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Angela Merkel: A Retrospective
by Philippa Kaur 21 January 2021, 17:30
Americans like to rate their presidents. In fact, presidential rankings have become something of a cottage industry in political science, ever since the eminent Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. started the tradition in the late 1940s.
In Germany, we don’t do that, at least not in a formal way. We do have, however, a sense of who was a good chancellor and who wasn’t, and there probably is something of a common understanding as to why. Chancellors stand out if they accomplished extraordinary feats. Konrad Adenauer will always be remembered for accomplishing Franco-German reconciliation and anchoring the Federal Republic firmly in the West; Willy Brandt for initiating a radical turn in West German foreign policy toward the East, culminating in the reconciliation with Poland; and Helmut Kohl for seizing the historic opportunity in 1989 and bringing about the peaceful reunification of the two Germanies.
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What about Angela Merkel, the first woman to hold Germany’s most powerful political office? Her tenure will end in a few months’ time, at the end, one hopes, of a horrific pandemic. On September 26, Germany will elect a new parliament, and Angela Merkel will retire. By then she will have been in office for more than 15 years, second only to Helmut Kohl, who managed to hold on to the office a few months longer. When Angela Merkel took over in November 2005, she was largely dismissed as “Kohl’s girl” who was likely to have a hard time asserting herself in a political party, the Christian Democrats (CDU) largely dominated by men.
The Anti-Trump
In fact, shortly after the election, then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder insisted on national television that there was no way that his Social Democratic Party would ever accept an offer from Angela Merkel to form a coalition with the CDU under her leadership. As it so happened, the Social Democrats did, and Schröder was finished. In the years that followed, it became increasingly clear that Merkel was quite capable of asserting herself in the treacherous waters of Berlin’s political scene. In fact, in 2020, Forbes magazine ranked Angela Merkel as the most powerful woman in the world — for the 10th consecutive year.
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Throughout her 15 years in office, the chancellor has, on average, received high satisfaction scores. As recently as December, more than 80% of respondents in a representative survey said that Angela Merkel was doing a good job. Appreciation for Merkel, however, has hardly been limited to Germany. In an international Pew poll from September 2020 covering 13 nations, Merkel was by far seen as the most trusted major world leader. More than three-quarters of respondents rated her positively; by contrast, more than 80% saw then-US President Donald Trump in a negative light.
Poll data also suggest that during Merkel’s tenure, Germany’s stature in the world has substantially increased. In a Pew study of 10 European nations from early 2019, almost 50% of respondents agreed that Germany played a more significant role in the world than a decade ago; fewer than half said the same thing about France and the UK. Germans are, for obvious historical reasons, understandably concerned about the country’s international image and reputation. Not for nothing, Canada’s The Globe and Mail referred to her in 2018 as the “anti-Trump,” only to add that “We need her kind more than ever.” This in itself will secure Merkel an eminent place in post-reunification German history.
Ironically enough, the article was written at a time when Merkel’s star appeared to be rapidly waning, the result of serious electoral setbacks on the national and regional level. In the election to the German Bundestag in September 2017, the Christian Democrats lost more than 8 percentage points compared to the previous election, which meant a loss of 65 seats in parliament. At the same time, the radical right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered parliament, garnering more than 12% of the vote. In subsequent regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse, the Christian Democrats lost more than 10% of the vote, setting off alarm bells in Munich and Berlin.
By the end of 2018, Merkel appeared to be up against the ropes, her days numbered. Particularly the upsurge in support for the radical populist right caused alarm, particularly in Bavaria. In response, the powerful Christian Social Union (CSU), Bavaria’s independent arm of the Christian Democrats, seriously contemplated once again to reach beyond Bavaria and create a genuinely national-conservative party, competing with both the AfD and the CDU. The CSU had always maintained that there must never be a democratically legitimated party to the right of the CSU. With the AfD, there clearly was, and Merkel’s Christian Democrats appeared not in a position to stem the tide.
Corona Winner
Yet Merkel managed to survive the various challenges to her leadership, despite continued electoral setbacks, which largely benefited the AfD. But skepticism abounded. In late 2018, a majority of Germans thought that Merkel would not serve out her mandate, due to expire at the 2021 parliamentary election. At about the same time, however, 70% of respondents in a representative survey said they wished she would finish her mandate. Once the pandemic hit Germany in the spring of 2020, Merkel’s stock started to soar once again. International media celebrated Germany as a most likely pandemic winner that had proven particularly resilient to the virus.
What a joke. Only this time, nobody’s laughing. At the time of writing, Germany is a coronavirus disaster zone. The country has proved, once again, to be completely unprepared in the face of the second wave of infections that threatens to overwhelm the health care system. Starting in early December, Germany posted record new infections, and this before the arrival of the UK mutation. By now, the situation in some parts of Germany is nothing short of catastrophic. At the same time, the situation on the vaccination front leaves much to be desired.
In mid-January, Germany recorded more than 22,000 new infections on a single day and more than 1,100 new COVID-19-related deaths. This is at least partly the result of the German government’s indecisive, hesitant and confusing response to the pandemic, made worse by Germany’s federal system, which provides for a plethora of veto points. This means that not only has it been difficult and quite tedious to arrive at a coordinated policy but also that every Land introduced its own measures, some more stringent than others. The result has been a certain degree of public exasperation. In a recent survey, more than half of respondents said they were annoyed at the measures that were “often contradictory.”
To be sure, Angela Merkel cannot be held personally responsible for the dramatic deterioration of the situation once the second wave hit Germany with full force. A lot of time was lost in December in attempts to get the various political officials from Germany’s 16 Länder to agree on a common strategy. And even in the face of a potential disaster in early January, Merkel had to do a lot of convincing to get support for more restrictive measures.
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Cultural Revolution
Under the circumstances, Angela Merkel’s other accomplishments as well as her failures are bound to fall by the wayside. They shouldn’t. On one hand, Angela Merkel has dragged the Christian Democrats into the 21st century. The CDU used to be the party of “Kinder, Kirche, Küche” (children, church, kitchen). Politics were a men’s world for, as my neighbor, a woman, used to tell me, politics is a “dirty business” — and dirty businesses should be left to men.
Angela Merkel dared to appoint a woman to the most male of all ministerial portfolios, defense. The German armed forces did not like her, despite the fact — as even Germany’s conservative flagship publication, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has conceded — that she managed to substantially increase their budget as well as and their image. Today, that former defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, heads the European Commission, another novum. She was replaced by another woman, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who in 2018 succeeded Angela Merkel as the head of the CDU.
Probably nothing exemplifies the cultural revolution Merkel set in motion than the question of sexual and gender identity. Those of us who grew up in the postwar period probably recall that once in a while, our parents would hint that somebody was a “175er.” This was in reference to Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code according to which homosexuality was a punishable offense. The paragraph goes back all the way to 1871, establishing that any sexual activity between two males (there was no formal mention of lesbians) was subject to criminal persecution and punishment.
