Category Archives: Europe

Stratfor: European unification – they’ll live unhappily ever after

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Summary: Here’s an essay about the European Union from one of Stratfor’s more perceptive analysts. It provides a unusual and insightful perspective on Europe’s long quest for unification, and the bumps along the way.

Stratfor

Europe, Unhappily Ever After
By Reva Goujon.
Stratfor, 20 September 2016.

The scene at Bratislava Castle last week was a familiar one: European leaders gathered for another summit in a typically idyllic setting, where the natural beauty of their surroundings belied the deep imperfections of the union they were struggling to salvage. But now, in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the Continental bloc, delusion steeped in the ideals of an “ever-closer” union is wearing thin, and the realists in the room seem to be gradually gaining ground.

The shift in the summit’s tone was to be expected; closet Euroskeptics can no longer hide behind the United Kingdom as they assert national rights and tamp down Brussels’ principles. They realize that the longer Europe’s leaders avoid the hard questions, opting instead to continue extolling the “spirit” of the European Union as a way to survive, the more the bloc’s guardians will have to react to — rather than shape — the enormous changes bubbling up from their disillusioned electorates.

As Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi (who has tied his own political fate to a referendum in October) testily noted, the Bratislava gathering amounted to little more than a “boat trip on the Danube” and an “afternoon writing documents without any soul or any horizon” on the real problems afflicting Europe.

Tempering Ideals With Realities

The same frustration was palpable in several conversations I had during a recent trip to Slovenia, a country that tends to stay below the radar in Europe but is nevertheless highly perceptive of ground tremors. Slovenia lies, often precariously, at the edge of empires. Under the weight of the Alps, the former Yugoslav republic has one foot lodged in the tumultuous cauldron of the Balkans while its other foot toes the merchant riches of the Adriatic Sea. All the while, its arms are outstretched across the Pannonian Plain toward Vienna, the seat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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Stratfor: Is the West Being Overrun by Migrants?

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Summary: People often compare today’s waves of immigration with those that played a large role in the destruction of the Roman Empire. Here Stanford Professor Ian Morris describes, the similarities, the differences, and the lessons this history holds for us. Morris focuses on the danger of migrants as organized military forces; he gives little attention to their disruptive domestic effects. For another perspective see America isn’t falling like the Roman Empire. It’s falling like Rome’s Republic.

Stratfor

Is the West Being Overrun by Migrants?
By Ian Morris at Stratfor on 7 September 2016.

Are the barbarians at the gates? Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front party, has no doubt that they are. “Without any action,” she told a rally at Amiens last year, “the migratory influx will be like the barbarian invasion of the fourth century, and the consequences will be the same.” That would be bad. According to St. Orientus of Auch, who lived through the original event, “Throughout villages and farms, throughout the countryside and crossroads, and through all districts, on all highways leading from this place or that, there was death, sorrow, ruin, fires, mourning.”

The Parisian political establishment turned up its collective nose at Le Pen’s analogy (being France, the newspapers concentrated on correcting her chronology: The invasions came mostly in the fifth century, not the fourth). And despite all his talk of building a wall to keep invaders out, Donald Trump has so far resisted likening himself to Emperor Hadrian. Not since Pat Buchanan, in fact, has an American presidential hopeful called Mexicans barbarians.

The internet, however, is full of comparisons between the end of ancient Rome and current events in the United States and European Union, and I find that when I give public lectures I regularly get asked how much the two periods have in common and how much we should worry about it. (Being both an immigrant and an ancient historian, I probably get this more than most people.)

The answer to both questions seems to be “not much.” But that said, they remain worth asking, because the details behind the answer are rather revealing. Just what was it about the Germanic migrations into the Roman Empire that made them so different from the contemporary Arab migration into Europe and Mexican migration into the United States?

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The third wave of Jihad begins. We will soon see its power.

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Summary: Jeremy Harding at the LRB looks at the next big step by jihadists, and the amazing oddity of the West’s response.

Islamic Jihad

 

Introduction

Modern jihad has gone through several phases, each stronger and more virulent than the predecessor. First came Afghanistan’s Mujahideen, who burned out in internecine conflict (defeated by the Tailiban). Al Qaeda came next, destroyed in the years after 9/11. Then came ISIS, now being destroyed after its premature shift to phase three insurgent operations (per Mao’s schema: holding territory and waging conventional warfare). Now jihad takes a new step, resuming phase two operations (terrorism) — but expanding their operations into Europe.

We can only guess at what form this will take, and what jihadists learned from their previous failures. Here Jeremy Harding explains this stage in jihad’s evolution, and the great oddity of the West’s response. Red emphasis added.

