Category Archives: Political issues

Shut up about “welfare”

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I have a lot of time for Eric Alterman, but this piece on THE TWILIGHT OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY misses the point. Alterman’s been to some sort of intellectual shindig in Paris to discuss the nature and causes of said twilight. Perhaps it wasn’t quite the grinding arse-paralyser that sounds. There’s a reason someone called a band Future of the Left – it loves having meetings about its future. But this one included Thomas Piketty of Piketty-Saiz fame and Ronald Dworkin and various other impressive crania.

Unfortunately, I can’t get past this.

People, it turns out, do not generally appreciate the opportunity to be forced to subsidize, through tax and transfer policies, the lifestyles of those they deem to be different from themselves. The French historian Pierre Rosanvallon noted that “it is here that the anti-immigration argument gets its force. On the left the view is one of nostalgia. An extremely weak response to a strong attack and it’s hard to see how it can survive the argument ‘the immigrants are stealing the welfare state.’”

Two things. For a start, perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the transfers seem to get less every time the matter is discussed. It is not in fact true that US or Western European workers have repeatedly turned down a big increase in the social wage because of the Muslims. Rather, it hasn’t been offered.

Secondly, surely the key to the problem is accepting the whole dogma of “welfare”. It may indeed be hard to persuade, yadda, yadda. But then it’s always hard to persuade someone of anything if there is nothing in it for them. New Labour ran its blood to water trying to come up with ever more cynical arguments to get people to be grateful for marginal improvements to the NHS, while never really noticing that UK workers experienced zero real wage growth from 2003-2010 at best.

Social democracy is more than just schools’n'hospitals politics. To be fair, Alterman nearly gets to this at the end of his piece but it doesn’t really add up to the sort of frontal, neo-brutalist self assertion that the advocates of wage-led growth set as a minimum standard.

Germany is not turning on itself

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I’ve recently read some interesting but somewhat shocking article, recommended by FT alphaville, in The Globe and Mail (Canada): “Germany’s season of angst: why a prosperous nation is turning on itself”. Fortunately, the author Doug Saunders is wrong.

Describing Germany’s booming economy, he writes:

These are, by several measures, the most successful people in the world. Yet it is very hard to find anyone here who is happy about this state of affairs.

And from my personal anecdotal evidence, he is right. When I talk to my fellow Germans about the economic situation, I have the same impression. But why is that? Doug’s interpretation, that Germany is afraid of change, involvement with the outside world, immigration or technological progress may be fitting with an earlier image of Germany. But I find other explanation much more plausible.

For starters, Germans fear the consequences of the Euro crisis in part because some politicians, academics and the media deliberately nurture fear. From “defending the Euro” to Prof Sinn’s exaggerated Target-2 arguments, from claims of high inflation to a Lehman-moment, the Germans are being told that the economic risks for them are huge and imminent, which is only partly correct (if at all). Interesting enough, the political risks – that the German taxpayers will become the major creditors of the periphery thanks to fear-induced bailouts (money and friendship…) – is discussed much less often.

But more importantly, Germans have lived through 15 years (!) of near-stagnation or mind-bogglingly high unemployment or both. That shapes your expectations in two important ways.

First, Germany knows how difficult it is to integrate and reform an economically (much more) devastated country of roughly the size of Greece. In fact, they have just been through it. So not only are they jolly well fed up with paying for something like that: after cumulated net public transfers of €1400bn (it’s not a typo), there are still €6bn in net transfers going to Eastern Germany. Per month. (The brain drain from former Eastern Germany was heavy, so how much “Western” Germany really payed is debatable.) At the same time, many Germans feel obliged to help European friends according to a recent poll:

A new survey finds that 60 percent of Germans believe their country has to help Greece in the eurozone debt crisis — like it or not.

Anyone caught in this tension will stray to extremes at times (like the person that Doug interviewed). The trigger may be when the Greek press retaliates with Nazi-jargon to German tabloids’ disgraceful headlines. Or when German politicians – supported by part of the German press – keep talking about “rescuing Greece” instead of being honest about what is actually being rescued: German investors and banks.

Second, after a decade-and-a-half-long economic struggle, Germans simply cannot believe that those times have finally passed for good, which is fully understandable for a country in whose national psyche security comes first. And no, Doug, the German boom is neither built on the birth of the Euro nor on “a deliberate strategy to keep labour costs low and productivity high”. It is built on Germany having re(!)-gained its competitiveness (warning: shameless cross-linking) and an ECB that will have to conduct too loose monetary policy for Germany in the years to come.

