Author Archives: News Sources

Brexit might provide an opportunity for genuine change in Europe

Ragnar Weilandt writes: the UK’s expectations of the EU were always mainly transactional rather than emotional or ideological. The founding members created the ECSC [European Coal and Steel Community] to end centuries of war. Southern European countries joined the Common Market in order to stabilize their democracies. The central and eastern Europeans joined the EU to adapt the Western European political and economic system and to end decades of Russian domination. Most member states and their citizens cherished the Union’s promotion of peace, freedom, democracy and human rights. In contrast, British elites and citizens primarily cared about market access.

The UK’s transactional expectations influenced its action. Many great continental leaders were inspired by the European idea. While it did not always influence their daily policy and rhetoric, it often guided important decisions and major speeches. In contrast, British leaders were largely driven by a continuous assessment of short-term costs and benefits. Moreover, they frequently resorted to cheap populism at the cost of the EU for the sake of short-term gains in domestic politics.

Since the UK joined the Common Market, it has used its status and its power as a big member state to secure special treatment at the cost of its fellow member states. Moreover, it opted-out of many of the EU’s basic structures such as Schengen and the Euro. In doing so, the UK set a precedent for smaller states’ cherry-picking. Moreover, it spearheaded various attempts to slow down political integration. Hence, successive British governments contributed to the inadequacy of the European institutional set-up that caused the various crises the EU is currently facing as well as its institutional inability to deal with them. It even actively obstructed the EU’s crisis management, notably by trying to block the fiscal compact in 2011 or more recently by refusing to participate in the European system of quotas to resettle refugees.

And at a time when the EU and its members are struggling with these crises and therefore have more than enough on their plates, British voters decide to hand it yet another major crisis. A crisis that will not only take away major political and administrative resources desperately needed to fix the Union, but also one that undermines and potentially even endangers the European project as a whole. Much like Charles de Gaulle predicted [when opposing British membership].

The UK certainly made its fair share of contributions to European integration. Notably it pushed for completing the single market and made the case for Eastern and Southern enlargement. It is a sad historical irony that diffuse fears of immigrants from these countries ended up being the reason for many voters’ decision to back Leave. However, in terms of transforming the EU into a well-functioning political entity, the UK has become a major stumbling block.

A stumbling block that might now disappear. [Continue reading…]

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Why Russia likes Brexit

Alexander Baunov writes: There are two chief complaints about the EU among Russian diplomats and foreign policy professionals. First, they argue that it is not an entirely independent political entity or sovereign body because the United States dictates its most important decisions.

Second, they argue that the EU has changed for the worse in recent times. Enlargement to the east means that Brussels now heeds too much the small Eastern European countries, which have a generally hostile attitude toward Russia. Great Britain is the most pro-American EU country and is prone to listen to Eastern European countries’ concerns about Russia. In contrast to Italy, France, or Germany, the Brits have never talked about lifting sanctions against Russia.

There is also the issue that the Russian leadership feels personally offended by Britain. Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair started off as firm friends and built a relationship. Putin’s first visit to the West was to London. Then, the British started supporting Putin’s enemies, they believe, and giving refuge to men like Boris Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko. So, with the separation of Britain from the rest of Europe, it will become easier to deal with the other countries of the EU.

One of Russian diplomacy’s most cherished dreams is to build relationships with every European country individually. Brexit makes this dream much more attainable. Russia dreams of a Europe of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when European Entente meant that nations could negotiate with, support, or restrain each other. A Britain apart from the European Union is a return to a Europe of the past that Russian politicians hope will also be a future Europe.

This dream is unlikely to be realized, however, and it’s worth remembering what this bygone international system led to: two world wars in which Russia suffered more than any other country. [Continue reading…]

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EU tells Swiss no single market access if no free movement of citizens

The Guardian reports: The European Union is to show its determination to make no concessions to the UK on Brexit terms by telling Switzerland it will lose access to the single market if it goes ahead with plans to impose controls on the free movement of EU citizens.

