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    Europe’s Thirst for Virtual Water: Blueberry Fields Forever?

    Blueberries have long established themselves among the superfoods. They are tasty, low in calories and full of beneficial nutrients. Most importantly, they are a rich source of antioxidants that serve to protect against a range of diseases, most notably cancer. This might explain why the demand for blueberries has steadily increased over the past few years. Between 2015 and 2019, Europe’s blueberry imports increased from 45,000 tons to 113,000 tons. Between 2018 and 2019 alone, the volume of imports rose by more than 40%.

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    Blueberries consist mostly of water. In fact, some 85% of the fruit is H2O. And that’s where the problem starts. In Western Europe, most of the blueberries you find in supermarkets today are imported from Spain; more precisely, from one province in the autonomous region of Andalusia, Huelva, located in the southwest, where Spain borders Portugal. Andalusia is known for the beauty of its major cities like Seville, Granada and Cordoba, and its beach resorts of Marbella, Torremolinos and Malaga.

    Andalusia also happens to be among the poorest autonomous regions in Spain. In 2019, it ranked close to the bottom with respect to GDP per capita; only Estremadura and Melilla ranked lower. In 2016, around 40% of the population lived in poverty; among children, the poverty rate stood at 44%.

    The Blueberry Dark Side

    Andalusia has also been the launching pad for Vox, Spain’s radical populist right. In the regional elections of 2018, Vox gained 11% of the vote, which put the party in a pivotal position. Since neither the left nor the right commanded a majority in the region’s parliament, Vox found itself in a position of kingmaker. At the time, Vox came out in favor of the center right. In Huelva, like across Andalusia, Vox is a major political player. In the November national election of 2019, Vox garnered more than 20% of the vote in Huelva, second only to the socialists who won 36%.

    Vox is a political force to be reckoned with. The party promotes itself as an ardent defender of ordinary hardworking people and of the unity of the Spanish state, threatened by Catalan and Basque independence aspirations. At the same time, the party has vigorously rejected any human responsibility for climate change. Environmental concerns are certainly not on the party’s agenda.

    This brings us back to blueberries from Spain. Over the past several years, the cultivation of blueberries in Huelva province has progressively expanded. Between 2016 and 2020, blueberry spring exports (February to May) increased by more than 80% in volume and more than 40% in value. At the same time, land devoted to blueberries increased from 4.4 squared miles to roughly 14 square miles. As a result, production more than doubled, from 20,815 tons in 2014-15 to 45,506 tons in 2019-20. Altogether, the cultivation of the three major “red fruits” produced in Huelva — blueberries, strawberries and raspberries — provides employment to over 100,000 people, generating roughly €1 billion ($1.2 billion) in revenue.

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    This is one side of the equation, one that Huelva’s authorities like to propagate. Unfortunately for them, the other (dark) side has once again been making international headlines. Here the focus is on the disastrous impact that cash crops have had on the natural environment, in particular on the Donana national park, a wetland reserve and UN Heritage site that is a refuge for over 2,000 different species of wildlife and serves as a way station for millions of migratory birds every year.

    The national park was already on the receiving end of an environmental catastrophe that severely affected its delicate ecological balance. In 1998, a dam burst at a mine near Seville, releasing up to 5 million cubic meters of toxic slush into the Guadiamar River, the main water source for the park. Cleaning up the mess cost the Spanish state some €90 million. It spent a further €360 million to restore parts of the park. Some of the money came from the European Union. It took several years for the park’s wildlife to recover.

    Yet little was learned from the disaster. By 2016, UNESCO threatened to put the park on its danger list. And for good reason: As The Guardian reported at the time, Donana was “said to have lost 80% of its natural water supplies due to marsh drainage, intensive agriculture, and water pollution from the mining industry.” The article cited a report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) that charged that farmers had been drilling more than 1,000 illegal wells that accelerated “the park’s destruction, as drought-resistant plants replace water-dependent ones in the region.”

    Ecological Crisis

    The expansion of cash crop cultivation in Huelva has only added to the ecological crisis, once again ringing alarm bells not only in individual countries that are among Huelva’s most important customers, such as Germany and the United Kingdom, but also in Brussels. A recent report on the website of Germany’s premier news program, ARD’s “Tagesschau,” set the tone: “Spain’s national park is drying out.” The main reason: Huelva’s red fruit industry has not only encroached on park land but, more importantly, has systematically starved the park of its most important lifeline — water. According to the report, estimates are that roughly 1,000 of the wells dug to irrigate the plantations are illegal. In other words, nothing had changed since 2016.

    By 2020, the European Commission had had enough. It took Spain to court. In December, it charged that Spain had looked the other way and allowed the continued illegal appropriation of groundwater, in the process inflicting serious damage to the nationally and internationally protected Donana wetlands. For all practical purposes, the failure lay largely with the regional Andalusian government. Five years ago, the regional government advanced a plan to protect Donana; five years later, according to an article in Spain’s leading newspaper El Pais, only 17% of the measures had been realized, 43% were incomplete, the rest — nada.

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    The regional government has, however, made an effort to go after Huelva’s most egregious water thieves. In March, two ex-mayors — one a socialist, the other a conservative — were put on trial together with 13 farmers, all of them accused of illegal appropriation of water. At the same time, the government has tried to shut down illegal wells. But with over a thousand currently in operation, the backlog is great, and more often than not the authorities have met with determined resistance.

    At the same time, however, the regional government has continued to license new water rights. In 2017, for instance, the government conceded more than 270,000 cubic meters of public groundwater to a cooperative society, which allowed the cooperative to more than double its production of blueberries in the Sierra de Huelva. All this, as a public official in charge of water management claimed, was done in the name of “sustainable development.” Donana’s endangered wildlife would probably disagree. But then, they don’t have a voice, and those speaking in their name, such as the WWF, have to a large degree been unheeded.

    Virtual Water

    Spanish blueberries produced in Huelva are a prime example of the ludicrousness of a development strategy based on international trade. Spain is a semi-arid, water-poor country. The distribution of water across the national territory is highly unequal. Water is relatively abundant in the north and relatively scarce in the south. Agriculture accounts for a large junk of the country’s total water use, roughly 60%. Yet agriculture contributes just 3% to the country’s GDP and employs roughly 4% of the active workforce. Particularly in the south, decades of agricultural practices have exhausted the soil and turned once fertile land into desert, shrinking the supply of arable land.

    Under the circumstances, producing a crop as water-intensive as blueberries in a semi-arid region borders on the absurd. The amount of water required to produce a certain amount of a product is generally referred to as a water footprint. The water footprint of blueberries is around 840 liters per one kilogram of fruit. This means that embedded in every kilo of blueberries for sale in the local supermarket are more than 800 liters of water. This is what is nowadays known as “virtual water” — the amount of water hidden from and invisible to the end consumer. Virtual water has become an increasingly important concept in international trade theory. What it means in practical terms is that with every kilo of blueberries we import from Spain, we bring in more than 800 liters of water.

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    By now, the absurdity of the situation should be obvious. Not only do we import water from a water-scarce region, but by importing the virtual water embedded in blueberries, we contribute to the depletion of a scarce resource in the exporting region which, in turn, is a major cause of the gradual destruction of one of Western Europe’s largest natural wetlands. And things are likely to get even worse. The upsurge in demand for blueberries and other red fruits has brought new producers into the market.

    As a result, prices have substantially declined, compelling producers to expand production and explore new market opportunities. Just the other day, after years of negotiations, Brazil gave a green light to the importation of blueberries from Huelva after the red fruits industry passed an on-the-ground inspection by a delegation of Brazilian authorities. And Brazil might only be the beginning. Huelva authorities have already set their eyes on even larger markets, notably China and India. In the meantime, environmental advocates are pinning their hopes on the European Court of Justice, which is supposed to consider the case over the next few months. Judgments rendered by the court are binding. Member states are obliged to comply with court decisions without delay. If found guilty, Spain might have to pay heavy fines.

    The WWF, which has been among the most vocal and determined advocates of the Donana national park, is confident that the court will rule in its favor. As Juan Carlos del Olmo, the secretary general of WWF Spain, put it, “Spain is about to be condemned for allowing the destruction of Doñana, a heritage that belongs to all Europeans.” He emphasized that the “Spanish authorities and especially the Regional Government of Andalusia, which have both turned a blind eye to this situation for years,” need “to take real measures to halt the degradation of Doñana.” This means, above all, closing the illegal wells that are “looting the aquifer and destroying biodiversity.”