Doug’s other examples, immigration and a new protest movement, as well as nuclear power and the Libya war, have multiple roots that are too complex to discuss in a single post. He might have a point here, but there are more sympathetic and equally plausible explanations. For instance, the success of a populist and alarmist book by Thilo Sarrazin about the alleged decline of Germany is a late response of the German public to problems that have been piling up largely unaddressed over the last 30 years. In this context, Doug much too easily dismisses the internationally underappreciated contrast to Italy, Netherlands, France or even Sweden (!), not to mention Austria, that no right-wing populist party has made it into the federal parliament during the last 20 years, despite an unmatched economic malaise and a proportional election system.

Germany is not turning on itself. Germans just have a hard time dealing with and making sense of the current economic situation – and who could blame them? But if you give it some time, you will see that the 2006 & 2010 World Cup euphoria was not just a break from a national state of angst.

Collapsing Case Against Strauss-Kahn?

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The New York Times talks to its sources in the NY Police Department and prosecutor’s office and reports:

The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.

Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors now do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.

More key phrases include “repeatedly lied” to investigators, “issues involving the asylum application,” and “possible links to people involved in criminal activities, including drug dealing and money laundering.”
Continue reading →

Desert dialectic

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Rowan Williams:

[we have seen a] quiet resurgence of the seductive language of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor”.

Iain Duncan Smith:

With respect to the Archbishop of Canterbury I have never ever spoken about the deserving or undeserving poor. I don’t believe in that concept. All I say is that the system itself has created an undeserving group, that’s what it has created.”

I’m struggling to understand what IDS is saying here. One way we might read him is this: nothing intrinsic to a population group makes that group undeserving; welfare allocation on its own – and nothing else – determines desert. But this takes away desert as a justification for policy: people are going to be getting pie – or not – just because IDS says so. Imagine if this were the stance with respect to taxes: George Osborne says the top rate is going to go up to 60%, well … because, that’s why. And when it does, you’ll deserve it. Or how about this: low Conservative tax rates have created a deserving group: the low taxed. You wonderful people, you.

In response, IDS might say: yes, of course our policies need to be justified, but that justification needn’t have anything to do with who gets what. When I say that welfare recipients are ‘undeserving’, I’m only saying that people oughtn’t to receive welfare because welfare has bad consequences. It has bad consequences if fifty people receive it or if fifty million people receive it. But what are the bad consequences of welfare? Here, IDS might say that when people choose welfare instead of work, they become apathetic and unhappy: welfare erodes self-esteem just as cigarettes erode your lungs. But someone making this sort of argument has to face the possibility that all kinds of unearned wealth have similar bad effects. Inherited wealth, for instance, or windfall profit. And that’s not a place any respectable Tory wants to go. But perhaps IDS can steer the discussion away from such difficult topics by arguing that welfare is bad because it, uniquely, has bad consequences for everyone. Our over-generous handouts are making the public debt unmanageable, and we won’t be caring about who gets what if the entire country goes under. However, if welfare is rejected for a reason like that, then it’s open for people to argue that welfare should be increased as and when things change for the better. Who knows what the future will bring. Take Alaska’s Permanent Fund, for instance. The Alaskans never saw that coming. Yet somehow I seriously doubt that IDS envisages a future of share and share alike, should the nation be so lucky as to run into big patch of oil, or something.

So what else could IDS say when it comes to explaining his position on welfare? All that’s left – it seems – is an argument that appeals to justice. That is, it’s simply unjust that some people get benefit when they’ve never had any intention of working: the responsible people lose out; they’ve lived carefully, they’ve never been slackers, they’ve carried the load. But then Rowan Williams’s accusation sticks.

Let Our Fame Be Great by Oliver Bullough

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Review in brief: Encounters between Russia and the peoples of the Northern Caucasus have not been happy ones, and have generally ended badly for the smaller nations involved. From the Nogai driven into the Black Sea in the 1700s to the Circassians mostly slaughtered or removed to the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s to the Chechens, who fought for 30 years in the 1800s, were deported en masse to Central Asia in 1944 and subjected to two wars since 1994, the overall picture is bleak. The individual stories are full of spirit and life, and Bullough goes to great lengths to find people and paints deft portraits. He’s a better reporter than analyst, but overall Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus is a splendid book.

An unholy alliance

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Sonia Le Gouriellec at Alliance Géostrategique quotes Bernard Badie on the Ivory Coast and the fact that democracy is a lot more than just elections.

