Levantine Arabs now entering their country by the hundreds of thousands will act like their Gastarbeiter Turks. They are in for a shock. Many also think that they’re getting the cream of the educated crop from Syria. I heard several people note that the people coming are young men, coming not directly from Syria but from camps in Jordan and Turkey. They are presumed to be engineers, doctors, and the like, and given Germany age-cohort picture, the consensus among the saintly is that they will boost the German economy in the not-too-distant future. This means that they know not the first thing about the real status of education in the Arab world. Only a very tiny percentage of these asylum seekers are well enough educated to hold down a middle-class enabling professional job in an economy like Germany’s.So the sound of the other shoe will consist of gunfire and bombs, most likely, and the sucking sound of cash exiting the coffers of the still very generous but increasingly fiscally fragile German welfare state. And what of the politics? The Left’s normative seizure of Germany is truly amazing. Even the Chancellor, who by German standards is far from a raving leftist, appears to firmly believe that everyone must be a multiculturalist for moral reasons, and that people who want to preserve the ethno-linguistic integrity of their communities—whether in Germany or in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere—are acting out of base motives. One even sees self-righteous criticism of the Australians now in the German press. The German leadership’s understanding of its moral obligation is without limit, and they refuse to limit in any way the number of refugees who can be taken into Germany, or the speed with which they may come. But more in Europe—a place of bloodline nationalisms compared to the U.S. creedal version—than in the United States there is a moral basis, too, for a community’s own sense of self-determination, which presumes the right of self-definition and self-composition. That is not racism in Europe any more than nervousness about immigrants is racism here in the United States. Wanting one’s own community to be a certain way is not aggressively or actively prejudicial against others, any more than declining to give money to a beggar on a city street is morally equivalent to hitting him in the head with a crowbar. It is simply preferring the constituency of a high-social trust society, from which, social science suggests, many good things come: widespread security, prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity being prominent among them.It is, in my view, better morally to respect the dignity of difference than it is to try to expunge it though the mindless homogenization of humankind, which is the unstated premise at the base of the “thinking” of much of the EU elite. What better way to get rid of pesky nationalism than to get rid of nations, eh? One can hardly blame contemporary Germans for this sort of thinking, for their own nationalism turned out to be rabidly illiberal at one point in their history. But it is nonetheless an error of moral reasoning. Asylum seekers distort the moral choice with the intensity of their need, and their innocence, but the point is that what we see in Western Europe is not a case of what is moral versus what is base, but two kinds of rights, incommensurate ( à   la Isaiah Berlin) as they are, clashing. This basic truth seems to have gone missing in Germany lately, and, unfortunately, its expression in Hungary comes from a man who is toxic morally and opportunistic as well, and so gives that side of the argument a very bad name.What the Europeans are doing, under the aegis of the European Union, but really at the instigation of Germany most of all, will have two basic political effects. First it will split the EU east and west, possibly even more bitterly than the economic woes of the past five years have split north and south. Second, it will reshape politics within West European countries.As to the former effect, think about Poland for just a moment. When Poland re-emerged into independence after World War I, it was a highly heterogeneous place. And that was troublesome, to put it mildly. The situation of most other Central and East European states was roughly comparable. Thanks to World War II and then the Russian insistence on a postwar territorial settlement of a certain kind, far more homogenous states emerged from the bloodbath. Poland today is vastly more homogeneous, both in ethno-linguistic and sectarian terms, than it ever was, and Poles by and large seem quite happy with the current situation—and they are doing well as a society by most measures partly because of it. Why should they jump for joy when Mr. Juncker and the Commission in Brussels tell them that all this needs to end? They clearly are not jumping for joy, and the pressure from without is bound to help President Duda’s party in next month’s parliamentary elections.To Poland’s west we are about to witness the biggest boon for right-wing xenophobes since the 1930s. All this moral unction reminds me of the reality-challenged 1920s in Europe, which gave rise to the very ugly 1930s (and yes, there will be a sharp economic downturn to speed the effect; it’s already begun, in China, because we have allowed a half dozen major regional business cycles with their own, often balancing-out, dynamics to coalesce into one huge global business cycle), and we all know what happened next. How is the thinking in Berlin now different in essence from the calamity of Kellogg-Briand and Locarno? It is downright Kantian: The ethereal categorical imperative über alles. It also seems to me very Christian in the sense that it represents a tilt of intentions over consequences—and Kant was, remember, a Lutheran Pietist, so we know where his basic intellectual urges came from. Indeed, the denizens of the German Left seem to me a very religious people, only they think they’re secularists just because a clutch of proper names has changed, and they don’t often go to church anymore, but rather collect for the functional equivalent of communal worship in political meetings, university seminars, and protest rallies.For all this we can blame the Nazis, because the moral ricochet over time is clear, and it is in many ways very noble. It’s nice that the Germans want to be moral, isn’t it? But absent a heavy doze of Niebuhrian moral realism, they now risk letting dead Nazis derange living thought from beyond the grave. At this point, sober Germans are worried about money, about what all this will cost. But this is not really about money. It’s about much more important kinds of business, political business ultimately, and politics is trump.I would love to be proved wrong about all this. But the derangement of moral reasoning in Western Europe seems so advanced and deep that it is hard to be optimistic. One fears that if reasonable people do not somehow apply a brake to this wild excess of selfless saintliness, unreasonable people eventually will. And guess who might still be around to cheer, encourage, and perhaps even arm the unreasonable? Yes, Vlad the Putin himself, as he is indeed already doing in a minor key. Then there will be a problem, and it will ultimately be a problem for Americans as well as for Europeans. Doesn’t it always go like that, again, whether we like it or not?Anyway, folks, that’s my slant on this week’s news from Germany and Poland. Darn good beer in both countries, however. So not all the news is bad.