The Swiss-EU talks, under way for two years but now needing a solution possibly within weeks, throws up the exact same issues that will be raised in the UK’s exit talks – the degree to which the UK must accept free movement of the EU’s citizens as a price for access to the single market.

The Swiss are desperate to strike a deal in order to give its politicians time to pass the necessary laws to meet a February 2017 deadline imposed by a legally binding referendum in 2014.

The former president of the FDP-Liberal Radicals, Philipp Müller, on Sunday said the Brexit threat should serve as a warning to the Swiss, amid suggestions in Brussels the prospect of UK-EU exit talks meant there was less willingness to give ground on freedom of movement. [Continue reading…]

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Venezuela’s democratic façade has completely crumbled

Moisés Naim and Francisco Toro write: Today, Venezuela is the sick man of Latin America, buckling under chronic shortages of everything from food and toilet paper to medicine and freedom. Riots and looting have become commonplace, as hungry people vent their despair while the revolutionary elite lives in luxury, pausing now and then to order recruits to fire more tear gas into crowds desperate for food.

Not long ago, the regime that Hugo Chávez founded was an object of fascination for progressives worldwide, attracting its share of another-world-is-possible solidarity activists. Today, as the country sinks deeper into the Western Hemisphere’s most intractable political and economic crisis, the time has come to ask some hard questions about how this regime — so obviously thuggish in hindsight — could have conned so many international observers for so long.

Chávez was either admired as a progressive visionary who gave voice to the poor or dismissed as just another third-world buffoon. Reality was more complex than that: Chávez pioneered a new playbook for how to bask in global admiration even as he hollowed out democratic institutions on the sly. [Continue reading…]

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At least 82 killed as ISIS bombing targets Ramadan shoppers in Baghdad

Reuters reports: At least 82 people were killed and 200 injured in two bombings that hit Baghdad around midnight Saturday, nearly all of them in a blast targeting a busy shopping area as they celebrated Ramadan, police and medical sources said Sunday.

A refrigerator truck packed with explosives blew up in Karrada in central Baghdad, killing 80 people and injuring at least 200. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, in a statement circulated online by supporters of the ultra-hard line Sunni group. It said the blast was a suicide bombing.

Karrada was busy at the time as Iraqis eat out late during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which ends next week. Police said the toll could rise as more bodies could be lying under the rubble of devastated buildings.

The bombing is the deadliest in the country since Iraqi forces last month dislodged Islamic State militants from Falluja, their stronghold just west of the capital that had served as a launch pad for such attacks. [Continue reading…]

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Bangladeshis behind restaurant killings, international link probed

Reuters reports: Seven militants who killed 20 people at a restaurant in Dhaka were local Bangladeshis and authorities had tried before to arrest five of them, police said, as investigators probed for possible links with international Islamist extremist groups.

The gunmen stormed the upmarket restaurant in the diplomatic zone late on Friday, before killing mostly non-Muslim hostages, including at least nine Italians, seven Japanese and an American.

Islamic State claimed responsibility, warning citizens of “crusader countries” that their citizens would not be safe “as long as their aircraft are killing Muslims”, the group said in a statement. It also posted pictures of five fighters grinning in front of a black flag who it said were involved in the attack, according to the SITE monitoring website.

The claims have not been confirmed, but Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told Reuters late on Saturday that neither Islamic State nor al Qaeda was involved. He reiterated the government’s line that home-grown militants were responsible for a spate of killings in the country over the past 18 months.

“This was done by JMB,” Khan said, referring to Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, which claims to represent Islamic State in Bangladesh. [Continue reading…]

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White House opts for distraction of holiday weekend when disclosing dubious count on civilian death toll from drone strikes

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: The US government today claimed it has killed between 64 and 116 “non-combatants” in 473 counter-terrorism strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya between January 2009 and the end of 2015.

This is a fraction of the 380 to 801 civilian casualty range recorded by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism from reports by local and international journalists, NGO investigators, leaked government documents, court papers and the result of field investigations.

