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      Oman Has Much to Offer the EU

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      Oman and the European Union share common interests in a number of political, economic, commercial and security fields. Oman’s strategic location and links to key international trade routes are of great importance to European interests in the region. In September 2018, Brussels and Muscat signed a cooperation agreement, in addition to the one signed by the European External Action Department and the Omani Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the aim of strengthening political dialogue and cooperation in sectors of mutual interest.

      Sultan Qaboos Brought Light and Modernity to Oman

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      Oman shares with the EU the challenge of maritime piracy, which is one of the most pressing security issues that both sides face in the Indian Ocean. Since 2008, Oman has been an important partner in Operation Atlanta, the EU Naval Force mission to combat piracy on the coasts of Somalia, the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden.

      Oman’s policy of being open with the world and balanced between the poles on opposing sides of regional conflicts — especially those represented by the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States — is similar to many EU policies in the Middle East. Muscat has highlighted its role in many regional and international issues, with Omani diplomacy complementing EU efforts to preserve stability and security in the region in ways that serve European interests.

      Investor Confidence

      Oman is considered a major logistical center for the Middle East, with its three major ports of Sohar, Duqm and Salalah, as well as a number of economic, marine and land “free zones.” With the aim of establishing an integrated infrastructure system for Oman, the General Authority for Special Economic Zones and Free Zones was launched in August to supervise the Special Economic Zone in Duqm and the free zones in Mazyouna, Salalah and Sohar.

      Embed from Getty Images

      An attractive environment for foreign direct investment (FDI) was created with the coming into force of the Foreign Capital Investment Law in January this year that allows foreigners to own 100% of investment projects as well as granting tax exemptions and customs duties. Moreover, the law does not set a minimum investment capital, facilitates procedures for establishing investment projects, grants extended rights to the use of investment lands and permits the transfer of capital to investor countries.

      In addition, Oman is the fifth safest country in the world and the third in the region, according to a recent report by Numbeo, which adds to investor confidence. In the first quarter of 2020, FDI reached over 15 billion Omani rials ($40 billion). With money coming from Iran, Kuwait, China, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, numbers from the National Center for Statistics and Information indicate that American and British capital constituted the highest share of FDI. The EU, however, has seen low investment rates in the country, with only the Netherlands coming in at roughly 304.7 million rials.

      The Vice President of the European Investment Bank (EBI) Vazil Hudak, during the International Investors Forum held in Muscat in 2019, spoke of the strengths of EU investment in Oman and the “huge” opportunities it offers. EBI is the largest financial investment institution in the world, with assets of more than €600 billion ($726 billion) and annually lends out nearly €70 billion. The EU could deepen its bilateral cooperation with Oman, directing EIB investments to achieve sustainable economic development in Oman, particularly after the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

      Crisis Cooperation

      In the long term, Oman has paid attention to improving its economy by diversifying sources of income and raising the contribution of non-oil sectors to the gross domestic product. Oman was the first of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to develop plans to reduce its dependence on oil and diversify its economy. As a result of these policies, in 2020, Oman achieved nearly 3 billion rials in profits in the non-petroleum sector that made up 28% of the total contribution to the GDP, an increase of 6% over 2019.

      Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying lockdown measures that put strains on the economy, Oman has sought to avoid withdrawing from its sovereign reserves estimated to be worth $17 billion and moved toward setting policies to cut spending and adopt a short-term fiscal balance plan for the next four years with the aim of improving the economic situation and raising the country’s credit rating.

      The EU is currently witnessing difficult times as a result of the pandemic and the severe economic effects associated with it, coinciding with the UK’s exit from the European Union at the end of the year. In light of the circumstances, commercial and economic interests between Oman and the EU should expand into joint action, moving forward on pending agreements, including the free trade agreement that the two sides used to manage collectively through dialogue between the GCC and the EU. These negotiations were hit by apathy due to a lack of agreement over customs tariffs and the continuing blockade of Qatar since 2017. But talks on bilateral free trade agreements between Oman and the EU countries have become crucial to removing trade barriers and spurring economic growth.

      Tourism and transport sectors were among the most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic globally, with analysts predicting that tourism recovery will take up to two years, and air transportation estimated to take anywhere from two to six years. In 2018, the tourism sector contributed 2.6% to the country’s economy and was one of the five key sectors that Oman’s Ninth Five-Year Plan focused on. Given the damage inflicted on the sector during the pandemic, recovery should be stimulated by easing travel procedures. On December 9, Omani authorities issued a decision to exempt citizens of 103 countries (including the EU) from entry visa requirements for 10 days with the aim of stimulating transport and tourism after the pandemic.

      On the European Union side, the decision to exempt Omanis from the Schengen zone is still under consideration despite the ongoing talks between the two sides over the last years. An easing of entry requirements for Omanis will contribute to enhancing tourism traffic between the two sides.

      The cooperation and partnership in times of crisis creates opportunities for broader ties and paths toward economic sustainability, political stability and security for countries. The European Union is an important partner for Oman and can take advantage of the sultanate’s fortunate geographical location. The advancement of Oman-EU relations is an important factor for both sides, especially in the post-COVID-19 era.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of Gulf State Analytics.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Amidst the Pandemic, Central and Eastern Europe Witnesses an Erosion of Democracy

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      Nearly a year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, its effects on people’s lives, countries’ economies and health care around the world are becoming clearer. In some Central and Eastern European countries, however, this pandemic has had repercussions in another crucial area: democracy. This begs the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic is emboldening the rise of illiberal politics in certain parts of the region. Indeed, the US-based Freedom House concluded earlier this year that Hungary and Serbia are no longer democracies but are “in a ‘grey zone’ between democracies and pure autocracies.”

      One democratic process affected by the COVID-19 pandemic around the world was elections. Indeed, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, elections have been canceled or postponed in at least 67 nations around the globe. Central and Eastern Europe was no exception. Serbia’s parliamentary election, originally set for April 26, was postponed by two months even though it was boycotted by much of the opposition due to the steady decline of democracy and media freedom in the country, resulting in a turnout of less than 50%.

      The controversial election secured another term for President Aleksandar Vucic with over 60% of the vote, granting his Serbian Progressive Party 190 seats in the country’s 250-seat parliament. As a result of the election and in-person voting, while the rest of Europe is now in its second wave of the pandemic, Serbia is now in its third.

