12 December 2011
Euro Crisis: Barking Up the Wrong Tree
By Gwynne Dyer
One senior European politician said angrily that British Prime Minister David Cameron was “like a man who comes to a wife-swapping party without his wife,” and there was some truth in that. Britain does not even use the euro currency, shared by 17 of the 27 EU members, but Cameron insisted on being part of the discussion in Brussels about how to save it. And in the end, he vetoed the solution that all the others had agreed on.
It was the eighth crisis summit of the European Union’s leaders this year, and it produced the fourth “comprehensive package” of financial measures to deal with the debt crisis. (The other three have already failed.) And if you judged the importance of the meeting by the scale of the uproar when Britain vetoed the EU treaty that was meant to stop the rot, it must have been a very important summit indeed.
But in fact they were all barking up the wrong tree in Brussels: the financial crisis over the euro will roll on, and the collapse of the common EU currency continues to be a real possibility. What the summit actually showed was how divided, distracted and deluded Europe’s leaders still are.
David Cameron went to Brussels knowing that his partners intended to come up with a treaty that would enshrine new financial rules for EU members, in order to reassure the “markets”, who have been demanding higher and higher interest rates to roll over the debts of EU members. He also knew that the nationalistic, “europhobe” faction in his own Conservative Party would never vote for such a treaty. They want out of the EU, not further in.
The only way out of Cameron’s dilemma, therefore, was to make sure that there would not be such a treaty. His stated reason for vetoing it was to avoid more stringent regulation, and possibly taxation, of the London financial markets, but his real reason was naked self-interest: a new treaty would split his own party and probably destroy his government.
His stated reason was nonsense. Any new financial regulations that would affect the London markets would have to be agreed unanimously by the EU countries at a later date; there was no need to veto the treaty if he just wanted to protect the free-wheeling, “casino” aspect of the London markets that had done so much to precipitate the crisis in the first place. Cameron just needed a cover story.
The other EU members feigned great anger at this, but some of them were secretly quite grateful for Cameron’s bad behaviour. They agreed to adopt the same rules anyway, but to do it outside the legal framework of the EU in order to get around the British veto. This had two great advantages: it meant that no referendums would be necessary – and if these new measures failed to reassure the markets, they could all blame Britain.
What were these fabulous new measures? They were all about “balanced budgets” in the eurozone countries, which would face sanctions if they let their budget deficit exceed 3 percent of GDP. They would even have to submit their national budgets to the European Commission, which would have the power to ask that they be revised.
These are exactly the steps that will be needed if the euro is to have a long-term future: it cannot survive if the countries using it do not have a unified fiscal regime. But the markets don’t give a damn about the long-term future of the euro; they just want to know for sure that they will get back the money they lend to eurozone countries, and until they have that assurance they will demand exorbitant interest rates on their loans.
In this context, the decisions taken in Brussels this week are merely a displacement activity. The bigger EU governments are using the crisis as a pretext to force through centralising measures that they have long wanted to impose on the weaker economies. But they are still not doing what the markets want, which is to take responsibility for the weaker countries’ debts.
Can it really be that simple? Can they really be that irresponsible? Yes, and yes again. Tip O’Neill, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, explained why this sort of thing happens in politics seventy years ago. “All politics is local,” he said, and that is true in spades in Europe today.
It’s not just David Cameron who is putting his local political interests above the interests of a broader European community. So is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who refuses to allow the EU to make a collective commitment to honour the debts of the weaker members.
That’s the only thing that will calm the markets, but Merkel’s voters are fiercely opposed to hard-working, thrifty Germans covering the debts of lazy, spendthrift Greeks and Italians (as many of them would put it), so she will not permit it. And so the euro crisis rolls on interminably.