India and Australia Conduct Joint Naval Exercises

The first bilateral military exercises between India and Australia are set to begin today, the Times of India reports:

[The exercise] will focus on anti-submarine warfare as the two countries look at deepening defence cooperation especially in the Indian Ocean. AUSINDEX-15 is being conducted off the east coast of India from September 11-19.

The maritime exercise is a tangible sign that will strengthen defence co-operation between the two countries as envisaged in the Framework for Security Co-operation announced by the Australian and Indian Prime Ministers in 2014, a Navy statement said.

The exercises begin a week after top Australian analysts told the Sydney Morning Herald that China was handily winning the battle for control of shipping routes in the South China Sea.

As we have said before, Sydney may seek close economic ties with Shanghai, but the Aussies are very worried about Chinese military aggression. India shares these concerns, and New Delhi has been working hard to improve relations with Canberra for some time: last year Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a big trip to Australia. Still, these exercises mark an important milestone for both countries. And they will be followed by another significant set of drills: Japan will join India’s Malabar exercises with the U.S., to be held in the Bay of Bengal in October. As Bejing continues to pursue its regional ambitions, its rivals are pulling together.

Corbyn Wins Labour Leadership

It’s official: the leftist Jeremy Corbyn is the new leader of the Labour Party. The New York Times:

Mr. Corbyn, 66, won the Labour leadership overwhelmingly and with the backing of thousands of newly recruited supporters, and in doing so delivered one of the biggest upsets in modern British politics.

His success underlines the extent to which European political structures have been destabilized by the aftershocks of the financial crisis in 2008, with voters increasingly attracted away from the political center ground, either to the socialist left or the nationalist right.

However, Mr. Corbyn’s program, which includes nationalizing energy and rail companies, has shallow support among fellow Labour lawmakers, a fact that suggests he may struggle to unite his party. Several senior party figures, including Emma Reynolds and Tristram Hunt, have already announced that they would not be serving in Mr. Corbyn’s team, though another, Hilary Benn, promised to support him.