      Europe’s Far Right Fails to Capitalize on COVID-19

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      Leading up to the elections in Poland, the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party proposed a change to the constitution to postpone the election for two years due to the pandemic, automatically extending President Andrzej Duda’s term in office. In the end, elections were held in June and July, with Duda narrowly beating the opposition Civic Platform’s candidate.

      Beyond elections, the pandemic has been used to mask legal and constitutional changes in the region. In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s government first passed the Authorization Act during the first wave of the pandemic, effectively giving the prime minister the power to rule by decree. The government’s first action was to pass a law mandating that transgender people only be recognized by their sex at birth. The government also announced that disseminating “fake news” about the pandemic or the government’s response to it was a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

      As a result, although no one has yet been charged under the new laws, several people were arrested and detained after criticizing the government on social media, which some commentators likened to being picked up by the notorious black cars driven by the secret police during the communist era.

      In November, as the country entered its second wave of the pandemic, the Orban government announced the Second Authorization Act for a period of 90 days. The following day, proposed amendments to the constitution were announced that would make it mandatory for children to be raised amid “Christian cultural values,” defining the mother as female and the father as male, as well as prohibiting changing gender after birth. These amendments bar same-sex couples from adopting, but single parents can request an exemption through special ministerial permission.

      Additionally, one minute before midnight on the day before new curfew measures went into effect, the government proposed a change to the election law, making it impossible for coalitions to contest elections, effectively wiping out the opposition.

      Embed from Getty Images

      At the same time that Hungary adopted its first Authorization Act, Poland adopted the Act on Special Solutions Related to the Prevention, Counteracting and Combating of COVID-19, which was ultimately used by the Polish government and PiS to limit social dialogue. A few weeks later, the “Stop Abortion” bill was enacted by the Polish parliament. Already among the strictest abortion laws in Europe, the high court’s October ruling that it was unconstitutional to abort a fetus with congenital defects effectively baned all abortions, bar in the case of incest, rape or a danger to the mother’s health.

      This new ruling was met with mass protests around the country, even spreading to church services in the devoutly Catholic Poland and seeing as many as 100,000 people on the streets of the capital Warsaw. This attack on women’s health was also met by a push to leave the European treaty on violence against women, known as the Istanbul Convention, citing that it is “harmful” for children to be taught about gender in schools. Hungary refused to ratify the treaty in May, stating that it promotes “destructive gender ideologies” and “illegal migration.”

      It is likely that what the world is seeing in these countries is what Ozan Varol calls “stealth authoritarianism” that “serves as a way to protect and entrench power when direct repression is not a viable option,” with the ultimate goal of creating a one-party state. The pandemic seems to be helping authoritarian leaders to secure their grip on power. In Serbia, Vucic gained popularity during the first wave and, even after criticism from the opposition and supporters alike, Orban maintained his popularity in Hungary, as shown in a recent Závecz Research poll.

      Findings from interviews carried out as part of a project, Illiberal Turn, funded by the Economic & Social Research Council, suggest that while people were predominantly supportive of democracy in the months before the pandemic, some of those interviewed in Hungary, Poland and Serbia during the first wave in the spring seemed to have a change of heart, expressing more sympathies toward authoritarian forms of government. This trend is worrying, as it shows the potential effects that crisis can have on democratic values. These abuses of power in Central and Eastern Europe cannot be ignored. It is crucial to pay attention to how these times of crisis can further exacerbate the already existing illiberal tendencies across the region.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Did Emmanuel Macron Have It Coming?

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      After watching the video of a street battle raging directly below the Paris apartment I once occupied at a time when François Mitterand was president, I turned to The New York Times’ editorial board’s response to President Emmanuel Macron’s accusation that The Times and other English-speaking media have been unfair in their coverage of Macron’s campaign against Islamist separatism.

      In an excellent article examining recent developments in France, Glenn Greenwald is far too generous when he suggests that the proudly authoritarian Macron is acting either “out of political calculation, conviction or some combination of both.” For the past three years, most people in France have been wondering whether in fact their president has any convictions beyond electoral calculations. Just ask the gilets jaunes, whose legacy is far from over. The yellow vests have been seen reemerging to accompany the current protests against Macron’s new law on global security.

      To defend his policies, Macron has frequently quoted Jean Baubérot, a historian of laïcité, the French ideology of secularism. In an interview with the journal L’Obs, Baubérot excoriates the president, notably calling into question Macron’s pompous invocation of the “values” of “la République.” But as Baubérot notes, Macron’s idea of values “could disguise less than honorable intentions.” At the same time, the historian reminds the president that values are communicated by “convincing rather than constraining.”

      Macron’s Problem With the News in English

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      Baudérot goes even further when he compares Macron to the revolutionaries of France’s Reign of Terror who worshipped the goddess of reason. He accuses Macron of attempting to turn laïcité itself into “a goddess of which France would be her chosen people.” No one has forgotten Macron’s ambition of becoming a Jupiterian leader. The supreme god must have his goddesses. 

      Macron’s pagan religion is clearly incompatible with Islam, but, as Olivier Roy and Régis Debray have pointed out, it is also incompatible with democratic rights and especially the freedom of expression. Roy points out that Macron’s latest initiatives brutally stifle the freedom of expression of schoolchildren as well as of an entire community bullied into conformity.

      The Times editorial board thinks that the issues Macron is concerned about “should be open to debate, both within France and among mature democracies.” In an effort to sound conciliatory, The Times agrees that “the debate cannot cross into any notion that any victim of Islamist terror ‘had it coming.’ Mr. Macron is right to reject any such suggestion.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Had it coming:

      An expression used by individuals and even political leaders — such as George W. Bush with regard to Saddam Hussein or Hillary Clinton with regard to Muammar Gaddafi — to justify not only acts of war but also their own gruesome terrorist methods.

      Contextual Note

      The Times editorial board politely makes its own significant point about President Macron’s simplistic approach to complex problems when it notes that “he goes too far in seeing malicious insult throughout the ‘Anglo-American media.’” Macron may not like this critique, but most lucid observers agree he “had it coming.” And it may be getting worse with the approach of the 2022 election.

