Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 72

How Trump Insults Real Americans

Many commentators have argued that liberal contempt for the sensibilities of white working-class voters contributed to Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency. It’s a fair point: If seasoned politicians alienate this constituency, demagogues will rush in to fill the void. But these worries often contain a troubling subtext: that white working-class voters are “real Americans” whose concerns are, somehow, more important than those of the motley basket of urbanites, minorities, immigrants, feminists, and intellectuals who vote for liberals. If liberals need to be more careful not to inadvertently insult working-class whites, it’s just as important that Trump’s supporters and apologists appreciate that a significant and growing number of Americans regard Trump’s presidency itself as an ongoing personal insult. This is at least as serious a threat to conservative positions—and to civil discourse generally—as the ressentiment of the white working class is to liberals. Trump’s undisguised bigotry and misogyny now taint almost every position he endorses or advances, making it hard to disentangle, for instance, legitimate criticism of current immigration policies from racist aversion to people of non-European ancestry, or, to take an especially timely example, support for conservative Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—accused of what amounts to aggravated sexual assault—from rank misogyny.

How and why is support for Trump’s presidency an insult? Let’s begin with the contrast to Barack Obama. For many—African-Americans in particular—the willingness of conservatives, who have long preached astride a high horse about moral character, to embrace Trump is worse than hypocritical; it’s a racial insult. It’s inconceivable that Americans would have tolerated a Barack Obama who had been taped bragging about groping women or found to have paid to silence a pornographic film actress he had slept with shortly after his wife gave birth. Yet many conservatives were willing to embrace a white man who violates every ideal and principle they had claimed to value and which Obama himself scrupulously adhered to and championed. It’s hard not the see this as, at best, a stark racial double standard, and at worst, a desperate bid to reassert the racial hierarchy that Obama’s presidency threatened, whatever the costs.

The insult to women is perhaps even more profound. Not only did Trump defeat an vastly more qualified woman using crude sexist invective as a weapon, but both his personal life and his Administration have been orgies of misogyny and illegitimate gender hierarchy, from his reported insistence that women “dress like women” to the paterfamilias presumption of giving his daughter (who styles herself the “First Daughter”) a de facto cabinet position, to his overtly transactional sexual relationships with everyone from the adult film star Stormy Daniels to each of his several spouses, most notably the stone faced Melania. The culmination of these affronts is the nomination to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, who now faces at last count three credible accusations of sexual assault and, if confirmed, will be in position to cast a decisive vote (since voting is what the high court has been reduced to) against women’s reproductive freedom. The term “white male privilege” is overused, but it surely applies to Judge Kavanaugh, who revealed to the Senate and the American public an embarrassing sense of unearned entitlement as he complained about having to respond to serious concerns about his past behavior and present character, recounted his life of elite schools, clubs, and recreational activities and noted, pointedly, that he and his accuser Christine Blasey Ford “did not travel in the same social circles.” Perhaps the nomination of Kavanaugh itself is not an insult to victims of sexual assault but the cavalier attitude Senate Republicans and the White House have taken toward the allegations that have now come to light certainly is.

Worse, these insults are not incidental to Trump’s popularity, they are central to it. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the sine qua non of Trump’s popularity—and of the party he now leads and has reshaped in his image—is the belligerent reassertion of old, discredited hierarchies of race and sex after a brief period in which they seemed, at long last, in recession. Women and racial minorities are insulted by Trump because he means to insult them—that seems to be much of the point of his presidency and may be the only thing he truly succeeds in.

Feminists have long insisted that the personal is political; in the Trump era the political is very personal and one insult inspires another in turn. Consider the evergreen subject of late-night talk show monologues, the rumored “golden shower” or “pee-pee tape” that reportedly memorializes the urine-soaked evening Trump spent with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel suite that had previously been occupied by Barack and Michelle Obama. At one level, the story is just an outlandish internet meme of the kind we, sadly, encounter on a daily basis on Facebook. As a rumor it’s not all that plausible and as a joke, it’s not all that funny. But it has captivated millions because something about it rings figuratively, if not literally, true.  With its contrast of images—a sexually depraved Trump cavorting with prostitutes and in bed once occupied by the monogamous Obamas, who were unsullied by even a hint of scandal in their eight years as President and First Lady—it’s a rumor that neatly encapsulates the most noticeable ways that Trump has offended the sensibilities of many Americans, combining compromised patriotism, corruption, the sexual exploitation of women, and a fetishistic compulsion to defile every accomplishment of President Obama. Each of these are flaws that Trump in fact exhibits; the rumor brings them all together in one prurient package. And gossiping about the tape is much more emotionally satisfying than talking about the proven instances of Trump’s corruption, sexism, or racist obsession with Obama, because it lets one do so while simultaneously insulting Trump, just as he insults the nation and a majority of its people.

I’ve offered a deliberately unsympathetic—one might even say insulting—portrayal of Trump and his core supporters to make a point. You don’t need to agree that all these characterizations are accurate to admit that they are plausible, just as one does not have to believe the now-stock portrayal of the smug, moralistic, politically correct liberal to acknowledge that it is plausible to isolated, demoralized voters already suffering from the economic and social dislocation of recent decades. Pundits often remind an imagined audience of self-satisfied liberals that the white working-class voters they’ve alienated are not going anywhere. True, but neither are the women, people of color, and many others who, with a great deal of justification, apprehend Trump’s entire presidency as a protracted personal insult. Indeed, the long and loudly lamented “liberal smugness” is, in today’s political environment, often simply the reflection of this politics of insult and contempt—pay back in kind.

All of this is of course especially damaging to the prospects of civil discourse on the many difficult questions that require citizens of differing views to begin with a presumption of good faith and good will. To take just one salient example, decent and sensible people might ask whether current immigration policies reflect an adequate consideration of the challenges as well as the promise of multiculturalism—the prospect of acculturating migrants from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds into common democratic and civic norms. In today’s environment, with civic norms openly flouted by third and fourth generation Americans, such questions seem moot; moreover, to ask them is to ally oneself with the unapologetic bigotry of the Trump Administration. But if a civil conversation is impossible, policy will be determined not by reasoned discourse—or even what typically passes for it inside the Beltway—but by reckless posturing and raw political power.  Similarly, it would be best for all concerned if one could at least hope that the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court will be even-handed and judicious in temperament. But if Kavanaugh, after last Thursday’s angry partisan screed, succeeds in ascending to the Supreme Court by a strictly partisan vote and without a serious investigation of the accusations against him, any decision involving women’s rights in which he is pivotal will be sullied by the cloud of misogyny that currently surrounds both his personal history and the President who nominated him. The high court, unable to command respect for its decisions, will find itself reduced to the role of simply another participant in an ideological tug of war.

Conservatives in the recent past have kept the worst instincts and impulses of their constituents in check. Many have described this effort as a cynical ploy to secure the support of bigots while denying complicity in bigotry. But faced with the fusillade of the bullhorn, one is nostalgic for the subtlety of the dog whistle. Whether from sincere conviction or mere expediency, this more genteel style allowed political discourse to begin from a presumption of good faith and contributed to a modicum of civility that is now utterly absent and, I think, badly missed. If liberals should worry about occasionally and inadvertently offending working-class whites, conservatives should worry much more about the deliberate and ongoing insult that Trump’s Presidency represents. The risk for them is that they and all their positions will be forever stained with the ugliness of bigotry. The risk for the nation is the death of civility and the beginning of a cold civil war.

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Bavarian Beer and Globalization

The Munich Oktoberfest is the Davos of the hoi polloi, an orgy of globalism for the masses. By the time it ends this coming weekend, as many as 7 million fans will have passed through its gates, which are as heavily guarded as the roads to the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps. (In 1980, a right-wing terrorist set off a bomb at Oktoberfest, killing 13 as they streamed into the Munich fairgrounds with its cathedral-sized beer tents.)

Today, celebrants come from every corner of the world, from as far away as Japan and Australia. Even the foreigners are decked out in Lederhosen and Dirndl dresses. When it’s over, they will have spent about $1.5 billion.

