Malta’s Justice Minister is Dr Borg.
That is all.
Assimilation
6
Category Archives: Minorities and integration
Turkey: Kurds Voting For Christmas?
Despite having read mountains (appropriately) of reporting on the Turkish-Kurdish-Iraqi crisis, I haven’t read anyone who has tried to answer the big question – why do the PKK seem to be doing everything possible to provoke the Turks into invading Iraq after them?
You’d think this was a pretty vital issue; who wants to be blitzed, after all? Fortunately, Handelsblatt does journalism; Gerd Hoehler reviews the history of the Kurdish movement and concludes that the PKK does indeed want Turkey to hit me as hard as you can. Why? It would set Turkey’s relations with essentially everyone in a state of chaos, it would probably upend the Turkish economy, and it would outrage the Turkish Kurds, to say nothing of all the others.
But it probably wouldn’t achieve strategic-level damage to the PKK; however, Turkey’s slow progress towards the EU and its (much faster) economic development have threatened to do so. The AK got an absolute majority of votes in most of Kurdistan at the last elections. So, the PKK needs an explosion; something that would reverse EU integration, wreck the economy, and whip everyone into a frenzy of rage.
Fortunately, as when this happened in 2003 and 2005, the Turkish government has been very good at moving towards war very slowly indeed and with immense ceremony; thus allowing the pressure to build for a resolution without an actual war. Hoehler, however, reports on a worrying degree of war fever – there’s been a surge of volunteers for the Turkish army, 4,200 in a week, and people are stopping cars on the highway with guns to make the drivers join in singing war songs. That has a nasty sound of August, 1914 about it; this would not be a good moment for losing control.
Post-National Elections: Poland
After Spain’s post-national elections, Poland is shaping up to be another case of post-national democracy in Europe: the Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk turned up in London this weekend to launch a campaign swing pitching for the votes of thousands of Polish expatriates. The polls suggest the Poles are quite narrowly divided; the contribution of the emigrants might be decisive.
As an Polish academic points out, they are also likely to swing towards the Civic Platform:
“They are generally students or graduates and pretty open-minded. It’s hard for a xenophobe to live in London, for example, for too long,” he said.
“And these people are Donald Tusk’s electorate. His party, Civic Platform, believes in openness in Europe and doesn’t play on a strong ethnocentric/nationalist discourse, unlike the ruling Law and Justice Party.”
Is this a case of demographic politics as well as European integration? Arguably, the Kazcynskis have been keen to ease their unemployment problem whilst not doing anything to worry an older electorate by shipping annoying young people to the UK. Whether Tusk can bring off the reverse manoeuvre with their votes is a good question – only 6,000 Poles in the UK voted in 2005, the peak year for Polish immigration. However, this phenomenon will probably lag substantially.
Unsurprisingly, given the probable balance of forces, the Polish government hasn’t really done much to ensure that expatriates can vote – there is no postal voting – although emigration and expatriation are hardly rare in Polish history.
There have been repeated expectations that this year, or this decade, will see a “European generation”; but usually, the people who are expected to be this turn out to enjoy the benefits of integration without thinking about it very much. If there ever is, perhaps it will be Tusk’s people?
Frozen conflicts 2: Some More About Transnistria
Various things about Transnistria that didn’t fit in the previous post. If you don’t find this sort of thing interesting, don’t hit that link. Continue reading
Quiet Riot
Quietly, there seems to be a tiny crisis affecting European politics. For a start, there’s the rocambolesque imbroglio making Belgium a generic cynosure. It would be hard to do better than to point again to Crooked Timber, although it’s worth pointing out that Jean Quatremer is doing a good job too. I especially like the quote from the Flemish prime minister about the 40,000 Flemish hunters (or light infantrymen – the context is missing and the word is the same) who can defend Flanders in the event of civil war; now that’s what I call statesmanlike.
Of course, nothing of the sort is going to happen – in fact, if you wanted my prediction I’d say nothing at all will happen. Belgium may consist only of the King, the army, a football team, some diplomats and taxmen, and the capital, but that’s more than the Austro-Hungarian Empire had in the way of central institutions. In fact the similarities are marked; the overlapping divisions, competing governments, large and permanently different capital city. But whatever happens, the result won’t be the first world war, or for that matter the end of the European Union. Whatever the collectif antiliberale says about it.
