Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 602

The Drowned Boy on the Beach: Europe’s Failures and Europe’s Challenges

Images of a boy on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, who had drowned trying to flee to Greece from the Syrian Civil War, shocked Europe yesterday. The Times of Israel has a representative roundup of the reaction from the European press:

“If these extraordinarily powerful images of a dead Syrian child washed up on a beach don’t change Europe’s attitude to refugees, what will?” The Independent said.

The Huffington Post’s UK edition said: “Do Something, David” — a reference to Prime Minister David Cameron who has pursued a hard line against migrant arrivals.The image appeared on the website of Spain’s El Pais, El Mundo and El Periodico, which titled the photo “The drowning of Europe”.In Italy, the La Repubblica daily tweeted the image saying: “One photo to silence the world.”

Good. Europe’s conscience—and the world’s—ought to be shocked. It is tragically too late for the boy in the photo, but there are hundreds of thousands more like him. We have been writing about the plight of the refugees hitting Europe, or drowning on the way, for over two years now; if this photo means that the nations of Europe will get more serious about fixing a broken migration system, some good may yet come of tragedy.

But it won’t be easy. The challenges facing any attempt by Europe to address this crisis are immense. It is insufficient for newspapers and humanitarians to wring their hands; the following five policy challenges—each monumental in its own right—will all have to be surmounted in order to “do something” meaningful:1. Syria: The drowned boy was fleeing the Syrian Civil War, as are hundreds of thousands others like him. As the Washington Post noted the other day, since the start of that conflict, 200,000 Syrians have died, 4 million have become refugees, and another 7 million have been internally displaced. Only about half the country’s population lives where it used to. Of the 800,000 asylum applicants predicted this year in Germany, most are expected to be Syrian. The West missed its chance to back the moderate rebels early in the Syrian Civil War. Now the country is split between the Assad regime, ISIS, and other Islamist rebels led by al Nusra—each of which has committed atrocities against civilians on a large scale. We can either exert real military force and political pressure to change the situation, or accept a peace that leaves one or more of these groups in place. Both options entail large costs. But until there’s peace in Syria, the refugee flow from the Eastern Mediterranean will not stop.2. Libya: The other main port of departure (if one can call it that) for immigrants to Europe is Libya. An irony: While our failure to intervene made the situation in Syria worse, our intervention in Libya led to the complete collapse of the country. And without a plan for what to do after our intervention there, we just went home. Immigrants coming from Libya proper are, like the Syrians, war refugees, but the collapse of the Libyan state has also opened the doors to massive economic migration from Africa. The demographic pressure here is immense, and it’s hard to see it slowing absent a functional government being reestablished in Libya. Again the choices are ugly: back a strongman, invade again, or countenance a Libyan incursion from an imperfect ally such as Egypt.3. Regaining control of the borders: No matter whether you want to welcome large numbers of refugees and migrants or keep them out, you have to regain control of the borders. Unless Europe deters crossings, large numbers of desperate people will keep taking to the Mediterranean in overcrowded, unsafe boats, often hoping to be rescued as much as to make land. Continuing passively to encourage those voyages through lax border enforcement is barbaric. If Europe wants to take in bigger numbers of refugees, it should send rescue ships or allow steamships and ferries to provide cheap transit from port to port. Either way, it has to deter the deadly, illegal crossings.4. Open the economy: European unemployment is now at 10.9 percent—and that counts as good news, because that’s the lowest it’s been in three years. Europe’s sclerotic economies have for some time been unable to employ even the citizens that are already there; European social services are also straining to adjust to the new realities of 21st-century economics and demographics. To offer new lives to migrants, both nation-states and the EU will have to make significant adjustments to things like employment regulations and benefits. This was already inevitable, but it’s being resisted fiercely. Now, unpopular economic reforms will have to be undertaken under the additional pressure of a Great Wave of new arrivals.