For what, apart from the rides? Last year, they gulped down 8 million liters of beer with an alcohol content of up to 6 percent—about twice as much as delivered by watery Budweiser. This year, a Mass (measuring one liter) was €11.50, about $13.50; in the store, the same quantity runs to a meager two euros. This is more modest than that legendary hot dog at Davos that sold for $43 a few years ago. At the Munich fair, the price of a beer is 5 percent higher than the suds last year—more than twice the official German inflation rate. So globalism doesn’t come cheap, whether in Davos or in Munich.

In Davos, if you want to be a “strategic partner,” you have to shell out half a million dollars per annum, not counting the private planes and the overpriced hotel rooms. In Munich, there is no admission fee, but they’ll get you inside the huge tents (actually temporary wooden structures) put up by the local breweries. Half a roast chicken can go for 20 bucks.

Getting in is just for starters. At both the World Economic Forum and Oktoberfest, the true measure of status is where you get to go next. At Davos, it is the private parties and dinners. Have you been tapped for the ultra-exclusive Goldman Sachs dinner, or do you have to slink off to the “Mongolian Night” to which everybody and his brother are invited? Will you be allowed to join a smallish breakfast meeting with Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron? If you are on the A-list, you can go all day without spending a single Swiss franc on Dover sole and champagne.

In Munich, status differentiation begins at the overcrowded beer tent. If you are a nobody, you patiently stand in line outside, awaiting the nod from the bouncer. If you are an important person, you show your personal invitation at a side entrance. Thence you are escorted to a private area where your friendly CEO will treat you to filet steak and Bordeaux—and all the beer you can drink, of course.

As at the WEF, business is informally conducted amid the upper echelons of Oktoberfest society. For big business, good will is worth whatever it costs. Nobody will be able to overhear your confidential chat amidst the hammering oom-pah music. There is still a price to pay, though, because you have to suffer folks jumping up on the tables and dancing to oldies.

This year, in the shadow of the upcoming Bavarian state elections on October 14, politics unfolds as well. Forming a coalition promises to be complicated, as the eternally ruling CSU, Merkel’s Bavarian sister party, has been hemorrhaging votes. So have the Social Democrats in a fractured system where the outlier parties on the Right and the Left have been making hay.

Never mind the shells lobbed back and forth between political rivals outside the beer cathedrals. Here in the Schottenhamel tent, the bigwigs are carousing at adjoining tables. Trial balloons are being floated between schnapps and bratwurst; coalition scenarios are being tested under the influence. United by the alcohol-fed bonhomie and Bavarian national pride, political enemies can clink mugs and tell the prying press: “We are just talking, not saying anything,” as a classic Bavarian line has it.

I once asked the CEO of a top U.S. investment bank why his company would drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on Davos, given the carefully vetted pap served up during the official programming at the Congress Hall. “Why would you want to invest your precious time, not to speak of the vast expenses?” He shot back: “Are you kidding? I have 30 back-to-back bilaterals here, saving oodles of time and money. Who wants to fly to Mumbai, Beijing, Tokyo, or Moscow if he can wrap it all up at Davos in three days?”

Despised by Donald Trump, that’s globalism in action—at least for the chosen few.

Davos was started in 1971 with a few handfuls of thinkers who gathered for a high-powered intellectual talkfest. Today, it is a party with a cast of thousands taking pride in being able to catch a glimpse of the world’s Great and Good—presidents, movie stars, and business leaders.

Oktoberfest goes back to 1810, to the wedding festivities of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Theresa. Custom demanded that the royals treated their subjects to food, music and beer. Bavaria’s kings were deposed a hundred years ago; now, the millions from around the world have taken over.

Why do they flock to Oktoberfest every year? “Because it is there,” as Edmund Hillary famously explained when asked why he climbed Mount Everest in 1953. Even in our digital era, where anybody can talk to Ouagadougou on FaceTime for free, sociability demands a place and physical proximity. Plus the kick of adrenaline-drenched rides on a towering roller coaster. Seemingly classless, the Oktoberfest brings together the masses—folks who would not fraternize without those 8 million liters of beer that loosen tongues and inhibitions.

Trade is global; fun and camaraderie are local, be they ever so fleeting. Oktoberfest is also the place where boy meets girl without recourse to Tinder or fear of #MeToo. The convivial atmosphere tends to make legitimate what might be deadly in the workplace. So just like Davos for the global elites, Oktoberfest opens enticing vistas for ordinary folks. Both Davos and Munich are brilliant business models profiting from ever-rising demand.

The Chinese may have Alibaba, but they won’t have an Oktoberfest like Munich’s. The kings of brew and joy rides have been honing Munich’s advantage since 1810. You can’t copy tradition. Next year, the price of a liter of beer will rise again, faster than inflation. Still, the mass of revelers will not shrink. Seven million from around the world can’t be wrong, as they lift their glasses and shout Prost—“bottoms up!”

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A Furious Fight Behind the Scenes

Tomorrow, Macedonians will vote in a historic referendum that could determine whether their country moves westward or into the orbit of the Kremlin. A “yes” vote would give popular legitimacy to the agreement struck by Greece and Macedonia in June to change the country’s name from the “Republic of Macedonia” to the “Republic of North Macedonia.” In exchange, Greece would withdraw its veto on its neighbor and enable Macedonia to begin the accession process to NATO and the European Union.

The accord was a rare bright spot in the Western Balkans, which has endured increasing democratic and economic backsliding. Western governments have welcomed the agreement, with key figures including U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis and German Chancellor Angel Merkel visiting Skopje to endorse the accord. Meanwhile, the government of Prime Minister Zoran Zaev is working hard to sell the agreement to voters, organizing rallies throughout the country and launching a glitzy social media campaign urging high voter turnout and a “yes” vote.

While the result is far from certain, these efforts appear to have had an impact. Recent polling by the International Republican Institute shows strong support for the agreement: 57 percent of respondents support the agreement, while slightly less than half (49 percent) of voters say they will vote yes. (Tellingly, the “yes” camp views the concession on the country’s name as a necessary compromise to further the Macedonia’s Euro-Atlantic ambitions.)

High voter turnout will be key to the referendum’s success, as 50 percent turnout is required for the result to be legally binding. Official figures put the country’s voting population at 1.8 million, so at least 900,000 Macedonians will have to cast a ballot for the vote to be valid.

At this point, however, the likelihood of reaching that threshold is in serious doubt. Macedonia’s census numbers are viewed with skepticism both inside and outside the country, and experts say the total voting public is no more than 1.5 million due to emigration and statistical inaccuracies. Compounding this challenge, the official voter rolls are estimated to contain up to half-a-million “ghost voters:” people who have died, are underage, are listed multiple times at different residences or are non-residents.

If the voting population of Macedonia is actually much lower than the official figure, a turnout of 900,000 may be unattainable, even with relatively high turnout. However, even though polling suggests modest support for the referendum proposal, recent of voter turnout have come in well below the 50 percent threshold, while calls for a boycott are gaining in strength.

Despite government statements to the contrary, a turnout below 50 percent would undercut the validity of the referendum.  This outcome would force a parliamentary vote in which the support of two-thirds of the 120-seat chamber would be required to pass the amendments needed under the agreement. Prime Minister Zaev’s SDSM-led coalition will likely only be able to muster 69 votes against the opposition VMRO party’s 51 members.

Whatever the result, the fallout from the referendum will not only affect the future of Macedonia’s domestic politics, but its place in Europe and in the geopolitical contest between the democratic West and the revisionist regime in Moscow. These tactics are in keeping with the Kremlin’s strategy of pushing back against the expansion of Euro-Atlantic institutions wherever possible. During a recent visit to Skopje, Secretary Mattis said there was evidence that Russia is funding groups advocating the defeat the referendum. Others allege that the Kremlin is funding pro-boycott websites, and analysis of social media indicates attempts to stoke tensions between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians (who disproportionately favor the agreement) as a way of undermining the process. This would be extremely dangerous given Macedonia’s history of inter-ethnic tensions, which led to armed conflict in 2001. Despite post-conflict efforts to increase minority rights in the country, ethnic Albanians still consider themselves second-class citizens.