    2020 marked the fifth anniversary of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, to which Spain has committed itself “at the highest level.” This includes ensuring “the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources.” It is not entirely obvious how the export of massive amounts of virtual water from Huelva’s blueberry fields is supposed to contribute to the latter goal.

    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 the “Great Reset”?

    Who wouldn’t reveal what is kept out of sight by those who do not have our best interests at heart? Although it is not only the far right that claims to be in the know about sinister plots, they certainly provide a steady stream of such revelations.

    Amongst recent ones, the “great replacement” stands out as an attempt to capture the imagination of the public. According to this ethno-nationalist theory, the “indigenous European—e.g., white—population is being replaced by non-European immigrants.” Yet since the second half of 2020, “the great reset” (TGR) conspiracy theory has been making rounds on the internet too.

    World Economic Forum

    In 2020, the need for a reset was presented by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in terms of reimagining capitalism in a post-pandemic world. As per the WEF, there is an “urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.”

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    The World Economic Forum brings together high-profile figures from politics and business every year in Davos. So, with the WEF pushing the initiative, it is no surprise that it has become a gift for conspiracy theorists. “Globalists” have been accused of using — or even orchestrating — the COVID-19 pandemic to rebuild and take control of the world economy, with a liberal-cosmopolitan elite executing the next step in a quest to overcome resistance.

    In an article for The Intercept about TGR, Naomi Klein, a Canadian-American writer and activist, talks about the difficulties to critically engage with the WEF project from a progressive perspective. She also points out that the initiative does provide “a coronavirus-themed rebranding of all the things Davos does anyway.” In her typical style, Klein summarizes the plan as encompassing “some good stuff that won’t happen and some bad stuff that certainly will and, frankly, nothing out of the ordinary in our era of ‘green’ billionaires readying rockets for Mars.”

    So, while there is ample space for criticism, far-right groups have been working on turning TGR into an umbrella for their political agenda. Globally, readers might have encountered such attempts. In November 2020, a video of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a UN meeting began circulating. In the clip, Trudeau says that the pandemic provided an opportunity for a “reset.” After the video went viral, he stated that thinking about such a reset in terms of a conspiracy theory arises from people “looking for reasons for things that are happening to them … we’re seeing a lot of people fall prey to disinformation.”

    The Far Right

    Against this background, the following briefly summarizes key aspects of TGR as they have circulated among the German-speaking far right. The cover pages of Compact, a German radical-right magazine, and the monthly of the extreme-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) have illustrated the conspiracy theory. An offshoot of the Austrian Identitarian Movement published a webpage, distributed leaflets and organized information booths called “info-zones” about TGR. These examples assert that the conspiracy attempts to put the form of globalization that existed prior to the pandemic on steroids. Rather than limiting globalization, which some claim enabled the worldwide spread of the coronavirus, even more of the same old medicine is being administered.

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    In an interview with the NPD monthly, Alexander Dugin, the Russian far-right ideologue, says that TGR is both the latest attempt by “globalists” and “the final battle” that is openly totalitarian and characterized by censorship, political repression and homicide. With the exaggerated help of the media, homogenous opinions allegedly rule.

    Various sources use the term Gleichschaltung, the process through which the Nazis established total control over German society, to describe what is unfolding today. Compact magazine claims we are already in 1934 (and not in 1933 when the Nazi Party took the first steps toward Gleichschaltung) as, apparently, the global, totalitarian takeover began last year. Unsurprisingly, the WEF, the European Union and politicians like German Chancellor Angela Merkel are said to be the villains of the story.

    As TGR is supposed to move the public even closer toward a global government, it not only endangers sovereignty and democracy, but also peoples and cultures. That is, conspiracy theorists claim that TGR aims to destroy existing bonds and structures through repeated lockdowns so as to provoke calls for and install a new world order. Or, as Martin Sellner puts it in a video dedicated to TGR, “here, we see one of the basic principles of universalist, globalist, totalitarian ideologues. Also, by the way, a basic principle of the Freemasonry, expressed, entirely free of conspiracy-theoretical wrong tracks: the world has to be built up.”

    Framework

    While such far-right views are hardly news, perhaps the most interesting attack is directed against transhumanism. By merging the digital with the physical world, the ruling elite, according to the Great Reset Stoppen website, enables “total surveillance.” As a result, global dictatorship becomes possible and a once rooted, cultural being is turned into a “socially isolated consumer” slave. Such a person is someone without property and privacy, and one who is not even encouraged to meet and mingle with others face to face. Hence, US tech companies are also on the list of villains.

    None of this is new, but TGR offers a framework for a wide range of far-right ideas, a rhetorical space into which diverse claims can be made. These include the “great replacement” as well as “patriotic” opposition to climate policies and Big Pharma and Big Tech. This time, those in the business of “revealing” sinister plots can even point to what is directly said by the World Economic Forum. Whether TGR will unite the far right’s stories and appeal to wider segments of the public remains to be seen.

    *[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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    Biden Changes the Russia Equation

    The Biden administration is posing some stark choices for its European allies. It is not only challenging them to stand more firmly against the Kremlin, but is expanding America’s expectations of what democracy should be inside their own countries. President Joe Biden’s tough position on Russia, especially the sanctions announced on April 15, risks further exacerbating the split within NATO countries over how tough to be on the Kremlin. The administration also risks blowback from Central and East European (CEE) states over its strong support for liberal democratic standards that not all of them endorse.

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    For all the contempt that many Europeans held for Donald Trump, his policies toward Russia were easier for some of them to live with. Hard-line NATO nations drew comfort from his continuation of sanctions against Moscow, sale of lethal arms to Ukraine and fierce opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Trump questioned Article 5 of the NATO charter, but Russian President Vladimir Putin never had the stomach to put Trump’s jumbled position on the issue to the test. Meanwhile, Europeans eager to accommodate Russia were encouraged by Trump’s attempts to forge a personal relationship with Putin and his enduring belief that the Kremlin could somehow become an ally.

    Trump was also a convenient president for those in CEE nations with conservative social values and an unsteady commitment to the rule of law. Trump’s attitude toward their countries was simply transactional; his interest was in what America could gain from their relationship. How they were governed held little interest for him.

    Bows and Wrist-Slaps

    Biden has changed the equation dramatically. Some might have expected him to set aside everything that Moscow did during the Trump presidency and focus on the future. Instead, Biden did the opposite. On April 15, he expelled Russian diplomats and imposed significant new sanctions for Russia’s actions during Trump’s time in office, leaving space for a whole new set of possible actions in case of further provocations from Moscow. Some observers found the measures Biden announced to be wrist-slaps.

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    But in many respects, the measures were significant and pointed clearly to future possibilities, ranging from new financial actions to the criminal prosecution of senior Russian regime figures. Officials also intimated that the US might already be retaliating on the cyber front.

    Biden has made the appropriate bows to potential cooperation with Moscow and offered Putin a summit in the coming months in a third country. But overall, the tone of his message to Russia has been hostile, including calling Putin a “killer.” Putin’s claim to legitimacy, at home and abroad, is built on the idea that he is a respected statesman and even something of an intellectual rather than the boss of a dictatorship backed by organized crime. (While most Russian reports on Biden’s comments translated “killer” as “ubiytsa,” the usual word for “murderer,” some media chose the imported word “killer,” which in Russian means a mob hitman.) 

    With Biden taking a more uncompromising attitude to the Kremlin, the question now is whether Western responses to Russian provocations will become much more unified and move well beyond diplomatic statements and scattered financial sanctions. Is a point approaching where US pressure — plus Russia’s threats to Ukraine, its torture of Alexei Navalny, its cyberattacks against the West and its murder of opponents abroad — might finally lead the allies to slash the scale of business deals with Moscow, choke off the flow of illicit Russian money and impose tighter restrictions on visas to the EU? Even if sanctions don’t work, they say something about the values that the country imposing them stands for.

    In CEE countries, substantial numbers of citizens still believe Russia poses little threat to their nations. But the drumbeat of provocations from Moscow, including espionage and even sabotage inside CEE countries, will have its effect. Even though Visegrad nations lack a united policy on Ukraine — mainly because of Hungary — they all backed Czechia’s expulsion of Russian diplomatic staff over the explosion of an arms depot in 2014. Will allied nations now respond to Czechia’s call for them to expel Russian diplomats from their countries, too, to show solidarity?

    Human Rights Challenge

    Meanwhile, the new US administration has thrown down a human rights challenge not only to authoritarian regimes, but to some of its CEE allies. Biden’s team has made clear that America once again cares very much about democratic rights in other countries. When directed at Russia, this message has the dual advantage of reflecting American values while also pressuring Putin, who, judging by his repression of even tiny protests, seems to genuinely believe a “color revolution” is around the corner.