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      As he always does, Emmanuel Macron insists on keeping his word — not to others, but to himself. This is his idea of remaining consistent with his convictions. He does so, especially when those who are directly concerned by his authoritarian measures express their disagreement. He then has no choice but to wait for the explosion and watch everything go up in flames.

      That is what happened when he chose to repeal France’s wealth tax and compensate by raising the tax on gas. It led to the yellow vest revolt. He claimed that it was all about ecology when it was essentially a means of shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor. It happened again with the stubborn promotion of retirement reform. The imminent explosion was only averted by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March that halted the legislative process.

      Even when Macron proclaimed that Islam was in crisis to justify putting France on a war footing against 10% of its own citizens, he admitted that the nation had failed its Muslim population by permitting their effective ghettoization, marginalizing most young Muslims. And concerning the depredations of the police, he admitted, in an interview with Brut, a media popular among the young, that “today, when the color of someone’s skin isn’t white, they will be much more subject to police controls.” 

      In the Brut interview, Macron characterized his proposed law to counter Islamic separatism as an attempt to “rearm the Republic against the supporters of radical Islam.” Who could not hear in this remark an echo of “The Marseillaise,” “Aux armes, citoyens”? Like Hillary Clinton with regard to Muammar Gaddafi, Macron seems to be anticipating the day when he will be able to chortle and say, “We came, we saw, [they] died.” While he admits that “French style integration failed,” he appears only to imagine a military-style response to that failure.

      Le Monde shows itself less indulgent than Greenwald on the possibility that Macron may be acting on principle. The newspaper comments that “during this free-flowing interview [with Brut], Mr Macron took the position of defending his record, with his eyes riveted on the 2022 election.” A French James Carville might be tempted to sum it up this way: “It’s the election, stupid.”

      Macron even allowed himself to enter into a spat with the writer, cineaste and ecological activist Cyril Dion, who had the temerity to remind the president that, in the wake of the yellow vest consultations, Macron had promised but failed to take on board the propositions of a committee of 150 citizens representing the full diversity of France. The president has now summarily dismissed the issue with a remark intended to sound insulting to anyone not belonging to the church of the goddess Laïcité: “Because 150 citizens wrote something, that doesn’t mean it’s the Bible or the Koran.”

      Historical Note

      The New York Times, as the voice of modern liberalism, has become hypersensitive to the question of diversity and racial justice. This may simply be a consequence of its alignment with the Democratic Party, which sees identity politics as the unique theme legitimizing its brand of “progressivism.” This focus on a single theme allows it to dispense with the need to show undue concern with distracting issues such as the militarism of the US empire, the trampling of civil liberties by the intelligence community or the need for economic justice in an increasingly indifferent capitalist plutocracy. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Consistent with this logic, in its response to Macron, The Times offers the truism that “racism and Islamophobia are major problems in France, as they are in the United States, Britain and elsewhere in the Western world.” Though obvious to everyone, it subtly suggests that Macron’s claim to universalism sounds more like French exceptionalism than a commitment to universal human rights.

      And The Times is absolutely right. The universalist “republican” values Macron embraces contain the idea that its institutions are color blind. On the instructions of the Ministry of the Interior, the police may or may not be color blind, but they are not blind. They have two eyes to see with, whenever they decide to stop someone in the street. Likewise, employers can discriminate when they see the name of a candidate on a resumé or at least discover the truth during the interview. In other words, France and the US both have a problem of white privilege, but they manage it — poorly, in both cases — in contrasting ways.

      The Times concludes by celebrating its vocation as a truth-teller ready to take on the challenge of racial justice: “That’s what the news media does, at home and abroad. It is its function and duty to ask questions about the roots of racism, ethnic anger and the spread of Islamism among Western Muslims, and to critique the effectiveness and impact of government policies.” The Times’ performance at this task has, over time, produced variable results. It still hasn’t admitted its complicity in the ongoing humanitarian disaster provoked by Bush’s wars in the Middle East. But with regard to Emmanuel Macron, we can congratulate it for showing the courage to stick to its principles.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      German Football for the “Real” Germans

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      Germany has three federal football leagues, with 56 professional teams. The elite 18 teams compete in the Bundesliga, the rest in the second and third divisions. Three decades ago, Germany was reunified. Yet until today, the vast majority of the clubs competing in the Bundesliga come from the western part of the country. The two exceptions are RB Leipzig and Union Berlin, which comes from the eastern part of Germany’s capital, unlike Hertha BSC, which comes from former West Berlin.

      What Is Behind Football’s Persistent Racism?

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      Like elsewhere in Europe, football in Germany tends to provoke strong emotions, particularly among the fan community, and here particularly among the most dedicated and fanatical supporters, the so-called Ultras. Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to experience the “yellow wall” in Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park, with its more than 20,000 spectators cheering their team on, gets a sense of the passion football can evoke in Germany. It sends chills running down the spine.

      A Turn of Passion

      Problems start when passions turn into aggressive behavior. As elsewhere in Europe, football hooliganism in its various forms, including open expressions of racism, continues to be a major concern in and around German stadiums. Not these days, of course, when stadiums are empty and fans are told to stay home.

      To be sure, football hooliganism is a problem throughout Germany. But it is particularly pronounced in the eastern part of the country. Dynamo Dresden, for instance, has a particularly negative image because some of its fans are notorious for their aggressive behavior and their refusal to follow security rules, particularly with respect to pyrotechnics. In Chemnitz, knows as Karl-Marx-Stadt under the communist regime, a significant part of the local football club’s fan community is closely affiliated with the city’s right-wing extremist underground. At the same time, right-wing extremist fan groups have a significant influence within the club.

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      Following a series of scandals over the past several years, club officials openly admitted that Dynamo has a serious problem with racism and anti-Semitism. This was also the case in the past in Zwickau, some of whose fans repeatedly attracted attention in connection with racist and homophobic chants during matches.

      All of these clubs belong to Germany’s 3. Liga, the lowest professional division. This is also the only league with a sizeable eastern German presence. Currently, there are five clubs from the east in a field of 20; in the past, the number of eastern clubs was even higher. In the 2015-16 season, for instance, there were eight. Understandably, in the eastern part of Germany, fans consider the third division something like “their” league. It is here that formerly great teams, such as the FC Magdeburg, three-times GDR football champion and winner of the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1974, play against each other.