The Greek government led by Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza party has also alleged Russian meddling to scuttle the agreement. In July, Greece expelled two Russian diplomats on the grounds of orchestrating influence operations against the accords. A Russian-Greek businessman has been accused of formulating a scheme to provoke violent anti-demonstrations ahead of the vote.

The “yes” campaign also faces powerful opposition within Greece, which could cause problems even if the Macedonian referendum succeeds. Mirroring the opposition in Macedonia, Greece’s center-right New Democracy party and the Independent Greeks (Syriza’s right-wing partner in the governing coalition) claim that any form of the name “Macedonia” is illegitimate, arguing that it should be reserved for Greece’s northern region and its use by another country implies territorial claims.  Both parties have promised to vote against the agreement when it is submitted to the Greek parliament following the Macedonian referendum.

The discomfort of some Macedonians to the renaming of their country should by no means be dismissed or diminished—it touches upon issues of identity and no doubt strikes some Macedonians as an unfair capitulation to pressure from neighboring Greece. While the decision rightly rests with the Macedonian people, it is crucial that the voters understand the consequences of refusing to endorse the compromise.

Simply put, if the referendum fails, Macedonia may not have another chance to join NATO for years given growing enlargement fatigue and Russia’s increasingly aggressive destabilizing efforts. This will deliver a strategic victory to Moscow by knocking a NATO-aspirant off its westward path and will reinforce the efficacy of the Kremlin’s campaign of disinformation and meddling in European affairs. It could also upset the country’s delicate inter-ethnic balance by causing pro-Western Albanians to question their place in a society where the Slavic-Macedonian majority is divided between those who support NATO membership and those who would prefer to draw closer to Russia.

Macedonia has traveled a long road to what proponents see as an uncomfortable but necessary compromise. It is crucial that the Macedonian people come out and vote on September 30 to decide which direction the country takes in the next leg of its journey.

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More is at Stake Than Just the Name Deal

On September 30th 2018, Macedonian citizens will vote in on the change in the country’s name from the Republic of Macedonia to the Republic of North Macedonia. The referendum is intended to affirm achieved earlier this year between Greek and Macedonian foreign ministers.

Ever since it became independent from former Yugoslavia in late 1991, Macedonia has been engaged in a dispute with its southern neighbor Greece over the country’s constitutional name. Athens believes that the name Macedonia is both appropriation of Greek cultural heritage and a potential territorial pretension to the Greek territory of the same name. This has led Greece to block Macedonia’s path towards NATO and the EU, and forced Macedonia to use the name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) in international forums. However, the referendum is relevant not just for the sake of the deal, but also for the wider region.

When the international community talks about potential hotspots in the Balkans, they usually talk about Bosnia or Kosovo. What many experts miss is the fact for more than one hundred years, Macedonia has been in the heart of regional geopolitics. Macedonia is the geographic heart of the Balkans, bordering Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Albania. Macedonia also controls the river Vardar which connects with Serbian Great Morava river. The valley formed by the two rivers is the corridor through which Central Europe and the Balkans connect through to the Aegean Sea. Local nations were aware of this in their own twentieth century rivalries. The key battles of the First Balkan Wars (1912-1913), in which Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Greece formed the Balkan League in order to expel Ottoman Turkey from the Balkans, by no accident took place in Macedonia. The Second Balkan War in 1913 occurred because of a Serbo-Bulgarian spat over their borders in Macedonia. The Bulgarian war efforts against Serbia and Yugoslavia in the two World Wars concerned Macedonia. The disputes that Tito’s Yugoslavia had with Greece, Bulgaria and Albania (25 percent of Macedonia’s population is Albanian) also prominently featured Macedonia.

When Yugoslavia was collapsing, one of the main reasons that Macedonian independence did not result in conflict was because many prominent thinkers (including Henry Kissinger) were awacoere that a war there could easily flare into something much bigger, something that could potentially suck in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, and even Turkey. These concerns, coupled with lessons learned from foot-dragging through the worst of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, led to the deployment in 1995 of a very effective conflict prevention mission, the United Nations Preventive Deployment Force (UNPREDEP). Unfortunately, the mandate of this mission ended in 1999 when China vetoed the extension of its mandate to punish Macedonia for its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. Conflict followed soon thereafter, when in 2001 Macedonian Albanians armed with weaponry smuggled from their compatriots in Kosovo launched an insurgency against Macedonian security forces. The conflict came to an end with the Ohrid Framework Agreement, which provided more autonomy at the local level for the Albanian population, as well as guaranteeing certain language rights. The conflict highlighted the fragility of Macedonia. While Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs, and Bosnian Croats have a history of fighting, they also have a long history of coexistence, as they are divided by religion but still speak the same language, broadly draw on the same South Slavic culture, and share many local customs. In Macedonia, the Slavic, Orthodox Macedonians, and most Muslim Albanians are divided by ethnicity, language, and religion.

Macedonia’s relations with its neighbors also carried a sense of unease. Kiro Gligorov, the first president of independent Macedonia, once stated that Macedonia is surrounded by “four wolves”—Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. The relationship with Albania was fraught because of the Macedonia’s large, at times restive, Albanian minority. Serbia recognized both Macedonia under its constitutional name and the Macedonian nation, but it does not recognize the independence of Macedonia’s Orthodox Church. Bulgaria was the first to recognize Macedonia as a state, but refused to recognize the Macedonian nation and the Macedonian language (although this dispute has mellowed significantly due to the friendship treaty the two countries signed in 2017).

But the relationship that has burdened Macedonia the most was the name dispute with Greece. Though it was initially a champion of EU expansion in the region due to its being the first Balkan country to conclude negotiations in 2001, Greece dug in its heels over Macedonia’s EU bid.  Macedonia’s path to NATO was also blocked at the Bucharest Summit in 2008 by Athens. From that point forward, Macedonia has existed in a kind of limbo. Nikola Gruevski, Macedonia’s Prime Minister between 2006 and 2016, seized on the impasse to stoke nationalism among his backers. He actively promoted narratives about the ancient Macedonian nation that drew its roots from the legacy of Alexander the Great. The Macedonian capital of Skopje is now overflowing with kitschy statues evoking Greek motifs—a grotesque testament to Gruevski’s relentless drive to irritate Athens.

Under Gruevski, Macedonia’s democracy markedly regressed, with the government exercising stringent control over the judiciary and media, and its intelligence services becoming notorious for surveilling just about everyone. Ethnic tensions within the country also made a comeback in 2015 when 22 people were killed in a confrontation between Macedonian police forces and alleged Albanian terrorists. Internationally, Gruevski strengthened ties with Russia, Turkey and China, while domestically, he built a formidable patronage machine that helped keep his hold on power.

That era ended in 2017 when Albanian parties, who used to support Gruevski’s VMRO-DPMNE, jumped ship and formed a government with the opposition Social-Democrats, who in turn promised to grant official status to the Albanian language. Macedonian Albanians showed a good deal of pragmatism during the tense negotiations during government formation, especially while Gruevski and his partisans threatened violence. They staked out a pro-Western position while publicly distancing themselves from the kind of Albanian irredentism that has been a feature of their politics for decades. The resulting government immediately capitalized on the moment, moving to grant the Albanians their desiderata. It also actively began pursuing talks with Athens and finally signed an agreement over the name earlier this year.

While it might seem overdramatic to predict Macedonia descending into chaos in case the referendum fails, a “no” vote would put the country back in the kind of domestic and international limbo that led to the flourishing of Gruevski’s grubby kleptocracy. And given that expectations have been raised, a failure could portend further polarization and splintering along political and ethnic lines. The logic that kept Kissinger awake still applies today. Albania may be tempted to boost the irredentism among its countrymen; Turkey, which likes to see itself as a key player in the region (and generally finds it hard not to take positions that make life more difficult for Athens), could also get involved; Greece, Bulgaria, and even Serbia may be tempted to play as well. A full-blown third Balkan War may be unlikely, but a roiling cauldron of intrigue, instability, and bursts of political violence, often fomented from outside, is all too easy to imagine.