5. Win democratic acceptance: On top of all this, EU leaders will need to convince the peoples of Europe, who spent the last hundred years bloodily sorting themselves into nation-states, to accept these newcomers on equal terms. “Tsk-tsking” anti-migrant sentiment is not a substitute for a real policy, and it’s in fact likely to inflame populist feelings. Many Europeans can be deeply generous, and writing off the masses as wretched xenophobes seems inaccurate and uncharitable. Recent events in Iceland, where ten thousand people out of a nation of 300,000 have offered refugees places in their homes, has shown that. But if the peoples of Europe feel their new neighbors have been unilaterally imposed on them by elites, the reaction will probably get ugly.The United States bears a great deal of responsibility in this crisis, particularly for the situations in Syria and Libya. But it appears that the Obama Administration will not let anything—not the distress of its allies, not the use of chemical gas, not even the threat of nuclear proliferation—draw it back into the Middle East in a serious way. The plain truth is, Washington will not act until 2017 at the earliest.And while it’s fair to complain of a lack of U.S. leadership—as we’ve said before, Europe functions so much better when America is engaged—it’s also fair to say that many of these problems, including the military ones, are things European states should be able to handle themselves. Acting to stabilize Libya is not “adventurism”, but a matter of urgent national security. Enforcing a border, reforming the economy, and developing coherent immigration and asylum policies are all things mature, developed democracies should be able to do. Insofar as Europe isn’t capable of doing these things, that’s a sign of deeper problems that need to be addressed, not papered over. The challenges are big, but the newspapers are right: it is time to “do something.”

To Be or Not to Be (Employees)

A jury will now have the chance to decide once and for all whether 160,000 Uber drivers in California are independent contractors, as the company contends, or traditional employees, as the plaintiff in a California class action suit argues. It took less than a month for a federal judge in California to allow the case against the company to proceed as a class action suit. The ruling has wide implications not just for Uber’s future, but for the labor model upon which much of the sharing economy rests. From the NYT:

The case, filed in 2013, presents challenges to Uber’s business model. Classifying workers as contractors lets the company keep its labor costs low while recruiting scores of people who use their own cars to ferry passengers around more than 300 cities worldwide. Uber’s rapid growth in just five years has given rise to a new service economy applying a similar contract-worker model across multiple sectors, from house cleaning to grocery delivery […]

The class-action certification may also set a precedent. Lyft, a competitor to Uber that has also raised venture capital, faces a similar class action.

Indeed, an estimate referred to in the FT predicts that “the labour costs for most sharing-economy companies would rise by between 25 and 40 per cent if they were forced to switch from being simple marketplaces to full-service companies.”

Uber, and the sharing economy at large, relies on a labor model characterized by low barriers to entry. UberX, Uber’s largest and most controversial offering, allows individuals without special certification—often those with other full or part-time employment—to register as drivers and pick up fares at their own convenience. For this large swath of drivers, the money made from driving is a very welcome supplement to their main source of income. Yet, when the company must begin sponsoring health insurance and retirement plans, this notion of the casual driver seems less tenable. In such a case, is classification as an employee indeed in the best interest of the driver?Ultimately, policymakers will have to get creative in finding ways to accommodate this young and booming segment of the economy, to balance fair worker treatment with a regulatory framework that fosters the service and sharing economy (0ne key shift here has to be thinking through ways to delink benefits like health care from employment in the first place). We might not yet know what form that will take, but the answer isn’t to regulate new industries with outmoded classifications. Freelance work is not just an integral component of the new service economy; it also gives workers autonomy and encourages entrepreneurialism.

Putin and Maduro Talk Energy Collusion in Beijing

Speaking on the sidelines of today’s military parade in Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro discussed the enormous problem both of their respective petrostates are currently facing: the crashing price of oil. While a member of OPEC, Venezuela has been vocally unhappy with the cartel’s decision (pushed by Saudi Arabia) not to set a floor to the oil market by cutting oil production. Meanwhile, Russia’s economy is reeling as it’s hit by both Western sanctions and falling revenues from oil exports.