      These matches evoke a strong sense of nostalgia — what in German is known as Ostalgie — for the bygone days when ordinary East German citizens were still somebody, unlike today, when there is a widely-shared sense that East Germans are second-class citizens in unified Germany.  

      A Sense of Resentment

      It is also important to note that over the past two decades, a sense of resentment has increasingly suffused German football. This has a lot to do with the dramatically grown gap between top teams in the Bundesliga and the rest of the field. Also significant is the arrival of newcomers who have successfully managed to outcompete “traditional” clubs, such as Nuremberg and Kaiserslautern, that have ended up in the lower leagues, without much hope to climb back into the limelight of German football.

      The case par excellence for the former is, of course, Bayern Munich, whose quasi-permanent grip on the championship has done little to endear them to fans outside of Munich. In fact, in a representative survey among fans from 2018, the club ended up dead last among first and second-league clubs.

      Remarkably enough, Bayern did even worse than RB Leipzig, until recently the absolute bête noire of German football, ever since it was promoted to the Bundesliga in 2016. Fans have dismissed RB as a “plastic club” or a “soda pop” club, given its strong affiliation with Red Bull, the club’s owner. Backed by the energy-drink manufacturer, RB not only advanced in record time through the lower ranks but, once in the Bundesliga, established itself on the top of the league. Last season, it even reached the semifinals of the prestigious Champions League.

      The other object of fan hatred is Hoffenheim, a club from a small village in southwest Germany. Hoffenheim made it into the Bundesliga more than a decade ago. Its success was largely owned to the fact that it received significant financial backing from the founder of SAP, a German IT company. Its founder has been the target of fan insults and even veiled death threats ever since.

      It is against this background that the logic behind the most recent eruption of fan hatred mixed with right-wing extremist racism attains its significance. The current object is Türkgücü, a football club from Munich. Since the new season, Türkgücü plays in the third league. Türkgürcü, as the name implies, is a Turkish-German club. For ages, it played in the lowlands of Bavarian amateur football, and nobody cared. With its ascent into professional football, however, this has dramatically changed.

      Germany’s far right is livid. For them, Türkgücü represents an “un-German” club that should not be allowed to play in a German league, but in Turkey. To be sure, the club’s name has only added oil to the fire. Türkgücü means Turkish power, and Turkish power is the last thing the German right wants to see in Germany.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The club was founded in 1972 by Turkish immigrants in Germany. For the next decades, it played in Bavaria’s minor leagues, largely ignored beyond the narrow confines of local football. Everything changed with the arrival of a Turkish businessman’s massive investment in the club. With this money, Türkgücü quickly moved from the world of amateur football into the professional league.

      Strike two, as they say in American baseball: Another club following in the footsteps of RB Leipzig, displacing not only traditional clubs, but German traditional clubs. This is particularly galling in the eastern part of the country, where Türkgücü replaced one of the two local clubs in the division. At the end of the 2019-20 season, two eastern German clubs were relegated to the minor leagues. One of them was Carl Zeiss Jena, three-time GDR football champion and European Cup Winners’ Cup finalist in 1981. The other club, by the way, was Chemnitz FC.

      The Third Way

      Equally important, Türkgücü’s foray into Germany’s professional football elite has mobilized Germany’s Turkish-German community. There is pride that a Turkish club, a “club of migrants,” has managed to break into Germany’s closed football society, a club with which the community can identify and which is seen as reflecting their values. In an atmosphere of growing German nationalism, reflected in the rise of the radical right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, it is easy for Germany’s far right to stoke anxieties and xenophobic resentment and exploit them for political gain, particularly in the eastern part of the country.

      A prime example is the extreme-right miniature party Der III. Weg (The Third Way), a groupuscule of neo-Nazi activists who see themselves as a national-revolutionary vanguard fighting for a new Germany. In its 10-point program, the party calls, among other things, for a “German socialism,” a localized economy, pro-natalist policies to prevent the Germans from dying out and, last but not least, the “peaceful reconstitution” of Germany within the borders of 1937 (which includes the western parts of current-day Poland).

      The party has its origins in Bavaria. Initially, it was not a party but an “internet information platform” designed to coordinate the various neo-Nazi networks in southern Germany. Outlawed in 2014 by the Bavarian interior ministry, it reconstituted itself as a political party, which guaranteed it a certain degree of protection from proscription. This is exemplified by the futile attempts to ban the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) despite its open promotion of a program largely informed by “Strasserism,” the revolutionary wing of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP).

      After its expulsion from the NSDAP in 1930, the Strasserites founded the Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists, better known as the Black Front. It existed until 1934, when it fell victim to the Röhm Purge. The fact that The Third Way has modeled one of its symbols after the Black Front’s party symbol — a cross made of a hammer and sword within a black circle — is a clear indication that the party considers itself as the legitimate heir to the Black Front.

      In recent years, The Third Way has focused its attention increasingly on the eastern part or the country. And for good reasons. The temporary mobilization success of the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (Pegida) movement in Dresden, followed by the dramatic gains of the AfD in the eastern German states, are a clear indication that there is fertile ground for far-right ideas. Some have even suggested that Saxony is a hotspot of right-wing extremism. In addition, a number of studies have shown that a significant part of the population in the east still see themselves as second-class citizens, a sentiment aggravated by the impression, often voiced during the refugee crisis of 2015-16, that refugees received preferential treatment compared to eastern Germans.

      This mixture of a sense of victimization and diffuse resentments offers a favorable opportunity structure for radical right-wing populist mobilization among the fringes of eastern German society and explains the sporadic electoral successes of far-right parties, such as the NPD and even The Third Way. The latter managed to elect one of its most prominent members, a notorious neo-Nazi originally from Franconia, to the municipal council in Plauen, a town in southwestern Saxony.

      Easy Target

      Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that The Third Way has targeted the club. By mobilizing against the club, the party seeks to exploit widespread animosities against Türkgücü and to bank on the expectation that its presence in professional football is seen as a provocation for every “nationally-minded” German, particularly in the east. Recently, the party has stepped up its campaign against Türkgücü. A few days before the club’s match against Magdeburg in mid-October, party activists positioned themselves in front of the Magdeburg stadium with a banner that said “Türkgücü not welcome!”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Third Way made it quite clear that this was not a singular action. In fact, as the party put it on its website, “Whether in Zwickau, Magdeburg or elsewhere: A Turkish team has no business in German football. Whether in Magdeburg or elsewhere, the message is clear: Türkgücü is not welcome!” At the same time, the party launched an anti-Türkgücü poster, “Our stadiums, our rules! Türkgücü is not welcome!” available for purchase on the internet and designed to raise awareness of the party and, as the poster explicitly suggests, gain new supporters.