“Third Wave Jihadism?“

By Jeremy Harding. Excerpt from London Review of Books. 15 July 2016.
Posted with the author’s generous permission.

“Gilles Kepel, a specialist on ‘Islam and the Arab world’, wrote last year in Terreur dans l’Hexagone – a study of French jihadism – that the Charlie Hebdo killings were ‘a sort of cultural 9/11’. The jihadism that we’re now confronted with, he argued, is a third wave phenomenon, superseding the mujahidin in Afghanistan (the first) and emerging in the long twilight of al-Qaida (the second).

“The latest wave is specifically targeted at Europe, with its significant Muslim population (about 20 million in EU countries): the approach is ‘horizontal’, favouring networks rather than cells; disruption, fear and division are the tactics; the radical awakening of European Muslims, many already disaffected and marginal, is the immediate objective. The murders at Charlie Hebdo’s offices and the kosher store in Paris brought the third wave ‘to a paroxysm’, in Kepel’s view, just as 9/11 brought the second ‘to its pinnacle’. At the time of writing, no one has laid claim to the atrocity in Nice: more than 80 dead, 50 hospitalised (‘between life and death’, in President Hollande’s words, earlier today).

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Causes and effects of the Nice attack

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Summary: The Nice incident was the latest in a long series of jihadist attacks in Europe. Here we look at the mass immigration which made it almost inevitable, and the likely effects. The resulting political destabilization will make mitigate (there is no cure) more difficult — and more attacks are coming.

French Muslims burning French flag

The attack in Nice is just the latest in a long series of attacks by Islamic terrorists in Europe since 2010. This is not just a shock like 9/11 was to America because it results from a long-standing, bipartisan (i.e., both Left and Right), and unpopular policy: allowing mass immigration. The cumulative effect of these attacks might discredit much of western Europe’s political leadership. That might prove more significant the death toll from these incidents.

“What does the word ‘enough’ mean? Is Sweden full? Is the Nordic region full? Are we too many people? We are 25 million people living in the North. I often fly over the Swedish countryside. I would recommend more people to do the same. There are endless fields and forests. There’s as much space as you can imagine. Those who claim that the country is full, they must demonstrate where it is full.”
— Fredrik Reinfeldt (Prime Minster of Sweden from 2006-2014), expressing views of EU’s elites.

The WaPo reports that “The refugee crisis could actually be a boon for Germany.” Pushing wages down! Higher corporate profits!

“‘…this country, which eighty years ago was responsible for the worst crimes of the century, has today won the applause of the world, thanks to its open borders.”
— Merkel, Chancellor of Germany since 2005. Applause of the world’s elites.

In August 2015 this EU poll asked people to list the most important issues facing the EU. What would this look like if run today? Click to enlarge.

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Professor Mark Blyth explains the real roots of Brexit & Trump

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Summary: Here’s one of the best essays I’ve seen about the deeper causes of Brexit, beyond Britain’s elites blaming the ignorance racist proles (which conveniently excuses them of any responsibility). Professor Mark Blyth shines light on the real forces at work, and shows how the US has similar problems. Brexit and Trump are the start of a new era for the West, for good or ill.

“Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.”
— Jean Monnet in his Memoirs (1978). He was one of the architect of the program to unite Europe (see his Wikipedia bio).

Brexit

Mark Blyth explains the hidden reasons for Brexit
Excerpt from transcript of an interview by Athens Live on 26 June 2016

“Let’s think about it this way: was austerity the policy or was austerity a side effect? What we have found out recently from a paper done by the German business school was that, according to their estimates, a full 95% of the cash that went to Greece ran a trip through Greece and went straight back to creditors — which in plain English is banks. Public taxpayers’ money was pushed through Greece to basically bail out banks…So austerity becomes a side effect of a general policy of bank bailouts that nobody wants to own. That’s really what happened, ok?

“…Why are we peddling nonsense? Nobody wants to own up to a gigantic bailout of the entire European banking system that took six years. Austerity was a cover.

“…If the EU at the end of the day and the Euro is not actually improving the lives of the majority of the people, what is it for? That’s the question that they’ve brought no answer to.

“…I’m very pro-European, but I’m against the euro, so if I still lived in the UK I would have an interesting choice. Now if you look at Larry Elliott in The Guardian, he thinks he should vote for exit because this might be the existential crisis that blows up the euro. Now why would you want to blow up the Euro, because “that would be terrible etc etcetera”. Because the long-term effect of the euro is going to be to drive Western European wages down to Eastern European levels in global competition for export share with the Chinese.

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