Prenons-la [la démocratie] comme un idéal, c’est-à-dire faisons-en une valeur partagée par tous, c’est-à-dire reconstruite par ceux-là même auxquels elle est censée s’adresser. Sa faiblesse se trouve dans sa dérive procédurale, dans son universalisme naïf, dans son formalisme, dans la volonté de plaquer et d’imposer de l’extérieur des modèles tout faits auxquels on ne cherche même pas à faire adhérer ceux auxquels on veut l’adresser. Peut-être que le fond du problème est là ; nous avons oublié chez nous que la démocratie était un idéal, nous n’en retenons plus que l’aspect facile de technique de gouvernement : on l’exporte telle quelle et on veut en faire en plus une technique d’action diplomatique ; on a alors tout faux.

This is, arguably, something the EU got right but the UN usually doesn’t. It’s never enough to put on an election, as you put on a play. In fact, it’s often the worst thing that could happen.

But at least it’s not the newly invigorated and enlarged Gulf Cooperation Council. Marc Lynch (he’s a serious these days so we can’t call him Abu Aardvark any more) covers this in some detail. Basically, what is emerging is a new reactionary international institution – a sort of NATO for dictators. In fact, it’s something like all the most radical criticisms of NATO, if they were all true, rolled into one. It doesn’t have nukes but it does want a nuclear industry.

Instead, it seems to be evolving into a club for Sunni Arab monarchs — the institutional home of the counter-revolution, directed against not only Iran but also against the forces for change in the region. Where the United States fits in that new conception remains distinctly unclear.

You bet, as they say. As it seems to be evolving into a police-military alliance, perhaps the closest parallel would be one of the reactionary alliances Europe tried out in the 19th century.

Who’s Next at the IMF?

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Now that Strauss-Kahn has resigned, the IMF needs a new director. Traditionally, the job has gone to a European, but since quota weights were realigned last year, it’s possible that the new boss may come from outside Europe.

I will go ahead and take a flyer no Kemal Dervis, on account of being both European and non-European, and well regarded for his work in Turkey and the international arena. Other ideas?

UPDATE: Well, heck. He say’s he’s not in the running.

A political group obituary

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As nobody who hasn’t been living in a Faraday cage on Ellesmere Island for the past four days no longer knows, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF managing director and probable next president of the French Republic, has been charged with attempted rape and has been remanded in custody of the New York police. I’m sure the AFOE Whole Control Inter-Macro Economic Soul Patrol will have some thoughts about the future leadership of the IMF in due course. For mine, I’m tempted to think that rudderless confusion is probably the least harmful condition for this organisation, but I know not every reader will agree.

Anyway. What about French politics? That’s bound to be more fun.

The most important fact here is that DSK was predicted by national polls to beat all the other candidates in the next presidential election. The Socialist leadership has been something between a soap opera and a French movie about self-torturing neurotic dread of action for years, but basically everybody expected that once he decided he was going to run, not only would he win the primary, but he’d also take out the general election. The facts are pretty simple – President Sarkozy has the worst poll rating of any French president ever. The extreme-right leader, Marine Le Pen, is doing better than ever. But DSK was both the top pick out of the Socialists, and also the polls’ pick for the big gig.

In fact, there was widespread speculation that the horrible experience of May, 2002 might be reversed. Rather than the extreme Left splitting the vote and leaving a run-off between the extreme Right and the Gaullist Right, the extreme Right would split the vote and leave a run-off between the extreme Right and the Socialists. This scenario was a little like a nuclear attack on Manchester destroying Old Trafford and Maine Road. A lot of people would think it a terrible disaster. But quite a lot of the people most concerned would have to mourn through gritted teeth to keep from laughing with pure schadenfreude.

Who was DSK? An academic economist and long-time Socialist, from a well-off family, one of those men who always seem to come up lucky. He was an effective minister of Finance, Economics, and Industry in the Jospin government, and he presided over possibly the first time the IMF ever thought wages should go up. I remember him wanting to know why the British let General Electric buy the division of Amersham International plc that at the time made practically all the world’s DNA sequencers. I still haven’t heard anyone answer that.

In French politics, he was very much parallel to his contemporary Peter Mandelson in Britain. Both ran economic ministries with some success, and did likewise as international civil servants. Both were considered dangerously foreign to their own parties for a mixture of reasons to do with ideology and with style – both liked the company of the rich and enjoyed good tailoring and better travel. They were certainly both well to the right of their parties, but it was DSK who was responsible for the 35 hours law in France, and the British Labour Party is now rediscovering how little it likes Conservative government in general. They were also both disliked for appearing clever, visibly enjoying cleverness, and repeatedly winning in micro-political squabbles with the journalists who hated them. As is the way with people who are genuinely clever and effective and look like they enjoy it, they were both hated and indispensable to the leaders of their respective movements.