      It is one of these ironies of history that these days, most football matches in Germany are what in German is called “Geisterspiele” — ghost matches that take place in front of empty ranks. In this sense, COVID-19 has saved Türkgücü from potentially having to face hostile crowds hurling racist epithets at its players. This has already happened earlier on in this season when one of Türkgücü’s players — ironically enough, a South Korean — was subjected to racist insults by fans of Waldhof Mannheim, a western club that occasionally has played in the Bundesliga. In the days that followed, 3. Liga clubs expressed their solidarity with the Türkgücü player.

      For the moment, the brouhaha over Türkgücü’s presence in German professional football has quieted down. Its relative success in the league, however, is likely to spark new resentment, particularly in the east. Add to this the fact that its main sponsor is ambitious, seeking to establish Türkgücü in German professional football and then move up to higher leagues in the footsteps of RB Leipzig. As a result, conflicts are inevitable, as are resentment and racism, all of them grist to the mill for the far right. This is quite ironic, given in German we call football “die schönste Nebensache der Welt” — the most beautiful pastime in the world. Of course, this only applies if it is restricted to “real” German clubs.

      *[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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      Is Michel Zecler France’s George Floyd?

      by

      In recent weeks, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has accelerated his recent campaign to bolster his credentials as Europe’s most determined authoritarian leader. Citing France’s secular philosophical tradition, he appears to believe in the 18th-century cultural meme of the enlightened despot.

      Macron came to power in 2017 after painting himself as the inclusive centrist standing midway between the left and the right, whose parties were in total disarray. Like Joe Biden today, he promised to unite a nation that had suffered from a system of “alternance” (alternate rule). For decades, it had allowed the powerful political organizations on the right and left to repeatedly replace the other as France’s ruling elite, perpetuating a political class that had lost touch with reality.

      After three years of Macron, and because of the events last week, the president may be suddenly realizing the truth behind William Butler Yeats’ observation a century ago that “the center cannot hold.” Yeats was of course referring to Western civilization as a whole, not French politics. Macron wants people to believe he represents Western civilization. After claiming Jupiterian authority at the beginning of his reign, he has increasingly projected himself as the all-seeing arbiter of modern political truth. He claims to embody what he calls “the principles and values” of la république. His version of the Enlightenment has become the French version of Puritan America’s shining city on a hill.

      The Rapid Growth of Emmanuel Macron’s Authoritarianism

      READ MORE

      Macron may have noticed that the American politicians — notably Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — who successfully marketed the shining-city meme to justify their militaristic authoritarianism, represented the right rather than the center. The right traditionally applauds xenophobic nationalism. But Macron still sees his brand as centrist. This obliges him to thread the needle by emphasizing secular universalism, traditionally approved by the left, as opposed to the right’s typically faith-based nationalism.

      In recent months, Macron has pushed two distinctly authoritarian themes: declaring cultural war on Islamists (meaning he has a beef with Islam itself) and reinforcing France’s already well-structured police forces to help the nation evolve into an enlightened police state. At the same time, he poses as the promoter of European unity, encouraging the EU to rally around his “liberal” values that notably include “freedom of expression,” redefined as the right — if not the duty — to blaspheme, so long as the target is Muslims, who clearly take their religion too seriously.

      Macron’s crowning achievement of the past week was the French parliament’s passing of the global security law, with its provisions to punish journalists and citizens who dare to film the police in the act of enforcing the always fair and just authority of the state. Those found guilty of filming the police face a €45,000 fine.

       Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Global security (Sécurité globale):

      The universally valid application of authoritarian methods of policing human activity in France and, why not, everywhere around the globe, since France is, as everyone should know, the source of universal moral values.   

      Contextual Note

      The vote in parliament took place the same day the surveillance video was released of the brutal beating by the police of Michel Zecler, a black music producer. The police booked Zecler for “violence against a public authority,” which, if successfully prosecuted, would have landed him in prison for many years. The three officers failed to notice the surveillance camera in Zecler’s professional premises, where the beating took place. The episode has proved severely embarrassing for Macron’s government. Although alive and safe, Michel Zecler could become the George Floyd of France. The law was already contested, but a massive protest on Saturday highlighted the symbolic importance of this incident. Others are likely to follow as the government hesitates on what tack to take.

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      Without the video, Zecler would have undergone the fate of so many other members of minorities harassed or brutalized by the authorities. The police officers claimed that he had assaulted them and attempted to seize their weapons. What judge or jury would believe Zecler’s word against theirs in a courtroom? Zecler has insisted on expressing his own respect for the police. He considers his attackers as three bad apples who do not represent the vast majority of law enforcement. What they do represent, however, is the workings of an arbitrary, racist and authoritarian system that Macron has chosen to reinforce and place beyond any criterion of accountability.

      The government finds itself in a quandary that in some way resembles the comedy of the Keystone Kops. The right-wing interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, a J. Edgar Hoover-type personality whom Macron appointed to demonstrate his commitment to authoritarian rule, immediately dismissed any reconsideration of the law. Within an hour, Prime Minister Jean Castex contradicted him, asserting, as France 24 reported, “that the government would review the wording of a controversial draft law that would place restrictions on citizens filming the police and publishing the images.” Castex immediately promised to set up “a commission to rewrite the text.”

      It didn’t take long for Macron’s own legislators who voted for the law to protest, calling the idea of appointing a commission to rewrite their law an insult. One complained of being treated like a “vulgar floorcloth” (serpillière), another like a doormat (paillasson). How embarrassing! The president had crafted the entire operation specifically for electoral purposes, following the results of private polling that showed a positive response to Macron’s promise to get tough on Muslims.

      Macron’s minister of justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, speaking to BFM-TV, dared to undermine Macron’s and Darmanin’s logic: “It’s out of the question to forbid journalists from filming and informing the public.” He called for “amending a number of the law’s provisions.”