During the Nazi period, gays suffered from severe persecution, many of them ended up in concentration camps. After the war, the Federal Republic not only retained the paragraph; it also used the Nazis’ “pink lists” — in the camps, homosexuals were marked by a pink triangle on their prisoners’ shirts — to initiate some 100,000 proceedings against homosexuals. It was not until 1994 that the “gay paragraph” was finally abolished, not least because of East German insistence during the negotiations on reunification.
More than 20 years and many gay parades later, in 2017, the German Bundestag voted on legalizing same-sex marriage. On the occasion, Angela Merkel allowed representatives to vote their conscience rather than following party discipline. Quite a few Christian Democrats came out in the support of the law, which was passed by a substantial majority, much to the chagrin of Germany’s conservatives. Some of them defected to the AfD given its vocal opposition to the law, which, as one of its leaders suggested, threatens to undermine Germany’s traditional values and harm society. Polls showed, however, that a substantial majority supported the law. In June 2017, 60% of men and more than 70% of women came out in favor of same-sex marriage across Germany.
We Can Handle This
Angela Merkel’s resolute position during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015-16 also comes out as a positive. In order to understand the enormity of the event, it might be useful to recall one of the great Lebenlügen (delusions) of the Federal Republic, the notion that Germany was “not a country of immigration.” Given the fact that by the 1980s, Germany was home to millions of guest workers and their families, many of whom had permanently settled in Germany, the notion ignored the reality on the ground. Yet it was not until 2001 that an expert commission of the German Bundestag came to the conclusion that the notion was “no longer tenable.” By 2015, a significant majority of Germans agreed with that statement, and in 2019, more than 70% of respondents agreed that in the future, Germany should accept as many refugees as in the past.
This is quite remarkable, given the storm Angela Merkel provoked when in 2015 she cleared the way for welcoming a million refugees, many of them from war-torn Syria. Her main argument was that Germany is a strong country: “Wir schaffen das,” Merkel announced — “We can handle this.” The German public was not entirely convinced. Perhaps they remembered Merkel’s predecessor, Helmut Kohl, who in 1990 had promised that unification would lead to “blossoming landscapes” in the eastern part of the country. The reality, of course, was the opposite. The West German taxpayers would have to pay the bills for decades to come while in the east, resentment continued to grow only to erupt in substantial support for the AfD.
Under the circumstances, German skepticism in 2015 was quite understandable. In early 2016, around 80% of the population expressed concern that the government had lost control over the refugee situation; among AfD supporters, it was virtually 100%. As expected, the radical right made the refugee crisis the central focus of their mobilization — a winning strategy, as the party’s success in subsequent elections demonstrated. But in the end, Merkel prevailed; early concerns that the refugee influx would lead to major social problems were largely proved wrong, and, in late 2018, a comfortable majority of Germany’s public agreed that the chancellor had done a good job with respect to her refugee policy.
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With Angela Merkel, the CDU moved to the left — or so her critics have insisted and complained. Others have argued that the left-wing turn of the CDU is largely a myth. The reality is somewhere in between. Empirical studies suggest that in the aftermath of reunification, all major German parties gradually moved to the center. With reunification, Germany added millions of citizens from a socialist regime whose value system and views on major social issues, such as abortion and homosexuality, were considerably to the left of the dominant value system that prevailed in the western part of the country. As a result, the conservative ideational elements in the CDU got progressively weakened, provoking vocal protest from the party’s right wing. A study from 2017 (but based on interviews held before the refugee crisis of 2015) found that CDU members largely agreed. They saw their own party “distinctly to the left” of their own position and that way before Angela Merkel’s now-famous “Wir schaffen das.”
Grey Spots
Yet against all party-internal resistance and opposition, despite calls for her to hand in her resignation, Merkel once again prevailed — a remarkable feat in these turbulent times. Future historians are likely to consider Angela Merkel’s 15-year tenure in an overall positive light. To be sure, there are grey spots, such as Germany’s handling of the fallout of the financial crisis of 2007-08 and, more recently, Berlin’s intransigence with regard to Italian pleas for “Corona bonds” during the first wave of the pandemic.
Another grey spot regards the question of gender equality. Officially, the European Union has been committed to gender mainstreaming since the mid-1990s. More often than not, the results are wide off the mark, particularly in Germany. To be sure, even here critics would concede that Angela Merkel has “contributed fundamentally to the recognition of women as leaders and decision-makers in Germany.”
In other essential areas of gender politics, her record is rather dismal. Her government did little to nothing to narrow the pay gap between men and women or to do away with Germany’s “anachronistic tax system” that privileges married couples “as long as one of the two (usually the husband) has a high income and the other one (usually the wife) earns little or nothing.” And actual reforms, for instance regarding child care and parental leave, were less intended to promote gender equality than to enhance the position of the family, in line with traditional Christian Democratic doctrine.
The record was equally dismal with regard to public life. As a semi-official account from late 2018 put online by the Federal Center for Political Education noted, in the course of Merkel’s tenure, the number of women in her cabinets progressively declined, from 40% in her first cabinet to 30% in her forth. At the same time, the CDU failed to attract new women members. In 2018, women made up around 25% of party ranks.
Things were not any better with respect to the composition of Germany’s Bundestag. At the end of the red-Green coalition in 2005, the share of women MPs had been more than 40%. After the election of 2017, it had fallen to a bit more than 30%. In the Christian Democratic parliamentary group, women made up barely 20%. And although Angela Merkel appointed a woman as defense minister, the most important ministries — interior, foreign affairs and finance — remained firmly in the hands of men.
This was to a large extent also true for Germany’s civil service. In 2020, 35% of top positions in the public sector were held by women. And, as the ministry for justice and consumer protection recently noted, “the higher up in the hierarchy, the lower the share of women.” But at least here, change is underway. By 2025, all senior positions are supposed to have closed the gender gap.
Klimakanzlerin
If Germany is a laggard with regard to gender equality, it has prided itself to be a leader when it comes to the environment. The reality, however, is somewhat different. In fact, when it comes to arguably the greatest global challenge, the fight against global warming and climate change, Angela Merkel has been a major disappointment.
As a reminder: Angela Merkel entered office as a strong advocate of decisive action against climate change. In fact, in the years that followed, German media nicknamed her the “Klimakanzlerin” — climate chancellor. Yet over time, she gradually abandoned her convictions, caving in first to the demands of German’s powerful automobile sector and then to the coal industry. Germany continues to rely heavily on coal for the production of energy. To a significant extent, it is the environmentally most disastrous type of coal, lignite.
Lignite power plants are among Europe’s worst polluters. Most of them operate in Germany and Poland. And while a number of EU countries, such as France, Italy and the Netherlands, have decided to stop coal-fired power production by or before 2030, Germany won’t phase out its coal plants until 2038. Mining lignite is an important sector in the southeastern part of former East Germany, in Lusatia, around the city of Cottbus. Electoral considerations, particularly given the AfD’s strength in that part of the country, of course have nothing to do with the Merkel government’s reluctance when it comes to coal. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
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Overall, Merkel’s climate policy has been suboptimal, to put it mildly. As a former environmental minister recently put it, for the government, political opportunism and convenience counted more than tackling an essential problem. That was before the pandemic hit. COVID-19 appears to have caused somewhat of a reconversion. By now, Angela Merkel has once again started to promote herself as the Klimakanzlerin. And for good reasons. COVID-19 has largely been associated with environmental destruction, the dramatic loss of biodiversity and global warming. Polls show that Germans are quite sensitive when it comes to these issues. A recent survey found around 85% of the German population not only concerned about these issues, but also willing to make lifestyle changes to “protect the climate.” Under the circumstances, Merkel’s return to her environmentalist roots is hardly surprising. It makes a lot of sense, politically speaking.