The international community and the Macedonian government appear to be aware of the dangers. The Macedonian Parliament set the following : “Are you in favor of NATO and EU membership, and accepting the name agreement between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece?” The change in the country’s name is thus tied to its Euro-Atlantic integration, creating a strong incentive for voters, who still strongly support joining the West, to vote yes on a difficult question.

For that very same purpose, the European Union started a pre-accession screening process for Macedonia three days before the referendum. Numerous high ranking Western officials including German Chancellor , French President Emmanuel Macron, NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence have expressed support for the name change. Let us hope Macedonia’s citizens will do the same. It sure beats testing the validity of worst-case scenarios. 

The post appeared first on The American Interest.

The Dark Side of Malaysia’s Democratic Fairy Tale

Like Cinderella, the Malaysian opposition has seemingly transformed itself overnight from a downtrodden victim into the belle of the ball. In a stunning upset at the polls in early May, the Alliance of Hope, led by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, toppled corrupt incumbent Najib Razak, handing his party its first defeat since the country’s founding in 1957. Now facing charges that he directed $600 million from the country’s sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB, into his personal bank account, Najib is well-suited to the role of fairy-tale villain. While Malaysians certainly deserve to live happily ever after, their Cinderella story may have a dark side.

For decades, Kuala Lumpur has been a confederate of Iran, Hamas, and North Korea. And it’s not yet clear whether the 92-year-old and notoriously anti-Semitic Mahathir, who has his own well-documented history of cronyism and corruption, has either the will or the ability to sever the government’s ties to rogue states and extremists.

Since the 1990s, North Korea has used Malaysia as a base to operate front companies that fund the regime. For example, a North Korean intelligence operative established Malaysia Korea Partners (MKP) in 1996. The firm operates in 20 countries and has signed $350 million worth of contracts through construction projects in Angola, Zambia, and elsewhere.

Malaysian banks have also knowingly allowed North Korean officials to open accounts for their front companies. Most notably, North Korean national Kim Chang Hyok, who operates multiple front companies for the RGB, including the defense firm Glocom, opened several Malaysian bank accounts without even trying to conceal his links to North Korea, according to the UN Panel of Experts. The same body also reported in March that the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB)—North Korea’s main intelligence agency—exerts effective control over Glocom.

North Korea’s sanctions evasion persists even though Kuala Lumpur’s relations with Pyongyang deteriorated after the assassination of Kim Jong-un’s eldest brother, Kim Jong-nam, in Malaysia in February 2017. Moreover, Mahathir’s decision in June to reopen the Malaysian embassy in North Korea raises concerns that the Prime Minister has little interest in shutting Pyongyang’s illicit schemes, which also flourished during his original tenure in office.

Malaysia also has a record of serving as a conduit for Iranian sanctions evasion. Just one week after taking office, Mahathir stated that “sanctions by big powers” will not influence Malaysia’s economic policies, suggesting that Malaysia may buck U.S. sanctions when they return in early November. Malaysia imported $293 million of goods and services from Iran last year, up sharply from $45 million in 2015.

In July, the U.S. Treasury designated Malaysia-based Mahan Travel and Tourism Sdn Bhd for working on behalf of Iranian carrier Mahan Air—the “airline of choice” for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force, which Treasury designated in 2011 for its deliveries of weapons and manpower to the Assad regime. Mahan Travel and Tourism Sdn Bhd had been operating for at least eight years in Kuala Lumpur, conducting sales, marketing, and financial services for the carrier.

Hamas is yet another sanctioned entity benefitting from Malaysia’s friendship. Malaysia’s largest Islamist party has had ties to Hamas since at least 2002. Najib, the former premier, even defied the Israeli blockade of Gaza to visit the enclave in 2013. And most recently, the Mossad assassinated Fadi al-Batsh, a high-level Hamas operative, in Malaysia. Al-Batsh, a professor and lecturer at the British Malaysian Institute, conducted research on weapons systems and drones on behalf of Hamas. In a memorial Hamas held for al-Batsh in Gaza, ten masked fighters guarded his mourning tent, a significant honor.

This support for Hamas dovetails with Malaysian leaders’ courtship of Islamists at home. The Najib government pushed attempts to amend Malaysia’s Criminal Jurisdiction Act to allow sharia courts to issue harsher punishments.  During the recent campaign, Najib said that Malaysia should be ruled by Muslim ethnic Malays.

While the change in administration offered hope that Malaysia would reject this path, Mahathir recently met with Indian Muslim hate preacher Zakir Naik after rejecting New Delhi’s request to extradite the well-known televangelist, who is wanted for money laundering and terrorism.  Naik has justified Osama bin Laden’s atrocities, and helped to incite a July 2016 terror attack in Bangladesh that killed 29 people.

Malaysia’s democratic overturning of the corrupt Najib government is indeed an achievement worth celebrating. But that progress should not blind us to the country’s unresolved past demons, the ongoing corruption of its ruling class, and its longstanding identity as an enabler of rogue regimes and terrorist non-state actors. If we are to see a “happy ending” for this Cinderella story, and a vindication of the faith placed in Mahathir’s new administration, Malaysia will need to do much more to turn its back on the villains it counts among its friends.

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NAFTA on the Brink?

Over the past decade, politics has increasingly involved a divide between what we might call technocrats and populists. The former offer “sensible” policies, while the latter emphasize popular sovereignty. In Western Europe and North America at least, these divisions have arguably become more important than the Left-Right divides of old.

It would be hard to conceive a more perfect representation of technocratic policymaking than the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Its promised advantages were derived from economic trade theory and were meant to produce benefits on an aggregate scale. Designed and sold as a “non-zero sum game” for all three participants, it neglected the adverse, micro-level consequences of its implementation and the political pushback it would engender. The election of Donald Trump, who had campaigned on either reneging or renegotiating NAFTA to protect U.S. jobs and prevent Mexico from “ripping off” American workers, signaled the ascendancy of the “populist” wing in American politics—and a credible challenge to NAFTA itself.

Was NAFTA a “good thing” for the North American economy as a whole? Yes, even if its impact was much less revolutionary than predicted. Did it produce pains in certain sectors that have translated into political opposition? Again, yes—and perhaps with greater force than was expected. The designers of the agreements certainly expected some of these costs, but they could not predict the rise of China, a development that has caused more political headaches than any specific provision of the deal itself. Trade economists have found that U.S. regions with higher exposure to Chinese imports experience fewer employment options and more social transfer payments.

NAFTA was agreed among the three countries’ leaders in August 1992 and signed in December of that year. Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney argued that NAFTA would provide an economic boost for Canada’s export sector, create domestic jobs, foster stronger cooperation with the United States, and strengthen democracy, free markets and rule of law in Mexico. For Mexico, NAFTA meant an opportunity to access a larger consumer market, the promise of higher wages for Mexican workers, and a regulatory environment that would encourage increased foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly in infrastructure. NAFTA, many claimed, would also help address immigration disputes with the United States; Mexican and U.S. political elites argued that NAFTA could create enough jobs for Mexicans to induce them to stay at home. For the United States, NAFTA was about ensuring access to the natural resources of its two neighbors, stemming immigration from Mexico, creating some domestic jobs (by encouraging Mexico to purchase more U.S.-made products), and in general contributing to the continuing U.S.-led globalization process.

NAFTA made possible a significant increase in trade among the three countries. Trilateral trade increased by 125 percent in real terms from 1993 to 2015, while U.S.-Canada trade increased by 63 percent and Mexico-U.S. trade by a whopping 432 percent. The consensus is that NAFTA did account for some of the growth experienced by the region and especially by Mexico (no surprise, given its smaller economy relative to its richer northern neighbors). It also arguably consolidated the North American region as an integrated and integral part of the global economy. But the lack of U.S. government investments in Mexican infrastructure and the failures of successive administrations to reform immigration policy have limited the impact of the agreement, making it more of a tariff-free zone than the institutionalized road to growth and convergence it could have been. Moreover, China’s entry into the world market changed the context in which NAFTA operated. The effect of China’s entry into the WTO in 2001 was that China’s trade with the United States increased roughly twenty-fold, and thus indirectly limited the expected job growth in Mexico.