      Historical Note

      Macron has been heralding the 18th-century Enlightenment as an export rivaling champagne, Bordeaux or foie gras. This tells us a lot about the political philosophy of a man whose career oddly parallels Donald Trump’s. For both men, the presidency is the first political office they have been elected to. Theoretically, that should be good for democracy in two nations that have suffered from the corruption associated with government by political professionals whose idea of governing amounts to playing off vested interests against one another.

      Neither Macron’s center nor Trump’s solipsistic system have the capacity to mold reality to their purposes. But if both political mavericks managed to make it to the top, it is also because the traditional parties had themselves succumbed to a reality they could no longer control.

      Future historians will undoubtedly look back with curiosity at this strange period of history inaugurated by Osama Bin Laden in 2001, in which small terrorist groups and individuals managed to destabilize the immense power of the Western nations not through the damage they did do it directly, but through their ability to provoke self-destructive authoritarian responses from Western governments.

      Embed from Getty Images

      To be elected and respected, leaders had to show their electorate their determination to base policy on paranoia. In the meantime, the entire political class had lost its ability to analyze causes and effects, for the simple reason that they were focused on the task of balancing the interests of the powerful cliques — financial, industrial and military — that formed a club they aspired to belong to.

      Their governments’ growing authoritarianism had a two-fold effect: It punished its own citizens by restricting their liberty and reducing them to puppets in a system increasingly designed for a single purpose: to protect the status quo. Since terrorists were attacking the existing system, good citizens could accept the idea that it was the system that needed protecting, not the people themselves. 

      The second effect was more fundamental. The laws and political practices designed to protect the status quo augmented the power of private interests, increasing their wealth and control over the economy. This produced devastating social effects. The people — the supposed bedrock of democracy — were faced with an intolerable psychological dilemma. They were asked to adhere willingly to an increasingly arbitrary system that pushed them further and further into economic oblivion. Up to now, the system has worked because it seemed like the only system possible. But Yeats was right: There comes a moment when the center cannot hold. Sometimes it’s an obscure name that triggers it — a name like George Floyd or Michel Zecler.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Dazzling Shallowness of Bernard-Henri Levy

      by

      One of the attractions, or oddities, of France is its reverence of those who are regarded as philosophers, or at least philosophical thinkers. In the age of fast information, we also have fast philosophy — soundbite philosophy. Not that this has no value, but this value has to be abstracted from the veneers that accompany not just instant thought but instant thought that seems intellectually attractive: exciting, provocative, perhaps outrageous, but plausible.

      Juliette Greco: Snatching Dignity From the Jaws of the Absurd

      READ MORE

      It is in this category that Bernard-Henri Levy now finds a home. It is the task of the reader to distinguish content from veneer. But since many readers seem no longer to try, Levy has a ready audience for instant diagnosis of serious situations, rendered “philosophical” by the constant dropping of names, recognized as the serious thinkers of the past, and constant references to his own earlier work.

      Sense of Exaggeration

      That earlier work is not inconsiderable. Although always controversial because of his willingness to eviscerate sacred cows, his condemnation of Stalinism was a bold challenge to the European left to make a new start that banished socialism achieved by tyranny. His intellectual histories of French thought, such as in “Adventures on the Freedom Road,” although even then striving for effect, were vibrant and made thought seem integral to the French project of a national self. He wanted that national self to be humane and humanitarian.

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      Levy’s championing of refugees was staunchly within the moral need for a nation to be compassionate. His defense of freedom elsewhere, as in his taking of sides with Ahmad Shah Massoud against the Taliban and his more recent advocacy of the Kurdish Peshmerga in their fight against the Islamic State, were evidence of a cosmopolitanism that he saw first evidenced in the life and adventures of his hero, the writer Andre Malraux. Malraux had fought in China (with the Communists), Spain (with the Republicans) and France (with the Resistance), and wrote great novels and art histories as well as somewhat exaggerated memoirs.

      That sense of exaggeration has always been with Levy. Every adventure has been a photo opportunity, including in Bosnia during the Siege of Sarajevo or wandering the ruins of what had been Muammar Gaddafi’s headquarters in Tripoli. That, of course, comes with kickback. Levy was indeed a frequent visitor to besieged Sarajevo, but those visits tended to be fleeting, leading the entrapped citizens of Sarajevo to nickname him not BHL, as he is widely known in France, but DHL — Deux Heures Levy, in and out (safely on a United Nations plane) within two hours.

      That he then compared himself with Susan Sontag, who stayed in the city for a lengthy period, accepting the same risks as all others without UN protection, was always rich. And his perhaps seminal influence on the French and, through the French, on NATO to intervene in Libya had the unforeseen consequence of war without end in the “liberated” country.

      His latter-day championing of Jewish identity and culture, echoing in some ways Levinas, but without his philosophical gravitas and genuine luminosity, leaves open questions as to Levy’s stance on any Israeli settlement with the Palestinians that they themselves might find just. This is a shame as, in some ways, he might be a reasonable interlocutor between the two peoples making, one would hope, the proviso that human rights must deploy equality of political rights — and, of course, that there is no humanitarian settlement without human rights.

      Gadfly of Thought

      Because he’s rich, given to Dior suits and Charvet shirts, lean enough and with sufficient hair to appear dashing in his late middle age, Levy crafts an image that all the same now seems that of the jet-setting gadfly of the international — and of thought.

      That sense of the gadfly of thought comes through in his latest (short) book, “The Virus in the Age of Madness,” on the COVID-19 pandemic. It is full of references to (highly excerpted) thought from great philosophers alongside references to his earlier writing. But there is a difference stylistically to his previous work. Levy was once the pioneer of an evocative methodology that married philosophy with fiction that all the same was evocative and sometimes illuminating. That was within the construction of an imaginary conversation between himself, or himself in disguise, and one of the great thinkers.

      The great thinker explains himself, but always within the terms posed by Levy as an interviewer. Of course, this made Levy the commander of explication and interpretation of another’s thought. But the technique drew in the reader and did provoke thought among the audience.

