Category Archives: Lands

Americans are more worried about ‘global warming’ than they are about ‘climate change’

AlterNet: What’s in a name? According to a recent Yale University Poll, quite a bit. In fact, the poll found that the public greatly prefers the term “global warming” over “climate change” when referring to the world’s epic climate shift.

The pollsters found that the term “global warming” is associated with “greater public understanding, emotional engagement, and support for personal and national action than the term ‘climate change.'”

And not only is the term “global warming” preferential, the term “climate change” appears have been a bad public-relations shift for scientists and environmentalists, at least in the short term.

“[T]he use of the term “climate change” appears to actually reduce issue engagement by Democrats, Independents, liberals, and moderates, as well as a variety of subgroups within American society, including men, women, minorities, different generations, and across political and partisan lines,” the poll found. “Within the Weather category, global warming generates a higher percentage of associations to “extreme weather” than does climate change, which generates more associations to general weather patterns.” [Continue reading…]

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Maya Angelou: American titan who lived as though there were no tomorrow

Following the death of Maya Angelou, Gary Younge writes: By the time she reached 40 she had been a professional dancer, prostitute, madam, lecturer, activist, singer and editor. She had worked with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, lived in Ghana and Egypt, toured Europe with a dance troupe and settled in pretty much every region of the United States. And then she wrote about it, the whole time crafting a path as a poet, epigrammist and performer. “My life has been long,” she wrote in one her last books. “And believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still.”

In a subsequent interview I described her as the “Desiderata in human form” and “a professional hopemonger”. She lived as though there were no tomorrow. And now that there really is no tomorrow, for her, we are left to contemplate – for us as well as her – where daring can get you.

But with her passing, America has not just lost a talented Renaissance woman and gifted raconteur. It has lost a connection to its recent past that had helped it make sense of its present. At a time when so many Americans seek to travel ‘color blind’, and free from the baggage of the nation’s racial history, here she stood, tall, straight and true: a black woman from the south intimately connected to the transformative people and politics who helped shape much of America’s racial landscape.

A woman determined to give voice to both frustration and a militancy without being so consumed by either that she could not connect with those who did not instinctively relate to it. A woman who, in her own words, was determined to go through life with “passion, compassion, humor and some style”, and would use all those attributes and more to remind America of where this frustration and militancy was coming from.

She described the 9/11 attacks as a “hate crime”, and said: “Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s program to prolong the war in Syria

Last August, shortly after the chemical attacks outside Damascus, the military strategist, Edward Luttwak, wrote in the New York Times:

[A] decisive outcome for either side [in Syria] would be unacceptable for the United States. An Iranian-backed restoration of the Assad regime would increase Iran’s power and status across the entire Middle East, while a victory by the extremist-dominated rebels would inaugurate another wave of Al Qaeda terrorism.

There is only one outcome that the United States can possibly favor: an indefinite draw.

By tying down Mr. Assad’s army and its Iranian and Hezbollah allies in a war against Al Qaeda-aligned extremist fighters, four of Washington’s enemies will be engaged in war among themselves and prevented from attacking Americans or America’s allies.

Last night’s edition of Frontline, broadcast on PBS, reported on a covert CIA program to arm the rebels in Syria, giving every indication that President Obama has taken Luttwak’s advice to heart.

A small training program combined with a trickle of weapons and ammunition — none capable of challenging Assad’s air supremacy — seems designed to have no effect other than prolong the war.

A rebel commander interviewed by Frontline said this about the Americans he had been trained by:

“The impression I got from their support is that they don’t actually want us to defeat the regime, but they don’t want the regime to defeat us either.”

“They told us they would train 30 to 40,000 men. I asked them: ‘How can you ever train that many if our training courses are limited to 85 recruits at a time?” In a year you can only train a thousand recruits. You would have to keep training men for 30 or 40 years. Is the revolution going to go on for that long?'”

Watch the complete Frontline report, “Syria: Arming the Rebels.”

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Egypt scrambles to raise turnout in presidential vote

The New York Times reports: After Egypt’s revolution three years ago, so many voters eager for democracy turned out for elections that officials had to scramble to accommodate the throngs.

On Tuesday, the military-backed government confronted the opposite problem. Officials extended a scheduled two-day vote for a third day not because of long lines, but because so few people had shown up.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army field marshal who deposed Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s first freely elected president, is still universally expected to win by a landslide. Yet the disappointing turnout has upended his supporters’ hopes that the vote would grant him new legitimacy after the ouster.