Despite a vigorous 15-year resume as chancellor, it is now it is clear that COVID-19 will define how Angela Merkel will be judged once she leaves office and by how well Germany will master this challenge over the months to come. This might be unfair. After all, Merkel is what Americans call a “lame duck.” But, as Donald Trump so eloquently put it, it is what it is. The German government’s recent frantic attempts to regain control of a situation that has largely spun out of control are an admission of unpreparedness paired with incompetence and mismanagement paired with wishful thinking. In March 2020, Angela Merkel stated on national television that COVID-19 represented the “greatest challenge since the Second World War.” She was right.
As long as Merkel holds Germany’s most powerful political position, she is in charge and ultimately bears responsibility. At the moment, a large majority of Germans have full confidence that once again, she will be at the top of her game and handle the challenge. It is to be hoped that their confidence is justified.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Amidst the Pandemic, Central and Eastern Europe Witnesses an Erosion of Democracy
by Philippa Kaur 10 December 2020, 11:19
Nearly a year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, its effects on people’s lives, countries’ economies and health care around the world are becoming clearer. In some Central and Eastern European countries, however, this pandemic has had repercussions in another crucial area: democracy. This begs the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic is emboldening the rise of illiberal politics in certain parts of the region. Indeed, the US-based Freedom House concluded earlier this year that Hungary and Serbia are no longer democracies but are “in a ‘grey zone’ between democracies and pure autocracies.”
One democratic process affected by the COVID-19 pandemic around the world was elections. Indeed, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, elections have been canceled or postponed in at least 67 nations around the globe. Central and Eastern Europe was no exception. Serbia’s parliamentary election, originally set for April 26, was postponed by two months even though it was boycotted by much of the opposition due to the steady decline of democracy and media freedom in the country, resulting in a turnout of less than 50%.
The controversial election secured another term for President Aleksandar Vucic with over 60% of the vote, granting his Serbian Progressive Party 190 seats in the country’s 250-seat parliament. As a result of the election and in-person voting, while the rest of Europe is now in its second wave of the pandemic, Serbia is now in its third.
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Leading up to the elections in Poland, the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party proposed a change to the constitution to postpone the election for two years due to the pandemic, automatically extending President Andrzej Duda’s term in office. In the end, elections were held in June and July, with Duda narrowly beating the opposition Civic Platform’s candidate.
Beyond elections, the pandemic has been used to mask legal and constitutional changes in the region. In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s government first passed the Authorization Act during the first wave of the pandemic, effectively giving the prime minister the power to rule by decree. The government’s first action was to pass a law mandating that transgender people only be recognized by their sex at birth. The government also announced that disseminating “fake news” about the pandemic or the government’s response to it was a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.
As a result, although no one has yet been charged under the new laws, several people were arrested and detained after criticizing the government on social media, which some commentators likened to being picked up by the notorious black cars driven by the secret police during the communist era.
In November, as the country entered its second wave of the pandemic, the Orban government announced the Second Authorization Act for a period of 90 days. The following day, proposed amendments to the constitution were announced that would make it mandatory for children to be raised amid “Christian cultural values,” defining the mother as female and the father as male, as well as prohibiting changing gender after birth. These amendments bar same-sex couples from adopting, but single parents can request an exemption through special ministerial permission.
Additionally, one minute before midnight on the day before new curfew measures went into effect, the government proposed a change to the election law, making it impossible for coalitions to contest elections, effectively wiping out the opposition.
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At the same time that Hungary adopted its first Authorization Act, Poland adopted the Act on Special Solutions Related to the Prevention, Counteracting and Combating of COVID-19, which was ultimately used by the Polish government and PiS to limit social dialogue. A few weeks later, the “Stop Abortion” bill was enacted by the Polish parliament. Already among the strictest abortion laws in Europe, the high court’s October ruling that it was unconstitutional to abort a fetus with congenital defects effectively baned all abortions, bar in the case of incest, rape or a danger to the mother’s health.
This new ruling was met with mass protests around the country, even spreading to church services in the devoutly Catholic Poland and seeing as many as 100,000 people on the streets of the capital Warsaw. This attack on women’s health was also met by a push to leave the European treaty on violence against women, known as the Istanbul Convention, citing that it is “harmful” for children to be taught about gender in schools. Hungary refused to ratify the treaty in May, stating that it promotes “destructive gender ideologies” and “illegal migration.”
It is likely that what the world is seeing in these countries is what Ozan Varol calls “stealth authoritarianism” that “serves as a way to protect and entrench power when direct repression is not a viable option,” with the ultimate goal of creating a one-party state. The pandemic seems to be helping authoritarian leaders to secure their grip on power. In Serbia, Vucic gained popularity during the first wave and, even after criticism from the opposition and supporters alike, Orban maintained his popularity in Hungary, as shown in a recent Závecz Research poll.
Findings from interviews carried out as part of a project, Illiberal Turn, funded by the Economic & Social Research Council, suggest that while people were predominantly supportive of democracy in the months before the pandemic, some of those interviewed in Hungary, Poland and Serbia during the first wave in the spring seemed to have a change of heart, expressing more sympathies toward authoritarian forms of government. This trend is worrying, as it shows the potential effects that crisis can have on democratic values. These abuses of power in Central and Eastern Europe cannot be ignored. It is crucial to pay attention to how these times of crisis can further exacerbate the already existing illiberal tendencies across the region.
*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Did Emmanuel Macron Have It Coming?
by Philippa Kaur 7 December 2020, 18:44
After watching the video of a street battle raging directly below the Paris apartment I once occupied at a time when François Mitterand was president, I turned to The New York Times’ editorial board’s response to President Emmanuel Macron’s accusation that The Times and other English-speaking media have been unfair in their coverage of Macron’s campaign against Islamist separatism.
In an excellent article examining recent developments in France, Glenn Greenwald is far too generous when he suggests that the proudly authoritarian Macron is acting either “out of political calculation, conviction or some combination of both.” For the past three years, most people in France have been wondering whether in fact their president has any convictions beyond electoral calculations. Just ask the gilets jaunes, whose legacy is far from over. The yellow vests have been seen reemerging to accompany the current protests against Macron’s new law on global security.
To defend his policies, Macron has frequently quoted Jean Baubérot, a historian of laïcité, the French ideology of secularism. In an interview with the journal L’Obs, Baubérot excoriates the president, notably calling into question Macron’s pompous invocation of the “values” of “la République.” But as Baubérot notes, Macron’s idea of values “could disguise less than honorable intentions.” At the same time, the historian reminds the president that values are communicated by “convincing rather than constraining.”