      This time, Levy seems merely to be interviewing himself, inviting himself to make declaratory and pontifical statements to do with his (seemingly erudite) outrage that COVID-19 has rendered all other catastrophes in the world second-rate as face masks and respirators subvert and overwhelm our awareness of hunger, war, (other) pestilence and political repression. This is a fair point but made with a dazzling shallowness that proposes no means of balancing concerns over the pandemic and for other worlds. It gestures toward the sacrifice of medical frontline workers but almost dismisses them toward the end in a frenzy of concern for the “out there.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The short treatise is a polemic that has a theme but no purpose. It pales beside Susan Sontag’s own short book, “Illness as Metaphor,” which discusses the use of metaphor in the ways we refer to serious illnesses — just as Levy announces his intention to dissect the uses of metaphor but winds up proposing grand vistas of image after image for the sake of effect. And, of course, he does compare himself to Sontag in their quite different Sarajevo involvements. He also progresses the use of Benny Levy, once the controversial aide to the elderly Jean-Paul Sartre, from one side of Bernard-Henri’s interview-as-philosophical-insight technique to the status of good friend. No aggrandizement is spared.

      Levy’s book does not even interrogate the disease itself. One would have expected Levy to interview the coronavirus, but, in fact, he dismisses its personification even in medical discourse without offering any epidemiological or biochemical investigation as to why the virus has been so easy to personify as an almost thinking antagonist. He offers no way forward except, fatalities and medical staff casualties notwithstanding, that we should diminish our concerns over COVID-19 and elevate our consciousness once again to countenance commitment against the great crimes of the world.

      But we never abandoned our commitment against the great crimes. Levy’s evidence that we did so relies only on the plenitude of newspaper headlines about COVID-19, as if that alone were enough to obscure ongoing and heroic struggles. He points out, of course, that he himself never ceased his war on the world’s great crimes.

      But this proposal of singularity ignores the fact that in every case of his activism, he had to cooperate with others and bear witness to the work of others. Levy never took up arms alongside the Peshmerga. He did, however, pose for a lot of photos with them. Perhaps one day he will publish a 1,000-page pictorial history entitled “How I Alone Tried to Save the World,” in hope that the world will forget that he once wrote meaningful books.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Rapid Growth of Emmanuel Macron’s Authoritarianism

      by

      In early October, French President Emmanuel Macron, as a preparation for the 2022 election, made the decision to mount a campaign blaming France’s Muslims for their failure to embrace the country’s increasingly dogmatic “Republican culture.” To counter Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration extreme right, Macron calculated that his shambolic center-right party needed to find a way of steering votes away from the passably racist National Rally led by Le Pen.

      In Macron’s eyes, French Muslims have failed to prove the sincerity of their expected conversion to France’s national religion of laicité, or secularism, that has now definitively supplanted the traditional role of the Catholic Church. To outdo Le Pen, he deviated the blame to the world’s entire Muslim population, claiming that Islam was in the thralls of a global crisis that offended French republican sensibilities. Its credo of “equality, liberty, fraternity” now excluded tolerance for any group of people who did not unanimously adopt all its trappings. Fraternity has its limits.

      Even before the gruesome assaults on a schoolteacher and three citizens in a church in Nice that horrified the French nation, through his rhetoric about a global Islamic threat, Macron managed to convince a number of governments in Muslim countries that France was at war with their religion. Several nations responded by recommending a boycott of French products.

      Emmanuel Macron Defends His Crusade

      READ MORE

      Some went further. Since Macron felt himself in a position to signal their crisis, some Muslim authorities were tempted to focus on his own. Noticing that the French president was proposing increasingly authoritarian laws that had the effect of targeting Muslim children in schools, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Human Rights Shireen Mazari penned a tweet comparing Macron’s proposed laws, which included attributing ID numbers to school children, to the Nazi policy of requiring Jews to wear yellow stars.

      Mazari initially made the accusation on the basis of an article that was later amended to state that the IDs would be required for all children, not just Muslims. The reform aimed at obliging every child in France to receive civic instruction teaching them the “values of the Republic.” Those values include celebrating the publication of insulting cartoons that may even express bigotry and limiting the freedom to don clothing or symbols that may signify affiliation with a religion other than republicanism. Because France’s values are universal, they trump anyone else’s particular values. Conformity is a core republican value.

      France’s Foreign Ministry wasted no time reacting to Mazari’s comparison of the new measures with Nazi practices. NBC News’s headline on the story read: “France ‘deeply shocked’ as Pakistan minister compares Macron to Nazis.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Deeply shocked:

      1. Morally offended
      2. Embarrassingly surprised that one has been found out

      Contextual Note

      In the film “Casablanca,” Captain Renault, the French chief of the local police under German occupation gives the order to shut down Rick’s Café, a nightclub where he spends most of his evenings. When Rick, the American owner of the café played by Humphrey Bogart, asks why, Renault replies “I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here” just as the croupier arrives to give him his winnings.

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      The French Foreign Ministry didn’t quite frame the message in the same terms as Captain Renault. NBC reports that “the minister spoke in ‘deeply shocking and insulting terms’ of Macron and the whole of France.” The ministry added, “These hateful words are blatant lies, imbued with an ideology of hatred and violence.” Clearly, Mazari had fallen into the trap of Godwin’s law (citing Nazis invalidates any argument) and the ministry jumped on it.

      France’s proposed law clearly applies the French anti-discriminatory republican rule that procedures must apply equally and uniformly to everyone. Unlike the policies of the Nazi regime, it doesn’t seek to exclude or eliminate groups of people considered different. Marine Le Pen’s party might be tempted to envisage measures of exclusion, but not France’s traditional parties. Not even Macron’s non-traditional Republic on the Move, which was cobbled together in 2017 by attracting a variety of traditional personalities from the political establishment to provide the president with a majority in parliament.

      The republican credo elevates universal civic values to the level of an alternative moral system, replacing all the traditional bases of morality, including the Christian principles of compassion, non-violence and concern for the oppressed. Universality implies uniformity. Individuals must show themselves not so much worthy of their neighbors and their community, but of the republic itself. In that sense, the spirit of the new policies put forward by Macron do vaguely resemble Hitler’s belief in a singular Aryan ideal.

      Historical Note

      Macron’s vision of la république takes Charles de Gaulle’s meme of aspiring to “a certain idea of France” beyond mere aspiration. Macron seeks to codify and monitor the behavior of individuals, who must now prove their conformity with the civic ideal.