Apparently it’s all a neoliberal plot to destroy the EU and socialism, based on this FT thinkpiece. Sadly, Jerome seems to have missed a bit:
the vital importance of a functioning EU to the continent’s stability and prosperity
And another one:
Democratic pragmatists, who support European integration as a means to enhancing national interests rather than as an end in itself, can plausibly argue that their vision of the EU has never been more relevant. If the Flemish and Walloons do unhook from each other, they can quickly hook back into the EU as separate entities bound by common European values. The very existence of the EU allows us to contemplate a resurgence in national sentiment without fear of violence or confrontation. In the context of Europe’s past, that is no small achievement.
No hostile paraphrasing there, eh.
Of course, Robin Shepherd is right – it’s precisely why we need the EU. I would expect that nobody will notice very much difference even if Belgium is abolished; funny little nationalisms are a luxury a continent where borders are meant to be irrelevant can afford.
Meanwhile, a million miles away (well, it feels like it..), Britain may be about to have another spasm of Euro-politics. The European issue in Britain has traditionally swung across the political spectrum, like a cow on a rolling deck, blundering into political parties and sending them flying like skittles. To kick off in the 1940s, Ernest Bevin as Labour Foreign Secretary was keen on the proto-Euroinstitutions, the OEEC, the European Payments Union, and NATO, and the idea of Europe as a “third force”, but was opposed by the Labour Left who thought the “same old gang” were behind the Schuman Plan, trying to get their hands on the nationalised coal industry.
Then in the 50s, there was a split in both parties – the Tories were unenthusiastic until MacMillan, but always had strong European and diehard imperial tendencies. Then, a period of consensus around the three applications to join. Then, in the 70s and early 80s, the Labour Party swung back against, before the 1988 Policy Review espoused “social Europe”. The Conservatives, meanwhile, passed Labour in ’88 going the other way, from ratifying the Single European Act of 1987 to the Eurosceptic wars of 1990-1997. It looks like the issue is about to crash into Labour again, but the ricochets will be widespread.
What has happened? Well, some of the trade unions are keen on holding a referendum on the not-constitutional treaty, and are deploying the same arguments as the Tories for it (it’s really the same thing, Blair promised one on the constitution, &c). But their reasoning is opposite; they are concerned about the bits about free trade from the Treaty of Rome. They’re hoping for a non de gauche, having seen what a triumph this was for their comrades in France. Of course, the problem with the entire argument is that turning down the treaty won’t reverse this, as it’s the status quo.
At the same time, the Conservatives are in favour of a referendum, because they think it’s something even they could win. (Yes, it’s harsh. Harsh, but fair.) And so are the Liberal Democrats; who probably don’t think they could win, but feel that it would be best to support a referendum. Not just any old referendum, though, but an all-out balls-to-the-wall one on British membership of the EU.
Risky, no? Not that anyone’s listening. Even if the only time this was done, the pro-membership side won convincingly, and every government that has been elected since 1970 has been more or less supportive of the EU, this positively frightens me. The upshot? The Prime Minister may be tempted to shoot the fox; more like sweep the whole field with a machine gun. That would be achieved by calling an election with ratification as a manifesto commitment; which may just have become more likely.
Secular science confronts Islam
Physics Today has a very interesting, and refreshing, online article (hat tip Sargasso) on Islam and science that ties in neatly with AFOE’s review of Olivier Roy’s latest book Secularism confronts Islam. The article is written by Pervez Hoodbhoy, nuclear physics professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. As usual, I shall give our readers one quote, but please do and go read the whole thing.
In the quest for modernity and science, internal struggles continue within the Islamic world. Progressive Muslim forces have recently been weakened, but not extinguished, as a consequence of the confrontation between Muslims and the West. On an ever-shrinking globe, there can be no winners in that conflict: It is time to calm the waters. We must learn to drop the pursuit of narrow nationalist and religious agendas, both in the West and among Muslims. In the long run, political boundaries should and can be treated as artificial and temporary, as shown by the successful creation of the European Union. Just as important, the practice of religion must be a matter of choice for the individual, not enforced by the state. This leaves secular humanism, based on common sense and the principles of logic and reason, as our only reasonable choice for governance and progress. Being scientists, we understand this easily. The task is to persuade those who do not.
Immigration and Germany, a Continuing Story
The German newspaper whose web site is now marginally better organized reports that Germany will offer a legal means to regularize the residence status of people who have lived in the country for several years without having, shall we say, dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s at the local immigration office. State governments have also agreed to give some preference in civil service hiring to people from immigrant backgrounds. The federal change had been agreed to by the current grand coalition, and the agreement of the states obviously includes those with governments of many different stripes.