The United States as Central Node

The United States has always been the linchpin of NAFTA, the indisputable juggernaut of the agreement. NAFTA has faced few challenges involving the Canadian-Mexican relationship; most disputes have concerned each country’s relationship with the United States. Those relationships are by nature asymmetrical. So, for example, while Mexicans and Canadians have had to move closer to U.S. borders to benefit from the industries that emerged after the trade agreement, Americans have not needed to relocate for the same reasons.

Canada has a material interest to preserve NAFTA, as nearly 2 million Canadian jobs, especially car manufacturers in Ontario, depend on exports to the United States. NAFTA has also resulted in an increase in Canadian crude oil to the United States. In the first years of the agreement (1993 to 2000), Canada’s economic dependence on exports increased from 29 percent to 44 percent of GDP, but since the Great Recession (2010s) that figure has stabilized back to around 30 percent. As a larger economy, the export dependence of the United States is only a little more than 10 percent of GDP, which has barely increased since the passage of NAFTA. NAFTA has been linked to job losses in the Canadian manufacturing sector, as Mexican assembly line worker wages ($8) are half the minimum wage in Ontario ($15). Car production in Mexico increased twelvefold from 1994 to 2016, while remaining stagnant in Canada and the United States. On the other hand, automation has been another major cause of job elimination, especially in the automobile sector. Selected Canadian industries like lumber, media, and dairy farming have been clamoring for continued protection even under NAFTA. But, on balance, the developed country profile of Canada attenuates some of its vulnerability to U.S. trade demands.

The story is somewhat different for Mexico. Mexico’s middle class has grown since 1994, and Mexican wages have grown—but not by nearly as much as American wages have. Mexico’s industrial landscape has changed in the years since NAFTA. Mexico, alone among Latin American economies, is no longer dependent on primary exports. Though several American auto companies opened factories in Mexico (clustered in northern Mexico next to the U.S. border to allow for lower shipping costs), the wages for Mexican autoworkers are significantly lower than they were for American autoworkers. The abundant availability of workers from the south and central parts of Mexico have not allowed trade unions to take hold, and the weaker working class mobilization allows for the continued payment of low wages to Mexican manufacturing workers. In addition, there have been limits to industrial upgrading in the Mexican economy. Though improving university training of industrial engineers has increased the supply of such high-skilled workers and the former Mexican President Felipe Calderon had promised the creation of 130,000 engineering jobs in 2012, many of these trained engineers remain unemployed and are still searching for work in their chosen field.

Mexico’s agricultural industries have suffered in some areas and grown rapidly in others. For instance, avocado sales have grown significantly under NAFTA. In contrast, Mexico’s corn producers were especially hard-hit by the open market, because they were forced to compete with heavily subsidized American farmers without similar support from their home country. Notably, many of the undocumented migrants who leave Mexico to work in U.S. agriculture are working on farms that grow similar products as the farms that used to exist in Mexico pre-NAFTA. American farms continue to rely heavily on undocumented workers from Mexico to keep their costs lower, and in previous years U.S. farmers have served as one of the most powerful lobbying groups for more relaxed immigration policies to protect their pipeline of cheap labor. The agriculture employment crisis in Mexico was expected, but the jobs that were supposed to absorb displaced labor went to China.

The superior position of the United States with respect to Mexico is underscored by the fact that Mexico has enforced contracts protecting American investors very well, in order to encourage more FDI from U.S. companies, but the United States has been unwilling to make major infrastructure investments in Mexico or to help Mexico enforce environmental regulations that were part of NAFTA. Corporate and economic interests in both countries have trumped environmental considerations. From 1985 to 1999, solid waste production in Mexico grew by 108 percent, water pollution by 29 percent and urban air pollution by 97 percent.

For the United States, the results from NAFTA are much less clear. The consensus is that while some jobs have disappeared due to NAFTA, others have been created by the possibility of new exports and profits. The political problem with this argument is that even if there is a net increase in jobs due to the agreement, job gains and losses will not be distributed equally by region or sector. Certainly, Texas has benefitted much more from NAFTA than has Minnesota, and the auto industry’s profits (if not employment) are in much better shape thanks to the agreement, while the textiles and furniture sectors have been decimated. (China, however, has played a much larger role in displacing workers in these two sectors.)

The Future

The future of NAFTA, and more importantly the future of the global trade regime itself, is far from clear. Both rely fundamentally on the willing U.S. provision of dollars, multilateral trade institutions and a military network (an important and understudied component of NAFTA). The Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has merely stated that Mexico is open to negotiating the terms of the deal to make the North America region more “competitive.” Mexico needs the deal more than Canada does, which might explain why the U.S. talks with Mexico were wrapped up so quickly (aside from the political expediency of getting a deal done before Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gets to power).

In Canada, the Liberal Party government under Justin Trudeau faces federal elections next year, and will not want to make too many self-defeating concessions. For instance, Canada wants to maintain its vital culture and dairy industry as well as Article 19, which preserves the bilateral panels to resolve trade disputes between Canada and the United States. On the other hand, going home without a deal could also backfire for Trudeau, as the Trump Administration might use the Canadian intransigence as excuse to further escalate punitive tariffs on Canadian products, thus further undermining the spirit of NAFTA. In the United States, the job trajectory of U.S. workers is unlikely to be much improved with the new deal, given the continued relevance of more important factors like automation or the growing market power of quasi-monopolist firms paying low wages. As such, renewed political attacks against NAFTA will re-emerge even if Trump will miraculously agree to a new NAFTA deal.

Once the nationalist spirit has been unleashed it is hard to contain it. There is an escalating logic to a trade war that can expose the fundamental fragility of the liberal international order. The success of international trade deals relies on the liberal market orientation of political leaders and on mutual trust far more than it does on money or material resources. A loss of economic resources can be compensated by the passage of time and finding new avenues to generate growth, but once trust is gone a spiral of trade war escalation will follow, as happened in the 1930s and 1940s.

Furthermore, increasing discord in the North American hemisphere could allow China to fill the gap by reinforcing trade and political ties with Mexico and Canada. Mexico still directs 74 percent of its exports to the United States, and only 1.9 percent to China, but for imports there is a greater balance with 49 percent from the United States and 17 percent from China. For Canada’s exports, 74 percent goes to the United States, and 4.5 percent to China, while for imports 53 percent come from the United States and 12 percent from China. These Chinese trade figures can only be expected to grow as China’s economic weight is increasing.

When former U.S. President Barack Obama pushed for the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he did not emphasize the point that the deal would benefit the American worker. Rather, he argued that the TPP, a wide-ranging trade deal that includes countries like Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, would allow the United States to craft the rules of multilateral trade as opposed to China. The Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the TPP and the businessman’s preference for cutting bilateral (as opposed to multilateral) trade deals implies a political vacuum in international trade relations that China is already filling with its own set of institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and its foreign investment program, One Belt One Road. As a result, we can expect that China is observing the current trade discord in North America with great interest.

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The Case for a Territorial Swap

The nearly two decades since the 1999 war in Kosovo and the NATO air campaign against Serbia have not brought closure to the conflict between ethnic Serbs and Albanians. Serbia and several other European countries still refuse to recognize Kosovo’s independence, and Belgrade continues to exercise control over several ethnically Serbian districts in the north, contiguous to Serbia. Just outside of Kosovo, Serbia’s overwhelmingly Albanian Preševo Valley saw an insurgency in 1999-2001 that aimed to join the district to Kosovo. Some 4,000 NATO troops remain deployed in Kosovo to maintain the peace and protect the Serbian minority. The tensions and uncertainty generated by the still-unresolved conflict take a continued economic toll on both countries, as well as impeding membership in Euro-Atlantic organizations.

In recent months, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Kosovo President Hashim Thaci have taken up the idea of resolving the conflict by means of a territorial swap, giving Northern Kosovo to Serbia and awarding the Preševo District to Kosovo. Foreign governments and experts have given this development a mixed reception. On the one hand, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton has said that “if the two parties can work it out between themselves and reach agreement, we don’t exclude territorial adjustments.” On the other hand, Angela Merkel has poured cold water on the idea, stating that “the territorial integrity of the states of the Western Balkans has been established and is inviolable.”

