Category: Politics

The European elections – A shift in political paradigm

The European elections on May 23 mark a point of transition in European politics. More than 50 % of Europeans eligible to vote made use of the opportunity. In some countries, the numbers were even higher. In Belgium 88.5% went to vote, in Denmark 66%, in Spain 64%, and in Germany 61%. These are remarkable figures. They show that for the first time in its history, the parliament has come to be recognized by a large number of Europeans as an important component of the political structure of the EU.  Not only the parliament but also the EU as a whole has thereby undoubtedly gained in democratic legitimacy.

But something even more important has happened in this election. Dire predictions about the inevitable rise of the radical right have not been borne out. Yes, right-wing parties did gain ground in some countries (Italy, UK), but they declined in some others (Germany, Spain). At the same time Left-Green won surprising new ground. Some commentators have bewailed that this  development will undermine the political center and thus threaten the political stability of the EU. We may, in reality,  be seeing the emergence of a new political order.

The established conservative and social-democratic parties of Europe have so far failed to pursue an effective course against the rise of the new right. It does not help to characterize this new right as populist, since that term can signify a multiplicity of different political positions. These “populists” are better described as localists. They hark back to the nation and the idea of national sovereignty; they try to construct walls against the outside world; they want to keep immigrants at bay; they seek to uphold traditional local values; and above all they oppose “globalization.” It is against this localism that Left-Green defines its agenda. Climate change cannot be combatted locally; it is a global affair; it demands international co-operation; our natural environment is the globe; all of humanity is bound together in the need to preserve the environment.

Environmental politics has, moreover, science on its side whereas the new right only has its little, shopworn, pitiful prejudices. But let’s not be too summary in that judgment. There is certainly value in tradition and in local cultures. Environmentalists need to learn that in addition to preserving natural habitats, we must also preserve cultural habitats. This insight is needed, if we are to drain the waters of the new right.

Doing prison time in Hong Kong

On my current visit to Hong Kong I am once again trying to talk to some of the activists in order to get a better understanding of the shifting political territory. When I contacted Joshua Wong, one of the most dedicated pro-democracy campaigners, he wrote back to me: “I might not able to meet you since my court case sentencing is scheduled on Thursday afternoon. I need to prepare before being locked up in prison.” This will be the third time he is sent there for his political engagement.

In 2017, he was jailed for his role in the occupation of Civic Square three years earlier. Last year, he was in prison for failing to comply with a court order concerning a protest in Mong Kok in 2014. Meanwhile, the organizers of the Occupy Central demonstrations of 2014 have also recently been sent to jail.

The Hong Kong authorities are using a heavy hand in dealing with those activists. In other jurisdictions such cases might have been dealt with more leniently and in a spirit of reconciliation. But here in Hong Kong the opposition is tolerated only as long as it accepts that it is and will always be only a minority and submits meekly to the edicts of the ruling system.

One begins to  understand why the ancient Greek democrats thought of majority rule as a form of tyranny.

 

 

Hot Days in Hong Kong

Saturday May 11, 2019

There was heavy fighting yesterday in the Hong Kong legislature over a newly proposed extradition law. Legislators were injured in the melee. The previous day had seen demonstrations in the street.

The law is supposed to sort out a pending case of a murder committed by a Hong Kong man in Taiwan. The accused has fled back to Hong Kong and the authorities say that he cannot be extradited because there exists no appropriate law to do so. But Hong Kong democrats are highly suspicious because the law would also allows extraditions to mainland China.  They see in it the long hand of Beijing which wants to get hold of those it accuses of having committed political crimes. The Hong Kong government is trying to soothe tensions by arguing that there are safeguards in the new law. Extraditions will not be automatic but will be reviewed individually. But knowing the weakness of the Hong Kong authorities in the face of pressures from Beijing that sounds hardly reassuring.

Officially, Hong Kong s a “self-administered region” under the current “One Country, Two Systems” arrangement. But that arrangement is under pressure. It is set to come to an end in twenty-four years. At the same time, Beijing is increasingly making itself felt in a hundred different ways. It’s goal is evidently to integrate Hong Kong step by step into the Chinese system: politically, economically, and socially. The resukt is an inevitable struggle between those who are willing to go along wirh Beijing’s demands and those determined  to resist.  We must look forward to more turmoil in the years ahead.