While the number of civilian casualties recorded by the Bureau is six times higher than the US Government’s figure, the assessments of the minimum total number of people killed were strikingly similar. The White House put this figure at 2,436, whilst the Bureau has recorded 2,753.

Since becoming president in 2009, Barack Obama has significantly extended the use of drones in the War on Terror. Operating outside declared battlefields, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, this air war has been largely fought in Pakistan and Yemen.

The White House’s announcement today is long-awaited. It comes three years after the White House first said it planned to publish casualty figures, and four months after President Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco, said the data would be released.

The figures released do not include civilians killed in drones strikes that happened under George W Bush, who instigated the use of counter-terrorism strikes outside declared war zones and in 58 strikes killed 174 reported civilians. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: In a seeming acknowledgment that the long-anticipated disclosure would be greeted with skepticism by critics of the drone program, the administration issued the numbers on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend. The use of a range of estimated civilian deaths underscored the fact that the government often does not know for sure the affiliations of those killed.

“They’re guessing, too,” said Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who has tracked civilian deaths for more than a decade. “Theirs may be a little more educated than my guesses. But they cannot be completely accurate.”

The disclosure about civilian deaths and the executive order, the subject of months of bureaucratic deliberations, carried broader significance. Issued about seven months before Mr. Obama leaves office, the order further institutionalized and normalized airstrikes outside conventional war zones as a routine part of 21st-century national security policy. [Continue reading…]

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Trump wants us to follow the Brits into a corner of isolation

Timothy Egan writes: In committing economic suicide, Britain is trying to close the door and hide from the world. It felt good, no doubt, to tell those overbearing bureaucrats in Brussels to bugger off. We’ll stick with our bangers and mash without any interference from Europe! But the Brexit vote was also a drunken swing at those “others” remaking the image of a lost England. To hear the haters tell it, “Polish vermin” and brown-skinned hordes have overwhelmed the little island nation.

Trump wants us to follow the Brits into a corner of isolation — by race, religion and trade. His philosophy, the rant of a besotted boob making things up in public, is anti-American at its core. In rejecting our former colonial masters, we threw off monarchy, the class system and a state religion. We opened our doors to all nations, all religions, all opinions.

The New World can certainly learn much from the Old World. But the sun never sets on a stupid idea. And this vote to stop the spinning globe and get off at 1952 is among the stupidest. Britain is cracking up now because it followed the crackpots. The United States could make the same mistake — rejecting free trade, and rejecting a welcome mat for free people.

Today, about 13 percent of Britain is foreign-born. What’s disruptive, especially in the timeless tableau of rural England, is that the number of immigrants has more than doubled since 1993. That’s what caused some of the open hatred in the campaign to leave the European Union. Trump is playing with that same fire now. [Continue reading…]

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Fading hope: Why the youth of the Arab Spring are still unemployed

By Heath J. Prince, University of Texas at Austin

The 2011 Arab Spring was a clear signal to governments and ruling parties that the time had come for reform, if not revolution. People in the Middle East and North Africa were demanding nothing less than sweeping political, social and economic change.

The upheaval was prompted by economic stagnation and a slow unraveling of social safety nets, borne disproportionately by the working class. Protesters made it clear that change would come not from autocrats or international financial institutions, but from the people themselves.

As is the case in Sub-Saharan Africa, economic growth has not translated into employment for large segments of the Middle East and North Africa populations. Recent analyses of post-Arab Spring policies demonstrate that state-level efforts to address one of the root causes of the Arab Spring, youth unemployment, are at best, a mixed bag and, at worst, represent a return to a pre-Arab Spring status quo.

Failure to address this most fundamental grievance could lay the groundwork for a renewed revolt and ensuing disorder.

When asked what sort of change he expected to see in five years, one young man who had been active in the 2011 revolt, answered, “Nothing – the same as today. Nothing has changed. Nothing will.”