Writing September 19 in the Washington Post, Carnegie Europe scholar Judy Dempsey labeled a redrawing of the Serbia-Kosovo border “a terrible idea,” averring that Vučić and Thaci “could set an ominous precedent for leaders who harbor separatist ambitions.” The current stability in the Western Balkans is fragile, ethnic hatred between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians persists, the two Presidents have not yet sold their people on the idea of a territorial swap, and institutions in the region are too weak to bear the stress that such a bold move would entail, Dempsey maintained.

However, the skeptics are wrong. The proposed territorial swap, while not without risks, is potentially an extremely promising development. It would not solve all the region’s problems, but it could solve several important ones.

The most serious objection to the territorial swap is, paradoxically, the easiest to refute. As armed conflict in Kosovo erupted in the late 1990s, many governments and analysts argued along the same lines as opponents of a land swap today—that an independent Kosovo would set a horrible precedent that would spur separatism elsewhere. The riposte to this argument was that Kosovo was sui generis—a one-of-a-kind situation created by the peculiarities of the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo’s autonomous status therein, Milošević’s ill-considered decision to revoke that autonomy, and the brutality of his repression of the majority Kosovar Albanians. No other place replicated this unique set of circumstances, hence no other place could reasonably claim analogous treatment. What happens in Kosovo stays in Kosovo.

It is astonishing how completely people seem to have forgotten the sui generis argument of twenty years ago. By what conceivable logic did the forcible ripping of Kosovo from Serbia entail no broad precedent with regard to separatism, but a peaceful, consensual land-swap agreement between Belgrade and Priština would create precisely such a deleterious precedent now? The proposal mooted by Presidents Vučić and Thaci would set a precedent indeed—not for separatism in any way, shape or form, but for the peaceful, orderly resolution of conflicts through land swaps. This is an example not to fear, but to welcome. Unfortunately it is difficult to see how the example could apply in other Balkan hot spots; but by the same token, there is no inherent reason why a Serbia-Kosovo land swap need exacerbate tensions elsewhere.

The obvious concern right now is with Bosnia, where Republika Srpska’s President Milorad Dodik has been maneuvering to sunder the Bosnian state and assert his entity’s complete de jure sovereignty. However, this effort is not being driven or even encouraged by developments in Kosovo, and having Belgrade and Priština bury the hatchet would not necessarily play into Dodik’s hand. In fact, it could arguably have a contrary effect. In any event, it would be the height of folly to miss perhaps the best opportunity in a generation to end the standoff over Kosovo because any rocking of the Western Balkans boat right now might further complicate the desperate situation shaping up in Bosnia. Bosnia must stand or fall on its own merits, and according to its own internal logic. It is, like Kosovo, sui generis.

The opposition to a land swap puts Serbia and Kosovo in a Catch-22 situation. Their institutions, purportedly, are too weak to sustain a risky endeavor like the proposed land swap; but those same institutions are likely to remain weak precisely until the Serbs and Kosovars can resolve their conflict. And the land-swap proposal is a promising and elegant method of doing so.

I would challenge opponents of a land swap to present a credible alternative scenario for how a settlement and reconciliation between Belgrade and Priština might occur. How quickly do people imagine that Serbs in Kosovo, and Albanians in Serbia, might jettison their ethnocentric concept of identity/loyalty and develop instead a robust civic affinity with the state that issues their passports? Or will ethnic Serbs and Albanians adopt such a strong supranational attachment to Europe that their archaic ethnolinguistic frame of reference will fade into insignificance? How many seminars on conflict management, or soccer camps for Serbian and Albanian children, will it take before we have Serbs and Albanians holding hands in a circle and singing “Kumbaya?” And how many more billions of Euros would need to be expended, and how many more decades would NATO troops need to be deployed, before Serbs and Kosovar Albanians attain this post-modern beatific vision?

Frankly, some people seem to have forgotten the lessons of Europe’s recent history. The continent did not move seamlessly or effortlessly to its present supranational bliss. Ethnic conflicts that roiled the continent were in many cases resolved only by massacre, ethnic cleansing, the post-war redrawing of borders, and the more or less compulsory exchange of populations.  Are Greek-Turkish relations still fraught? Try to imagine the tensions if there were a million-strong Greek minority still living in Anatolia. Could neighboring countries have accepted Germany’s leadership of the EU if relations with Berlin were complicated by the presence of millions of Volksdeutsch on their soil? What would be the prospects for Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation if each of these states retained to this day a large ethnic component of the other? The truth of the matter is that, in many parts of Europe, a separation was required before a coming-together became possible.

However, perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the opposition to a Serbia-Kosovo land swap has nothing to do with the merits of the idea, but with the implicit conceit that outsiders know better than the locals how to resolve the region’s conflicts.  In a , former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana struck exactly the right note.  While putting the Vučić-Thaci negotiations in the context of EU mediation efforts, he was at pains to add “of course, it is not the EU’s prerogative to dictate the terms of the conflict’s resolution, and it is clear that local ownership will be key to any deal that may emerge from the process.” Indeed, it is Vučić and Thaci who bear the responsibility for their nations, and who will suffer the political consequences if their initiative fails. It is for the West to support, not to prescribe, let alone to micromanage.  Unfortunately, one sometimes has the sense of Westerners hovering over the western Balkans like helicopter parents lest the rambunctious children inadvertently injure themselves. And it is hard to avoid the impression that many people scorn the idea of a land swap because it entails accepting the realities of Balkan ethnic nationalism and doesn’t meet post-modern standards for diversity, tolerance, and multiculturalism.

No, a land swap would not be a cakewalk; there would be losers as well as winners, and there is still much difficult work for the two presidents to do. Nevertheless, their proposal portends a sea change for the better on numerous counts. It promises to resolve the vexing issue of recognition for Kosovo’s independence, both by Serbia and the rest of the international community; to act as a catharsis on the collective Serb psyche, allowing a “letting go” of Kosovo to occur; to establish a mutually agreed border between the Serbian and Albanian worlds; to delete two territories, Northern Kosovo and  Preševo, from the entirely too-lengthy list of Balkan flashpoints; to give ownership of the process to the local leaders, allowing the EU and NATO to disengage; and to clear the decks for both Serbia and Kosovo to develop economically and prepare for membership in Euro-Atlantic institutions, as desired. The cherry on the sundae would be the removal of one of Moscow’s choicest spoons for stirring the pot in the Balkans. Any one of these accomplishments ought to prompt discussion of a Nobel Peace Prize. The prospect of realizing all these achievements in one fell swoop, amid the general gloom about the Balkans’ trajectory, anti-globalist populism and the enervation of Europe’s integration project, ought to fire our imagination, not invite our censure.

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The Third France

“Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est”—all of Gaul is divided into three parts—is the opening line of Caesar’s Commentary on the Gallic Wars, which introduced several generations of Americans to the study of the Latin language. Ancient Gaul’s 21st-century successor, modern France, similarly divides into three parts: Paris, the political, economic, and cultural capital, the city of light with its monumental buildings and spectacular parks and gardens; the provincial cities—Marseille and Nice in the south, Bordeaux in the west, Lyon in the east and Lille in the north; and rural France with its many villages, which the French sometimes call “la France profonde.” It is in this third France, in the southwest region known as the Périgord, in the fictional but realistic village of St. Denis, that Martin Walker has set his splendid series of mystery novels, with the local policeman, Benoit “Bruno” Courrèges, at their center. A Taste for Vengeance, published this spring, is the eleventh in the series.

Walker, a former journalist for the English newspaper The Guardian and the author of several well-received works of non-fiction, spends part of each year in Washington, DC and part in the region about which he writes. His works of fiction are examples of what the French call romans policiers—detective novels—of a very high order: deftly plotted, gracefully written, with compelling characters and surprising twists at the end. The books, however, offer the reader more than suspense: They provide a vivid portrait of the French countryside, the beating heart of the French nation, in the new world of the 21st century.