But one senior Russian official poured cold water on the notion of any bilateral effort to tinker with the global oil market, as Reuters reports:

A senior source at the Russian government played down the significance of the meeting, saying the presidents would mostly discuss mutual cooperation and Russian ties with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

“They (Putin and Maduro) will exchange their views on the oil market, that’s it. It is highly unlikely that any measures will be agreed to prop up prices. How can you imagine two countries cutting their production? Their market share will be quickly snapped up by others in that case,” he said.

For his part, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro simply said he had some “not bad ideas” on the question of how to stop the slide and stabilize the price of oil, but it’s hard to imagine either country constraining its supply (in fact, Russia already said this week it would not purposefully cut production). With that option out of the window, there’s little else to do but hope other producers might cut theirs—either the Saudis by strategy or American shale producers by necessity—or else wait for an uptick in global demand.

Minimum Wage Hike Would Hit Manufacturing Hardest

There is no shortage of reasons to be skeptical of the intensifying push, now formally endorsed by the Democratic Party, to raise the national minimum wage to $15 per hour. This magnitude of such a hike is unprecedented; city-level $15 minimums have not exactly been roaring successes; restaurants could respond to a wage hike by automating more jobs; and the minimum wage movement, as currently constituted, is facilitating outrageous union malfeasance. And, of course, trying to set one national minimum wage is foolish policy when cost of living varies from place to place.

But if one more were needed, Adam Ozimek offers yet another compelling reason for concern in a piece at Moody’s: a $15 dollar minimum wage would be especially damaging to U.S. manufacturing, an industry that has recently started to make a small and fragile comeback.Minimum wage debates typically focus on the service, hospitality, or retail industries, and it’s easy to see why: The majority of workers making under $8 per hour work in one of these sectors. An increase to, say, $9 dollars per hour probably would have the biggest impact on service and retail. But Ozimek argues that an increase of the magnitude currently being considered would also have a strong impact on the manufacturing sector. He crunches the numbers and finds that 35 percent of manufacturing workers—5.3 million people—are currently earning less than $15 per hour. “Lifting the minimum wage to $15 an hour”, he notes, “would not just be quantitatively larger than previous U.S. experience, but qualitatively different in that it would affect a different set of workers and industries.”Moreover, mandated wage increases in the manufacturing industry could imperil more American jobs than wage increases in the fast food industry because manufacturing is more mobile, and more subject to the forces of global economic competition. Ozimek writes:

The potential for lost jobs is particularly acute given that many manufacturers face global competition. If wages become too high in one place, it’s easier for a manufacturer than for, say, a restaurant, to relocate operations. After all, the huge decline in manufacturing employment in previous decades is in part a warning about the unsustainability of above-market wages in a globally competitive environment.

Minimum wage increase or no, mass manufacturing can never reclaim the place in America’s economic life that it held 50 years ago—the economy has changed too much since the heyday of the blue model. Nonetheless, we’ve been thrilled to see the manufacturing industry pick up some steam over the last few years, providing a crucial source of jobs and income during a period of economic transition, especially in rural and suburban areas. The $15 dollar minimum movement is a good way to send even what’s left of manufacturers packing, and stop the recent uptick in American manufacturing. It’s ironic that it has the blessing of a party that has made restoring manufacturing a key part of its platform for decades.

Is the 2C Goal Dead?

It sure seems that way. Scientists have coalesced around the goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius, arguing that 2C is a key level of warming that we ought to avoid in order to escape some catastrophic consequences brought on by feedback loops. But new research says the world’s current approach to climate change won’t come close to achieving that goal. The BBC reports:

As part of the attempts to tackle global warming, countries have agreed to submit their national plans to the UN before key talks in Paris in December…So far, 56 governments have published their “intended nationally determined contributions,” or INDCs in the jargon of the UN.

The likes of China, the US and the EU have already submitted their intentions. In this analysis, [researchers at the Climate Action Tracker (CAT)] looked at the plans of 15 countries that between them account for almost 65% of global emissions.

Of those 15 countries examined, nearly half were deemed “inadequate” in their approach towards limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius. “It is clear that if the Paris meeting locks in present climate commitments for 2030, holding warming below 2C could essentially become infeasible, and 1.5 degrees C, beyond reach”, warned one of the researchers.