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Donald Trump loves crazy conspiracy theories — just like the majority of Americans

The Boston Globe reports: Sometimes, Donald Trump sounds as though he is just passing on information, as he did after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died. “They say they found a pillow on his face,” Trump told a radio interviewer, “which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.”

Other times, he seems to be wondering aloud, as he did when he suggested the Clintons might have been involved in what he termed the “very fishy” 1993 suicide of former White House aide Vince Foster.

More famously, he helped drive the so-called birther movement, insisting that President Obama was not born in the United States and that investigators he had sent to Hawaii would expose “one of the greatest cons in the history of politics and beyond.”

Trump’s affinity for conspiracy theories might seem the stuff of a few kooks and cranks living in their parents’ basement.

But far from being a marginal phenomenon, conspiracy theories have always been part of the American political landscape and are believed by more than 55 percent of the public — a group that cuts across race, gender, income, and political affiliation, according to researchers and polls.

The surprising breadth of conspiracy beliefs shows that while Trump’s rhetoric may repel a large segment of voters, it is also tapping a deep vein of thought among Americans who distrust elites and suspect that larger, darker forces are orchestrating domestic and world events.

“When I started studying conspiracy theories, I was stunned,” said Thomas J. Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University. “I thought I was going to find them on the fringes of American attitudes, but they are a core way that Americans read about and explain political phenomena in response to uncertainty.” [Continue reading…]

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Inside the six weeks Donald Trump was a nonstop ‘birther’

The New York Times reports: Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country.

But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.

That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.

“What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Mr. Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?”

Mr. Farah recalled that Mr. Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s birthplace, to resolve the debate.

Mr. Trump’s eagerness to embrace the so-called birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to right-wing conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Mr. Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system.

In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination. [Continue reading…]

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Bernie Sanders just won a string of concessions from the Democratic Party

Vox reports: Bernie Sanders has refused to endorse Hillary Clinton — though he’s already said he’d vote for her — unless the Democratic Party does more to reflect his positions on a range of policy issues.

It’s looking like that hard-line negotiating tactic is being rewarded.

On Friday afternoon, a draft of the Democratic National Committee’s platform was published by multiple news outlets. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent points out, it shows Sanders winning on at least six signature issues that reflect long-held goals of his movement.

The platform just outlines the key “ideas and beliefs” of the party — it doesn’t bind any of its members to particular actions — but it’s supposed to represent a sort of blueprint for where the party is headed.

Sanders wants those goals to be as closely aligned to his as possible before throwing his full support behind Clinton’s presidential bid. From what we’ve seen so far, Clinton and the DNC have been largely willing to grant many, though not all, of his requests — perhaps because there’s no enforcement mechanism behind them, or perhaps because they remain concerned that some Sanders supporters won’t show up for Clinton in November. [Continue reading…]

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Millions of Iraqi children repeatedly and relentlessly targeted, says UN

The Guardian reports: One in every five children in Iraq is at serious risk of death, injury, sexual violence and recruitment into armed groups, while nearly 1,500 have been snatched from the streets or their homes since 2014, says a new report (pdf).

The UN children’s agency, Unicef, says 3.6 million children face this litany of risks – an increase of 1.3 million in 18 months. A third of all Iraqi children – 4.7 million – need humanitarian aid, with conditions only getting worse following fierce battles around the city of Falluja.

“Children in Iraq are in the firing line and are being repeatedly and relentlessly targeted,” says Peter Hawkins, the agency’s representative in Iraq.

“We appeal to all parties for restraint and to respect and protect children. We must help give children the support they need to recover from the horrors of war and contribute to a more peaceful and prosperous Iraq.”

The report says almost 10% of Iraq’s children – more than 1.5 million – have been forced to flee their homes since the intensification of fighting in 2014. [Continue reading…]

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Why are voters ignoring experts?

Jean Pisani-Ferry writes: By the time British citizens went to the polls on June 23 to decide on their country’s continued membership in the European Union, there had been no shortage of advice in favor of remaining. Foreign leaders and moral authorities had voiced unambiguous concern about the consequences of an exit, and economists had overwhelmingly warned that leaving the EU would entail significant economic costs.