 

A World Without History

Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University Without a History Major?’ New York Times, Jan. 12, 2019

“STEVENS POINT, Wis. — Chancellor Bernie Patterson’s message to his campus was blunt: To remain solvent and relevant, his 125-year-old university needed to reinvent itself. Some longstanding liberal arts degrees, including those in history, French and German, would be eliminated. Career-focused programs would become a key investment. Tenured faculty members could lose their jobs. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Dr. Patterson explained in a memo, could “no longer be all things to all people.” Dr. Patterson’s plan came as Stevens Point and many other public universities in rural America face a crisis. Such colleges have served as anchors for their regions, educating generations of residents. Now student enrollment has plummeted, money from states has dropped and demographic trends promise even worse days ahead.”

America and China: new enemies?

From today’s South China Morning Post:

Renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs has said diplomacy is needed between the US and China to prevent “utter disaster” as he defended his controversial criticism of Washington’s targeting of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies.
The Columbia University professor faced a firestorm of criticism on social media after he accused the US of hypocrisy for its targeting of Huawei senior executive Sabrina Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested by the Canadian authorities last month at the behest of the US.
“The US attacks on Huawei, in my view, are not about Huawei’s actions but about technological competition,” Sachs said on Tuesday.
“I don’t think we should take claims against Huawei by the US at face value.”
“We need diplomacy to stop an IT arms race,” he said. “Right now we are on the path to disastrous cyberwarfare.
“This is reckless and should not be left to the hardliners on both sides. We need global rules, globally supervised, just as in the areas of other armaments.”
He added that the US targeting of Chinese firms should be seen against the background of the Trump administration’s attempt to assert American “exceptionalism” and to fight the perceived challenge of China and Russia to US power.
“It is a very dangerous and utterly false idea that China is ‘attempting to erode American security and prosperity,’” he said, referring to the US national security doctrine issued by the White House a year ago.
Sachs warned that conflicts like the continuing trade war and the targeting of Chinese IT firms “recall an early era of great power confrontation that eventually led to utter disaster”.
“China is not America’s enemy, unless such zero-sum thinking by the [US government] drives China in that direction … China is not a malevolent actor to be ‘contained’ by the US.
“China is a great and rightly proud civilisation that aims for the prosperity of its people. China and the US have every reason to cooperate. It would be insane and utterly self-destructive to do otherwise,” he said.

 

 

The Enemy In-Chief

Since its foundation the US has always had an enemy in-chief. First it was the British who helped to solder the nation together. Then came the extermination of the American Indians extending the American territories “from sea to shining sea.”. Then the civil war when the Americans made mortal enemies of each other with wounds that are still not fully healed. Then came the Spanish, the Germans (twice), the Russians, the North Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq,

Now it appears that a new enemy in-chief has come into sight. Today it is China’s turn. A new act in a deeply dangerous game.

Karl Marx never looked so good

A cartoon series about the life and times of Karl Marx is set to be shown on a Chinese video streaming website with the full backing of Beijing, according to the host company. The Leader, which recounts the story of the German philosopher and socialist revolutionary, will be broadcast by Bilibili.com “soon”, the company said on Tuesday. The production was commissioned by the central government’s Marxism office, in cooperation with authorities in Inner Mongolia; Weiming Culture Media, which is based in the region; and animation company Dongmantang, Bilibili said on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service. (South China Morning Post, Dec. 19, 2018)

Can Democracy Work?

Can Democracy Work? is James Miller’s sequel to his book of thirty years ago, Democracy Is in the Streets. In the intervening years he seems to have become less certain of the answer. The earlier book had been a somewhat nostalgic view back at the radical students of the 1960’s from the sobering perspective of the Reagan years. Can Democracy Work? is a view back at the history of democracy from the equally sobering perspective of Trump’s America.