      Recently, China’s President Xi Jinping inveighed against a trend that when translated into English is rendered as “splitism.” China is an immense country with a dominant ethnic group, the Han, and the ambition to control territory that includes other ethnicities and cultures. China enjoys the security that comes from governing a population that not only believes in its overwhelming ethnic unity but also, largely as a reaction to its humiliation by Western powers in the 19th century, embraces a fervent form of nationalism. This has permitted Xi in the 21st century to consolidate and reinforce the authoritarianism that Mao Zedong had pushed to a chaotic extreme half a century ago.

      Macron’s links his idea of Muslim separatism in France to the entire Muslim world. This curiously echoes Xi’s complaint about “splitism.” The two ideas are fundamentally different, of course, since Xi worries that the cultures and traditions of autonomous regions, such as Tibet or Xinjiang, might lead to movements of political independence. No risk exists in France of a Muslim nation splitting off, whereas in the past, there have been very real threats of Breton, Alsatian or Basque separatism.

      Historically, France achieved a sense of national unity by imposing the French language on its linguistically diversified regions. Forcing children whose native language was Breton, Alsatian, Basque or Occitan to think in French and imagine themselves as descendants of the Gauls (who obviously didn’t speak French) led to the virtual disappearance of the regional languages. Macron probably sees this historical reality as a policy that paid off in the end. Why not apply it to another important component of contemporary French demography: Muslims?

      Macron is now discovering that there are a number of problems with this approach. Unlike Basques or Bretons, French Muslims are geographically dispersed across the nation. The history of their relations with the French formerly colonialist nation is extremely complex. And the fact that it is their religion rather than their ethnicity or their geographical origin that defines them means that treating them as a coherent group is not just perilous, but impossible, especially if the reasoning is restricted to France itself. An important part of their identity derives from a global community that is also extremely diverse.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This may help to explain why Macron believes that Islam is in a crisis. Someone who has a “certain idea” of France itself expects other nations and groups of people to have a certain idea of themselves. For the universalist republican Macron, anything that isn’t uniform and unified must be in a state of crisis.

      By taking on the entire Muslim world, Macron may end up disastrously achieving the goal of unifying Muslims by posing as their common enemy. His policies that now insist on shaping all young Muslims in France into the universalist republican mold is creating rather than resolving tension. For one thing, it inevitably provokes more irrational attacks by unhinged fanatics — and every community has its unhinged fanatics.

      Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Méheut writing in The New York Times call the system Macron is putting in place “France’s Dragnet,” a policing campaign that now focuses on Muslim children as young as 10. Teachers have been instructed to denounce children who show signs of thinking differently about the values of the republic. It has already left numerous children “traumatized” and fearful to speak freely in class for fear of being suspected of terrorist intentions. That is how, in the wake of drama surrounding the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, France promotes its republican version of “freedom of expression.” 

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The Rise of the Digital Émigré

      by

      The French word “émigré” specifically refers to people who leave their home country for political reasons, a self-exile of sorts. In that sense, it’s a very different term from “immigrant,” “expat” or “nomad.” In history, émigrés have fled abroad to escape from revolutions in France, the United States and Russia. Many aristocrats escaped war-torn European countries amid the chaos of the Second World War. In the early 1920s, cities such as Shanghai and Paris were havens for émigré communities. Now, a century later, political changes have created a new wave of émigrés. I call them digital émigrés.

      For example, 2020 has brought an unprecedented rise in American citizens leaving the United States to seek new lives abroad. In fact, the number of Americans who gave up their US citizenship skyrocketed to 5,816 in the first half of 2020, compared with 2,072 in all of 2019, according to research from New York-based Bambridge Accountants. 

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      This trend has been accelerated not only by America’s poor handling of the pandemic, but also the rise of Trumpism and more generalized far-right political attitudes, plus uncertainty about health care and worries about newly emboldened militia groups across the country. Those who leave may include parents looking for safer countries to bring up their children or members of marginalized groups worried about the rise in racist political ideologies.

      Across the Atlantic, a similar dynamic is happening in the UK. Brexit has been a massive push factor for British digital émigrés. The number of British citizens moving permanently to European Union countries rose by 30% since the 2016 referendum. According to research, half of this number decided to leave within three months of the original vote. By now, some will already be almost eligible for citizenship in their destination country, which in some cases takes a minimum of five years.  

      Other Brits fled at the last minute, during the transition period of 2020, while their EU rights were still valid. At the time of writing, some are still planning an escape before the end of 2020. There has also been a 500% increase in British citizens who have taken up citizenship of one of the 27 EU countries. This is a predictable response to the actions of a UK government forcibly removing people’s long-held rights.

      These trends in both the UK and US indicate that people are no longer prepared to tolerate the consequences of damaging political decisions. In the past, it was harder to uproot one’s life and leave for another country. For starters, international moves require having a source of income, which can be challenging to find when you don’t speak the language, don’t have connections and aren’t familiar with the local culture.

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      Fortunately for 21st-century digital émigrés, the rise in remote working, and particularly in doing business online across borders, has provided the necessary freedom to make rapid international relocations. What’s more, the pandemic has boosted this trend by further legitimizing online working, compelling more employers to accept it as the norm. Countries needing immigration have seen the remote working trend as a golden opportunity to attract skilled professionals to their shores. A number of countries, including Estonia and Bermuda, have introduced digital–nomad visas. Others, such as Portugal and the Czech Republic, have special pathways to residency for foreigners who generate income from outside the country.

      In the case of Portugal and, more recently, Greece, generous tax breaks are available for those who make money online. For those countries, the beauty of the setup is that the foreigners’ money can help revitalize the local economy without taking jobs on the ground away from citizens.

      Indeed, the digital émigré trend is gaining such momentum that governments are beginning to take notice. If a large number of educated and skilled citizens leave their country permanently, taking their tax money with them, it could have severe implications for that country’s economy. Perhaps governments should keep this more firmly in mind when they decide to enact policies that deprive people of important rights, such as the freedom to live, work, study and retire across European Union countries. 

      Governments should tread carefully in this “digital first” world, where borderless working is rapidly becoming the norm. Remote working and online business empower digital émigrés to vote with their feet. These highly educated and skilled professionals can easily relocate their entire lives to destinations that more closely match their values, goals and lifestyle choices.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More