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Baudérot goes even further when he compares Macron to the revolutionaries of France’s Reign of Terror who worshipped the goddess of reason. He accuses Macron of attempting to turn laïcité itself into “a goddess of which France would be her chosen people.” No one has forgotten Macron’s ambition of becoming a Jupiterian leader. The supreme god must have his goddesses.
Macron’s pagan religion is clearly incompatible with Islam, but, as Olivier Roy and Régis Debray have pointed out, it is also incompatible with democratic rights and especially the freedom of expression. Roy points out that Macron’s latest initiatives brutally stifle the freedom of expression of schoolchildren as well as of an entire community bullied into conformity.
The Times editorial board thinks that the issues Macron is concerned about “should be open to debate, both within France and among mature democracies.” In an effort to sound conciliatory, The Times agrees that “the debate cannot cross into any notion that any victim of Islamist terror ‘had it coming.’ Mr. Macron is right to reject any such suggestion.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Had it coming:
An expression used by individuals and even political leaders — such as George W. Bush with regard to Saddam Hussein or Hillary Clinton with regard to Muammar Gaddafi — to justify not only acts of war but also their own gruesome terrorist methods.
Contextual Note
The Times editorial board politely makes its own significant point about President Macron’s simplistic approach to complex problems when it notes that “he goes too far in seeing malicious insult throughout the ‘Anglo-American media.’” Macron may not like this critique, but most lucid observers agree he “had it coming.” And it may be getting worse with the approach of the 2022 election.
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As he always does, Emmanuel Macron insists on keeping his word — not to others, but to himself. This is his idea of remaining consistent with his convictions. He does so, especially when those who are directly concerned by his authoritarian measures express their disagreement. He then has no choice but to wait for the explosion and watch everything go up in flames.
That is what happened when he chose to repeal France’s wealth tax and compensate by raising the tax on gas. It led to the yellow vest revolt. He claimed that it was all about ecology when it was essentially a means of shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor. It happened again with the stubborn promotion of retirement reform. The imminent explosion was only averted by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March that halted the legislative process.
Even when Macron proclaimed that Islam was in crisis to justify putting France on a war footing against 10% of its own citizens, he admitted that the nation had failed its Muslim population by permitting their effective ghettoization, marginalizing most young Muslims. And concerning the depredations of the police, he admitted, in an interview with Brut, a media popular among the young, that “today, when the color of someone’s skin isn’t white, they will be much more subject to police controls.”
In the Brut interview, Macron characterized his proposed law to counter Islamic separatism as an attempt to “rearm the Republic against the supporters of radical Islam.” Who could not hear in this remark an echo of “The Marseillaise,” “Aux armes, citoyens”? Like Hillary Clinton with regard to Muammar Gaddafi, Macron seems to be anticipating the day when he will be able to chortle and say, “We came, we saw, [they] died.” While he admits that “French style integration failed,” he appears only to imagine a military-style response to that failure.
Le Monde shows itself less indulgent than Greenwald on the possibility that Macron may be acting on principle. The newspaper comments that “during this free-flowing interview [with Brut], Mr Macron took the position of defending his record, with his eyes riveted on the 2022 election.” A French James Carville might be tempted to sum it up this way: “It’s the election, stupid.”
Macron even allowed himself to enter into a spat with the writer, cineaste and ecological activist Cyril Dion, who had the temerity to remind the president that, in the wake of the yellow vest consultations, Macron had promised but failed to take on board the propositions of a committee of 150 citizens representing the full diversity of France. The president has now summarily dismissed the issue with a remark intended to sound insulting to anyone not belonging to the church of the goddess Laïcité: “Because 150 citizens wrote something, that doesn’t mean it’s the Bible or the Koran.”
Historical Note
The New York Times, as the voice of modern liberalism, has become hypersensitive to the question of diversity and racial justice. This may simply be a consequence of its alignment with the Democratic Party, which sees identity politics as the unique theme legitimizing its brand of “progressivism.” This focus on a single theme allows it to dispense with the need to show undue concern with distracting issues such as the militarism of the US empire, the trampling of civil liberties by the intelligence community or the need for economic justice in an increasingly indifferent capitalist plutocracy.
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Consistent with this logic, in its response to Macron, The Times offers the truism that “racism and Islamophobia are major problems in France, as they are in the United States, Britain and elsewhere in the Western world.” Though obvious to everyone, it subtly suggests that Macron’s claim to universalism sounds more like French exceptionalism than a commitment to universal human rights.
And The Times is absolutely right. The universalist “republican” values Macron embraces contain the idea that its institutions are color blind. On the instructions of the Ministry of the Interior, the police may or may not be color blind, but they are not blind. They have two eyes to see with, whenever they decide to stop someone in the street. Likewise, employers can discriminate when they see the name of a candidate on a resumé or at least discover the truth during the interview. In other words, France and the US both have a problem of white privilege, but they manage it — poorly, in both cases — in contrasting ways.
The Times concludes by celebrating its vocation as a truth-teller ready to take on the challenge of racial justice: “That’s what the news media does, at home and abroad. It is its function and duty to ask questions about the roots of racism, ethnic anger and the spread of Islamism among Western Muslims, and to critique the effectiveness and impact of government policies.” The Times’ performance at this task has, over time, produced variable results. It still hasn’t admitted its complicity in the ongoing humanitarian disaster provoked by Bush’s wars in the Middle East. But with regard to Emmanuel Macron, we can congratulate it for showing the courage to stick to its principles.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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The Rapid Growth of Emmanuel Macron’s Authoritarianism
by Philippa Kaur 25 November 2020, 12:30
In early October, French President Emmanuel Macron, as a preparation for the 2022 election, made the decision to mount a campaign blaming France’s Muslims for their failure to embrace the country’s increasingly dogmatic “Republican culture.” To counter Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration extreme right, Macron calculated that his shambolic center-right party needed to find a way of steering votes away from the passably racist National Rally led by Le Pen.
In Macron’s eyes, French Muslims have failed to prove the sincerity of their expected conversion to France’s national religion of laicité, or secularism, that has now definitively supplanted the traditional role of the Catholic Church. To outdo Le Pen, he deviated the blame to the world’s entire Muslim population, claiming that Islam was in the thralls of a global crisis that offended French republican sensibilities. Its credo of “equality, liberty, fraternity” now excluded tolerance for any group of people who did not unanimously adopt all its trappings. Fraternity has its limits.
Even before the gruesome assaults on a schoolteacher and three citizens in a church in Nice that horrified the French nation, through his rhetoric about a global Islamic threat, Macron managed to convince a number of governments in Muslim countries that France was at war with their religion. Several nations responded by recommending a boycott of French products.
Emmanuel Macron Defends His Crusade
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Some went further. Since Macron felt himself in a position to signal their crisis, some Muslim authorities were tempted to focus on his own. Noticing that the French president was proposing increasingly authoritarian laws that had the effect of targeting Muslim children in schools, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Human Rights Shireen Mazari penned a tweet comparing Macron’s proposed laws, which included attributing ID numbers to school children, to the Nazi policy of requiring Jews to wear yellow stars.