    Yet the policy may well make some allies uncomfortable. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a speech on March 30, declared that in America’s view, there is no “hierarchy of rights” in a democracy. He not only vigorously and specifically defended abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, but essentially put them on the same level as freedom of speech and religion. In so doing, he lined up with forces in the EU that are pressing some CEE countries not only to strengthen basic democratic institutions, but to also adopt liberal social values. The US position creates a new opening for pro-Russian and populist politicians who have been claiming for years that the West is intent on undermining the “morals” of former members of the Soviet bloc.

    Virtuous as the US position may be, it is unclear how far the administration will go with it. Blinken, an experienced diplomat, knows that idealism often must bow to political realities. As his predecessor Mike Pompeo put it, “Our commitment to inalienable rights doesn’t mean we have the capacity to tackle all human rights violations everywhere and at all times.” Even if the administration recognizes no hierarchy of rights, it certainly has a hierarchy of interests. At the top of that hierarchy may well be the geopolitical imperative of keeping CEE nations out of Russia’s orbit.

    If the US runs into too-strong opposition over its human rights agenda, it could focus more on campaigning against corruption. That cause has wide public support. It is also effective against many anti-democratic forces, including pro-Russian actors who thrive on murky financial deals. This could de-escalate conflict over liberal social values while still encouraging activities that undermine Kremlin influence in the CEE region.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of GLOBSEC.]

    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 Politics of Recognition vs. Redistribution

    At an earlier stage of my life, I had the great pleasure of spending two years teaching at York University in Toronto, Canada. Unlike the University of Toronto, whose campus looks like Harvard or Yale, York resembles British public universities such as Sussex: modern, functional, but without what in French is called “cachet.” York University also happened to be one of the last genuinely left-wing schools in the Western world, at least in the social sciences. I had colleagues who had actually read Karl Marx — and took him seriously. 

    By sheer coincidence, the day I interviewed for a position in the Department of Political Science, York had scheduled a public lecture by Nancy Fraser, a renowned feminist political theorist/philosopher from the New School for Social Research in New York City. The lecture was on the politics of recognition. Given her impeccable left-wing credentials, York was friendly terrain — or so it seemed. I still remember Fraser’s rather stunned expression when confronted with a barrage of attacks by York’s Marxists, who charged her with discounting if not dismissing the central importance of social class. 

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    That was some 20 years ago. Yet ironically, the tension between the politics of recognition and the class-based politics of redistribution is still as pertinent as it was when Fraser theorized it in the late 1990s. In recent years, it has become even more of an issue of vital importance for the future of progressive politics in liberal democracies, not least because of the challenge posed by contemporary radical, right-wing populism.

    Social Justice

    The questions of both redistribution and recognition are about social justice. Above all, social justice concerns leveling the playing field. This is a point Fraser has never tired of repeating. She has adamantly pointed out that struggles for redistribution are anything but “antithetical to struggles for recognition.” The problem is that, more often than not, one tended to be disassociated from the other. In reality, however, social justice involved both questions of redistribution and of “representation, identity, and difference.” 

    Unfortunately, the reality is quite different. In the 1980s, the left, by and large, started to abandon their commitment to what once was called the working class and its aspirations. In its wake, as Axel Honneth noted more than a decade ago, “‘equal distribution’ or ‘equality of good’ no longer form its central categories, but ‘dignity’ and ‘respect.’” To make matters worse, ordinary workers not only lost their privileged position in left-wing narratives. They were also increasingly denigrated, their needs and aspirations dismissed, and their values and views tagged as reactionary and retro, an expression of pervasive working-class authoritarianism. 

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    I remember a column written by the German satirist Wolfgang Ebert that said it all in a few lines. The article appeared in 1985 in the prestigious German weekly Die Zeit. The text was meant to be taken as what it was: satire on Germany’s post-68 new left, their delusions and disillusionment, which finally ended in the complete disavowal of the proletariat as a revolutionary class. On this reading, if the revolution never happened, it was because “the masses — not to speak of the working class as the so-called subject of the revolution — failed.” 

    In fact, Ebert continued, the masses “always fail.” Instead of following their “true interests” or at least listening to their “intellectual leaders,” they preferred to follow the siren calls of consumerism. Ebert’s conclusion: “Who would be stupid enough to risk their neck for these dumb masses?” The German Social Democrats (SPD) certainly didn’t. That’s why they are where they are today. Since the federal election of 1983, their share of the vote has plunged, from 38% to just over 20% in 2017. 

    Fast forward to 2011 in France, a few months before socialist Francois Hollande narrowly defeated the sitting president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the second round of the 2012 election. The election was overshadowed by the downfall of socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who for some time had been seen as a serious candidate for the presidency until his aspirations were sunk by sex scandals. 

    Terra Nova

    The reason Strauss-Kahn is mentioned here is because of his affiliation with Terra Nova, a progressive think tank modeled after the Center for American Progress and charged with “contributing to the intellectual renewal of the Left in France and in Europe.” In 2011, Terra Nova released a strategic paper that essentially advised that the left should forget about French workers. These workers, the authors charged, were no longer concerned with economic and social questions; instead, they had bought into the “cultural issues” promoted by the right. At the same time, they had progressively been seduced by the far-right National Front, both on cultural and socioeconomic questions.

    In short, as a highly critical commentary on the Terra Nova report in France’s premier left-wing daily, Liberation, ironically put it, workers were “dirty and nasty” — at least that was the impression one got from reading the paper. If the socialists were serious about winning the 2012 presidential election, Terra Nova insisted, they had to come up with a new progressive subject. Terra Nova suggested a “future-oriented” coalition (“tomorrow’s France”), “younger, more diverse, more feminized.” This was to be a coalition of the culturally progressive and the economically marginalized — except, of course, traditional workers. 

    The analysis was apparently heavily influenced by American strategists busily constructing the new or “emerging” Democratic majority — the title of an influential book from 2004. Today, as a recent dissertation on this question demonstrates, this (hitherto still quite elusive) majority consists of the “ascendant” and “rising” American electorate — constituencies that, unlike the traditional white working class, are growing as a share of the overall electorate: people of color, the young and well-educated, socially liberal whites and single women. As Christopher Cimaglio, the author of the essay, pointed out, in this framework, “the white working class often serves as a receding reactionary backdrop to emerging, forward-looking groups: ‘a more highly educated and diverse constituency,’ ‘a coalition of transformation, comfortable with demographic and cultural change.’” 

    Political Polarization

    The result of this strategy is what we have today: widespread polarization, mutual recriminations, intense loathing on both sides of the aisle, and a politics of grievances and resentment that makes a mockery of one of America’s most sacred notions: e pluribus unum. Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, roughly 80% of registered voters, both Democrats and Republicans, said “their differences with the other side were about core American values.” Around 90% in both camps “worried that a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States.”

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    To be sure, the left’s embrace of identity politics and diversity, together with its somewhat callous dismissal of what in French is called the couches populaires (aka “ordinary people”) seeking to make a decent living, has not gone unchallenged. Just a few years ago in Spain, a polemic with the telling title “La Trampa de la Diversidad” (the diversity trap) became a national bestseller — and provoked a vicious backlash. Among other things, the author, the polemicist Daniel Bernabe, was charged with denigrating the feminist, LGBTQ and ecological causes, primarily for suggesting that the oppression of women was fundamentally rooted in economics — i.e., the capitalist system — rather than purely in sexism, which he considered as just another face of capitalism.

    For Bernabe, everything started with Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher managed to reframe economic inequality in terms of individual difference and diversity against a form of socialism that sought to impose “uniformity.” In the years that followed, socialists and social democrats, such as Tony Blair of the UK and Gerhard Schroder of Germany, bought into this narrative — with suboptimal success, to put it kindly.

    Recently in Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht, a leading politician of The Left party (Die Linke), provoked controversy with a new book highly critical of the left’s adoption of identity politics. Identity, according to Wagenknecht, has become the pet project of a self-indulgent, left-libertarian, individualistic, urban, cosmopolitan elite — a “lifestyle” politics reflecting the smug complacency of the morally superior, far removed from the mundane material concerns of ordinary workers. The charge implies that if today’s left embrace causes such as Fridays for Future or Black Lives Matter, it is less out of genuine conviction than out of the need to constantly reaffirm their distinctive identity and habitus, promoted as “the epitome of progressivism and responsibility.”