When polling places around the nation remained largely empty on the second day of voting, signs of panic swept the government. Officials initially extended voting hours on Tuesday by an hour, to 10 p.m. Then, a holiday was declared for state and private employees, as well as for banks and the stock market. Train and subway fares were suspended. State television said that the police would help the elderly or the sick get to polling stations, and it repeated admonishments from Muslim and Christian leaders about a religious duty to vote.

Officials also said that the government would fine those who did not vote up to $70 — a large sum for most Egyptians — and that unlike in the past, the fines would be enforced.

Analysts said the government’s scramble to increase the turnout undermined the endlessly repeated premise of the new military-backed order: that Mr. Sisi had the passionate support of an overwhelming majority of Egyptians to oust Mr. Morsi and to assume leadership. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s deadly vaccination ruse in Pakistan

An editorial in the New York Times says: The use of a sham vaccination program in the government’s hunt for Osama bin Laden has produced a lethal backlash in Pakistan where dozens of public health workers have been murdered and fearful parents are shunning polio vaccine for their children.

Leaders of a dozen American schools of public health raised an alarm with the Obama administration 16 months ago and finally got a response this month when the White House promised that the C.I.A. will no longer use phony immunization programs in its spying operations.

The fakery — one of an assortment of intelligence stratagems before the successful raid that killed bin Laden — should never have been used in a world where hardworking health care agencies depend on the trust of local communities.

The C.I.A.’s ruse involved phony door-to-door solicitations by a physician promising to deliver hepatitis B immunizations; his real purpose was to confirm bin Laden’s suspected hiding place. The ploy helped fuel a militant backlash against immunization workers, and as many as 60 health workers and police officers have since been killed.

Meanwhile, polio is on the rise, with Pakistan accounting for 66 of the 82 cases reported so far this year by the World Health Organization. Last year, there were 93 cases of polio in Pakistan, where the health organization warns that the disease is endemic, as it is in Afghanistan and Nigeria.

The C.I.A. can no longer seek to “obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material” gathered this way, according to a promise from the Obama administration. That is small comfort for those suffering the aftereffects of this ruse.

Convincing wary parents to accept polio vaccination — and finding health workers willing to risk violence — has been made more difficult than ever.

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The head of Omidyar Network in India helped elect Narendra Modi

Mark Ames reports: Last weekend, India’s elections swept into power a hardline Hindu supremacist named Narendra Modi. And with that White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Obama administration “look[s] forward to working closely” with a man who has been on a US State Dept “visa blacklist” since 2005 for his role in the gruesome mass-killings and persecution of minority Muslims (and minority Christians).

Modi leads India’s ultranationalist BJP party, which won a landslide majority of seats (though only 31% of the votes), meaning Modi will have the luxury of leading India’s first one-party government in 30 years. This is making a lot of people nervous: The last time the BJP party was in power, in 1998, they launched series of nuclear bomb test explosions, sparking a nuclear crisis with Pakistan and fears of all-out nuclear war. And that was when the BJP was led by a “moderate” ultranationalist — and tied down with meddling coalition partners.

Modi is different. Not only will he rule alone, he’s promised to run India the way he ran the western state of Gujarat since 2001, which Booker Prize-winning author Arandhuti Roy described as “the petri dish in which Hindu fascism has been fomenting an elaborate political experiment.” Under Modi’s watch, an orgy of anti-Muslim violence led to up to 2000 killed and 250,000 internally displaced, and a lingering climate of fear, ghettoization, and extrajudicial executions by Gujarat death squads operating under Modi’s watch.

We can understand the White House being forced to congratulate Modi through gritted diplomatic teeth. What’s harder to stomach is the public cheering of India’s election results by one of the most prominent progressive names in Silicon Valley. [Continue reading…]

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Russians revealed among Ukraine fighters

The New York Times reports: For weeks, rumors have flown about the foreign fighters involved in the deepening conflict in Ukraine’s troubled east, each one stranger than the last: mercenaries from an American company, Blackwater; Russian special forces; and even Chechen soldiers of fortune.

Yet there they were on Tuesday afternoon, resting outside a hospital here: Chechen men with automatic rifles, some bearing bloodstained bandages, protecting their wounded comrades in a city hospital after a firefight with the Ukrainian Army.

“We received an invitation to help our brothers,” said one of the fighters in heavily accented Russian. He said he was from Grozny and had fought in the Chechen War that began in 1999. He said he arrived here last week with several dozen men to join a pro-Russian militia group.