Mazari initially made the accusation on the basis of an article that was later amended to state that the IDs would be required for all children, not just Muslims. The reform aimed at obliging every child in France to receive civic instruction teaching them the “values of the Republic.” Those values include celebrating the publication of insulting cartoons that may even express bigotry and limiting the freedom to don clothing or symbols that may signify affiliation with a religion other than republicanism. Because France’s values are universal, they trump anyone else’s particular values. Conformity is a core republican value.
France’s Foreign Ministry wasted no time reacting to Mazari’s comparison of the new measures with Nazi practices. NBC News’s headline on the story read: “France ‘deeply shocked’ as Pakistan minister compares Macron to Nazis.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Deeply shocked:
1. Morally offended
2. Embarrassingly surprised that one has been found out
Contextual Note
In the film “Casablanca,” Captain Renault, the French chief of the local police under German occupation gives the order to shut down Rick’s Café, a nightclub where he spends most of his evenings. When Rick, the American owner of the café played by Humphrey Bogart, asks why, Renault replies “I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here” just as the croupier arrives to give him his winnings.
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The French Foreign Ministry didn’t quite frame the message in the same terms as Captain Renault. NBC reports that “the minister spoke in ‘deeply shocking and insulting terms’ of Macron and the whole of France.” The ministry added, “These hateful words are blatant lies, imbued with an ideology of hatred and violence.” Clearly, Mazari had fallen into the trap of Godwin’s law (citing Nazis invalidates any argument) and the ministry jumped on it.
France’s proposed law clearly applies the French anti-discriminatory republican rule that procedures must apply equally and uniformly to everyone. Unlike the policies of the Nazi regime, it doesn’t seek to exclude or eliminate groups of people considered different. Marine Le Pen’s party might be tempted to envisage measures of exclusion, but not France’s traditional parties. Not even Macron’s non-traditional Republic on the Move, which was cobbled together in 2017 by attracting a variety of traditional personalities from the political establishment to provide the president with a majority in parliament.
The republican credo elevates universal civic values to the level of an alternative moral system, replacing all the traditional bases of morality, including the Christian principles of compassion, non-violence and concern for the oppressed. Universality implies uniformity. Individuals must show themselves not so much worthy of their neighbors and their community, but of the republic itself. In that sense, the spirit of the new policies put forward by Macron do vaguely resemble Hitler’s belief in a singular Aryan ideal.
Historical Note
Macron’s vision of la république takes Charles de Gaulle’s meme of aspiring to “a certain idea of France” beyond mere aspiration. Macron seeks to codify and monitor the behavior of individuals, who must now prove their conformity with the civic ideal.
Recently, China’s President Xi Jinping inveighed against a trend that when translated into English is rendered as “splitism.” China is an immense country with a dominant ethnic group, the Han, and the ambition to control territory that includes other ethnicities and cultures. China enjoys the security that comes from governing a population that not only believes in its overwhelming ethnic unity but also, largely as a reaction to its humiliation by Western powers in the 19th century, embraces a fervent form of nationalism. This has permitted Xi in the 21st century to consolidate and reinforce the authoritarianism that Mao Zedong had pushed to a chaotic extreme half a century ago.
Macron’s links his idea of Muslim separatism in France to the entire Muslim world. This curiously echoes Xi’s complaint about “splitism.” The two ideas are fundamentally different, of course, since Xi worries that the cultures and traditions of autonomous regions, such as Tibet or Xinjiang, might lead to movements of political independence. No risk exists in France of a Muslim nation splitting off, whereas in the past, there have been very real threats of Breton, Alsatian or Basque separatism.
Historically, France achieved a sense of national unity by imposing the French language on its linguistically diversified regions. Forcing children whose native language was Breton, Alsatian, Basque or Occitan to think in French and imagine themselves as descendants of the Gauls (who obviously didn’t speak French) led to the virtual disappearance of the regional languages. Macron probably sees this historical reality as a policy that paid off in the end. Why not apply it to another important component of contemporary French demography: Muslims?
Macron is now discovering that there are a number of problems with this approach. Unlike Basques or Bretons, French Muslims are geographically dispersed across the nation. The history of their relations with the French formerly colonialist nation is extremely complex. And the fact that it is their religion rather than their ethnicity or their geographical origin that defines them means that treating them as a coherent group is not just perilous, but impossible, especially if the reasoning is restricted to France itself. An important part of their identity derives from a global community that is also extremely diverse.
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This may help to explain why Macron believes that Islam is in a crisis. Someone who has a “certain idea” of France itself expects other nations and groups of people to have a certain idea of themselves. For the universalist republican Macron, anything that isn’t uniform and unified must be in a state of crisis.
By taking on the entire Muslim world, Macron may end up disastrously achieving the goal of unifying Muslims by posing as their common enemy. His policies that now insist on shaping all young Muslims in France into the universalist republican mold is creating rather than resolving tension. For one thing, it inevitably provokes more irrational attacks by unhinged fanatics — and every community has its unhinged fanatics.
Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Méheut writing in The New York Times call the system Macron is putting in place “France’s Dragnet,” a policing campaign that now focuses on Muslim children as young as 10. Teachers have been instructed to denounce children who show signs of thinking differently about the values of the republic. It has already left numerous children “traumatized” and fearful to speak freely in class for fear of being suspected of terrorist intentions. That is how, in the wake of drama surrounding the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, France promotes its republican version of “freedom of expression.”
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Macron’s Problem With the News in English
by Philippa Kaur 17 November 2020, 16:34
At some moment in the recent past, French President Emmanuel Macron assigned himself the mission to single-handedly reform Islam and imbue it with the Enlightenment values that made it possible for a lowly Rothschild banker to rise up to become the democratically elected pseudo-monarch of France’s faltering Fifth Republic. He thus became understandably upset when he discovered how English-speaking media have been failing to align behind his global leadership on the issue of defending French exceptionalism, which Macron defines as his nation’s divine right to promote half-assed, unfunny, gratuitously insulting pseudo-satirical cartoons.
As one of the rare French leaders to be reasonably fluent in English, Macron was able to track what he sees as the half-assed, unfunny, gratuitously insulting reporting of the English-speaking press concerning his noble mission. After reading comments made in the Financial Times and Politico, his growing ire impelled him to pick up his phone and call Ben Smith, a highly regarded journalist at The New York Times, to make sure that his imperious voice would be heard on the other side of the Atlantic.
Emmanuel Macron Defends His Crusade
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Ben Smith doesn’t hide his surprise at receiving an unsolicited phone call from a man who has no small opinion of the importance of his office. He dutifully reports the president’s concern: “So when I see, in that context, several newspapers which I believe are from countries that share our values — journalists who write in a country that is the heir to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — when I see them legitimizing this violence, and saying that the heart of the problem is that France is racist and Islamophobic, then I say the founding principles have been lost.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Share our values:
Follow the dogmas of our secular religion.
Contextual Note
The complaint that the anglophone media has been unjust to him is not something that Macron discovered on his own. On October 29, Princeton professor Bernard Haykel published an article in Le Monde taking to task the reporting of both The New York Times and The Washington Post for treating the recent beheading of Samuel Paty — a French teacher who showed his students the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Prophet Muhammad as part of a class on freedom of speech — as a crime rather than as a significant political event reflecting the actions of a global conspiracy. Haykel achieved some notoriety in the US in 2015 when he publicly complained, as did many Republicans, that “President Obama refused to use the word ‘Islamic’ to describe the brutal group calling itself the ‘Islamic State.’”