    Other critics of identity politics have been even less kind. “Blue Labour” theorist Jonathan Rutherford, for instance, in an article for New Statesman, argued that the decline of the British working class had turned Labour into a “party of the bourgeois left,” espousing what he called the cause of “cosmopolitan liberalism.” This, he charged, is the “culture of the elites,” one that is “deeply divisive,” grounded in identity politics. In turn, identity politics at least “in its libertarian pursuit of self-realisation and its judging and dividing into victim status hierarchies, is corrosive of society.”

    Under the influence of cosmopolitan liberalism, Rutherford argued, “progressive and left politics in the 1990s turned away from class politics and solidarity in favour of group identities and self-realisation.” In the process, the politics of recognition turned into a politics of victimization. At the same time, society has moved on. While the postindustrial, postmodern plebs fight over the question of who has been most victimized, the “new revolutionary subject,” the “‘universal educated person’ of urban, higher-educated and networked youth,” is busy conceptualizing a brave new world of material abundance, social harmony and ecological wellbeing — or so I understand what Rutherford is trying to say.

    Identity Politics

    Others have gone even further, charging that identity politics threatens to undermine liberal democracy. On this view, identity politics has led to a fragmentation of social cohesion, undermined a common sense of belonging, and been replaced by a new type of “tribalism” that has largely benefited the right and far right. As Francis Fukuyama pointed out, identity politics reflects “important grievances.” At the top of the list is the long history of denigration, discrimination and outright violence that various ethnic minorities have been subjected to by the white majority. 

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    In some cases, however, identity politics has taken on an “exclusive character where people’s ‘lived experiences’” determine who they are. This, Fukuyama said, has “created obstacles to empathy and communication.” One might add that it has done a disservice to the notion of a shared humanity. 

    In other cases, the combination of identity politics and political correctness has reached absurd dimensions. Take, for instance, the case of Felipe Rose, the iconic member of the Village People. Rose is the guy dressed in Native American garb, which has exposed him to charges of cultural appropriation and playing to stereotypes. As a critic put it, “Rose’s Halloween-style Indian is the only character [among the Village People] to play on the identity of a living culture.” Dina Gilio-Whitaker, the critic, added: “Why on earth, after American Indians have for decades been successfully waging war against the use of Indian stereotypes in popular culture, is Felipe Rose still parading around on stage in an Indian costume” like a cartoon character come to life? 

    The answer is simple. The singer defines himself as of Native American descent (Lakota Sioux) and has done more for America’s indigenous population than many a well-meaning left-wing culture warrior (pun intended). Skeptics might want to watch Rose’s “Trail of Tears” — a tribute to the “eviction” of the Cherokee and other nations from their ancestral lands resulting in thousands of deaths on the way.

    Does this mean the left should abandon recognition in favor of a return to an exclusive focus on redistribution? Quite the contrary: As Fukuyama has strongly insisted, the politics of recognition reflects a fundamental human desire for dignity, for being esteemed. Taking his cue from the eminent German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he noted that “history itself is driven by the struggle for recognition, by the desire of human beings to have their fundamental dignity recognised by other human beings and that modern democracy emerges when equal dignity, not the dignity of the master, but the mutual recognition of equal dignity, is achieved.” 

    Michael Sandel, a leading political philosopher and celebrated author of “The Tyranny of Merit,” argues along similar lines. As he wrote in The Atlantic, any “serious response to working-class frustrations must combat condescension and credentialist prejudice. It must also put the dignity of work at the center of the political agenda.” In the book, Sandel cited data chronicling the decline of America’s white working class, many of whom have simply fallen out of the labor market, as if “defeated by the indignities of a labor market indifferent to their skills.” The data comes from Isabel Sawhill’s work on what she calls “the forgotten Americans.”  They are the victims of the kind of “misrecognition” that Fraser has theorized. More often than not, they have given up, both with respect to the labor market and to life itself, succumbing to what Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called “deaths of despair.”

    “White Trash”

    These developments are not only highly unsettling. They also drastically demonstrate the central importance of recognition in the current period of hyperglobalization, accelerated innovation and automation, and run-away individualization. Under the circumstances, it is of paramount importance to bestow a modicum of visibility to the ignored and forgotten, to have their existence acknowledged.

    Yet this is seldom the case. America’s “white trash” underclass is a case in point. Poor and, more often than not, addicted to opioids, structurally irrelevant as both producers and consumers, white trash epitomizes what is wrong with today’s politics of recognition and identity, laying bare its internal contradictions — if not its inherent hypocrisies. White trash might appear to be an American phenomenon but it is not. As Imogen Tyler has shown, the denigration of the white, socially marginalized underclass is also prevalent in Britain, reflected in the notion of the “chav,” a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor. In fact, over the past two decades, “chavs” increasingly became a prevalent comedy television trope, exposing poor whites to ridicule and opprobrium by urban elites.

    This suggests that the struggle for recognition, as Fraser has affirmed, is an all-encompassing, comprehensive struggle based on an inclusive notion of hurt and grievances. On this reading, the struggle for recognition and dignity cannot be divorced from the struggle for redistribution or, for that matter, the struggle for equal participation. This, of course, is hardly a new idea. As early as 1918, Max Weber distinguished between three distinct but interrelated foundations of social inequality: resources, power and status. The latter refers to “inequality based on differences in honor, esteem, and respect.” As Stanford sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway has noted, we tend to forget “how much people care about public acknowledgement of their worth.” Yet they tend to “care about status quite as intensely as they do [about] money and power.” They want “to be someone.”

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    Historically, this was one of the main selling points of populist leaders, including Juan Peron in Argentina. Peron, who served two terms as president before his death in 1974, accorded workers and the poor and dispossessed “their own voice and a new sense of their relevance.” This was a particular concern of his wife, Evita, who “was instrumental in transforming the sense of identity of the workers and the poor, and in doing so she helped them gain a sense of their own ‘dignity’, as she frequently repeated.”

    As Carlos de la Torre, a leading specialist on Latin American populism, has put it, populism is “a politics of cultural and symbolic recognition of the despised underclasses. It transforms the humiliations that the rabble, the uncultured, the unseen, and those who have no voice have to endure in their daily life into sources of dignity and even redemption.” 

    Unfortunately, in today’s world, many people are denied the right to be someone. As Senator Bernie Sanders recently noted with respect to rural Americans, “there is not an appreciation of rural America or the values of rural America, the sense of community that exists in rural America.” He added: [S]omehow or another, the intellectual elite does have, in some cases, a contempt for the people who live in rural America. I think we’ve got to change that attitude and start focusing on the needs of people in rural America, treat them with respect, and understand there are areas there are going to be disagreements, but we can’t treat people with contempt.” 

    Unfortunately, this is has happened too often, not only in the United States but also in Europe. Social justice, however, can only be achieved if everyone is brought on board.

    Equal Rights

    There are myriad examples of how these dimensions of social justice are inextricably linked. Take, for instance, the struggle for women’s equal rights. In Germany, until 1958, women were not allowed — by law — to open their own bank account without the explicit permission of their husbands. In other words, it was the men who disposed of the money women brought into the marriage and the money they earned while married. In the United States, until the mid-1970s, banks could refuse to issue unmarried women a credit card. If they were married, their husbands were required to cosign.  

    Germany and the United States are not alone. In 1979, a British general practitioner refused to give former Labour MP Helen Goodman a prescription for contraception on the grounds that she was unmarried. In Switzerland, it took until 1971 for women to be granted the right to vote. Swiss men were largely opposed, as were many Swiss women. The reason why Switzerland agreed to accord women the right to vote was that the country wanted to accede to the European Convention on Human Rights. For this to happen, women’s suffrage was a sine qua non, much to the chagrin of Swiss men. In fact, it took until 1990 for the last Swiss canton (Appenzell Innerrhoden) to allow its female citizens to vote. Each of these cases confirmed Simone de Beauvoir’s conclusion that women constituted the “second sex.” No wonder the Vatican added her treatise to the index of prohibited books. 

    These examples illustrate the notion that the way in which humans are recognized — or not — has important consequences, material and otherwise. Take the case of gay rights. It took until 1987 for homosexuality to no longer be categorized as some kind of “mental disorder” in the United States. It took three more years for the World Health Organization (WHO) to follow suit. It took another few decades for the WHO to stop classifying gender incongruency as a behavioral and mental disorder. As Patchen Markell noted, “the denigration of non-normative sexualities … helps to sustain the maldistribution of resources ranging from health care to police protection.”

    In fact, take the more recent case of “welfare chauvinism,” which has led to attempts by Western European governments to limit access to social benefits for migrants and refugees while favoring the “native-born.” More often than not, the poor do not vote. Why should they? Nobody cares about them anyway.