Yet the warnings were ignored. A pre-referendum YouGov opinion poll tells why: “Leave” voters had no trust whatsoever in the advice-givers. They did not want their judgment to rely on politicians, academics, journalists, international organizations, or think tanks. As one of the Leave campaign’s leaders, justice secretary Michael Gove, who is now seeking to succeed David Cameron as Prime Minister, bluntly put it: “people in this country have had enough of experts.”

It is tempting to dismiss this attitude as a triumph of passion over rationality. Yet the pattern seen in the UK is oddly familiar: in the United States, Republican voters disregarded the pundits and nominated Donald Trump as their party’s presidential candidate; in France, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, elicits little sympathy among experts, but has strong popular support. Everywhere, a significant number of citizens have become hostile to the cognoscenti.

Why this angry attitude toward the bearers of knowledge and expertise? The first explanation is that many voters attach little value to the opinions of those who failed to warn them about the risk of a financial crisis in 2008. Queen Elizabeth II spoke for many when, on a visit to the London School of Economics in the autumn of 2008, she asked why no one saw it coming. Furthermore, the suspicion that economists have been captured by the financial industry, expressed in the 2010 movie Inside Job, has not been dispelled. Ordinary people feel angry about what they regard as a betrayal by the intellectuals.

Most economists, let alone specialists in other disciplines, regard such accusations as unfair, because only a few of them devoted themselves to scrutinizing financial developments; yet their credibility has been seriously dented. Because no one pled guilty for the suffering that followed the crisis, the guilt has become collective. [Continue reading…]

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How a quest by elites is driving ‘Brexit’ and Trump

Neil Irwin writes: What lesson should a card-carrying member of the economic elite take from the success of Donald J. Trump, and British voters’ decision to leave the European Union?

Voters in large numbers have been rejecting much of the underlying logic behind a dynamic globalized economy that on paper seems to make the world much richer. For the bankers, trade negotiators, international businesspeople and others who make up the economic elite (including journalists like me who are peripheral members of it), this is cause for introspection, at least among those who aren’t too narcissistic to care what their countrymen think.

Here is an overarching theory of what we might have missed in the march toward a hyper-efficient global economy: Economic efficiency isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Efficiency sounds great in theory. What kind of monster doesn’t want to optimize possibilities, minimize waste and make the most of finite resources? But the economic and policy elite may like efficiency a lot more than normal humans do. [Continue reading…]

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Time to reimagine Europe

Mary Fitzgerald writes: My daughter is three and my son is nine weeks old and from time to time ­– in the evenings when I can stay awake long enough – I write a diary for them that I hope they’ll read as adults. As well as documenting their first smiles, steps, jokes and nightmares (‘the wicked witch stole my snot rag!’), I’m trying to bring to life some of what’s happening in the world outside their home. And so I’ve been asking myself how to convey the events of the last few weeks to people reading about them in 20 years time.

In the end, 16 million Britons voted to stay in the European Union. Over 17 million voted to leave. It’s complicated, but both official campaigns primarily fed off and stoked fear: fear of economic collapse on the one hand, fear of immigration on the other. Across the mass media we heard little from those trying to advance more positive arguments: the idea of European/global citizenship on one side, of what ‘more democracy’ would mean on the other.

Whether you’re angry about the troika’s treatment of Greece or you want tighter immigration controls, the bloated, unaccountable, elitist EU can be blamed…

On openDemocracy, as always, we’ve tried to give space to perspectives sidelined or ignored elsewhere. During the lead up to the vote, we brought European voices into an alarmingly parochial national conversation. We asked if another Europe is possible and what a post-xenophobic politics would look like. In the wake of the result, we’ve featured the views of readers from the north of England to Kazakhstan, and profiled different reader voices on the future of the UK Labour party. We’ve asked what happens to EU migrant workers, to Scotland and to the entire continent. And we’ve challenged the idea that Leave voters didn’t know what they were doing – a dangerous and condescending attitutude which risks learning nothing from the result. Meanwhile Anthony Barnett’s Herculean ‘Blimey it could be Brexit!’, a magnificent book written ‘live’ one chapter a week during the referendum campaign, is a precious gift to those trying to dig deeper into what it all means both now and in the future. 