Miller begins his book by recounting his own engagement in 1967 with the Students for a Democratic Society. But: “As time has passed, I’ve had second thoughts about many of my old convictions, and I’ve tried to imbue my students with a skeptical outlook on their own political assumptions, no matter how fiercely held.” (p. 10) He has been asking himself, he adds, in particular: “What is living, and what is dead, in the modern democratic project? … For that matter, what is the modern democratic project? … And can it really work – especially in complex modern societies?” (Ibid.) With these questions in mind, Miller looks back at the history of democracy which he tells in a series of vividly recounted episodes.  By the end of his book it is obvious that he has not come up with answers. “As I contemplate what democracy has become in modern times, I find myself feeling uncertain about its future,” he writes “(1) as a name for various actually existing forms of government; (2) as an ideology, an ideal manipulated by a ruling elite in the material interests of a few, not the many; (3) as a moral vision, of free institutions as a better solution to the problems of human coexistence than the authoritarian alternatives.” (p. 240) Still, he feels committed to “a democratic faith that was instilled in me from birth… I find as a result that I harbor hopes that form part of who I take myself to be.” (p. 241) He ends by reminding us of “Abraham Lincoln’s characteristically American hope, especially in the darkest of times: ‘that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth,.” (p. 245) But given Miller’s forthright account of the terror, turbulence, and violence that has accompanied the history of democracy, and his bleak vision of the present, it isn’t clear on what he thinks this hope is based.

Miller is clear, however, on one point: that the democratic experiment of the radical students of the 1960s has failed. He is skeptical, therefore, also of the attempt to resurrect its ideals and practices fifty years later.  He argues, for that reason, against the “Occupy Wall Street” movement of 2011 and similar spontaneous political movements around the world. These movements, he writes, have pursued “an unstable political idealism, an amalgam of direct action and direct democracy, with many of the virtues of a utopian and romantic revolt … but also some of the vices.” (p. 229) Miller is particularly critical of these movements to pursue a leaderless, non-hierarchical form of direct democracy.  “Organizing without organizations,” he argues “is a fantasy – not a winning long-term political strategy.” A fantasy, we might add, that in Miller’s eyes also brought down the SDS.

Miller own views have, over time, come closer to those of the American political scholar Samuel Huntington. When he had first read Huntington, he writes: “I bristled at his hostility to the New Left and his skepticism about the value of participatory democracy.” (p. 217) Huntington’s analysis had been simple: “What ailed the country was an excess of democracy. America needed a new ‘balance,’ in which citizens would remember that in many situations ‘expertise, seniority, experience, and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority.” (p. 218) Huntington had warned of the self-destructive potential of democracy. Miller adds: Such worries, which  seemed absurd to me as a young man, seemed eerily apt as I was writing this book – and discovering that my own views had grown closer to Huntington’s than I imagined possible.” (p 218)

Miller proves sympathetic also to Huntington’s final thought that America’s democratic faith is grounded in a conception of its own identity, an identity that is in danger of being undermined by demographic changes and the  threat of a reactive “white nativism.” Miller asks: If the Soviet version of democratic idealism has collapsed under the weight of a “renascent, religiously inflected form of Russian nationalism, why should Americans assume that their version of democratic idealism would prove any more resilient, if put to the test of white nativism?” And in what sounds like agreement, Miller concludes: “For Samuel P. Huntington at the end of his life, this is what American democracy looked like: a fragile ideology, with cloudy prospects.” (p. 226)

There is little that Miller can tell us about the road ahead. If democracy fails, what then? What possibilities arise at that point? Will we face political chaos? Or autocratic and bureaucratic order? Can we think of more or less desirable forms of political order ahead? How will we set about in solving the problems created by a gigantic world population, by technological innovations, and the pressures these two factors put on our environment? Miller’s book remains in the end a history, looking back rather than forward. The question he leaves us with is how much we can learn from the past with respect to a quickly changing future.

 

 

Democracy Is in the Streets

Miller’s book describes how the SDS initially sought a radical renewal of American democracy. The group was sidetracked from this objective by the ever-expanding and ever more controversial war in Vietnam. By June1969, the SDS had fallen into the hands of Maoists in the Progressive Labor Party and soon afterwards the group fell apart.

Democracy is in the Streets had been a Bible for me when it first came out. I felt that it made sense of the political perturbations I saw on the UC Berkeley campus, even though the 1960s already gone. The book also opened my eyes that democracy could be more than a form of government; that it could also be form of life and a way of thinking. I am still drawn to the idea of “participatory democracy” that the SDS laid out in the programmatic statement composed at Port Huron in Michigan in June 1962 and helpfully reproduced in James Miller’s book.  I am also still attracted to the idea of a “consensus politics” as the SDS pursued it.