The scene at the hospital was new evidence that fighters from Russia are an increasingly visible part of the conflict here, a development that raises new questions about that country’s role in the unrest. Moscow has denied that its regular soldiers are part of the conflict, and there is no evidence that they are. But motley assortments of fighters from other war zones that are intimately associated with Russia would be unlikely to surface against the powerful will of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, experts said. [Continue reading…]

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Ukraine says hundreds of armed militants have crossed border from Russia

McClatchy reports: The Ukrainian army said Tuesday that it had evicted armed separatists from the international airport in Donetsk after a 24-hour gun battle, but the government in Kiev warned of a new threat as truckloads of armed Russian volunteers reportedly crossed the border.

Donetsk Mayor Oleksandr Lukyanchenko said 48 people were killed, including two civilians, in the fighting at Sergei Prokofiev International Airport.

The pro-Russian rebels said they had suffered more than 50 fatalities, many of them the result of an army attack on a truck evacuating wounded. A government spokesman said the incident was under investigation.

Shots still were being fired near the airport Tuesday afternoon, and it wasn’t clear when the facility would reopen. If the Ukraine military has cleared the facility of insurgents, it would mark a rare and swift success for a force that repeatedly has failed to dislodge separatists from city halls and police stations in eastern Ukraine.

The unity of Ukraine is riding on how the government handles the separatist uprising in the east, the latest installment of which began at 3 a.m. Monday, just hours after the conclusion of national elections that installed candy billionaire Petro Poroshenko as president. Dozens of armed insurgents of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic stormed the airport terminal, closed it to passenger traffic and then sent in a truckload of reinforcements. [Continue reading…]

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Russia joins global dash for shale oil in policy volte-face

The Telegraph reports: Russia is launching a strategic drive to unlock its shale oil wealth as crude output stagnates and reserves run low in the West Siberian fields, aiming to replicate America’s technology leap in a near total reversal of policy.

The Kremlin has launched an “action plan” to master fracking methods and lure investors into the Bazhenov prospective, a shale basin the size of France to the east of the Urals. Officials are no longer dismissing shale’s promise as a mirage. “We are clearing away the administrative barriers to exploration. This is the urgent challenge we are now facing,” said Kirill Molodtsov, the deputy energy minister.

The US Energy Department estimates that Russia has 75bn barrels of recoverable shale oil resources, the world’s largest deposits. The Bazhenov field is 80 times bigger than the US Bakken field in North Dakota, which alone produces 1m barrels a day.

BP joined the scramble on Saturday by signing a deal to explore for shale in Volga Urals with Rosneft, even though Rosneft’s chairman Igor Sechin is on the US sanctions list. [Continue reading…]

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Israel wants the Middle East to remain dominated by dictators

Ynet columnist, Smadar Perry, writes: Egyptian polling stations opened Monday morning across the country. Tens of thousands of inspectors-judges, representatives of civil organizations, foreign diplomats and even representatives of the Arab League have arrived to ensure that no one would try to tamper with the ballots.

The truth is that there is no need for that. Barring any dramatic surprises, “Egypt’s strongman,” Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, will be the president. All surveys grant the second candidate, Hamdeen Sabahi, symbolic success. Sabahi himself is already offering his services, hoping that they’ll just take him, as the prime minister or vice president.

Next week will be the turn of the sweeping victory in Syria. After arranging two anonymous “rivals” for himself and forcibly taking the right to vote from the six million refugees who have run away from him, Bashar Assad will be the “rais” for the third time. He will of course justify himself by saying that “that’s what the nation wants,” and no one will be able to force him to keep promises or create reforms.

The reason is so prosaic: Up until this moment he hasn’t even bothered presenting a political platform or economic programs. He doesn’t have to. Bashar will win for certain, and after the elections, as they say, everything will work out (for him).

In the past few days I have been hearing more and more complaints from people I talk to in the Arab world that Israel – and the criticism focuses constantly on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – only wants dictators in our neighborhood. We democrats don’t care about the Arab Spring, the protests, the terrible economic distress, the refugees and the terror attacks.

My interlocutors present irrefutable proof of their claim, how Israeli messengers are lobbying vigorously, as we speak, for the waiting president al-Sisi among the high echelons of the administration in Washington. Netanyahu, they say instinctively, is insisting on not getting in Bashar’s way. He is the only one he wants in the palace.

Between you and me, they’re right. We’re better off with dictators. [Continue reading…]

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Investigation confirms U.S. snooping activities against China

Xinhua reports: A Chinese Internet information body on Monday said an investigation spanning several months has confirmed “the existence of snooping activities directed against China” as exposed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

A report by China’s Internet Media Research Center said Chinese authorities have looked into the NSA’s secret surveillance program codenamed PRISM, which is revealed by British, U.S. and Hong Kong media based on documents leaked by Snowden.