But don’t worry: interminably is not the same as forever. Sooner or later there will be a real crash, and all these people will be duly punished for their fecklessness. Unfortunately, everybody else in the EU will be punished too.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 2 and 6. (“It was…indeed”; and “His stated…story”)
22 July 2011
The Terrorist Threat, Part XXVI
By Gwynne Dyer
You could almost hear the enormous sigh of relief as journalists around the world welcomed the news that there had been a big explosion in Oslo and many shooting deaths on a nearby island. There’s been practically no foreign news for them to write about – it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, and all the major villains of international politics are on holiday – but this is terrorism, and terrorism always sells.
“Even if one is well prepared, it is always rather dramatic when something like this happens,” said Prime Minister Jens Stolteneberg with admirably Norwegian restraint. But restraint is not the dominant mode in journalism, and plenty of people were willing to hypothesise on who caused the explosion and why. The leading theories were:
1. It was Islamist terrorists taking belated revenge for the cartoons published by Jyllands-Posten six years ago that mocked the Prophet Muhammad. They would have had to be very ignorant terrorists, since Jyllands-Posten is a Danish newspaper and Oslo is in Norway, but the distinction may not be clear if you live far away and you didn’t pay attention in geography class.
2. It was Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafy carrying out his threat earlier this month to attack European targets in retaliation for European help to Libyan rebels: “Hundreds of Libyans will martyr in Europe. I told you it is eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.” There are six Norwegian fighter planes operating over Libya, after all.
3. It was an extreme right-wing conspiracy with its roots in Norwegian politics, taking aim at the ruling Labour Party.
It’s starting to look as if the last theory was correct, with Anders Behring Breivik, the sole suspect who has been arrested, cast as a Norwegian Timothy McVeigh. The point is that if you are not Norwegian, it doesn’t matter much. Indeed, even if you are Norwegian, it shouldn’t matter much. This is a big media event and a tragedy for those directly involved, but it is not actually a big event.
A hundred people killed in a train wreck or an airline disaster is a two-day story in the country where it happened, and a one-day story that does not lead the television news (unless there are particularly dramatic pictures) in the rest of the world. Whereas a hundred Norwegians killed in a bomb attack and a shooting spree once in a half-century makes headlines around the world.
This is quite understandable in some ways: we know that we all have to die eventually, but we feel entitled not to be murdered by strangers. Besides, news is really news precisely because of its scarcity value. If there were bomb attacks and shooting incidents in Oslo every day, most foreign media would soon stop reporting it on a daily basis. There would be a piece of reportage or analysis every month or so, and that would be it.
The problem is that terrorism gets people’s attention, just as it is intended to. It then becomes the basis for making policy. And often that policy is very expensive, very intrusive and very foolish. There will now be thousands of new metal detectors, and thousands of new “security” personnel to run those machines and carry out body searches, at the entrances to public buildings across Europe and probably beyond.
There may even be armed guards at youth camps run by political parties. It will create some employment at a time when it is needed, but that will presumably not be the aim of the exercise. The goal, or so we will be told, is to reduce the likelihood of such a terrible event happening again. But you can’t do that. All you can do is to move the terrible events around.
If you make all government buildings everywhere totally impenetrable, with overlapping layers of tight and time-consuming security, then the next bomber with a grievance will just blow himself up in a bus. Or in a supermarket, or at a major sports event, or just in a crowded city street. Unless you are willing to legislate against more than a dozen people being together anywhere, terrorists will continue to enjoy a “target-rich environment.”
Fortunately, these terrible events are very rare. They are rare partly because governments keep track of individuals and groups that show some interest in terrorism, but mainly they are rare because there really are not that many such individuals and groups.
The ordinary citizen’s safety lies in statistics, not in ever more elaborate “security” measures. You are still more likely to die from falling off a ladder or drowning in the bath than you are to die in a terrorist attack. When they tell you to re-shape your life or your foreign policy in response to the “terrorist threat,” tell them to go jump in the lake.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 8 and 12. (“This is…it”; and “Fortunately…groups”)
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
7 March 2011
Islamophobia in Europe
by Gwynne Dyer
From the beginning of next month, it will be illegal for a Muslim woman in France to wear a full-face veil (niqab) in any public place. An opinion poll last week suggested that Marine LePen, the new leader of the far-right National Front, could win the first round of next year’s presidential elections in France. These two facts are not unconnected.