Moreover, the 2C goal looks to already be a non-starter at this December’s Paris climate summit. Way back in February, UN climate chief Christiana Figueres admitted that the world’s climate pledges did “not get us onto the 2C pathway”, while her counterpart at the EU, Miguel Arias Canete, defended the abandonment of the goal by supposing that “if we have an ongoing process you can not say it is a failure if the [sic] mitigration commitments do not reach 2C.” The German Institute for International and Security Affairs’ Oliver Geden summed things up nicely (or, perhaps more accurately, dourly) this spring, saying “[t]wo degrees is a focal point for the climate debate but it doesn’t seem to be a focal point for political action.”

How Music Gets Made

The summer festival scene is to classical music what the farm leagues are to baseball. It’s where up-and-coming instrumental musicians and opera singers at all levels—high school, college/conservatory, and early professional—come to get intense training and a good hard look from the pros who run the business. Famous festivals such as Glimmerglass in upstate New York or the Santa Fe Opera (which, despite the name, is organized along festival lines) have furnished the boards of the world’s premiere opera houses with stars for over two generations. If you want to understand how music gets made—whether as an aficionado or simply an observer of the American cultural scene—it’s vital to take a look behind the festival curtain.

In the case of one of the newest players on this scene, the “farm” in question is literal. The Castleton Festival is staged on a farm in the foothills of the Shenandoah, and the festival theater had originally been a converted chicken coop. (It’s come a long way since.) Just seven years old, Castleton may be unfamiliar even to the buffs among our audience—but I doubt it will remain so for long.

The festival was founded by Lorin Maazel, the former conductor of the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera, and the Cleveland Orchestra, and one of the 20th century’s true musical superstars. To quantify that statement: the 600 acres of horse country on which Castleton is held were bought, and the festival for years subsidized to the tune of millions of dollar, by Maazel—all from the profits of his career in classical music. (In one instance he sold his Guadagnini—a $1 million violin made by a rival of Stradivarius—to support the festival.) When Maazel died last year, influential friends and fans decided to make it a permanent memorial to the maestro. Celebrities and super-patrons from Lang Lang to Alec Baldwin to Daisy Soros assisted in fundraising efforts, while Wynton Marsalis agreed to spend the last two weeks of the festival in residence at Castleton with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and New York Governor Anthony Cuomo lead a list of political luminaries who threw their weight behind this year’s performances.

“Castleton” might be a new name, but the men and women, sponsors and artists both, behind it represent much of the top musical talent and social, political, and literal capital invested in the artistic world. Therefore, how Castleton performed at every festival’s task—preserving what is old and good, and discovering what is new and good—would be a significant measure of the health of the arts. I arrived at the farm gate on a hot July day with great expectations.

I was originally drawn to Castleton by the chance to see the world premier of an opera with an unusual subject— the Supreme Court of the United States, and its oddest of couples, the great friends and collegial rivals Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. As I explained in my review earlier this month, this comic, tuneful offering by 31-year-old composer/librettist Derrick Wang was a triumph. (Do, if I may say so, read the whole thing.)

Commissioning Scalia/Ginsburg was a natural fit for Castleton, keeping the festival closely engaged in America’s biggest cultural and political questions on the one hand, and at the same time providing an opportunity to a promising young composer just as the festival as a whole provides to promising young artists. And boy are those young artists promising—whoever is doing Castleton’s recruiting is good. (Much of the talent at the top levels was actually spotted by Maazel, who even late in life was known to have an eye for and a passion for nurturing it.) Mix the budding stars with some real pro’s pros, and you’ve got music.