Labour’s turn to the hard left is part of broader revival of the left across the Anglosphere. The NDP is running Alberta, and Bernie Sanders is ahead of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and Iowa. But whether the left turn within the parties will lead to national power is another question. By global standards, majorities in the English-speaking world have historically been relatively hostile to the hard left.

Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership election may be less about a Labour revival than about the conversion of a mass party with aspirations to govern the country into a smaller party of sectarian dissent. The collapse of Labour in Scotland, where it was the natural governing party, and where many of its most skilled and experienced national officials had their base, changes the nature of British politics in ways that have yet to be fully understood. Without a large bloc of Labour MPs from Scotland, it is pretty much impossible to envision a Labour majority in the British Parliament anytime soon.If Scotland eventually secedes—and recent polls show that a new referendum would give a strong majority for independence—then Labour would likely be a permanently marginalized opposition party in a smaller UK. England, Wales and Northern Ireland as a political entity are considerably to the right of the current UK with Scotland. And if Scotland stays, uneasily, in the Union with the SNP as its new dominant party, Labour would only be able to form a government in coalition with the Scots Nationalists. That coalition is likely to be very unpopular with English voters, and fear of it was one reason the Conservatives won a surprise majority in the last UK election.So Labour’s future is up for grabs. Before the Scottish wipeout, Labour leadership elections were about choosing the next potential Prime Minister of the UK. After the wipeout, the Labour election could be more about choosing a satisfying leader for a party of permanent opposition. A party leader who makes the hard left feel comfy and warm may in fact be the right choice for a party that sees its prospects of power fading away. If you are doomed to lose whatever you do, you might as well let your freak flag fly.What will be interesting to see is what the ambitious group of people who have made their careers in Labour politics precisely because they want to govern one day will now do. Will they stick with Labour? Will they reach out to the battered Liberal Party to create a new kind of opposition to the Conservatives that could do well in England?

Interesting times.

Sharing the Refugees, but Not the Financial Risks

In the wake of the Greek debt crisis, Germany has a message for the rest of Europe: don’t put us on the hook for any more of this. The Financial Times reports:

Germany is determined to halt plans for the eurozone to pool more financial risk, in a challenge to a Brussels-led push to deepen single currency integration after the Greek crisis.

Despite calls from France, the European Commission and European Central Bank for a common system to protect bank deposits, Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, will tell eurozone counterparts on Friday that it would be wrong even to discuss such measures before more discipline has been instilled in debt markets.According to a document circulated to finance ministers and seen by the Financial Times, Berlin in effect insists on weakening the rights of investors in bank and sovereign bonds so that they — rather than taxpayers — foot the bill for bailouts.

Greece has been leading the charge for mandatory refugee quotas and burden-sharing on that front. But shared financial liabilities? Nein, danke.

Everybody wants a Europe a la carte—and everybody has a few red lines. Unfortunately, the net result is a Europe whose institutions increasingly do not work—and a Europe in which no nation, including Germany, seems to have enough political capital or will to really make them.

We’ve Got Good Climate News, For a Change

Our planet’s climate is still capable of surprising its best scientists. A new study brings us a positive climate change development, for once, showing that the waters surrounding Antarctica are capable of storing a lot more carbon dioxide than previously thought. The Guardian reports:

The oceans absorb around a quarter of emissions caused by human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels, reducing the speed of climate change. About 40% of this occurs in the Southern Ocean, which surrounds the Antarctic, making it the planet’s strongest ocean carbon sink. […]

Earlier studies had suggested that rising emissions caused by humans had brought about the saturation of the Southern Ocean in the 1980s. Researchers estimated that the efficiency of the Southern Ocean to absorb CO2 had dropped by about 30% which they put down to higher wind speeds across the area which brought carbon-rich waters to the surface. This was itself a consequence of climate change and the depletion of the ozone layer, they said, creating a feedback loop that would only get worse over time.But the new report published in the journal Science shows that this downward trend in capacity reversed around 2002 and regained its former strength in line with rising emissions by 2012. The scientists put the change down to a combination of dropping water surface temperatures in the Pacific sector and a change in ocean circulation keeping carbon rich waters below those at the surface.