This is all to the good. Every step that has been taken away from the late Kohl government’s position that “Germany is not a destination for immigration” has been a step in the right direction. In recent years, the number of German citizens has held steady mainly because of people taking on citizenship, as deaths continue to outpace births. The head-in-the-sand view that there aren’t immigrants in Germany is steadily retreating to the margins, and rightly so. (In practice, according to the newspaper, the new regulation affects about 100,000 people who have been denied asylum over the years.)
One criterion is that the foreigner should not “have come into serious conflict with German laws.” I hope they don’t mean like this or this. On the other hand, Americans and Australians are apparently exempt from the language requirement for getting residence permits for family members. Jawohl, fair dinkum, guys.
Business Week loves immigrants
As long as they’re in Spain, that is..
Less snarkily, the article asks the very important question whether this is an answer to the problem of aging populations, and contrasts Spain with Denmark and Nicolas Sarkozy’s election campaign. And it even tackles Edward Hugh’s concerns that the Spanish construction boom may pop with unpredicted consequences.
Meanwhile, Margaret Hodge successfully bears out Barnett’s crack that the British and French are “fearful” on this. The story is here:
At present we prioritise the needs of an individual migrant family over the entitlement that others feel they have to resources in the community,’ Hodge writes. ‘So a recently arrived family with four or five children living in a damp and overcrowded privately rented flat with the children suffering from asthma will usually get priority over a family with less housing need who have lived in the area for three generations and are stuck at home with the grandparents.
‘We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants.
To put it another way, more people should die of carbon monoxide poisoning in Rachmanesque squalor to save Labour/BNP swing votes in constituencies like…Margaret Hodge’s! You can’t begin to guess how much I despise this woman.
Spain’s postnational local election?
Richard Corbett MEP directs us to this BBC report on Spain’s rash of political parties dominated by immigrants from other European countries, especially Germany and Britain. In one municipality, San Fulgencio, there are some three such parties, including one run by a former policeman that declares its opposition to immigration.
This immediately raises an interesting question of language. As Corbett points out, the BBC reporter refers throughout to “ex-pats”, who are apparently something quite different to “immigrants”. I am an expatriate, you are a local, he is an immigrant, they are bogus asylum seekers taking our jobs? I suppose it’s not surprising that these large, usually politically silent, communities should export their political preferences with them – one can well imagine people who fit into UKIP, the BNP, or the Tory hard right fitting into what Edward Hugh calls Spanish separatism.
Certainly, we can discern a progression through perhaps three phases. To begin with, these places were tourist resorts (hence the infrastructure problems that motivate much of this political activity, the lead times being long). Then they began to be retirement communities, with the demographic shift and the run-up of the property market. Now, interestingly, not only are the retirees living longer, but the expat (or immigrant!) population is getting younger, in a symbiotic process with the appearance of an expat economy.
Tourists are politically irrelevant, at least in the context of an open society. Retirement communities may have been thought to be so. If people have families and businesses, though, they can’t help but have interests that are affected by local politics. Corbett raises an interesting point when he postulates a British Polish Party. After all, they would be starting at stage three already, although the fact a lot of them intend to leave would be a countervailing force.
I wonder how many more extranational political parties the EU will see?
The Suburb as Frontier
Just back from a trip to France, where this quote in a book on the history of Libé struck me:
Le Tiers-Monde commence en banlieue!
The Third World begins in the suburbs, in other words. This was 1972 or thereabouts, and it was a slogan of the very far Left.
Curiously, the same notion is still with us, but with the opposite end of the political spectrum…or perhaps this metaphor is unhelpful. Spectrum implies variance around a central value, along a single axis. It’s now the far-Right outside France, and its pals in the traditional French Right, who see the third world at the gates of Paris. The French extreme-left doesn’t seem to care very much any more, and the French extreme Right’s position is even stranger.
Back in the day, the growing concrete world of HLMs and sweeping flyovers across the Ile de France was the new frontier for the Communist Party. As the workers moved from the stinking slums of Paris’s railway districts out to enjoy their acquis social, so the Party would go with them. (Hence the towns where you can stage a demo between the rue Stalingrad and the hall Youri-Gagarine.) Moving out to the suburbs was moving towards the future, and if it should be a multicultural one united by class consciousness, so much the better.