“Subsequently, an investigation carried out by various Chinese government departments over several months confirmed the existence of snooping activities directed against China,” the report said. [Continue reading…]

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What is Hezbollah fighting for (apart from Hezbollah)?

The New York Times reports: For many months, Shiite communities across Lebanon lived in fear as car bombs tore through their neighborhoods, punishing Hezbollah and its supporters for sending fighters to aid President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war in neighboring Syria.

But Hezbollah succeeded on the Syrian battlefield in chasing rebels from the border towns where many of the attacks originated. The bombings have since stopped, leaving Lebanon’s Shiites grateful for Hezbollah’s intervention and luring a new wave of aspiring young fighters to the group’s training camps.

“The situation here has changed 180 degrees,” said Saad Hamade, a scion of one of largest clans here. “The whole story is over for us.”

While the civil war in Syria remains a grinding battle of attrition, for Hezbollah more than a year of combat has produced a new sense of purpose that extends beyond battling Israel to supporting its allies and Shiite brethren across the Middle East. And although its victories have come at a great cost in lives and resources, it has also gained the rare opportunity to display its military mettle and earn new battlefield experience.

“The fighting in Syria could change the entire balance in the region, and Hezbollah has intervened to prevent the formation of a new balance of power against it and against Iran and its allies,” said Talal Atrissi, a Lebanese analyst who is close to the movement. “This is its strategic vision.”

But the fighting has also diluted the resources that used to go exclusively to facing Israel, exacerbated sectarian divisions in the region, and alienated large segments of the majority Sunni population who once embraced Hezbollah as a liberation force. Some Sunnis now openly refer to the “the party of God” — Hezbollah’s name in Arabic — as “the party of Satan.”

Even Hezbollah’s supporters acknowledge that it is unclear when and how the group will be able to disengage from Syria. [Continue reading…]

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What does Pakistan make of Narendra Modi?

BBC News: The victory of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in India’s elections has created as much concern in Pakistan as Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s decision to attend his oath-taking ceremony has created excitement.

Both emotions invoke images from recent history.

Concern over the BJP’s victory is linked to the widespread belief in Pakistan that the party is a political front for the Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh (RSS), a belligerent Hindu supremacist group that advocates a Hindu way of life and has been an active opponent of Muslim separatism in Kashmir.

Pakistan, which is 96% Muslim, disputes India’s claim over Kashmir, supports separatists there and has fought three of its four wars with India over the Kashmir region.

There are also images of the RSS-led riots that culminated in the 1992 demolition of the 16th Century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, and the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat in which more than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu brags about defying the U.S. and expanding settlements

Noam Sheizaf writes: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of his settlement building achievements in a recent meeting with young Likud supporters. Responding to a question from the audience, Netanyahu said: “I was threatened in Washington: ‘not one brick’ [of settlement construction] … after five years, we built a little more than one brick…”

Asked “about peace talks with the Palestinians,” Netanyahu reportedly replied, “about the – what?” to which the audience responded by breaking out into laughter.

Last year was a record year in settlement construction in the West Bank. According to figures released by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), there were construction starts on 2,534 housing units last year, not including East Jerusalem – an increase of 123 percent from 2012, and more than any other year since the CBS began compiling data.

Netanyahu’s quotes were posted online by Akiva Lamm, a Likud member from Kiryat Arba, a settlement near Hebron. [Continue reading…]

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Afghanistan hits out at U.S. spying allegations from Wikileaks

AFP reports: Afghanistan on Sunday, May 25, expressed anger at the United States for allegedly monitoring almost all the country’s telephone conversations after revelations by the Wikileaks website.

Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said on Friday, May 23, that Afghanistan was one of at least two countries where the US National Security Agency “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls”.

The Afghan government responded to the claims by ordering the interior and telecommunication ministries to stop illegal monitoring of calls, and said it would lodge a complaint with the US.

“These activities are an obvious violation of agreements based on technical use of these (telephone) stations,” said a government statement.

“Most importantly, it is a violation of the national sovereignty of Afghanistan, and a violation of the human rights guaranteed to all Afghans.” [Continue reading…]

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Most U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan attack houses

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals.

By way of contrast, since 2008, in neighbouring Afghanistan drone strikes on buildings have been banned in all but the most urgent situations, as part of measures to protect civilian lives. But a new investigative project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research project based at London’s Goldsmiths University, and New York-based Situ Research, reveals that in Pakistan, domestic buildings continue to be the most frequent target of drone attacks.

The project examines, for the first time, the types of target attacked in each drone strike – be they houses, vehicles or madrassas (religious schools) – and the time of day the attack took place. [Continue reading…]

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Poroshenko a leader Moscow ‘ready’ to work with

AFP reports: Russia said Monday it was ready to talk to Ukraine’s new president Petro Poroshenko, raising hopes that after months of tensions Moscow sees in the billionaire a leader it can work with.