Good climate news is so hard to come by that even the researchers closest to the discovery are having trouble overcoming their inclination towards pessimism. The report’s lead author, Professor Nicolas Gruber, warned that “we cannot conclude that this will continue for ever. One has to recognise that despite this remarkable increase in the Southern Ocean carbon sink, emissions have gone up even more.” Professor Toby Tyrell of the University of Southampton echoed that caution, noting that while this new research is “good news,” it isn’t “any reason to be complacent, however, because we still understand rather little about the internal workings of the Southern Ocean carbon cycle. For this reason we cannot be sure how resilient the Southern Ocean carbon sink will be in the future.”

And, yes, just because we know that the Southern Ocean is storing heat now doesn’t mean we know what it will do in the coming years. It’s actually refreshing to see scientists being candid about the limits of our current models, even if it is only to discount the importance of a positive bit of climate news. We really know precious little about our planet’s climate, and that’s not for want of effort, funding, or ingenuity. Since the system we’re trying to model and predict is one of the most complex we have at hand to study, it’s no wonder that our best efforts time and again fall short. Over and over again we fail to account for some new feedback loop or deviation from expected warming patterns or, in this case, to anticipate a shift in the ability of a massive natural carbon sink to store heat.Pointing out the flaws in climate science doesn’t mean we should junk the idea that the world is warming, and that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions bear responsibility. That much seems readily evident to the skeptical eyes here at AI. But to go beyond that—to try and predict specific levels of warming or say with certainty that at 2 degrees Celsius the world is doomed—is tempting fate, and not in a good way. Al Gore was predicting an ice-free Arctic Ocean by now, but you still need husky dogs rather than a life preserver to get to the North Pole. Yes, ice is melting at the Pole, and yes, that’s concerning, but the breathless exaggerations and overconfident doomsaying espoused by Gore and panicky greens make a mockery of scientific research and undercut the credibility of serious scientists doing serious work. Moreover, the green Chicken Littles have created a nasty little feedback loop of their own: the grim future they’ve predicted is so horrifying and apocalyptic on the one hand, and so frequently wrong on the other (no more snow in the winter, Katrina as the first in an endless wave of mega-hurricanes, drowned polar bears, melted Himalayan glaciers), that the public tunes them out. To regain lost attention, they ramp up the scare propaganda and double down on the overstated predictions.Climate change may, as even sober greens say, be the largest single problem humanity has yet faced, and it’s one that operates on larger scales—both spatial and temporal—than those the average person or politician is accustomed to. It stands to reason that, while we can see the general outline of the threat faced, we don’t yet grasp the guts of the thing, so to speak. We’d be better served approaching climate change with a measure of humility, rather than bold, brash righteous finger-wagging swagger.Poor green strategic choices, as well as policy recommendations grounded more in Malthusian panic and science phobia (no to nuclear power, no to GMOs) than in sober analysis and sensible prescription keep greens perpetually frustrated, and get in the way of practical and sensible steps that would make a real difference. So while on the one hand we’re as encouraged as anyone by this new report’s positive climate news, we remain concerned at the enormous gap between the capacities of the climate change movement and the needs of the planet on which all of us depend.

Putin’s Strong Move in Syria

When Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted that he was moving military assets to Syria last week, it appears that the Obama Administration was caught completely flat-footed.

Secretary of State John Kerry spoke on the phone with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov twice in four days this week to express his concerns, but Lavrov apparently brushed him off, saying that nothing out of the ordinary was underway. Then today, at a press conference, Lavrov warned of “undesired, unintended consequences” due to the lack of direct communication between U.S. and Russian forces. “We are always in favor of military people talking to each other in a professional way. They understand each other very well,” he said. “If, as John Kerry has said many times, the United States wants those channels frozen, then be our guest.”Increasing the chances of just the kind of incident Lavrov warned of appears to be exactly what the Russians are up to: Russia is preparing for a real show of force off the Syrian coast next week. Reuters:

A source close to the Russian navy told Reuters a squadron of five Russian ships equipped with guided missiles had set off to conduct maneuvers in Syrian waters.