I first drafted this article on the assumption that Remain would win, narrowly, and I warned against complacency and urged democratic reform of the EU. The fact that I was wrong about the result only reinforces those arguments. France chooses a new president in less than a year and the majority of opinion polls predict the Front National’s Marine Le Pen comfortably winning enough votes to be one of the final two candidates. The Brexit result is a gift for her, in a country where anti-EU sentiment is even higher than in the UK. Germans will also vote for a new government within the year, with the right-wing anti-EU Alternative for Deutschland rapidly gaining ground. The warning signals have been growing louder for years, with the far-right candidate Norbert Hofer’s narrow defeat in Austria’s presidential election yet another recent close call. On the right and the left, whether you’re angry about the troika’s treatment of Greece or you want tighter immigration controls, the bloated, unaccountable, elitist EU can be blamed.

Perhaps when the citizens of other European countries see the political and economic turmoil visited upon the UK, and watch the leaders who urged Brexit in short order failing to deliver on their promises, the idea of leaving the EU may start to look less appealing. But while many of the underlying causes of their discontent remain, such an effect is likely to be minimal.

Either way, a quick second vote or some other procedural or legal gymnastics to bypass Britain’s referendum result would be a big mistake. [Continue reading…]

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Brexit aftershocks: An inside look at the EU’s raging power struggle

Der Spiegel reports: For the last supper, quail salad is served. It’s 7:30 on Tuesday evening, and the leaders of 27 European Union countries — without British Prime Minister David Cameron — are scheduled to meet the next morning. A whiff of nostalgia is in the air, even if everyone is angry with Cameron, who because of a power struggle in his party, didn’t just gamble away his country’s EU membership, but may ultimately have triggered a political meltdown in the proud United Kingdom.

Cameron is buoyant, doing his best to avoid appearing as the tragic figure he has now become. His counterparts from across the EU are tactful enough to keep quiet about what they really think of the outgoing British premier. They speak of Britain’s historical accomplishments — at a time when the country, after 40 years of EU membership, looks to be leaving the bloc.

Taavi Roivas, the youthful prime minister of Estonia, who always sat next to Cameron during European Council meetings, expresses his gratitude that British soldiers ensured his country’s independence 100 years ago. French President François Hollande recalls how British and French soldiers fought side-by-side in World War I. The Irish prime minister notes that his country was at war with England for almost 1,000 years and that it was really only the EU that brought lasting peace.

And what about Cameron? He says that he wouldn’t do anything differently if he had it all to do over again. It wasn’t a mistake to hold the referendum, he tells the bewildered gathering, but the EU leaders refrain from contradicting him. Perhaps one important element of the European project is that it is no longer seen as necessary to respond to every folly. Only at the very end of the evening, when an EU diplomat is asked whether Cameron was presented with a departing gift, did he answer laconically: “He got a warm meal.”

By the next morning, no one is thinking of Cameron anymore. He made history, if involuntarily, but history has now moved on from the British prime minister. The vote in favor of Brexit, after all, hasn’t just convulsed British politics, it has also set the stage for the next monumental power struggle within the EU.

On one hand, that struggle is about the question as to how uncompromising the EU should be in hustling Britain out of the union. For those in favor of a strong and powerful EU, for those who always saw the UK as a bothersome obstacle in their path, the British withdrawal process can’t proceed fast enough. Plus, French President Hollande and others want to use Britain as an example to show the rest of Europe how bleak and uncomfortable life can be when one leaves the house of Europe. Hollande, of course, has good reason for his approach: The right-wing populist party Front National has threatened to follow Cameron’s example should party leader Marine Le Pen emerge victorious in next year’s presidential elections. [Continue reading…]

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