In Bruno, an army veteran who served in the Balkans during the war in the 1990s, went through police training, and was assigned to St. Denis, the author has created a very appealing character. Bruno lives alone just outside the village in a house he restored himself, surrounded by his vegetable garden, his chickens and ducks, and his cockerel, Blanco, whose familiar cocoricu (French for “cock-a-doodle-do”) wakes him in the morning. In addition to his official duties he serves as the volunteer tennis instructor and rugby coach for the children of St. Denis. During the course of the series he develops several romantic attachments but the great love of his life, Isabelle, a fellow law enforcement professional, while making periodic visits, has chosen to pursue a high-flying career in Paris rather than settling down with him in St. Denis. Unlike the detectives created by British authors—Sherlock Holmes, for example, and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple—Bruno is not an eccentric. He’s an average Frenchman, with above-average shrewdness and courage. Unlike his fictional Scandinavian counterparts, he’s gregarious and happy, not dour and tormented.

In following his adventures the reader encounters both the continuities and the changes in the way of life of the third France. What remains unchanged is the strong sense of community among the villagers, of the kind that has no doubt marked rural communities everywhere since they came into existence with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. The ties among the inhabitants of St. Denis, the kind that tend to dissolve when people move to the cities, remain strong. Bruno has no living blood relatives but his friends in the village become his extended family: the mayor, to whom he reports; the baron, a local landowner and fellow army veteran; the village doctor and the science teacher at the local school (both women); and, not least, his faithful Basset hound, Balzac.

The powerful sense of community shapes the way Bruno does his job. Among the citizens of St. Denis he almost never resorts to coercion, deploying instead friendly persuasion. He functions less as the cop on the beat than as a social worker and guidance counselor. To be sure, he and his colleagues in law enforcement depend on the methods of electronic communication that have spread around the world, including to rural France. The Internet is an important tool of investigation in St. Denis, as it is elsewhere. Moreover, dealing with armed outsiders often requires the use of force, and some of the novels climax in dramatic gun battles: Bruno is no pacifist.

In solving crimes and dealing with trouble of all kind, however, he relies heavily on his personal network. He advises a new police officer in a neighboring village to “make a courtesy call to every house in your commune at least once a year and leave each of them your card with your mobile phone number. Make a note of birthdays and weddings and baptisms and wish people well. Make yourself into a friendly fixture of everyone’s life and find some way to have regular involvements with all the kids,” as Bruno does with his tennis lessons.

Another familiar theme of village life recurs in the Bruno novels: the impulse to keep the outside world at bay, to resist the intrusion of distant authorities. For St. Denis, those authorities reside in Paris, the seat of France’s famously centralized and powerful national government. The mayor is consistently re-elected to his post in no small part because he is well-connected in the capital and adept at defending the village’s interests there. Bruno himself maintains cordial if wary relations with his counterparts at various levels of the French law enforcement bureaucracy. The series furnishes a kind of tutorial in how that bureaucracy works.

In recent decades another external force with which the village has to contend has become important: the European Union (EU), with its headquarters in Brussels. The European Union has brought major benefits to St. Denis: grants for economic development and cultural preservation; an influx of tourists, making tourism rather than agriculture the village’s leading industry; and some non-French Europeans who settle there and become part of the community. On the other hand, Brussels also issues meddlesome regulations on a wide range of activities, some of which contradict the village’s long-standing traditions and that Bruno must find ways to circumvent.

Yet another venerable feature of French village life found in the Bruno novels is the significance of food and wine, which is a major theme in each of the 11 books. A Hollywood pitch for the series might describe it as “Maigret (Georges Simenon’s famous Parisian detective) meets Julia Child.” An enthusiastic and skillful chef, Bruno enjoys cooking for his friends. Walker describes the preparation of meals, by Bruno and others, with the detail and precision found in cookbooks. (His wife, Julia Watson, is in fact a food writer.) The dishes, invariably using local ingredients, range from simple peasant fare to, in A Taste for Vengeance, a lunch at a Périgord restaurant with a Michelin star.

While offering a guide to the food of the region and a description of the customs and folkways of 21st-century village life there, the Bruno books remain, first and foremost, mysteries, whose plots involve solving crimes. In many of them the crime has its roots in French history.

History looms larger in Europe than in the United States, and in no European country does it weigh more heavily than in France. To be sure, the French nation has a glorious history. France was the dominant power in Europe and the vanguard of Western civilization from the 17th century through the Napoleonic era; but the country also has a considerably less glorious recent past. In World War II France suffered defeat and occupation at the hands of Germany, which gave rise to a small but determined French resistance. After 1945 the French fought and lost two colonial wars, in Indochina in the 1950s and Algeria in the 1960s. From these unhappy experiences spring a number of the crimes that Bruno has to solve. For France in general, and the St. Denis of Martin Walker’s novels in particular, a line from one of William Faulkner’s characters holds true: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

As those historical episodes become more distant in time, it becomes more difficult to devise plots in which the memory of them animates events in the second decade of the 21st century. Accordingly, the source of trouble in A Taste for Vengeance turns out to be a place that is for Great Britain the equivalent of Indochina and Algeria, but where the British experience is both older and more recent: Ireland.

Through the descriptions of Bruno’s daily rounds, of his relations with his friends, and of the vicissitudes of social and political life in St. Denis, the novels give the reader a vivid picture of everyday life in rural France. While Martin Walker’s books are entertainments, not works of philosophy or history, from the picture he paints a lesson emerges: Crimes, criminals, wars, and conquerors come and go, but the pleasures of the third France, the French countryside, endure.

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A New Hanseatic League?

Earlier this month, leaders from the Three Seas Initiative converged in Bucharest to reinforce their commitment to the two-year-old alliance. The Three Seas Initiative, which links the 12 countries along the Baltic Sea, the Adriatic Sea, and the Black Sea, is a grand initiative indeed. As Croatia’s President, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, said at the Bucharest summit, its ambition is to “make Central Europe the backbone of European resilience.”

Here’s the thing: Grand alliances are not doing too well these days. Tension is rife in both NATO and the European Union. A better example of multinational collaboration is, in fact, to be found among one of those three seas. The countries along the Baltic Sea have built not one overarching alliance but a patchwork of cooperation. Their pragmatic approach should be replicated by other regions of Europe and beyond.

In 1161, a German duke named Henry the Lion decided that the bloody battles between merchants from his North German empire and their competitors on the Swedish island of Gotland had to cease. Henry the Lion had realized that with peace in place, both sides would prosper—so he instituted an agreement that granted the Gotlanders the same rights as domestic merchants in his own dominions. Thus was born the Hanseatic League, one of the most successful alliances in history.

The name Hanseatic League was informally claimed several years ago by a group of northern EU member states, led by the United Kingdom. But it’s barely more than a label. Today’s de facto Hanseatic League is instead a modern incarnation of Henry the Lion’s creation: a cooperation patchwork between the tiny Baltic states and a few near neighbors. One outgrowth of this cooperation is the Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB8), a foreign policy coordination group comprising the five Nordic and three Baltic states. When Ojars Kalnins, a Chicago-bred Latvian MP and member of NB8, recently visited Washington, almost none of the legislators he spoke to had heard of the NB8. “But when I told them about it they were blown away,” Kalnins told me.

Indeed, thanks to groupings like NB8, Baltic Sea countries have achieved an extraordinary degree of cooperation. “The Baltic Sea region has never been as integrated as it is now,” noted Marko Mihkelson, an Estonian MP. The Baltic states and four of the Nordic countries, along with Britain and the Netherlands, recently launched the Joint Expeditionary Force, a 10,000-strong force that can be deployed on short notice. The Nordic-Baltic Mobility Fund supports cross-border artistic projects in the region. In honor of the three Baltic states’ 100th independence anniversaries earlier this year, the Swedish government launched a cultural exchange fund. Ministers regularly meet to coordinate their countries’ policies on trade, foreign affairs, defense and transport. It helps that the neighbors have similar political cultures and objectives. There’s even a Baltic Sea Philharmonic for the region’s best young musicians—though it’s a private initiative funded by NordStream, the controversial Russian-backed energy venture.