But Miller’s book makes clear how underdeveloped the notion of participatory democracy remained and how difficult it proved for the members of the SDS to practice the promised consensus politics. Miller himself joined the group in the late sixties. “I was, of course, opposed to the war in Vietnam,” he writes. “But I was also attracted by the vision of participatory democracy, although at the time I scarcely understood its intellectual provenance.” (p. 17) In re-reading the book now, I am struck by Miller’s sense of alienation from this early political enthusiasm – a feature that I had hardly taken in at my first reading many years ago. Miller writes in retrospect that his experience since the 1960s have left him “skeptical of the assumptions about human nature and the good society held by many radicals; … cynical about the ‘revolutionary’ potential of youth.” For many years he did not even want to think about the Sixties at all, “since I had grown ashamed of my youthful naiveté.” (Ibid.)

Miller wrote his book during the Reagan years.  He was thus keenly aware of the limits of what the radical students of the 1960’s had achieved.  “In city streets and on college campuses, in thousands of small experiments in participatory democracy, mys generation tested for itself the limits of political freedom. Those limits proved sobering,” he writes at the end of his book. But he adds: “Yet the spirit of Port Huron was real. A mass Movement to change America briefly flourished, touching countless lives and institutions.” (pp. 327-328) And there were important changes in American life that occurred as a result of the political agitation of the 1960’s – changes that have proved permanent. For one thing, he quotes Tom Hayden, “the system of segregation, which until 1960 was considered impregnable, collapsed. Students, who had never been considered a social force, became a political factor. The Vietnam War was brought to an end, partly because of the role of students. More than one President was thrown into crisis or out of office. And the Movement created an agenda. At the time it was seen as anathema, as terrible – very unruly. But people have absorbed more of the agenda than they realize.” (p. 325)

Compared to the activism of the 1960’s the political engagement of American students today appears listless and tame.

Made in China 2025

The Trump administration has been worried about China turning itself into a leading economic power. Its current trade war with China is officially aimed at bringing about relatively small changes in China’s economic policies but its real aim is to constrain China’s long-term development. We can be sure that China would be willing to adjust its trade policies but it will certainly not abandon its overall development plans. There is no reason to think that the Chinese would ever consent to being in a permanently inferior economic position.  And it is not obvious that the US can keep it there.

Here is an informative overview from the South China Morning Post of China’s 2025 development plans. Click here

 

Trouble in Paradise

The small city of Paradise has been consumed by one of those California forest fires that are becoming only too frequent. Dozens of people have died. Meanwhile, we have been choking in the polluted air 200 miles away. Last year, close friends almost lost their house in the fires that raged around Santa Rosa.

Who can we blame but ourselves? Our freeways are clogged by millions of cars; we fly across continents for business or pleasure; we maintain polluting industries in order to keep the economy going. When our politicians prove unable or unwilling to take action they only reflect our own attitudes. Living in Berkeley, I find myself surrounded by “environmentalists,” but they still burn their woodfires in their chimneys even on the worst bad-air days. Official “Spare the air” alerts are a joke. They are backed up by nothing and largely ignored.

We are changing the air all around us; not only its quality but also its currents. And so the clouds that used to bring rain do not come any more. One year of drought is followed by another and only occasionally do we have a genuine rainy season. No wonder that forests dry out, that trees are attacked by diseases and insects, and that firestorms consume houses, neighborhoods, and entire cities.

Xi Jin Ping Thought Made Easy

“Xi Jin Ping Thought” has become the fourth pillar of China’s official political ideology. The other three are Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng Xiaoping Theory. The official title of this new ideological component is “Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” But what is its content? Beijing’s People’s Daily has taken the trouble to make it all clear to its readers and here is the chart the newspaper designed for this purpose. Good luck with it.

The need that China’s rulers feel to formulate such an official ideology is surely remarkable. It reveals how differently they think about politics which they see as being not just a pragmatic operating with power but as requiring also an associated system of ideas. The roots of this way of conceiving politics go back to the Enlightenment and the French revolution. And it manifested itself subsequently not only in Marxism-Leninism but also in Italian fascism and German National-Socialism.