    “Deplorables” in America

    Unfortunately but not unexpectedly — here, Fukuyama is right — the political right have, in recent years, hijacked identity politics in the service of division and polarization, driven by resentment and mutual recrimination. A paradigmatic example is the American tea party movement. One of its grievances was that welfare programs went “to ‘undeserving’ immigrants, minorities, and youth” instead of “hardworking” Americans.

    An even more outrageous example is a statement made by Idaho State Representative Priscilla Giddings, who recently justified cuts for Idaho’s universities. She claimed that state lawmakers “don’t want funds expended for courses, programs, services, or trainings that confer support for extremist ideologies, such as those tied to social justice.” Giddings, a member of the Republican Party, also opposed a bill in the Idaho legislature that would have released a federal grant designed to support the development of Idaho’s early childhood care and education system. She was particularly incensed that the program was aligned with a nonprofit organization that in its national catalog stated that “whiteness … confers privilege, as does being male” and that the organization “supports a ‘social justice curriculum.’” Giddings did not believe, she stated, “that you are privileged based on your gender or your race.” The bill failed, depriving Idaho’s children of much-needed funds.

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    Donald Trump, the former US president, built on this base during his first election campaign. To a large extent, he appealed to grievances not met by the dominant politics of recognition, which has tended to privilege minorities while dismissing the plight of the underprivileged, as long as they happen to be white. In 2016, he made restoring dignity to American workers a central trope of his speeches. When Hillary Clinton famously called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” he responded that, for him, they were “hard‐working American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people.” But above all else, Trump said, they were Americans, “entitled to leadership that honors you, cherishes you, and defends you.” He added: “Every American is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect in our country.” In the election, around two-thirds of white voters without a college degree voted for Trump.

    There can be no doubt that in recent decades, the question of recognition and dignity has become central in the politics of advanced liberal democracies. A prime example is the notion of multiculturalism, which presumes that all cultures are equal but different. In the process, the question of economic justice has taken somewhat of a back seat, to the detriment of those who have been struggling to keep afloat in an atmosphere of rapidly increasing economic uncertainty.

    One result has been an upsurge in support for political parties. Such parties have been astute in exploiting widespread popular resentment in the service of an exclusionary nativist notion of deservedness based on ethnicity or cultural compatibility. Unfortunately, too often the left have given up on their traditional electoral base, leaving the field wide open for the pied pipers of the radical, populist right. The radical right have promoted themselves as the advocates of ordinary people, claiming to give them a voice and a modicum of visibility and a sense of empowerment.

    Pandora’s Box

    The success of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the regions that comprise the former East Germany is a case in point. As Jennifer Yoder, a professor at Colby College, recently suggested, support for the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia — strongholds for the party — is to a large extent the expression of a “revenge of the East.” As she pointed out, it reflects a profound sense among easterners of “not being taken seriously,” of never being asked what they think.  At the same time, it illustrates the perception “that one’s own status now and in the future is at risk.” It is this combination of the subjective experience of a lack of recognition and materially-related anxieties with regard to the future that has proved a powerful motivation for supporting a political party that purports to speak for both the mental state and the interests of the eastern German population.

    Germany is hardly a unique case. The claim to take ordinary people seriously, to give visibility to the forgotten and invisible has been a major selling point of radical, right-wing populists — from Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump. In its election program for the 1985 election, the National Front in France declared that the “dignity of the French people” was one of its priorities. This was at a time of profound disillusionment among French workers over President Francois Mitterrand’s radical reversal of economic policy — aka tournant de la rigueur — of 1983.  Above all, rigueur meant austerity and subservience to Germany’s stringent monetary policy, which left French workers in the cold. Hardly surprising, in the years and decades that followed, many of them found a new home in Le Pen’s National Front.

    It might seem that the politics of recognition and diversity has opened Pandora’s box. To a certain extent, this is true. There is no good reason to recognize the suffering of ethnic, sexual and religious minorities at the hands of the majority, while dismissing the suffering of significant parts of the majority. White trash, as I have previously argued, might be white, but it is still dismissed and denigrated as “trash.” In this case, white privilege not only becomes meaningless, but it serves as an insult, adding to denigration and misrecognition, to use Fraser’s term.

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    Hardly surprising, the “deplorables,” to use Clinton’s term, overwhelmingly came out in support of Trump, who, as Clinton suggested, “lifted them up.” To be sure, Clinton meant that Trump reaffirmed their sexist, racist and homophobic views. Yet it could also mean that those who voted for Trump were — perhaps for the first time ever — given a sense that they existed, were “visible” and that they counted.  

    Le Pen, after being elected as the leader of the French radical, populist right, made the politics of recognition central to her project. In 2011, a few months before the presidential election, she promoted herself as the candidate of “la France des invisibles,” of all those citizens who never merit being mentioned, who are forgotten, who are — as she put it — “des triples riens.” The notion is an allusion to the triple-A ratings bestowed by international agencies on the creditworthiness of states — the main obsession, or so Le Pen maintained, of France’s political and economic elite.

    Le Pen failed to advance to the second round of the presidential election, which ended in a duel between Sarkozy and Hollande. In 2017, she made it to the second round but lost to Emmanuel Macron. Yet Le Pen’s politics of recognition had clearly hit a nerve, as did her adoption of a socioeconomic project that promised to expand the French welfare state; though this was under the proviso that the expansion would only be for the French.

    Same Boat

    The French case is neither unique nor limited to the radical, populist right. In Denmark, for instance, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a Social Democrat, has advanced similar propositions, many of them adopted from the country’s far right. In today’s world, it appears that both recognition and redistribution only work if they are associated with a large dose of exclusion. Unfortunately, “identity politics” has turned into a zero-sum game. More often than not, the result has been more resentment and even less willingness to listen to the other side. The remarks by State Representative Giddings is paradigmatic of these trends. This kind of politics can only exacerbate social tension and increase polarization, in the process diminishing chances for moving forward.

    A progressive politics based on an honest assessment of the multiple crises we face today can only succeed if it includes all sectors of society, independent of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and material circumstances. It might sound a bit trite, but we are all sitting in the same boat. It would be a tragic mistake to throw some passengers overboard for the simple reason that they are deemed not to belong. 

    *[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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    Corruption, an Unnecessary Evil

    Since the United Nations Convention Against Corruption was adopted in October 2003, International Anti-Corruption Day is observed annually on December 9. In the context of the ongoing pandemic, António Guterres, the UN secretary general, had a clear message: “Corruption is criminal, immoral and the ultimate betrayal of public trust. It is even more damaging in times of crisis — as the world is experiencing now with the COVID-19 pandemic. The response to the virus is creating new opportunities to exploit weak oversight and inadequate transparency, diverting funds away from people in their hour of greatest need.”

    Corruption impacts every aspect of society and involves all kinds of companies, large and small, in an array of industries. Certain sectors are seen as carrying a higher risk of corruption — oil and gas, armament, construction, among others — but no industry is spared. The World Bank estimates that more than $1 trillion in bribes is paid each year. In the health sector alone, an estimated $450 billion, or around 6% of total expenditure, is lost to fraud annually. Some argue that bribery is part of doing business, but such practices increase costs and put companies at risk of severe financial, legal and reputational damage.

    Tackling Corruption: The Solution Is?

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    For society at large, the effects of corruption are far-reaching and have severe economic repercussions, create unfair competitive advantages and result in the loss or decreased quality of public services. The consequences of this can be devasting. Martin Manuhwa, head of the Federation of African Engineering Organisations, notes that when public contracts are not awarded based on honest and fair bidding, “Infrastructure collapses. Roads develop potholes, and people die. Basically, corruption kills.”

    Looking for Accountability

    Historically, citizens have expected governments to hold companies accountable for corrupt behavior, but their track record of doing so is spotty. Following the 2008 global financial crisis, the United States began enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act more vigorously. Since then, the US has been a world leader in prosecutions and investigations of foreign bribery, but countries such as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel, France and Spain have recently increased efforts as well.

    However, a recent report from the European Commission found that only 30% of Europeans believe their governments’ anti-fraud efforts are effective. Indeed, Transparency International’s Exporting Corruption 2020 project finds that although high-profile settlements make headlines, the enforcement of foreign bribery laws is very low amongst most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries; in 2020, only four out of the 47 OECD members actively pursued prosecutions.