Though Henry the Lion hadn’t planned to build a regional alliance, two centuries after his bold move the Hanseatic League comprised most of the Baltic Sea region, stretching from today’s Netherlands to Estonia, even as far south as Krakow. The League waged the occasional war, but it was primarily an economic alliance, forging trade deals with other parts of Europe, and sometimes even staging blockades.

Admittedly, neither the medieval League nor today’s Baltic Sea countries have achieved the perfect union. The Baltic states differ significantly from one another, Estonia essentially a one-nation Silicon Valley while Lithuania features a traditional manufacturing sector. The countries have strong disagreements on asylum policy. The Baltic Sea itself is dangerously polluted. But in an age where political tensions are growing, and where NATO and the European Union struggle to maintain unity, the region is a rare success story. “Our countries are likeminded, and we’re geographically and culturally close,” Kalnins pointed out.

And precisely because they’re likeminded, the countries cooperate on top of treaty arrangements by, for example, informally sharing threat updates. Through such constant contact and sharing, the neighbors have created an informal security bloc whose unity in itself functions as a deterrent against Russia. And the cooperation is a complement, not a threat, to larger alliances like NATO and the European Union. In fact, EU authorities are actively encouraging such cooperation, as seen in the European Commission’s agreement to co-finance the Baltic states’ planned joint railway, Rail Baltica.

The lesson from Henry the Lion and the Baltic Sea region in the 21st century is this: A bloc doesn’t need federal or supranational ambitions in order to be successful, and it doesn’t need a large number of members. Indeed, in an age where citizens are wary of distant institutions and large alliances struggle under the weight of their diverse membership, the Baltic Sea region’s pragmatic model of a cooperative patchwork between likeminded countries has potential for other regions where neighbors are united by regional threats and opportunities. “The Nordic-Baltic example can be applied at least in part to other regions,” said Azita Raji, a former U.S. Ambassador to Sweden. “The Visegrad states [Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia] have the potential to develop regional cooperation along similar lines.” Or imagine a Mediterranean version of the Hanseatic League.

The Three Seas Initiative is laudable. Making Central Europe the backbone of resilience: Who could argue with such an ambition? But an ambitious plan has to be filled with content agreed to by all its members. While the Initiative deserves every success, the countries around the Adriatic and Black Seas may find there’s considerable potential in deeper, Baltic Sea-style cooperation with their closest neighbors.

Like siblings, neighbors are often plagued by competitiveness. But if the perennially competitive Sweden and Norway can successfully team up in a 21st-century Hanseatic League, other neighbors should be able to do the same. And as Henry the Lion knew, cooperation can thrive without grandiose beginnings. It just needs a common purpose.

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America Through the Looking Glass

Like most political journalists in Washington, D.C., I just knew Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was over the minute he insulted John McCain.

On July 18, 2015, just a month after declaring his candidacy, Trump groused that the Arizona Senator and former Republican presidential nominee “was a war hero because he was captured” and “I like people that weren’t captured.” Three days later, I attended a foreign policy colloquy with McCain at the Hudson Institute, his first public appearance since Trump’s disparaging comments. A wall of cameras lined the back of the room. Not wanting to leave his friends in the press empty-handed, McCain began by addressing the “issue du jour.” Avoiding explicit mention of Trump, McCain characteristically deflected attention away from himself, instead taking offense on behalf of the many “18, 19-year-old draftees, who went and answered their country’s call and came back and were not well treated” by an America divided over the Vietnam War. “No matter . . . how this present controversy plays out,” McCain continued, “I’d like to make sure that whatever happens we maintain the respect and affection and appreciation for those who served a long time ago.”

Of course, Trump’s campaign did not collapse over his denigration of McCain’s war record. Nor would it flop when he joked about then-Fox News host Meghan Kelly’s menstrual period, mocked fellow candidate Carly Fiorina’s “face,” proposed banning all Muslim immigration, claimed he saw “thousands” of American Muslims cheer the attack on the World Trade Center, praised Vladimir Putin as a “strong leader,” asserted that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any supporters, or suggested the “Second Amendment people” assassinate his opponent Hillary Clinton. Neither Trump’s years-long questioning of Barack Obama’s American citizenship nor his insult about Mexicans being rapists and criminals were sufficiently outrageous to stymie his ultimately successful campaign for the presidency.

And so the same will be said about the rousing sendoff given for McCain earlier this month at Washington, DC’s National Cathedral. McCain’s parting gift to the nation he loved was a dramatic, nationally-televised event at which speaker after speaker essentially endorsed his 2008 presidential campaign slogan, a modest statement of principle which defined his entire life: Country First. In a remarkable display of humility, McCain asked the two men who bested him in his own presidential ambitions—Obama and George W. Bush—to deliver eulogies. And as McCain had himself done at that think tank event three summers prior, none of the speakers mentioned Trump. But they didn’t have to, for the message throughout the morning was clear: The man Washington had come to bury exemplified the sort of traits—personal courage, patriotism, self-sacrifice, bipartisanship, honor—so clearly lacking in the current Commander-in-Chief.

Before the assembled guests had even departed the church, pundits were already declaring the service an epochal moment in the struggle against the Trump presidency, “the Biggest Resistance Meeting Yet,” in the words of the New Yorker’s correspondent. But it is this very perception—the great and the good of the nation’s capital convening at a funeral to denounce the sitting president of the United States—that all but guarantees the event will eventually be seen as just another episode in the country’s ongoing process of deepening polarization. Just as it was mistaken, in retrospect, to presume that Trump’s presidential campaign could be torpedoed by an insult about a war record, so are we are similarly deluding ourselves if we believe that a stirring expression of the old, bipartisan spirit will drive him out of Washington.

For in the minds of Trump and his many supporters, arrayed in that church was The Swamp. Dick Cheney, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all sitting chummily together in the same pew to mourn the last lion of the Senate might represent an enviable sort of civility to those of us appalled by the current President’s rhetoric and behavior. But to those who voted for Trump and continue to support him through each and every outrage against decency, such a distinguished assemblage is exactly what they voted to overthrow: a smug, self-satisfied elite responsible for disastrous foreign wars of adventure, the financial crisis, the illegal use of a private email server for government business, the politicization of the IRS, and so on. That every bold-faced name in media was there among the mourners, waxing nostalgic about “The Maverick” (who, in the minds of many Trump backers, was a “warmonger” and advocate of open borders) further confirmed the corrupt nature of the spectacle.

Many of the President’s most steadfast supporters thrill to him not in spite but because of his insults, rudeness, and utter lack of decorum. In this sense, Trump could not be more different from McCain. In all the tributes offered to the late Senator since his death, perhaps the most oft-cited example of his virtue was an encounter during the 2008 presidential campaign when, at a town hall, he took the microphone away from a woman who had said his Democratic opponent with the funny-sounding name was an “Arab.” McCain, former Senator Joe Lieberman eulogized, “defended his opponent’s name and honor and thereby elevated for that moment our politics and made us a more perfect union.” According to Obama, McCain “saw himself as defending America’s character, not just mine.”

These tributes are correct in their appraisal of McCain the man, whose antiquated sense of honor was such that he ordered his campaign staff to avoid any mention of Obama’s radical preacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, on the dubious grounds that doing so was racist dog-whistling. (Of course, McCain’s conscientiousness didn’t stop those very same Democrats and journalists, who today laud him as a secular saint, from accusing him of racism anyway.) And yet the prominence afforded to this decade-old encounter in the eulogies for McCain illustrates how far we’ve gone through the Looking Glass: The white racial grievance which McCain scrupulously tried to avoid on the 2008 campaign trail was precisely what Trump appealed to eight years later.

“Have you left no sense of decency?” the lawyer Joseph Welch famously asked Senator Joe McCarthy in the summer of 1954. Today, historians point to this exchange as marking a major turning point in public opposition to McCarthyism, and one could hear an echo of it (as well as a little bit of Charles Spencer) in the eulogy delivered by the late Senator’s daughter, Meghan, who decried “cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly.” But as much as the media try to portray John McCain’s funeral as the Joseph Welch moment of the Trump presidency, its effect will likely be a sharpening of our divisions.

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