“We are ready for dialogue with Kiev’s representatives, with Petro Poroshenko,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Russia’s first reaction to his victory in Sunday’s vote.

Lavrov was cautious, saying Moscow was ready for “pragmatic dialogue, on an equal footing” and warned that for Kiev to continue its military operations against pro-Russia rebels in the east would be a “colossal mistake”.

But Poroshenko — a billionaire with strong Russian business interests and a history of working with both pro-Western and Moscow-backed Ukrainian governments — is the kind of figure analysts say the Kremlin can see as a partner.

“Poroshenko is an extremely attractive president for the Kremlin… This is a person who will be able to negotiate with Moscow and find compromise,” said Alexander Konovalov, president of the Institute of Strategic Assessments.

“There was a camp in the Kremlin that wanted to feed the fire in Ukraine. Now I think they will move into the shadows,” he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has not yet reacted himself to Poroshenko’s victory, but he did say he will “respect” the result of the vote and promised to work with Kiev’s new authorities. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Ukrainian government warplanes carried out airstrikes against pro-Russian rebels who seized Donetsk international airport on Monday, triggering a battle in and around the complex in a show of force by both sides after the election of a new president.

Reuters journalists saw black smoke billowing from the area of the airport after repeated explosions and gunfire, while jets roared overhead. A security official also said paratroops had landed in one of the fiercest clashes since violence broke out in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine some two months ago.

Loud thuds sounded from the area but after four to five hours Ukrainian soldiers appeared to have pushed back at least some of the separatists towards the town, though it was not clear if the army had recovered control of the airport.

There was no full account from either side of casualties. But the press service of the regional administration said one man had been killed and two injured from shrapnel of a shell which struck a part of the railway station serving the airport.

Saying that a deadline had passed at 1 p.m. (1000 GMT) for separatist militants to lay down their arms, a spokesman for the Ukrainian joint forces’ security operation in the region said two Sukhoi Su-25 jets had carried out strafing runs, firing warning shots around Sergei Prokofiev International Airport. [Continue reading…]

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The rise of Europe’s anti-EU nationalists

Following elections in France and the rest of the EU, Roger Cohen writes: Make no mistake, [National Front leader Marine Le Pen] could become president. The National Front has surged before, notably in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the incumbent’s father, reached the runoff stage of the presidential election. But in the dozen years since then the European and French crises have deepened. France has near zero growth and growing unemployment. With an estimated 25 percent of the European Parliament vote, the National Front crushed both the governing Socialists (14 percent) and the center-right Union for a Popular Movement (20.8 percent).

“An earthquake,” was the verdict of the Socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls. He is not wrong. A two-party system is now a three-party system. Marine Le Pen, subtler and cleverer and more ambitious than her father, is electable. She is plausible.

Elsewhere on the Continent the anger behind the National Front’s surge was also evident (no election is better suited for letting off steam than the European because the real power of the European Parliament is limited). In Britain, Austria and Denmark, more than 15 percent of the vote went to similar anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, anti-establishment, anti-boredom political movements. But it is in France, which constitutes with Germany the core of the European Union, that a European, economic and psychological crisis has assumed its most acute form.

According to the French daily Le Monde, the National Front took 43 percent of workers’ votes and 37 percent of the vote of the unemployed. Popular sentiment in France has turned against a Europe associated with austerity, stagnation, unemployment and high immigration. Le Pen’s promise of a more nationalist and anti-immigrant France, rejecting European integration and America, has appeal to the disenchanted. A promised Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, with Putin and his “family values” as Europe’s salvation, masks a void of economic ideas. [Continue reading…]

Martin Kettle writes: Britain likes to think that it marches to a different political drum from the rest of Europe. Yet the 2014 European parliament election has generated a great political paradox. In these elections, British voters flocked in record numbers to the anti-Europe flagship party Ukip. And yet, as they voted against Europe, British voters have never seemed more part of the European mainstream than they do this morning. Across Europe, in one way or another, voters in most countries did very much the same thing.

The European Union has never confronted a crisis of legitimacy like the one that erupted in the polling booths of Europe this weekend. From Aberdeen to Athens and from Lisbon to Leipzig, and irrespective of whether the nation is in or out of the eurozone, the 2014 European elections were an uncoordinated but common revolt against national governments and a revolt against the post-crash priorities of the European project.

This election wasn’t a revolt of Britain against the EU. It was a revolt of European voters against the EU and against national governing parties. And British voters were simply one part of it. [Continue reading…]

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