Morning Ed: Europe {2016.04.21.Th}
Well, here’s some depressing polling on Muslims in Britain. Great response from British Muslims, though.
Chantal Mouffe explains the consensus of the centre and how Europe has entered a post-political age, and Ian Begg asks if the welfare state of Europe is still worth having.
Let’s call it Havelland.
Iain Martin thinks Corbyn’s upgrading his PMQ game, George Greenwood explained what Labour can learn from the Corbyn experiment, while James Clark says David Cameron will win the class war.
The British Polling Council does a post-mortem on what went wrong with the UK election of 2015. No Shy Tory effect! Turnout models not bad, no provable herding. And so the problem was… {click the link!}
The New York Times explains why the EU is breaking down.
In an article about hipster Neo-Nazis, an interesting factlet that runs contrary to a lot of narratives: Far-right support in Germany is half of what it was ten years ago. Though, to be fair, I remember of hearing about a lot of problems twenty years ago, and I was only barely politically aware.
India wants the Koh-i-Noor diamond back. It’s currently set into one of the royal crowns.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-04-20/india-wants-large-diamond-britain-s-crown-jewelsReport
They’ve been asking for that rock back for over fifty years now.Report
True, they probably won’t get it back this time either.Report
Nope, they probably would need to hash out between Pakistan, Iran and themselves who is the “rightful” owner. Not much chance of that happening.Report
Yes, the stone has a very interesting history.Report
EU: The eu was never going to make it as it. You cannot merge that many countries with so little in common into one political state. When the Greeks and other med states were let in on dubious debt accounting stats, it was the beginning of the end.
Common market and all, sure. Not a “united states of Europe”. And we’re still there defending their asses. We should have walked away decades ago.Report
Well they couldn’t get the common market without the rest; much as the Germans would have loved to do so. I’m not so confident that the EU is doomed. Ironically two of their crises are poised, in the long run, to negate each other (their demographic overhang and the heavy immigration issue). If they can take a horsewhip to the cultural relativism and maintain a stiff upper lip about the revanchist terrorists sneaking in with refugees then they could weather it okay. Brussels needs reform obviously, the EU is very young after all.Report
I don’t think it’s doomed, but I think it’s at least 50 years away from what its architects want it to be. And there’s a lot that can happen in the meantime to turn 50 into 75 or 100.
But the rich and powerful want it to happen, and will not stop from wanting it to happen, and so it’s likely to happen.Report
Agreed, it’s not like the Americans got done right or quickly and they all spoke the same language.Report
They can’t have a unitary monetary policy without some sort of embedded transfer mechanism to offset the countries who are being screwed by the monetary policy.
If Germany is booming and Italy busting, you can treat one or the other — but whichever one you treat is going to screw the other, unless you move money around to offset it.
We do it automatically in the US through the federal budget. Everything from automatic stuff (SS payments and such don’t get cut when a state is in a recession, or unemployment benefits, etc) to the block grant programs (just because your state’s economy is hurting doesn’t drop your road funds).
A unified currency doesn’t mean all of Europe is experiencing the same economic conditions — but it will mean they’re experiencing the same monetary policy.Report
Exactly. And until monetary policy is extracted from each of the EU member states, this will always be an issue. I don’t see the member states signing up for that anytime soon.Report
Eventually they’ll either leave the EU or the EU will, effectively, apply a federal tax and some blunt block transfers back that’ll offset monetary policy to the countries that find that shoe on the wrong foot.Report
Well if they don’t then the periphery will exit and the Germans will potentially lose their free access to those markets. There’s a reason the Germans don’t want the EU to dissolute; it is not just the periphery countries that benefitted from integration.Report
To my understanding, those markets became significantly larger because the German banks were loaning lots of money to the Greek banks and government, which funneled the money to Greek consumers. Much of the debate now is about which set of taxpayers will be making the German banks whole. The Greeks (that’s the whole austerity side) or the Germans (that’s the debt-forgiveness side).Report
This strikes me as correct, but cart before the horse. Before they can start really integrating economically, they have to deal with the reasons they haven’t done so yet. Upping and deciding to go USA-like isn’t really feasible, for the reasons it hasn’t happened. Namely, that being European isn’t a thing, isn’t likely to be any time soon, and can’t be (directly) legislated into being a thing.Report
It’s not like I had a solution, and this problem — while incredibly obvious in hindsight — was probably not even on their radar when the EU was formed.
They probably, if rather naively in hindsight, expected the free trade and common currency amongst members to basically homogenize the general state of their economies — they didn’t expect a divergence like the Great Recession caused. And to be fair, the Great Recession was….pretty unprecedented. It came within a whisker of being a throwback to the 30s in terms of “awful” and I suspect an awful lot of people thought that something like that had been banished forever by monetary policy.
(On the US side, I remember how flabbergasted Greenspan looked, for instance. I’d put money down that he didn’t even think it could happen given even moderately competent Fed policy).Report
t came within a whisker of being a throwback to the 30s in terms of “awful” and I suspect an awful lot of people thought that something like that had been banished forever by monetary policy.
The rate at which goods and services were being produced declined by about 5% between the 2d quarter of 2008 and the 2d quarter of 2009. The decline registered between the summer of 1929 and the spring of 1933 was on the order of 30%. Bit more sizable than ‘a whisker’.Report
Well they couldn’t get the common market without the rest;
They had a customs union without the rest for nearly three decades, bar for agricultural goods, for which they contrived a common set of subsidies.Report
1. The UK Labour Party does have an anti-Semitism problem though:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jews-jeremy-corbyn
2. Post-Politics is an interesting thesis. The centre-right parties of Europe certainly don’t try and dismantle the welfare state as much but politics is in the eye of the beholder and their are plenty of partisans in Europe as well.
3. Let’s see if Cameron can survive the Panama Papers. His supporters have been left to some very weak tea defenses. I generally agree though. There is a certain kind of leftist that does not understand aspirational voting especially if it relates to material and consumer goods. Ironically many of these leftists come from pretty privileged households themselves.Report
The UK Labour Party does have an anti-Semitism problem though:
The entire British chatterati is anti-semitic,and the sores have been running for about 30 years now. Caroline Glick offered after her last appearance before an audience in Oxford that she hoped she’d never set foot in the UK ever again.Report
What Art said. It’s really a problem in most European bobo communities but the British are the wors. Jews are regarded as vulgar and not really persecuted group that should be ignored.Report
Flint is back in the news. Three persons were charged with crimes in connection to the water issue. I wonder if the left will laud Snyder for seeing that charges were brought?
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/water-712865-flint-lead.htmlReport
Nope, for 2 reasons:
1) It’s what he is supposed to do.
2) He isn’t bringing himself up on charges.Report
No, they won’t, because that would interfere with their blame-shifting efforts. Partisan Democrats quit telling the truth when George McGovern and Nat Hentoff retired.Report
Dammit, 2016!Report
The post politics thesis goes hand in hand with the EU’s technocratic vision. Nearly all of the architects of the EU wanted to make it demagogue proof. This meant that the democratic parts had to be underemphasized while the technocratic parts overemphasized. Technocracy doesn’t move people.
The post-politics thesis is the same. There is a big consensus among elite politicians on many economic and social issues. You aren’t allowed more deviation to the left or the right without risking ostracization, although this hurts the right more in practice in Europe. People want something different though.Report