President Nicolas Sarkozy is in a panic as the National Front gains in the polls, for his own core vote is also on the right. He has responded by ordering a nationwide debate on Islam’s place in secular France, and he has made it quite clear which side he is on: he wants no minarets in France, he tells journalists, and no halal food in school canteens. But the new anti-niqab law is the centre-piece of his strategy.
It is a solution to a problem that does not exist. There are around five million Muslims in France, about 8 percent of the population, but only a couple of hundred Muslim Frenchwomen wear the niqab in public. They probably shouldn’t drive, since all that paraphernalia severely restricts their field of vision, but in what sense is their occasional presence in public spaces a threat to society?
In fact, there are probably more British women wearing niqab in my small patch of London than there are French women wearing niqab in the entire country. In Camden Town, I see them in the supermarket, on the bus, in the street – and when I overhear them talking to their husbands or their kids, I notice that most of them have London accents.
That’s because most of the niqab-wearers are not immigrants. They are the British-born daughters of immigrants, and the fact that they now appear in public wearing this extreme garb – which was not normally worn by women back in Pakistan, or Algeria, or wherever their parents came from – is part of the crisis that always affects second-generation immigrants everywhere.
The men of the conservative older generation are horrified as their daughters absorb the values of the larger society around them, and try desperately to isolate them from those influences. It was a losing battle for Italian and Jewish fathers in New York a hundred years ago, and it’s a losing battle for Algerian and Indian fathers in London and Paris now.
But these things take time to work out, and in the meantime a tiny minority of British Muslim women wear niqabs, and an even tinier minority of Muslim Frenchwomen. So why would a French government ban women wearing niqab from taking a bus, entering a shop, or even just walking down the street, on pain of a 150-euro ($200) fine?
In addition to a fine, the wicked transgressors will be obliged to attend a citizenship class that stresses the egalitarian values of the French republic, including gender equality. This is a very large sledgehammer being used to crack a very small nut. But it will have served its purpose if it gets Sarkozy re-elected.
The right is in the ascendant in French politics, and this has unleashed a wave of panic-mongering over “multiculturalism.” Assimilation of second- and third-generation immigrants is actually proceeding at the normal pace, but in the midst of the process it is possible to believe that the cultural turmoil is leading to a permanently divided society. Most people on the right do believe that.
Whoever can more convincingly claim to have the solution for this imaginary problem wins the right-wing vote, and the National Front is drawing ahead of Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). Under the leadership of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front came second in the 2002 presidential election; under the leadership of his daughter Marine Le Pen it could do even better.
The recent opinion poll commissioned by Le Parisien newspaper gave her 23 percent of the vote, while Sarkozy’s party and the Socialists got 21 percent each. She has ditched the National Front’s neo-fascist and racist rhetoric in favour of a low-key, “common-sense” style that is having a real political impact.
But all she can do is force a run-off second round in which, like her father in 2002, she would be overwhelmingly defeated. French political parties are divided on many things, but they would all unite to keep the National Front from power.
The tide of Islamophobia is running strongly on the European right at the moment. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been trumpeting the failure of multiculturalism for the past six months, and British prime minister David Cameron recently added his voice to the chorus. It is only a cynical political stratagem, but it could have real consequences.
Left to their own devices, the various immigrant groups in these countries, including the Muslim groups, will assimilate to the general society in a couple of generations, as immigrants generally do. You can accelerate the process a little with the right government policies, but not much. However, you could stall it entirely by attacking the minority groups and driving them into cultural ghettoes. That’s the game that Sarkozy is playing now.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 8, 11 and 12. (“In addition…elected”; and “The recent…power”)
Gwynne Dyer’s new book, “Climate Wars”, is distributed in most countries by Oneworld.