It is probably worth pointing out that they are both Jewish and – much as everyone involved would deny it – this does look like a role grounded in stereotype.

Mandelson collected a lot of fairly horrible abuse from the cheaper end of the British press because (and again, everyone involved will now whine about this) he’s gay. DSK was regularly written up as a stereotypical French ladies’ man, a Latin lover for whom it was all both indivisible from his personality and from the sheer style of politics.

It seems, in the absence of a coup de theatre to blow the theatre roof off, that only one of these statements was true. Women are already turning up who claim that he raped them years ago – most shamefully, one of them was apparently told by her mother to shut up. Her mother is a relatively important official in the PS’s regional organisation for Paris, DSK’s power base throughout his career, and someone who could perhaps have expected favour if and when he was back in power. This week’s Canard Enchainé is likely to be an explosively sordid document.

It would seem that the whole story is the classic one of an abuser protected by his friends, family, and colleagues. The network would say nothing, and indeed would influence others to say nothing, until the day when he pushed his luck outside its zone of influence. At this point, it is usual for a whole lot of people to have sudden and wholly unexpected fits of principle. I would not be surprised if skeletons tumbled from many other French politicians’ cupboards in the next few weeks. If I sound pissed off, well, how many other people were convinced that he was a decent man?

So far, the party and specifically the Ile de France regional federation seems to be…well, check out the list. It is to be expected that a lot of the people named will rapidly forget that the whole thing is a plot against them because Sofitel is a French company. (Surely, had he stayed at the Hilton, that would have been even more suspicious?) I hear that this tone of denial is quite widespread among people who certainly ought to know better.

Upshot? It seems unlikely anyone will be more satisfied with Sarkozy as a result. In fact, only a revolution of opinion would be enough to help much. And Sarkozy’s personal style – all yachts and executive jets and watches and models – is rather like DSK’s. It will probably give Marine Le Pen a little more.

Inside the PS, expect yet more neurosis. DSK’s supporters skew to the right of the party, and he has a particular beef with Laurent Fabius (who in any case isn’t going to win). In the absence of other factors, they’d probably be spread roughly equally between Ségoléne Royal, François Hollande, and Martine Aubry. But there are other factors. Royal and Aubry have defined geographical power bases, Royal from being president of Poitou-Charentes, Aubry from being mayor of Lille. If you had to pick, you’d probably take the second for an intra-party fight. DSK’s support is localised in Paris – it was the only PS federation not to vote for Royal as candidate last time out. Hollande’s base is in the party organisation, from his years as first secretary and therefore chief organiser. It’s fair to say that a lot of his people are also based in the capital, so he might claim more of a bonus than anyone else. He has recently been enjoying an upward trend in the polls.

It is possible that this is an end of an era, or at least a significant moment in moral history. As I said above, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were more disgraces in short order, and that the general tolerance-level will have been reduced to a more defensible value.

Also, the style of French politics is changing. Mitterand is dead, Jacques Chirac is gone. Sarkozy is the least popular president on record. DSK, Laurent Fabius, Charles Pasqua, Simone Veil, Edith Cresson, Rachida Dati, a whole series of enormous and often enormously flawed personalities have left the scene in one way or another. Dominique de Villepin and Alain Juppé hang around, but will either make any impact?

The new style is understated and in fact quite dull. On the Right, there are people like François Fillon and Christine Lagarde – a gang of grey managers. On the Left, people like Hollande and Aubry – solid town hall politicians. Marine Le Pen’s unique selling point is that she makes fascism boring. Her party’s thuggish stewards have been ordered by party headquarters to dispense with their shiny boots and paramilitary trappings, and are said to be exploring British football-casual style for the future. So much the better for the Italian textile sector, so much the worse for Leicester. But perhaps dull is good. It’s worth remembering that dull is great news in the long term of European history. They said Clement Attlee was dull.

And now, for the IMF…

Oh My

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Removed from a Paris-bound plane.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, was removed from a Paris-bound flight on Saturday afternoon minutes before takeoff after a New York City hotel housekeeper accused him of sexual assault, the police said. …

Strauss-Kahn was being questioned after a 32-year-old chambermaid complained that a naked Strauss-Kahn sexually attacked her in his Manhattan hotel room, the police said. The maid, who said she broke free, suffered minor injuries, police said.

The NYPD expects to bring formal charges Sunday morning, New York time.