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    Over the past two decades, there has been a proliferation of company-wide anti-corruption compliance systems and industry-level regulations designed to discourage bribery. Governments are often “quite happy” to pass the cost and responsibility of enforcement off to someone else, but self-regulations are often inadequately administered and lack audits performed by independent, disinterested parties. Tools such as the OECD’s Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises provide companies with recommendations for implementing compliance programs. It is then up to the companies to conduct internal audits and ensure employees and contractors are following their anti-corruption policies. Companies are motivated by a variety of factors: legal requirements, the risk of fines and prosecution, reputational damage and, for some, a genuine desire to act more ethically. But while there are self-reported cases of foreign bribery, the temptation to cover up infractions is compelling. 

    Various efforts by industries to self-regulate have also emerged. Non-binding, industry-led initiatives or “soft laws” attempt to set anti-corruption norms by asking companies to adhere to a set of principles. For example, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative “invites” multinational companies to disclose money they pay states to extract natural resources.

    In industry-level self-regulating organizations (SROs), member companies develop policies for a particular industry and they, as opposed to an independent agency or government regulator, monitor and enforce member compliance. One example is the Banknote Ethics Initiative (BnEI). The organization was created by some banknote producers to “provide ethical business practice.” Members agree to abide by BnEI’s Code of Ethical Business Practice and to undergo an audit “carried out by a third-party auditor” in order to become accredited. According to their website, audits are conducted by two entities: GoodCorporation and KPMG. But if there are only two options for auditing members of an SRO, are auditors actually independent?

    While SROs can help set standards for industries in the absence of effective government regulation, there is also an inherent conflict of interest. As the NGO Truth in Advertising argues, “Self-regulators are, by definition, funded by the companies they claim to regulate. Don’t for a second believe that any self-regulator wants — or even would be permitted by its constituent members — to do all that it can to prevent harmful or deceptive business practices that are proving lucrative for the industry.” The OECD and the UN Environment Programme add that self-regulatory processes are often burdened by a lack of enforcement and inadequate sanctions of member companies, lower incentives to voluntarily report bad practices and are dominated by a small number of companies that prioritize what is in their best interests.

    An International Anti-Bribery Standard

    A new development offers hope for addressing the global corruption problem. In 2016, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) introduced the ISO 37001 Anti-Bribery Management Systems. Created using input from existing recommendations and from countries, non-profits and esteemed multilateral institutions, the standard provides an auditable, independent benchmark of international compliance principles and enables organizations of all sizes, public or private, to prevent, detect and address bribery.

    To become certified, an anti-bribery management system meeting the standard’s requirements must be implemented, an individual overseeing compliance needs to be appointed, and financial controls, monitoring and reporting processes need to be in place. Audits are done over a three-year period (to ensure policies are not simply on paper) and are performed by independent certifying bodies.

    Numerous companies and governments have since pursued certification as ISO 37001 has increasingly become recognized as the reference for anti-bribery. Anti-corruption lawyer Jean-Pierre Mean says the advantage of certification is benchmarking and reassuring organizations that they have implemented effective measures. Moreover, “It also demonstrates that you have a system that works to stakeholders, personnel, shareholders, and the community at large.”

    As a sign of confidence in the standard, prosecutors in Brazil, the US, Denmark, Switzerland and Singapore have required companies to pursue ISO 37001 certification as conditions of settlements in many lawsuits. While certification cannot guarantee bribery will not take place, it is universally recognized proof of a company’s willingness to prevent it. Companies and governments should require ISO 37001 certification from potential partners as a prerequisite to doing business, discarding superfluous and therefore suspicious self-regulation.

    Increased efforts to curb bribery have had varying levels of success. Government enforcement of existing laws needs to be strengthened as evidence has shown that self-regulation is flawed. The introduction of ISO 37001 as an independent standard for anti-bribery holds the most promise, but more companies and governments need to pursue certification for change to happen. Corruption may be as old as it widespread, but it can also be avoided.

    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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    Russia Ramps Up Pressure Against Kremlin Critics

    Visibly weakened following a hunger strike in prison yet full of his usual verve, Alexei Navalny appeared before a court via videoconference on April 29 to appeal his fine for the defamation of a World War II veteran just as branches of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) were being shuttered across Russia. This is but the latest installment of the Kremlin’s campaign to increase pressure on Russia’s civil society and opposition.

    On August 20, 2020, Navalny was hospitalized in the Siberian city of Omsk after falling ill during a flight to Moscow following what appeared to be a poisoning attempt. After a standoff with the Russian authorities, Navalny was finally airlifted to a hospital in Berlin, where his poisoning was officially confirmed. The substance was identified as the nerve agent Novichok, a Soviet-era chemical weapon. The use of Novichok inspired calls for further investigations from international figures and (mostly Western) governments.

    A joint investigation by Bellingcat, CNN, Der Spiegel and the Insider “has discovered voluminous telecom and travel data that implicates” the FSB in Navalny’s poisoning. As the report states, “the August 2020 poisoning in the Siberian city of Tomsk appears to have happened after years of surveillance, which began in 2017 shortly after Navalny first announced his intention to run for president of Russia.” Moreover, Bellingcat released a recording in which Konstantin Kudryavtsev, an FSB officer, unintentionally confesses the details of the operation to Navalny himself, who phoned Kudryavtsev under the disguise of a high-ranking security official.

    How Alexei Navalny Created Russia’s Main Opposition Platform

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    Once he recovered in Germany, Navalny flew back to Russia on January 17, but was detained immediately after landing. Following his arrest, he was charged with breaking the probationary terms of a previous prison sentence, which required Navalny to periodically report to Russian authorities. Navalny was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail, triggering a public outcry and mass protests across Russia.

    In prison and in failing health, on March 31, Navalny began a hunger strike demanding medical treatment by independent doctors. On April 23, he ended the hunger strike on its 24th day after consultation with non-prison medical staff. However, despite the bad publicity and an international outcry the case has engendered, the Kremlin remains unmoved by growing calls for the release of President Vladimir Putin’s potential political adversary.

    Fault Lines

    The poisoning of Alexei Navalny has once again highlighted the cracks in relations between Russia and the West. Last year, the National Security Council stated that it will “work with allies and the international community to hold those in Russia accountable, wherever the evidence leads, and restrict funds for their malign activities.” In response to Russia’s use of Novichok, the United States enacted additional economic sanctions, in addition to steps taken against Moscow for its interference in the 2016 presidential election. Officially announced by the State Department on March 2, these sanctions bring together Washington and the European Union in their condemnation of the attempted assassination and imprisonment of one of Russia’s key opposition figures.

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    As stated by US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, “The U.S. government has exercised its authorities to send a clear signal that Russia’s use of chemical weapons and abuse of human rights have severe consequences. Any use of chemical weapons is unacceptable and contravenes international norms.” The actions taken by Washington include an expansion of previous sanctions under the US Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 as well as measures in accordance with Executive Order 13382, which target proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. In addition, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act has been used against various Russian individuals and adversaries with connection to Russia’s chemical weapons program as well as defense and intelligence sectors.

    The United States is not the only country expressing its disapproval for the actions of the Russian government. Last year, after German officials said they had “unequivocal proof” of Navalny’s poisoning with Novichok, Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted that there are “serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer.” Similarly, after laboratories in France and Sweden confirmed the use of the nerve agent, French President Emmanuel Macron released a statement urging President Putin to provide information on the “attempted murder.”

    In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson also expressed his concern. The attempted poisoning of Navalny has parallels with the attack on the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, in 2018. Then, Novichok first came to international prominence but also failed to kill the intended victim. Johnson publicly condemned Navalny’s sentencing in February, joining Merkel, Macron, the European Parliament and the US in calling for his immediate release.

    The Kremlin Stands its Ground

    The Kremlin denies the allegations that it was behind the attack on Navalny. In his most recent annual address to the nation, President Putin reprimanded the West for its treatment of Russia and warned of possible consequences. The warnings centered around crossing a red line drawn by Moscow and came right after the US announced its newest round of sanctions. As Putin stated in the address, “Russia has its own interests, which we will defend in line with the international law. If somebody refuses to understand this obvious thing, is reluctant to conduct a dialogue and chooses a selfish and arrogant tone, Russia will always find a way to defend its position.”

    Additionally, the Russian president revived the accusation of a US-backed plot to assassinate Alexander Lukashenko, the besieged Belarusian leader who largely owes his tenuous position to Kremlin support in face of mass protests following a disputed election last year. However, no concrete evidence of either the plot itself or any involvement of Western governments has presented itself despite the claims made by Lukashenko himself. Although Navalny was not explicitly mentioned during Putin’s address, implications were made that the country’s opposition movement is part of the Western strategy to destabilize Russia — a familiar refrain in the Kremlin.