26 February 2011
Democracy and the Arabs
by Gwynne Dyer
One of the incidental pleasures of the past few weeks has been watching the Western media struggling to come to terms with the notion of Arab democracy.
The Arabs themselves seem clear enough on the concept of a democratic revolution, but elsewhere there is much hand-wringing about whether Arabs can really build democratic states. After all, they have no previous experience of democracy, and it’s basically a Western invention, isn’t it? The Arabs don’t even have Athens and the Roman republic up their family tree.
Sure the revolutions are brave, and they’re exhilarating to watch from afar, but in the end the military will take over, or the Islamists will take over, or they’ll mess it up some other way. This is the assumption – sometimes implied, sometimes flatly stated – that still underpins much of the outside comment and analysis on the Arab revolutions.
The current rationale for this arrogant and ignorant assumption is the “clash of civilisations” tripe that Sam Huntington and his pals have been peddling around the official circuit in Washington for almost two decades now. The Arabs just belong to the wrong civilisation, and so they can’t get it right.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it’s really the centuries-old justification for European imperial rule over the rest of the planet, re-cycled for modern use. Europe once ruled the lesser breeds with a firm hand, but it can no longer do that directly. Instead it backs tough local rulers who promise to provide “stability” – and coincidentally protect the West’s interests in the area.
So when the Arabs start overthrowing their rulers in non-violent revolutions that are just about democracy, not about Islam or Israel, there is astonishment and disbelief in the Western media. Time for a little deconstruction.
What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents. Democracy didn’t need to be invented; just resurrected.
The default mode for human beings is equality. Every pre-civilised society we know about operated on the assumption that its members were equals. Nobody had the right to give orders to anybody else.
What drove this was not idealism but pragmatism. In hunting-and-gathering groups, nobody can own more than they can carry, so there is no way to accumulate wealth. If you want meat, then you’ll have to cooperate in the hunt. These were societies where nobody could control anybody else, and so they HAD to make their decisions democratically.
They were all very little societies: rarely more than fifty adults (who had all known one another all their lives). On the rare occasions when they had to make a major decision, they would actually sit around and debate it until they reached a consensus. Direct democracy, if you like.
People have been running their affairs that way ever since we developed language, which was almost certainly before we were even anatomically modern human beings. So 99.9 percent of our history, say. That is who we are, and how we prefer to behave unless some enormous obstacle gets in our way.
The enormous obstacle was civilisation. All hunting-and-gathering societies were essentially egalitarian. The mass societies that we call civilisations arose less than ten thousand years ago, thanks to the invention of agriculture. Until very recently all of them, without exception, were tyrannies, pyramids of power and privilege in which the few decided and the many obeyed. What happened?
A mass society, thousands, then millions strong, confers immense advantages on its members. Within a few thousand the little hunting-and-gathering groups were pushed out of the good lands everywhere. By the time the first anthropologists appeared to study them, they were on their last legs, and none now survive in their original form. But we know why the societies that replaced them were all tyrannies.
The mass societies had many more decisions to make, and no way of making them in the old, egalitarian way. Their huge numbers made any attempt at discussing the question as equals impossible, so the only ones that survived and flourished were the ones that became brutal hierarchies. Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.
Fast forward ten thousand years, and give these societies mass communications. You don’t have to wait for Facebook; just invent the printing press. Wait a couple of hundred years while literacy spreads, and presto! We can all talk to one another again, after a fashion, and the democratic revolutions begin. We didn’t invent the principle of equality among human beings; we just reclaimed it.
Modern democracy first appeared in the West only because the West was the first part of the world to develop mass communications. It was a technological advantage, not a cultural one – and as literacy and the technology of mass communications have spread around the world, all the other mass societies have begun to reclaim their heritage too.
The Arabs need no instruction in democracy from anybody else. They own it too.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 13. (“If…area”; and “A mass…tyrannies”)
Gwynne Dyer’s latest book, “Climate Wars”, is distributed in most of the world by Oneworld.