The productions which followed Scalia/Ginsburg the weekend I was there amply proved this. The night after I saw the legal light opera, I attended festival’s grand opera offering, Gounod’s underappreciated Roméo et Juliette. It featured a very strong cast that mixed veterans and two young stars: Rebecca Nathanson, a sprightly soprano, as Juliet and Daniel Montenegro, a tenor with a light yet carrying voice, as Romeo. Both of them have achieved some success already on the West Coast, especially at the L.A. and San Francisco operas, and based on that night’s performance they’re both worth keeping an eye on. Most notable, though, was the conducting of Maazel’s handpicked successor, Rafael Payare. Please realize I am not usually an effusive reviewer when I say this may have been the most impressive single opera orchestra conducting performance that I’ve heard outside of those of James Levine. It was a stunning and unusual display of intense orchestral color and yet masterful control, with Payare allowing his orchestra full license to explore the music’s romantic richness while preventing the sound from bleeding over the boundaries of the rhythms. Payare, the conductor of the Ulster Orchestra, is already making a name for himself on the international guest-conducting circuit; expect greater things to come.

Sprinkled throughout the festival were showcase opportunities for the younger artists, the so-called C.A.T.S. (Castleton Artists Training Seminar—groan-worthy acronyms exist in the arts, too). These came in two forms, short opera scenes and a full production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Yes, a plain, old, non-sung play for the opera singers. Maazel’s widow, Deitlinde Turban Maazel, an acclaimed German actress, serves as the festival’s Artistic Director and ensures that those involved receive more dramatic instruction in a summer than many opera stars receive in a career (alas). Our Town is a sneak-up-and-whack-you-in-the-head tearjerker, and, despite obviously differing levels of dramatic experience, the young opera singers sold it—particularly Jonathan Dauermann in the role of the Stage Manager.

On the last day I was there, I saw Fabio Luisi conduct the festival orchestra in a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Brahm’s Symphony No. 2. Luisi, the Metropolitan Opera’s principle conductor, was probably the most famous man at the festival. Yet the musicians I spoke to before the performance had universally praised his approachability and efficiency in rehearsals. He’s what we’d call in other settings “a players’ coach.” Luisi put the resulting good will and attentiveness to use on Sunday, making dramatic adjustments to the tempo, particularly in the fourth movement of the Brahms, in ways that were tremendously powerful, but which you normally can’t do with even a top professional orchestra—you’ll lose the players. Well, not Luisi. The results were unexpected and evocative.

Under Luisi’s conducting, Alessandro Taverna, a young Venetian pianist, performed the Rachmaninoff. Like Rafael Payare, Taverna was one of Maazel’s last recruits, and also like Payare, he demonstrated a virtuosic ability to combine two seemingly contradictory, in-demand skills: the ability to muddle as thoroughly as the base of a good mint julep the deeper chords that drive the piece’s Romantic power, and yet such precision on the high, graceful notes that each seemed to fall like a raindrop. The audience, no musical neophytes, gave him a standing ovation, three curtain calls, demanded an encore, and then—I have never seen this before—clapped him to his seat when he took his place in the audience after the intermission. I stood and clapped my hands numb with the rest.

If you’re a reader in the Washington area, add Castleton to your summer calendar next year—it’s just 68 miles from the Capital. (Tickets, at $35-200, also tend to be a lot cheaper than they would be to see the same artists in the city—and there’s not a bad seat in the house.) If you’re in New York and support the arts, keep it on your radar: events previewing and/or supporting Castleton are often held there, and moreover the Big Apple is the home or will be the eventual destination for many of the artists involved in the festival. Most of all, though, if you’re a fan of music anywhere, keep an eye out on the big stages—and an ear out toward the major labels—for the up-and-coming singers (and the composer Wang) I’ve mentioned to appear soon. This is how classical music gets made.

Happy Fracking, America

The shale industry keeps surprising us with its resilience, to the point where maybe, just maybe, we ought to start expecting these new innovations. Earlier this week we brought you walking rigs, and today it’s a new “super-sizing” technique that’s allowing shale producers to crank up the output even with oil solidly below $50 per barrel. The WSJ reports:

The trick is applying supersize versions of the horizontal-drilling and fracking techniques that worked successfully elsewhere to an area that hasn’t seen this approach yet. The gains come from extending the lateral portions of wells by thousands of feet and pumping them full of enormous volumes of sand, chemicals and water to flush out more hydrocarbons.