“They will train to repulse an attack from the air and to defend the coast, which means firing artillery and testing short-range air defense systems, ” the source said, adding that the exercise had been agreed with the Syrian government.Russia on has given notice of several rounds of navy drills with rocket firing tests in the sea off Syria from Sept. 8 to Oct. 7, according to Cypriot aviation authorities and international governmental databases of notices for airmen. Some flight paths will be temporarily closed.

And to spice up the situation, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, has sent hundreds of troops into Syria to coordinate with the Russians. (Apparently, the decision to do so was made when Soleimani flew to meet with Putin in Moscow in direct violation of a UN travel ban.)

The White House has been scrambling to come up with a response, but, according to Josh Rogin, is coming up largely empty:

There is concern inside the Obama administration, even among those who advocate for confronting Russian actions in Syria, that the U.S. has no real leverage to fight back. If Obama decides not to accept the Russian air force presence in Syria, he would have several options, all of which have drawbacks or limitations.

The U.S. could impose new sanctions on Russia, although the current punishments related to Ukraine have not changed Putin’s calculus, and there’s little chance European countries would join in on a new round. The U.S. might warn Russia that its base is fair game for the opposition to attack, but that could spur Putin to double down on the deployment. The U.S. could try to stop the flow of Russian arms, but that would mean pressuring countries such as Iraq to stand up to Putin and Iran, which they might not agree to.

All those concerns are well-founded. But what the Obama Administration doesn’t seem to fully grasp is that this situation is largely of its own making.

By not having any discernible, coherent policy for Syria apart from ensuring that the United States does as little as possible, they have created a vacuum, one that Putin has now decided to fill. What exactly the Russians see as the endgame in Syria is hard to judge at this point, but it is clear that they intend to influence the facts on the ground so that they will have an authoritative say in the matter.If President Obama doesn’t like it, he has no one to blame but himself.

The Migration Crisis and Europe’s Crippling Doubts

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead puts the European immigration crisis into context:

What we are witnessing today is a crisis of two civilizations: The Middle East and Europe are both facing deep cultural and political problems that they cannot solve. The intersection of their failures and shortcomings has made this crisis much more destructive and dangerous than it needed to be—and carries with it the risk of more instability and more war in a widening spiral.

The crisis in the Middle East has to do with much more than the breakdown of order in Syria and Libya. It runs deeper than the poisonous sectarian and ethnic hatreds behind the series of wars stretching from Pakistan to North Africa. At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples seek.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Great Wave of immigration from the Middle East and North Africa is crashing into a continent beset with its own problems:

In Europe and the West, the crisis is quieter but no less profound. Europe today often doesn’t seem to know where it is going, what Western civilization is for, or even whether or how it can or should be defended. Increasingly, the contemporary version of Enlightenment liberalism sees itself as fundamentally opposed to the religious, political and economic foundations of Western society. Liberal values such as free expression, individual self-determination and a broad array of human rights have become detached in the minds of many from the institutional and civilizational context that shaped them.

Capitalism, the social engine without which neither Europe nor the U.S. would have the wealth or strength to embrace liberal values with any hope of success, is often seen as a cruel, anti-human system that is leading the world to a Malthusian climate catastrophe. Military strength, without which the liberal states would be overwhelmed, is regarded with suspicion in the U.S. and with abhorrence in much of Europe. Too many people in the West interpret pluralism and tolerance in ways that forbid or unrealistically constrain the active defense of these values against illiberal states like Russia or illiberal movements like radical Islam.Europe’s approach to the migration crisis brings these failures into sharp relief. The European Union bureaucracy in Brussels has erected a set of legal doctrines stated in terms of absolute right and has tried to build policy on this basis. Taking its cue from the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other ambitious declarations and treaties, the EU holds that qualified applicants have an absolute human right to asylum. European bureaucrats tend to see asylum as a legal question, not a political one, and they expect political authorities to implement the legal mandate, not quibble with it or constrain it.