Later, of course, it turned out more than a little tougher. As in most other places, just being a good trade unionist didn’t stop you being a racist. There were the betrayals of 1956 and 1968 and the internal crises that followed. Eventually, the roaring full-employment years came to an end too. But before then, the New Left had already found a new frontier in the suburbs – addressing the new proletariat, and the new concerns, whilst also getting around the Stalinist old farts at PCF headquarters and the ugly sense that a lot of proletarians didn’t agree with you. If you were a Maoist, the idea of surrounding the city from the countryside had an obvious attraction, not to mention the advantages of going to the revolution on the RER rather than the next flight to the Congo.
Later yet, with 80s structural unemployment, hand-wringing liberals and social democrats found it the moment to write a ton of reports on how to save the suburbs. It will be noted that, so far, the people who lived there are invisible. Very true. It ‘s in the nature of the frontier that there is never anyone there but the pioneer and the bad guys (Stalinists, pieds-noirs, cops, etc).
The latest take on this was the rise-without-trace of Nicolas Sarkozy, who made the suburbs briefly the new frontier for the Right. Having noticed them, he offered to hose the lot down, and here encountered another feature of the frontier – if you turn up waving your guns around, you’ll usually find a fight. Gunfighters were a vanishingly tiny feature of the U.S. West, compared to farmers, ranchers, sheep herders, railroaders, cavalrymen, cops, and Indians, or to put it another way, “people who did something useful”. More recent scholarship has tended to show many of the most famous bloodbaths as unnecessary, plain evil, or most often, the result of mutual stupidity.
In the general scapegoat hunt post-Iraq, though, plenty of right-wing people all over the world were willing to buy in – just as plenty of young idiots were willing to join the posse and run that city slicker out of town. This suited Sarko. Like all Ministers of the Interior, his core product is control, and the best marketing strategy for that stuff is fear. Unfortunately, he tends to evoke that in a lot of people, and a lot of people tend to evoke it in him.
Hence, last week, the mighty Kärcher called off a visit to La Croix-Rousse, in the heart of Lyon, for fear of left-wing demonstrators summoned by an instant messaging and SMS network. Itself a manifestation of another wave of suburban pioneers, the post-2005 volley of .orgs broadly supporting the Left and their voter registration campaigns. He did, however, manage to speak near the Pont Alexandre III in Paris – hardly the towers of La Courneuve – under guard by over a hundred cops of various kinds. A similar force as John McCain took for a stroll in Baghdad.
Which brings me to my final point. The latest pioneers on the suburban frontier are the Front National, of all people. While Sarko was struggling to manoeuvre around his own security, Jean-Marie Le Pen staged a string of appearances around the northwestern expressways, including one on the access deck at Argenteuil, where once Sarko wielded his metaphorical hose. Le Pen, despite his history, his ravings about making a “pure-blooded Frenchman” president, and essentially everything he has ever stood for, coped with a couple of cops and a squadron of journalists.
This points up the absurdity of Sarko’s monster guard force. But it also points up the weird way Le Pen is trying to win votes on the suburban frontier. Said the Black Panthers, “We want access to the American Dream.” And strangely, this is the substance of his address to the ‘burbs. He speaks of the equality of all citizens in the Republic, state secularism, and the need to create jobs by kicking foreigners out of them. Ironically, it’s just the stuff that was churned out about laicité, Theo van Gogh, and the rest in such great quantity back in 2004 – but this time, it’s directed at angry young blacks as well as angry old whites.
It’s surely a strange election. The PCF is nonpresent, its leader not even using the word “communist”. The far-left is almost exclusively a bourgeois taste. The Gaullist right has vanished. The “droite classique” has swung across behind it, from its right to a position overlapping the Socialists. The Greens have split three ways along the lines Charlie Stross predicted, between Luddites and techno-ecologists, but that’s not all. The Viridian Greens are well catered for by Dominique Strauss-Kahn within the PS, the fundamentalists by José Bové, but there is still a rump for the ex-minister Dominique Voynet.
And there’s the world’s most useless candidate, one of three Trotskyists, Gérard Schivardi. Polling around 0.5%, he has refused to suggest who his voters should support in the second round, and improved on that by promising to spoil his own ballot. Fortunately for democracy, he’s been so ineffectual that even France Decides 2007 got his name wrong, with a week to go…