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Oddly, Haykel himself, in a CNN interview, called the Islamic State the result of “an expression of this humiliation, this rage, this sense of disenfranchisement that hundreds of millions of Muslims feel.” In other words, the problem is essentially political and not religious.
Why did Macron wait till now to vent his spleen by calling Ben Smith? Perhaps he believes that the defeat of President Donald Trump has removed the influence of The Donald’s evangelical voters from the corridors of power in Washington. With Joe Biden’s election, Macron can now assume that the college-educated Americans who elected the Democrat are ready to align behind Macron’s brand of Enlightenment-inspired aggressive Eurocentrism that privileges the idea of a clash of civilizations. Macron is not asking The Times for more accurate reporting of events. He wants English-speakers in the US and the UK to adhere to his personal worldview. The French journal Le Point offered this summary of the French president’s conversation with Ben Smith: “For the President of the Republic, the journalists of these media organizations do not understand the French context in which these events occurred.”
Is Macron ready to teach them the truth and help them understand? In his inimitable Jupiterian style, consistent with that of a 19th-century “laïc,” or schoolmaster, rather than with teaching, he prefers dictating. As Smith reports, “Mr. Macron argues that there are big questions at the heart of the matter.” It appears to be a clash of civilizations within Western civilization. “Our model is universalist, not multiculturalist.” This is Macron’s way of saying that we are right and you are wrong. “Universalist” means one culture possesses the rules that apply everywhere. “Multiculturalist” means anarchy, chaos, or what Charles de Gaulle once called the “chienlit.”
As a journalist concerned with respecting the context, Smith insists on the importance of paying attention to the pragmatic as well as the abstract: “Such abstract ideological distinctions can seem distant from the everyday lives of France’s large ethnic minorities, who complain of police abuse, residential segregation and discrimination in the workplace.” Smith recounts how the conversation ended, with Macron’s concluding suggestion, “My message here is: If you have any question on France, call me.”
Monsieur Macron, after all, is “le president,” the man with all the answers. When back in 2018 Fox News journalist Chris Wallace asked Macron the question, “So what is the best part of being the president of France?” Macron replied, “Deciding.” The universalist Macron especially likes to decide how others should live their lives and report their news.
Historical Note
Throughout history, even the most powerful despots, skilled at stifling literary production at home, have rarely attempted to censor the foreign press. But when a 21st-century monarch claiming to represent universal values senses danger abroad, no choice remains but to inform The New York Times, after which order may be restored.
Macron’s concern highlights a curious historical phenomenon that helps explain the persistence of institutional racism in both France and the United States. For a long time, Christian fundamentalism provided the core justification of racism in the US. Over time, it became secularized and merged with the political idea of Manifest Destiny, thanks to which a white Christian population was fated to conquer a continent and eventually lead the world.
The rationalist tradition inaugurated by the French Enlightenment provides a different brand of racism, one based on admiration of the achievements of white civilization. The ideas circulating in France in the 18th century contributed to the founding of the US, a nation whose economy to a large extent depended on the maintenance of slavery. All men may have been created equal but only some acquire property, enabling them to become more equal than others. And since blacks cannot aspire to property, they are clearly not equal at all. When revolutionary France embraced “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” it abolished any religious rationale to justify slavery. At the same time, it began its mission civilisatrice, a concept invented to justify a century and a half of brutal colonialism, especially in Africa.
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The chaotic revolutionary and Napoleonic eras ended with the restoration of monarchy. Christian missionaries now had their role to play, civilizing the dark populations of the world. But the colonizers focused primarily on Enlightenment values that supported the idea of efficient, profitable economic exploitation of other peoples and their resources.
The French were inviting others into the classroom of civilization, demonstrating their eagerness to dictate universalist values to peoples who, as Nicolas Sarkozy framed it in his notorious address in Dakar, never “fully entered into history … never really launched themselves into the future.” Racism was already a vibrant feature of the Enlightenment. In a recent article for Foreign Policy on Voltaire, generally revered as the paragon of tolerance, French-Algerian journalist Nabila Ramdani pointed to the philosopher’s portrayal of Africans in his 1769 work “Les Lettres d’Amabed” as “‘animals’ with a ‘flat black nose with little or no intelligence!’” She cites other luminaries of the period, pointing out that such judgments were “typical of Enlightenment philosophers, who provided disturbing justifications for the hatred of racial and religious groups.”
Ben Smith notes that Macron’s “larger claim is that, after the attacks, English and American outlets immediately focused on failures in France’s policy toward Muslims rather than on the global terror threat.” How dare the foreign press choose its own approach to reporting the news? How dare it take into account the complete context of a dramatic event rather than focusing on what every politician knows the news media prefer to report on: gore, human suffering and the paranoia they inspire?
Perhaps Macron hopes The New York Times will do for him what it did for Joe Biden out of fear of Trump’s being reelected. Marine Le Pen is France’s Trump. Promoting paranoid theories, as The Times did with Russiagate, is the best way to ensure the centrist will defeat the enemy on the right.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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What Is Behind the Rise of Islamophobia in France?
by Philippa Kaur 5 November 2020, 10:14
On October 29, the French Ministry of Interior sent out a message on social media warning of “Violent radicalization, Islamism … If you have any doubts about someone you know, contact the toll-free number.” The situation in France has exploded into what is now increasingly reminiscent of 1930s Germany when Hitler sought informants on Jews.
Muslims Will Not Kill God for Marianne
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Samuel Paty, a schoolteacher who showed his students the derogatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad that inspired the 2015 attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, was killed by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee, Abdoullakh Anzorov. When French President Emmanuel Macron defended the display of the cartoons, which are considered by Muslims to be extremely offensive, as a matter of freedom of expression, the ongoing tension between the French state and its roughly 6 million-strong Muslim population (or 10%) is, in fact, a manifestation of a much deeper crisis, heralding what seems to be a growing trend across Western civilization.
French Islam
For France, the issue has its roots in the country’s domestic and international politics. The concept of radical assimilation has been a part of France’s governance tradition since its colonial reign. In the 19th and 20th centuries, in Francophone Africa, the natives were considered “French” and “civilized” as long as they rejected their own cultures in favor of that of the colonial power.
The same mentality applies to the immigrants who have moved to France from former African colonies, particularly Algeria, Tunisia, and those countries across West Africa. This strict interpretation of the assimilation policy is further reinforced at home by the rigorous redefinition of French secularism, or laïcité, whereby the visibility of religion, particularly Islam, is suppressed in the public sphere, and the responsibility of immigrants, and Muslims in particular, is to demonstrate their attachment to French values and culture.
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The suppression of religion in the public sphere has created enormous friction between the secular state and Muslims, whose faith requires observance around the clock. For example, the arrest of Muslims who have had to pray in the streets due to lack of mosques has become commonplace. In a striking display of French secularism, a Muslim woman was forced on a beach in Cannes in 2016 by police to remove her Islamic burkini and given a citation for “wearing an outfit that disrespects good morals and secularism.” France’s aggressive attempt to create nationwide equality has naturally led to repression of diversity, forcing Muslims to retreat to ghettoized suburbs. This in turn created discrimination and a fear of social rejection among France’s rapidly growing Muslim population.