    The sanctions imposed by the United States are similar to past rounds put in place after the poisoning of the Skripals, demonstrating a continuity with previous disputes and attesting to the fact that the Kremlin’s behavior is largely unaltered by international outrage. Similarly unsuccessful have been the calls by leading academics, scholars and Nobel laureates both in and outside Russia urging the Kremlin to end its practices of persecuting political opponents.

    While ignoring international pressure, the Kremlin is ramping up domestic repression. One target is Navalny’s FBK, which prosecutors labeled as an extremist organization and ordered it to shut down. On April 30, Ivan Pavlov, a human rights lawyer representing Navalny’s foundation, was detained by the FSB. According to his organization, Komanda 29 (Team 29), Pavlov was charged with the “disclosure of materials of the preliminary investigation.”

    Independent media has also been increasingly targeted. Meduza, which has been publishing out of Latvia since its editor-in-chief left Russia in 2014, has recently been designated as a foreign agent. Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, an independent nonprofit corporation that receives funding from US Congress, has also been threatened. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulator, has fined RFE/RL up to $1 million for hundreds of violations of the foreign agent law.

    Meanwhile, Washington has stated that discussions are still ongoing for a possible meeting between presidents Biden and Putin, which may be a good opportunity for the new occupant of the White House to turn up the pressure on Moscow. All in all, neither Alexei Navalny’s popularity nor Vladimir Putin’s increasing authoritarianism are likely to catalyze immediate systemic changes either in the power dynamics in Moscow or vis-à-vis the West.

    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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    Will France’s 2022 Election Become a Political Volcano?

    In just 12 months, French voters will be invited to judge Emmanuel Macron’s five years in office as president of the Fifth Republic. Most pundits in the media lazily assume it will boil down to a second-round repeat of the 2017 contest: Macron versus the right-wing firebrand, Marine Le Pen. Macron has the theoretical advantage of being the incumbent, but Le Pen has the practical advantage of challenging this largely unconvincing office-bearer. The French are seriously disappointed with Macron’s politics, much as they were with the two previous one-term presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande.  

    Reporting on the still-glowing embers of the famous but now dormant gilets jeunes movement that rocked France two years ago, Le Monde’s Marie Pouzadoux cites political scientist and professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, Pascal Perrineau, who has been following the yellow vest phenomenon since it started. He sees it as a deeply-rooted protest movement capable of re-emerging at any moment. After an initial loss of momentum during Macron’s so-called “great debate,” the outbreak of COVID-19 and restrictions on public assembly put the movement into a state of suspended animation. 

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    Surveying the current political climate at the approach of next year’s presidential election, Pouzadoux notes that “the executive has in fact drawn ‘no lesson’ from this protest movement or from the demands raised during the ‘great debate’ that followed it.” Perrineau offers this account of the state of play: “Today, the yawning gap between certain categories of the people and the elites continues to widen, while discontent and mistrust are maintained by the vertical management of power.”

    Perrineau sees a growing “climate of heterogeneous anger” that will open “an immense space” for Marine Le Pen in next year’s election. This is simply because, like Donald Trump in 2016, Le Pen represents the kind of anti-establishment gamble the voters, faced with an unpalatable choice, may now be ready to make. But, unlike the US, France’s tradition of protest and revolution opens another option. Perrineau senses the possible emergence of an inclusive protest movement that he calls “eruptive and emotional,” capable of effectuating what he calls “giletjaunisation” — the “’yellowvesting’ of French society.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Eruptive and emotive:

    The equivalent in the world of politics of the trendy term “disruptive innovation” in the economy, presaging a paradigm change that no one anticipated

    Contextual Note

    France’s political landscape has been in a state of utter disarray for at least the past decade. It was that disarray that allowed Macron to sneak through the cracks and humiliate the powerful political parties that had comfortably shared or alternated authority during the six decades of the Fifth Republic. But France was not alone. The US and the UK in particular have seen a similar disarray among the electorate. Yet despite the radical cultural and psychological upheaval, traditional parties have maintained their domination and managed to confirm, however uncomfortably, their authority.

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    Unlike Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party in the US, the yellow vest movement never really disappeared into the folds of history. Another commentator cited in the article, political science professor Frédéric Gonthier, believes a remobilization of the movement is plausible, though no one is ready to forecast what form it might take.

    Most commentators agree that, while the gilets jaunes brand still has legs, it is unlikely that whatever revolt may emerge in 2022 will be a simple repetition of the 2018 scenario, unfolding under the same banner. Much depends on how the denouement of the COVID-19 crisis plays out. But that is exactly what the political elite fears today. On Monday, France ended its third phase of lockdown in a year and will continue its policy of curfew into June. What may happen when the population is once again free to assemble and protest without restriction no one can guess today. The election period itself will be rife with confusion as the different personalities in the still identifiable parties begin to vie for influence.

    Pouzadoux concludes her article with a quote attributed to Macron’s administration: “You must wait till the sea recedes to discover the disaster left on the beach.” Some may remember, thanks to recent experience, that the sea never recedes faster or further than at the approach of a tsunami.

    Historical Note

    Most people are aware that France’s Fifth Republic has outlived its life cycle and its historical logic. Someday soon, a Sixth Republic will emerge. 2022 is a year to watch. In purely electoral terms, it is bound to be messy. If the second-round presidential contest turns out to be a repeat of 2017, no matter who wins, there will be an increase in possibly uncontrollable eruptive emotion.

    Neither Macron nor Le Pen has a solid political base, an absolute necessity for any semblance of political stability given the institutions of the Fifth Republic. Macron has managed to hold on this long simply because the presidential system dictates that the electorate has no choice other than revolt. But he has failed to establish his authority in the eyes of the populace. The French are unlikely to support another five years of the clever outlier who sneaks past the confused peloton to win the race. It’s the rules of the race that will be challenged. Should Le Pen win, the confusion would be greater since she has no hope of gaining the parliamentary majority a president needs to even begin governing.  

    Everyone will remember 2020 as the year a pandemic upset the world order. Future historians may call 2021 a year of transitional hesitation for the entire clueless planet, as leaders attempt to redefine “the new normal” without the slightest idea of what a revised version of normality might look like. Will the two-year reign of terror by COVID-19 end before the start of 2022? France’s reign of terror in 1793 lasted only a year but spawned Napoleon and the eventual reconfiguration of Europe. It ushered in the Industrial Revolution led by a hyperaggressive British Empire that would triumph before being undone by internal European rivalries a century later.

    While US President Joe Biden attempts to reaffirm his personal vision of empire as he boldly asserts that the US is “in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century,” the “other countries” of the world — starting with US’s ally in Asia, India — are wondering whether it makes sense to frame the challenge ahead as a competition between dominant powers seeking to control the global economy in their selfish interest. The Biden administration now appears poised to defend the sacrosanct intellectual property of pharmaceutical companies that has aggravated beyond description the COVID-19 crisis in India and the rest of the developing world.

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    The race to dominance among Europe’s rival nations two centuries ago triggered an as yet unfinished series of global disasters. These include the deployment of nuclear weapons against civilian populations in Japan and now dire, uncontrollable threats to human health and social stability as a consequence of climate change, all of which can be attributed to our civilization’s obsession with competition.

    One event worth watching in Europe this year, ahead of the French presidential election of 2022, is the state of play in Germany, where federal elections to elect the 20th Bundestag will take place in September. Recent polls show a potential lead for the Green party. If confirmed, this would overturn several decades of post-unification history. More significantly, as The Guardian’s Philip Oltermann reports in reference to the possibility of Annalena Baerbock’s party emerging as the leader of a new coalition, this eventual seismic event is attributable to the failure of imagination and vision of the traditional political elite.

    “The underlying theme of her campaign so far,” Oltermann writes, “is that Germany is more innovative than its political class — a claim that got a boost last week when the country’s constitutional court ruled that the government’s climate targets do not go far enough.”

    Addressing climate change requires a movement emerging from the people in a spirit of cooperation, not competition. Biden, Macron and Le Pen all represent the commitment to some form of aggressive nationalistic competition. Could eruptive emotion end up serving the cause of global harmony? The adepts of competition are not about to give up their battle.

    *[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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    German Nationalism, From Revolution to Illiberalism

    It is often noted that 19th-century nationalism owed much to the rise of academic history. As historians have observed, studies in national development provided materials for later and cruder claims of fascist cultural supremacy. For instance, Leopold von Ranke and Georg Hegel represented different versions of such narratives. The former traced a conceptual movement in large patterns of events; its ideological consequences were various, but one aspect was the justification of the Prussian state. The latter urged rigorous attention to historical evidence but suggested that in such detail a pattern of providence could be found.