So far, the impressive results have been confined to a small area in a single Louisiana parish near the Texas border. But if the approach works across the giant Haynesville Shale, which spans 120 miles across both states, the era of low American gas prices could extend for decades into the future, experts say.“There’s a large likelihood that the United States will be enjoying very low gas prices for a very long time, maybe 20 years,” said Mark Papa, who has monitored Haynesville developments as a partner at Riverstone Holdings LLC, one of the biggest energy-focused private-equity firms in the U.S.

True, America’s rig count has dropped significantly this year, in part a reflection of the competitive market conditions brought on by the dropping price of oil. But the productivity of the rigs that remain continues to grow thanks to innovations like those being deployed in the Haynesville Shale. The industry is therefore a lot healthier than a simple perusal of the rig count might suggest.

William McKinley, Republican Visionary

President Obama’s decision to  the official name of Alaska’s tallest mountain from McKinley to Denali has sparked a predictable outcry: Not only from Ohioans, who are protective of the sixth president to hail from the Buckeye State, but also from conservatives, who argue that the President is letting shallow identity politics get in the way of preserving America’s heritage, and who compare the decision to the administration’s (now revised) announcement that it would replace Alexander Hamilton with a woman on the $10 bill.

Now, William McKinley was no Alexander Hamilton, and a mountain in Alaska has no intrinsic connection with him, so we aren’t sounding the sirens here at TAI about the name change the way we did about the talk of taking Hamilton off the currency.

But before the controversy fades away, it’s worth noting that McKinley, who served from 1897 to 1901, was actually a reasonably significant president, likely to stand higher in the presidential rankings than most—and certainly much higher than many of his more recent successors. He was probably the most successful as well as the most important president in the generation between Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, and many of the shifts in Republican ideas that came to fruition under the Rough Rider were incubated during the McKinley era.

McKinley was a transitional figure; he was the last president to have held a command in the Civil War and the first to sense the importance of a progressive GOP agenda that could attract the industrial working class to the Republican Party. He brought a consistent economic vision to national politics: adherence to the gold standard plus a protective tariff would keep investment flowing, push wages up, and boost economic growth. It worked, and for the next generation the GOP would dominate American politics until the Great Depression signaled the end of the McKinley system.

The era of prosperity that McKinley inaugurated also provided the basis for a generation of Progressive reform that would reshape the country and lay the foundations for the stable industrial prosperity and mass consumption of the New Deal era.

You would have to be crazy to think McKinley’s policies would work today—the modern economy faces a wholly different set of challenges from the ones it faced at the dawn of the Progressive Era. But a generation of political consensus and economic prosperity is a more enduring monument than a name tag on a mountain. President Obama will be fortunate indeed if, one hundred years from now, historians place him in the same class of American presidents as William McKinley. 

Is It Time for the World to See America’s Crude?

Because of a 1970s-era exporting ban, American oil producers can’t sell their crude abroad. But the global oil picture today looks remarkably different than it did forty years ago, and burgeoning American production has many calling for an end to the ban. A new report from the Energy Information Administration takes an in-depth look at what lifting that ban might mean.

One of the most frequently cited reasons for lifting the ban has to do with the difference in price crude fetches here in America as compared to the rest of the world. The West Texas Intermediate (WTI) benchmark, used as a stand-in for the price of crude here in the U.S., frequently trades at a significant discount compared to Europe’s Brent benchmark, the price most often used when we talk about the global price of crude. Today WTI is hovering just above $45 per barrel, $4 cheaper than Brent, nearly a 10 percent discount. At times the divide between those two benchmarks has risen past $10, and that has consequences for producers, especially in today’s bearish market.That’s because cheap crude, while nice for consumers, stretches the ability of oil companies to make a profit. When prices drop, companies have to cut capital expenditures and lay off employees, and, in the case of relatively high-cost U.S. fracking, that can also mean ratcheting down production. In that sense, the WTI discount can hurt the ability of American oil companies to compete in the global market. And while the gap between WTI and Brent has narrowed somewhat over the past year, the new EIA report finds that if U.S. production stays high and the export ban is maintained, the discount “is expected to increase to more than $10/b.” However, with a discount that high, if the U.S. were to lift the ban then we could expect “higher wellhead prices for domestic producers, who would then respond with additional production.”That sounds like lifting the ban could be beneficial for producers, but what about consumers? For that, we turn to the WSJ:

[The EIA report] concludes that lifting the nation’s four-decade ban on oil exports wouldn’t increase U.S. gasoline prices and could even help lower them, raising the stakes in the debate about whether to lift or relax the ban. […]

Because most U.S. retail gasoline is priced based on the global benchmark rather than the national one, it could lower prices at home, the study concludes. Global crude traded more than $4 higher than U.S. prices on Tuesday, settling at $49.56 a barrel.

Cheaper gas and a more competitive environment for U.S. producers sounds like a win-win, but lifting the ban is still a politically fraught endeavor. One option, Arthur Herman has argued in these pages, would be slowly to mete out American crude on the global market to carefully-chosen allies. In this way, we might fully capitalize on the strategic advantage our new bounty gives us. Whatever happens, the fact that we’re now having this discussion is remarkable. Today we rely on foreign sources for just 27 percent of our oil, the lowest level in 30 years, and that’s opening up new policy options. Hail shale!

The Failure of the EU’s Technocrats

As migrants continue to drown in the Mediterranean and 3,000 others remain stranded outside of Budapest’s train station, the brokenness of Europe’s immigration system is on full display. The Schengen Zone—Europe’s common border system—now seems to many Europeans to be not a blessing but a trap, while European leaders fight acrimoniously over various reform proposals that never seem to get anywhere. And each time one of these migrant-sharing proposals founders, the original problem intensifies, and countries of initial arrival are pushed more and more to their breaking point.

The Financial Times yesterday touched on one of the most important underlying problems: in migration policy as in other areas, like the euro crisis, the EU lacks the tools and the institutions to enforce its will (such as, in this case, an interior ministry). The paper quotes Guy Verhofstadt, who was once the prime minister of Belgium and now leads the European Parliament’s liberals: “Europe is a master of putting in place a policy and then not putting in rules and institutions absolutely necessary for these policies. Be it the euro or Schengen.” Both the euro and the Schengen system, that is, gave major traditional national competencies to Brussels, but they did so without creating the legal powers that make those institutions work on the national level.European-wide governance was set up with the ultimate goal of “ever-closer Union”—i.e. full federalism—in mind, but the system’s architects knew that the nations involved were not yet ready to dissolve their countries into the larger whole. The elites’ solution was to paper over the fact that many of the needed legal and political foundations had not been laid down. They declared large goals accomplished, and assumed that, insofar as problems occurred, they would in and of themselves create political momentum to centralize more power in Brussels in order to fix whatever situations arose. During the 90s in particular—when the euro was proposed and Schengen was being implemented—there was a tendency to assume that “history” was heading inexorably in the post-national direction and would sweep away all petty impediments in its path.The problem, as Europe is now seeing, is that the opposite can happen: Many of the crises have turned out to reinforce nationalist, rather than internationalist, tendencies. At its worst, this can take the form of Hungary’s drive to build a border fence or the growth of parties like the Swedish Democrats and France’s Front National. But it can also often take a different form: sensible centrist parties, such as the British Conservatives or the Polish Civic Platform party (PO), pointing out that the EU is making a hash of things and sounding skeptical about further integration. In practice, even the most ardently pro-integration states have started resorting to using national power to accomplish what Brussels can’t. The Greek euro crisis was eventually resolved (for now) when Angela Merkel intervened to take the reins from the Eurocrats who, supposedly, should have been benefitting from the crisis in the form of increased power and importance.Much of the EU system’s popular appeal rested on the supposedly superior ability of disinterested technocrats to solve European problems. Now, even those who haven’t become more nationalist because of the current EU policy disputes or the immigration crisis have good reason to doubt Brussels’ ability to deal problems when they matter most. Europe badly needs to address not only its immediate migrant crisis, but to rethink its whole approach to making policy. It cannot continue announcing grand solutions first and building consensus and necessary institutions second.