This brings us to how Islam is viewed in France. Much as across Europe, Islam is the fastest-growing faith in France. French Muslims are much younger and have considerably more children than other French nationals. Correspondingly, Christianity in France is in free fall. According to the survey by St. Mary’s University, London, only 25% of the French between the ages of 16 and 29 identify as Christian. What is even more concerning for the French state is that the number of people converting to Islam is on the rise as well. Out of France’s 6 million Muslims, 200,000 are estimated to be converts, among whom are celebrity figures such as the rapper Diam’s and footballer Franck Ribery. Conversion to Islam is particularly prevalent among women, which has created a body of research examining this trend.
The increasing demographic disparity between Islam and Christianity, coupled with an increasing refugee influx from Muslim countries, has given rise to the notion that within two generations, Muslims are going to be the majority in Europe. Naturally, this argument has been used by right-wing politicians across Europe. France is no exception. Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, has skillfully used this argument throughout her political career. In the first round of the 2017 French presidential elections, Le Pen garnered a sizable 21.3% of the vote against Emmanuel Macron’s 24%, only to lose in the run-off election. The 2017 election clearly showed that right-wing politics are on the rise in France and elsewhere in Europe.
Macron’s harsh stance toward French Muslims should also be seen from this angle. In the 2022 French presidential race, Macron is expected to seek a second term against Le Pen, his most likely contender. To the president’s dismay, the current polls suggest that at 26%, Le Pen has an edge over his 25%. This being the case, the incumbent Macron is clearly courting the far-right constituency by adopting Islamophobic policies that would be expected from a Le Pen presidency.
More Problems
The current atmosphere is highly conducive for a further rise of the far right across Europe. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by the Great Depression of 1929 and its devastating impact on Germany. Likewise, the 2008 global financial crisis jolted the West so much that we have been witnessing the demise of the center-left and the gradual rise of the radical right in Poland, Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the United States.
Macron’s current effort to elevate Islam as France’s biggest problem should also be seen as an attempt to distract the public from his failures at home and abroad. The rapidly deteriorating economy, austerity measures, heavy taxation and the proposed pension reform have inspired the yellow vests movement that has been staging violent demonstrations against the government since 2018. Abroad, France appears to be bogged down in its never-ending wars in former African colonies as French casualties pile up. In Libya, Macron has failed to secure warlord Khalifa Haftar’s rule. In the East Mediterranean, France has failed to secure the interests of Greece, an ally.
There is one country that France has had to unsuccessfully counter in the above-mentioned regions: Turkey. It is for this reason that Macron has consistently perceived Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his archrival and increased his anti-Turkey rhetoric. Furthermore, Erdogan, at the moment the most outspoken critic of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, is the only world leader who can influence Muslims in France, and Macron knows it. Erdogan’s call on Muslims for a worldwide boycott of French products prompted the French government’s plea to the Muslim world to denounce the boycott. While the economic effect of the boycott is not known yet, Macron seems to be softening his tone on the cartoon issue.
France’s unsuccessful assimilation policies, rapidly deteriorating economy, failed foreign policy alongside the ensuing rise of the far right have all contributed to the current demonization of Muslims in the country. As Western values such as democracy, human rights and equality are losing relevance, there is little hope that this trend will change any time soon.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Emmanuel Macron Defends His Crusade
by Philippa Kaur 2 November 2020, 15:29
Throughout the month of October, French President Emmanuel Macron projected himself into the global news cycle as the leader of a new crusade launched ostensibly to bring Islam into conformity with French Enlightenment ideals. In reality, his campaign is aimed at bolstering his chances of winning a second term in the 2022 presidential election.
Is Peace Religious or Secular?
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The Muslim world’s reaction to Macron’s crusade has been one of stunned bewilderment. In an interview with Al Jazeera on Saturday, the president offered no apologies and instead sought to explain his motives: “I understand the sentiments being expressed and I respect them. But you must understand my role right now, it’s to do two things: to promote calm and also to protect these rights.”
Here is today’s 3D definition:
Promote calm:
Engage in any action — however ill-conceived, unjust or destructive — that affords peace of mind to a politician worried about his diminishing chances of winning the next election.
Contextual Note
Can President Macron be serious when he says that his actions and discourse have served to promote calm? Has the world or France itself become calmer since his speech at the beginning of October, when he declared that Islam was in crisis globally? Can he be unaware that when a Western leader announces what Al Jazeera describes as “his plan ‘to reform Islam’ in order to make it more compatible with his country’s republican values,” some may interpret that as a sign of aggression against their culture by a European who appears to have retained a neocolonial mindset?
Does Macron believe that by providing a supplementary motive to unhinged individuals driven by fanaticism and ready to engage in murderous violence against his own people he is promoting calm and protecting rights? President Donald Trump might claim the same thing when he encourages white supremacists and the police to attack protesters in the name of “retribution.” The only logical perspective that could lead to calm in the struggle he describes would be total victory. In other words, crushing and humiliating the other side. But even that would be a failed plan. Humiliation brings short-term peace but sets the stage for major revolt as soon as the winner’s grip begins to loosen.
Macron proudly announces: “I will always defend in my country the freedom to speak, to write, to think, to draw.” The only threat to that freedom can come from institutions with the power to repress it, not from individuals who react irrationally to what some people write, think and draw. Macron’s language is fundamentally dishonest. The controversy that has been going on for over a decade is not about the right to speak, think and draw. It concerns the possible social consequences of publishing, disseminating and amplifying messages that some may interpret as an expression of hateful and discriminatory intimidation.
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Jules Ferry, the virulently anticlerical father of laïcité, created France’s modern public education system. As minister of education in 1883, he instructed teachers to speak “with the greatest reserve, whenever you risk even brushing against a religious sentiment of which you are not the judge.” He insisted that if “a single honest man may take offense at what you are going to say … abstain from saying it.” Macron has a different reading of laïcité. In fact, the controversy turns around a bigger problem at the core of today’s civilization: the role of the media. In its quest to increase its audience, the media routinely amplifies every difference of opinion or quarrel that it presents as a cause to be defended, on one side or the other. In such circumstances, every word and gesture may be perceived as a provocation of the other side.
By way of contrast, in a society that encourages healthy dialogue and debate, friction and tension will inevitably exist, but they contribute to building a culture of tolerance and open exchange. Social dialogue can have its ugly moments, as parties directly challenge each other. But respectful dialogue creates networks of understanding rather than pockets of conflict. As soon as debates are turned into defending “a cause,” dialogue disappears.
Causes kill debate by invoking a higher principle that often exists only in the purveyor’s mind. Emmanuel Macron’s formulation of the idea of freedom is far more absolute than its actual practice in France, where restrictions on freedom of speech, including libel and hate speech, incitement to violence and insulting public servants, exist and are enforced. Jules Ferry would have expected his teachers to reflect on whether the Charlie Hebdo cartoons fell into any of those categories.