As ever, we highly recommend you read the whole thing.

Nigeria Joins the Crisis Club

Nigeria has been ejected from JP Morgan’s emerging bond index. The fall in the price of oil was always going to hit Nigeria hard, but poor governance only makes the shock worse. JP Morgan’s move is a stunning vote of no confidence and a real problem for President Buhari—the man Washington and much of the rest of the world is hoping can bring some order and progress to the most populous country in Africa.

Almost one out of four people in sub-Saharan Africa live in Nigeria, and its oil riches give it options that many other African countries can only dream of. But if ever a place was cursed by oil wealth, it is this country, where an intense, destructive scramble for unearned oil wealth has created one of the most crooked elites on planet earth.The rest of the world cannot ignore Nigeria’s troubles. Nigeria is the home of Boko Haram and, as the largest and most important country in West Africa, it is the lynchpin for whatever hopes exist of preventing further spirals of violence, polarization and state collapse across the troubled region. The hope was that President Buhari’s strong ties to the military, deep political roots in the Muslim North, and genuine national political mandate would help him get a grip on Nigeria, tone down the corruption, and begin the development of institutions (including security institutions) that could stabilize the country and lead to strong growth.A full-blown economic crisis in the first months of Buhari’s presidency isn’t reassuring. Nigeria has been disappointing its own people and well-wishers around the world since it achieved independence from Britain back in 1960. A dynamic private sector has made many Nigerians rich, and the entrepreneurial talents of Nigeria’s people have the potential to make this one of the world’s most dynamic societies. But religious rifts (between a mostly Muslim North and Christian South, and also within the North between Boko Haram and the jihadis and the traditionally moderate Islam of the area) and deep tribal splits make it difficult to create the kind of competent and transparent institutions that would secure the rule of law and provide a framework for the prosperity Nigerians so desperately want.The scale of Nigeria’s problems and the complexity of its society make it a difficult country for outsiders to help. But what happens there matters to people all over the world. President Buhari has one of the world’s hardest and most important jobs—and the job is getting harder by the day.

To the Finland Station—Or Not

Ever since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were knocking back the brewskis in the bars of Brussels as they put the finishing touches on their manifesto, lefties everywhere look to recessions and depressions—“crises of capitalism” as they call them—to usher in the socialist golden age. So far that hasn’t happened—and with Syriza losing ground to the conservatives in the Greek election campaign, it appears that once again the triumph of the proletariat will have to be postponed. As The Times of London reports:

Polls suggest that Mr Tsipras, 41, may now either lose to Evangelos Meimarakis, his main conservative opponent, or be forced to form a grand coalition with him. A rash of recent opinion polls show Mr Meimarakis and his centre-right, pro-bailout New Democracy party pulling ahead of Syriza by a single percentage point. That’s a nine-point swing since Mr Tsipras called the election, so momentum is with his arch rival.

The hard-core lefties have split from Syriza, and will spend the next few years in coffeehouses and taverns analyzing where and why it all went wrong. But something, somehow—the gulags, maybe? The grinding poverty and environmental destruction of communist rule? The mind-boggling incompetence of Syriza and the hollowness of all the fine promises Tsipras and the left made about the magical unicorns that were going to bring better terms from the EU? The corruption and hypocrisy of party hacks and hirelings, or maybe the dispatches from Venezuela where the Bolivarian socialists can’t deliver toilet paper—keeps voters, even when angry and stressed, from wanting to take another ride on the Lenin train.

It’s still unclear whether the conservatives will beat Tsipras outright or just deprive him of his majority, but politically if not economically, Greece seems to be turning a corner.