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    Ranke’s method, adopted by a generation of historians, was that of a conservative liberal of the Restoration period, envisaging a balance of European power. By mid-century, however, new historians had taken a Prussian-centered national narrative to a new level of conviction, combining elements of Hegel’s statist teleology with Ranke’s evidence-based method. In the German revolution of 1848, the rhetoric of liberty and nationhood was confused, and the goals of a constitutional monarchy and a united Germany seemed united under one banner.

    Yet within a short time, the revolution failed, and a conservative mood descended. Subsequently, the liberal spirit of nationalism was replaced by a Bismarckian argument for nationalist militarism and expansionism. Academic writing was touched by this sequence of events.

    A Historical Method

    Prior to 1848, academic historians were already sketching accounts of providential German unification and expansion. The writers of the Prussian School of History were former students of Ranke and Hegel. They wrote at first in a liberal register. Johannes Gustav Droysen began his career as a classicist, coining the term “Hellenism.” His 1833 life of Alexander the Great launched his academic career. A popular volume, its account of the Macedonian marshaling of Greek culture into a powerful empire was read as a pattern for Prussia’s future role.

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    Droysen’s historical work became overtly political with his 1842-43 “Lectures on the Wars of Liberation,” a record of Prussian popular resistance against foreign invaders. A member of the Frankfurt parliament during the 1848 revolution, he witnessed the failure of its liberal and nationalist aspirations. The crisis came when members voted to fight for the regions of Schleswig-Holstein against the claims of Denmark. It was clear, on Prussia’s withdrawal of support, that the parliament was impotent without the northern state’s backing, and by 1849 Frederick William IV was secure enough to reject liberal proposals.

    Since 1840, Droysen had taught at Keil University in the disputed region. His account, “The Policy of Denmark towards the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein,” lent support to nationalist calls for the defense of Germany’s territory. In a similar spirit, in 1851 he published a life of Count Yorck von Wartenburg, the general whose decision to change sides was a turning point in the war with Napoleon. The historical stage was set for a renewal of this national self-assertion. Otto von Bismarck, the prime minister of Prussia and the founder and first chancellor of the German Empire, no doubt saw the usefulness of such narratives when formulating his foreign policy in the early 1860s.

    Droysen took pains with his lecture series on the historical method, hoping to provide a philosophical basis for the discipline. The lectures were published only in 1937, but in 1858, he circulated a precis, the “Grundriss der Historik,” translated as “Outline of the Principles of History,” which describes history as theodicy, forming an organic pattern of growth. The method was Rankean, but drew explicitly on Hegel in its emphasis on the direction and progression of history. Going beyond Ranke’s hints at the runic import of recorded facts, Droysen pointed directly to signs of development, specifically toward a Prussian state.

    This commitment was clear in his major work, “The History of Prussian Politics,” which he began having taken a chair at Jena in 1851. Through the period of the Prussian wars on Austria and France until his death in 1884, Droysen completed 14 volumes that traced the growth of the Prussian monarchy to the year 1756.     

    From French Revolution to German Empire

    Heinrich von Sybel made his name with a history of the first crusade written with Rankean documentary rigor. Yet he already had a political aim, undercutting romantic medievalism in his commitment to a liberal future. In 1848, he too attended the Frankfurt parliament, and similarly transferred his nationalist faith toward Prussian statism over time. Despite this allegiance to the “polar star” of the north, he took a chair at Munich on Ranke’s recommendation, leading Prince Maximilian’s new Bavarian Historical Commission and founding the Historische Zeitschrift (Historical Journal).

    His debt to Ranke did not preclude a shift in tone. A celebrated 1856 address on historiography demurred at the excessive pursuit of objectivity. His major work of these years, the “History of the French Revolution,” was a Burkean warning against the destructive effects of Jacobinism. Using archives in Paris, Sybel mounted a scholarly assault on France’s role in recent European history. He effectively downgraded the revolution to a by-product of historical providence centering on Prussia. The French historiographer Antoine Guillard described it as “an attack not only on the Revolution but on the mind and history of France.”

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    In this view, the French Revolution indeed signaled the end of the old order, but it was merely one of three such events, the others being the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the destruction of Poland. This wider break with feudalism and the rise of a modernity that would be encapsulated in a unified Germany under Prussia. French pride at the assertion of popular sovereignty and human rights was undercut and German nationhood celebrated.

    Taking a chair in Bonn in 1861, the historian was now also a politician, sitting in the 1860s and 1870s in the Prussian Diet and the Constituent Reichstag of the North German Confederation. Bismarck saw Sybel’s value and made him director of Prussian archives in 1875, where he worked on his last major work, “The Founding of the German Empire by William I.” This overtly politicized work of history gave a Bismarckian slant to events leading up to 1871. Some, noting William I’s ambivalence about his chancellor’s maneuverings, joked the phrase “by” should have read “despite.”

    The work lacked life and bore the weight of a propagandistic tome; later its political slant worked to its author’s disadvantage as the focus on Bismarck over William I offended the new kaiser, and Sybel was banished from the state archives in 1890. He died five years later, having completed his last volume. Sybel, though wary of democracy as a step toward Bonapartism and a believer in Prussia’s power, was also a believer in a Burkean pluralism, whereby power was best distributed among social groups under the protection of the state. Toward the end of the 19th century, a more virulent language of racial homogeneity and expansionism came to the fore.

    Racial Theory

    The boldest publicist of the Prussian School, whose messages most clearly herald the racialized nationalism of the 20th century, was Heinrich von Treitschke. Born in Saxony with Czech roots, Treitschke began his career as a Privatdozent in Leipzig, but his conviction in Berlin’s destiny to rule was out of place there, and he returned to take university posts in Prussia. His earliest publications included patriotic poems, while his 1859 dissertation on “the science of society” made a strong case for the state as necessary and primeval, without need for a contract with its citizens. Prussia provided a nucleus for a German state forming according to historical destiny.

    Treitschke’s path exemplified the historians’ trajectory away from liberalism. As his writing gained influence, his distance from Ranke was clear. When sending a copy of his polemical essays to his father in 1865 he noted: “That bloodless objectivity which does not say on which side is the narrator’s heart is the exact opposite of the true historical sense. Judgment is free, even to the author.” His essays, often biographical studies or political arguments, grew more fervently nationalistic. The smaller German states should submit to annexation; colonial growth was a natural expression of a vital new power.

    This set a tone for German expansionism from the 1860s onward. Treitschke too was politically active, sitting in the Reichstag in 1871 as a member of the new National Liberal party and welcoming the culture war against Catholics isolated in the new Kleindeutschland. In 1874, he was invited to take the chair in history in Berlin; Ranke was ushered from his post to make room for Treitschke, whom he deemed disapprovingly a publicist, not a historian. Yet student fraternities preferred their new teacher, the court made him official historiographer of Prussia in 1886, and his academic standing was reinforced by his editorship of Historische Zeitschrift after Sybel’s death in 1895.

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    Treitschke’s “History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century” was a colorful and lively work; keyed into the public mood, it impressed foreign readers including the British historian G.P. Gooch, who compared it to Macaulay’s “History of England” in style and vigor, “both vibrate with their authors’ personality.” Gooch wrote in 1913, not seeing the full legacy of the Prussian School. As Treitschke gained influence in polemical attacks on socialists and Jews, his arguments converged with forms of social Darwinism and a racialized politics. In 1879, a long review essay in the Preussische Jahrbucher, the right-wing journal he edited from 1866 to 1889, concluded with an anti-Semitic polemic. He claimed that fundamental differences between Jews and Christians in Germany could not be resolved, and that the Jews had “assumed too large a space in our life.”

    These passages were later republished in the pamphlet, “A Word About Our Jews,” which reached a wider audience and sparked the Berlin Anti-Semitism Conflict, a two-year spate of protest and violence against the Jewish population. Treitschke’s anti-Semitic pronouncements coincided with those of Adolf Stöcker, then a court preacher to William I, who created the Christian Social Workers’ Party in 1878 to draw laborers away from socialism. Between them, Treitschke and Stöcker gave a new clerical, political and academic respectability to anti-Semitism from the 1880s onward.

    Such theories were not far removed from the biological variants of similar ideas, for example in Ernst Haeckel’s monism of the same period, with which it seems aligned as much with a social Darwinist as an Idealist or Christian idea of providence. It was Treitschke who coined the phrase “The Jews are our misfortune,” repeated ad nauseam in the Nazi period, and most recently adapted as “Israel is our misfortune” by the far-right party Die Rechte (The Right) in the European Parliament elections of 2019. The tradition of German nationalism had come a long way from the liberal rhetoric of freedom during the revolutionary period.

    *[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