French political culture has traditionally reserved a special status for satire. Its preservation ensures that the people may criticize the government and institutions of authority. The government is free to counter with its own arguments but runs the risk of being held to account if it goes too far in restricting citizens’ rights. The cartoons in question had nothing to do with the questioning of national authorities. They were much closer to nationalistic propaganda.
The controversy over the cartoons appears to cross an invisible borderline between satire and gratuitous and xenophobic insult. There is no readily identifiable borderline but a culture that pretends to be as rational as France’s vaunted Enlightenment culture claims to be should acknowledge the reality of the borderline. Even in his attempt at an apology in the Al Jazeera interview, Macron clearly refuses to do so.
It is a well-known fact that politicians distort everything to attain their ends. It is part of their job profile. Macron distorts even the idea of distorting. He complains about “distortions” that led people “to believe that the caricatures were a creation of the French state.” That is clearly a distortion on his part. No serious voice has made that claim. He then generously notes that “in the world there are people who distort Islam and in the name of this religion that they claim to defend, they kill, they slaughter.” That may be true, but the effect of his speeches has been to distort the nature what he calls the “global crisis” of Islam.
Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, Marwan Bishara, sagely and humbly expresses the wish that Macron “should begin to improve the atmosphere between France, Europe, and the Muslim world.” Bishara nevertheless implies that is unlikely. On this occasion, he doesn’t mention the reason why, which he is well aware of. There will be a new presidential election in 18 months.
Historical Note
Samuel Paty, the assassinated teacher at the heart of all this, undoubtedly believed that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, originally published in 2015, belonged to history and could be treated as artifacts of the past when he presented them in a civics class. After all, political cartoons published in newspapers are essentially ephemera. They quickly disappear from everyone’s cultural memory. The Greeks understand that since their word for newspaper is εφημερίδα — ephemerida.
If Paty believed that the cartoons belonged only to the past, he was wrong. Because of the media’s and politicians’ obsession with causes and the fact that the Charlie Hebdo murder trial was currently underway, the issues around the cartoons were very much alive.
In the late 20th century, Ireland endured a prolonged conflict between Protestants and Catholics marked by terrorism. The IRA was better organized and better equipped than any of today’s loose Muslim extremist networks. We might wonder today whether it would have made any sense for Protestant cartoonists to publish cartoons of the pope as a terrorist? (They obviously could not have taken Jesus as their target because both of the warring religions were Christian).
The answer is simple. It didn’t happen. Everyone understood the conflict had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with communities and conflicting loyalties. This is perfectly illustrated in a joke from that time: It’s night and a man is walking on the streets of Belfast. Suddenly a shadowy figure leaps out and thrusts him against a wall in a dark alley. He feels a gun pressed up against his skull. A voice shouts, “What religion are you?” He thinks: “If I say Catholic and he’s Protestant, he’ll kill me. If I say Protestant and he’s Catholic, I’m dead.” Thinking quickly, he said, “I’m Jewish.” He then heard the voice blurt out, “I must be the luckiest Palestinian in Ulster.”
Now that is meaningful and effective satire. Though troubling, it can elicit a laugh from people of any religion.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Belarus: Is There a Way Out of the Crisis?
by Philippa Kaur 29 September 2020, 13:32
Belarus is politically deadlocked. The peaceful movement protesting against veteran ruler Alexander Lukashenko and the manipulation of the presidential election on August 9 is too strong for the state to simply suppress it by force. As long as the political leadership continues to respond with repression, the protest movement will persist and diversify. However, it lacks the institutional leverage to realize its demands.
President Lukashenko can rely on the state apparatus and the security forces, whose loyalty stems in part from fear of prosecution under a new leader. Lukashenko himself is determined to avoid the fate of leaders like Kurmanbek Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan and Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, who were driven into exile following “color revolutions.”
Belarus Is Not a Unique Case
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This stalemate is replicated at the international level. While the European Union refuses to recognize the result of the presidential election, the Kremlin regards Lukashenko as the legitimately elected leader. Moscow refuses to talk with the Coordination Council founded by the opposition presidential candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. The EU, for its part, interacts mainly with representatives of the protest movement because Minsk flatly rejects mediation initiatives from the West.
Currently, only Russia regards Lukashenko’s announcement of constitutional reform and early elections as a path out of the political crisis. All other actors dismiss his constitutional initiative as merely an attempt to gain time.
Constitutional Reform as a Starting Point
In fact, a constitutional reform could offer a solution. But it would have to be flanked by confidence-building measures and guarantees. The following aspects should be considered:
An end to all forms of violence and repression against peaceful demonstrators; no prosecutions for protest-related offensesRelease of all political prisoners, give an option of return for all exiles and deportees; reinstatement of persons dismissed from state employmentConvocation of a constitutional assembly integrating all relevant political and social groupsConstitutional reform to be completed within a maximum of 12 monthsParallel reform of the electoral code to ensure a transparent election process and appointment of a new Central Election CommissionFree and fair presidential and parliamentary elections in accordance with criteria set by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)The specific details of such a roadmap would have to be clarified in dialogue between the current state leadership and the Coordination Council, with the possibility of both sides agreeing to involve additional societal actors. Mechanisms would be needed to ensure observance.
In this regard, granting all state actors an amnesty would be key. At the same time, acts of violence and repression occurring in the past weeks would need to be documented by an independent body. On the model of the truth and reconciliation commissions employed elsewhere, a reappraisal of recent history could lay the groundwork for a moderated process — also involving the churches — to overcome the divisions in society. It would also preserve the possibility of later prosecution if the roadmap was not followed.
What the EU Could Do
The European Union could support such a process by suspending the implementation of sanctions as long as the implementation of the roadmap is proceeding. It should also prepare a phased plan to support reforms, the economy and civil society; certain aspects would be implemented immediately, with full implementation following the conclusion of the constitutional reform and new elections.
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But the Belarusian actors must be fully in charge of preparing and realizing such a roadmap. International institutions should restrict themselves to advising, upon request, on procedural matters. Such a function could for example be assumed by members of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe.
Russia might potentially see benefits in such a scenario. The Kremlin’s backing for Lukashenko risks fostering anti-Russian sentiment in Belarus’ traditionally pro-Russian society. In the current situation, an extensive integration agreement would be a risky venture for Moscow. Massive Russian subsidies would be needed to cushion the deep economic crisis emerging in Belarus.
Moreover, parts of Russian society could respond negatively if Moscow were to intervene politically, economically and possibly even militarily in Belarus. Conversely, an orderly transformation would allow Moscow to minimize such costs. But that would presuppose the Kremlin factoring societies into its calculations.
This approach would demand substantial concessions from all sides. But the alternative — in the absence of dialogue and compromise — is long-term political instability with a growing risk of violent escalation.
The European Union should therefore use all available channels of communication to encourage a negotiated solution. It should refrain from supporting Baltic and Polish initiatives to treat Tsikhanouskaya as the legitimately elected president of Belarus. That would contradict its approach of not recognizing the election result. It would also exacerbate the risk of transforming a genuinely domestic crisis into a geopolitical conflict.
*[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions relating to foreign and security policy.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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