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 December 14, 2010
ISTANBUL: ANCIENT CITY AND THROBBING METROPOLIS…WHERE EAST MEETS WEST…ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT…AND IRANIAN TORTURERS…I touched down in Istanbul with a good deal of excitement. Its reputation had preceded it, causing a palpable sense of anticipation on my part. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize winner in literature from Turkey, writes of his hometown Istanbul with a mixture of melancholy and majesty that tries to reconcile the local landscape’s ancient history with its modern aspirations. Formerly known as Byzantium under the Romans, then as Constantinople after it converted to Christianity under Emperor Constantine, and finally its current name after the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, human habitation has existed at this location as far back as the 10th century B.C. During this long history, this city served as the capital of the Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman Empires (the latter lasting for nearly five centuries until 1922). In short, Istanbul is a historical proving ground, where empires conquered and got conquered, leaving layer upon layer of lost stories with the latest incarnation sitting atop the buried remains of Romans, Christians, Celts, Muslims, Crusaders, Jews, churches, mosques, Turks, Greeks, Venetians, Bulgarians, and other peoples who transmigrated east to west and back again. Today Istanbul is a modernizing mega-city of nearly 14 million people, one of the largest in the world, and also the commercial heart of Turkey. Construction cranes stretch against the skyline in practically every direction, and it occurs to me that they are the true national monuments of modern Turkey. Turkey proper, for its part, is one of the most important emerging national economies in the world, with roaring economic growth rates that rival that of China and India. Muslims, Christians, and Jews live in relative harmony here, yet it’s as if its too-jumbled history pulses within the walls, the monuments, the winding streets, indeed within each individual Turk now inhabiting this ground zero zone. How could it not? No wonder Orhan Pamuk keens over the beauty residing in Istanbul’s "crumbling city walls, in the grass, ivy weeds and trees I remember growing from the towers and walls." Indeed, Istanbul’s unique geographical position makes it the meeting ground of East and West; it is the only city in the world to exist on two continents, Europe and Asia. These two worlds are divided by the Bosphorus Strait that runs roughly north-south through the heart of the city like the sands of an hour glass, connecting the Black Sea in the north to the Sea of Marmara to the south (which in turn is connected to the Mediterranean). That tectonic parting into two worlds in essence defines Turkey’s historic as well as modern-day dilemma: whether to step further toward the West, or further toward the East. Or straddle both, for as long as it can. Long a member of NATO, aspiring to become a member state of the European Union, all parties to the negotiations are not sure if Turkey fits comfortably in the western camp primarily due to that “Muslim thing,” as well as vast differences in educational and wealth levels between the West and most of Turkey outside Istanbul and the country's capital, Ankara. But Turkey doesn’t fit comfortably in the East either, even with its Muslim roots, especially since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 and the emergence of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as the progenitor of a secular nation now known as the Republic of Turkey (Turks are immensely proud of “their George Washington,” Ataturk, and there are statues and likenesses of him everywhere - when Time magazine held an online election to select the most important person of the 20th century, Turks practiced the old village tradition of voting early and often, resulting in Ataturk winning, much to Time - and the West’s - chagrin. The magazine voided the election and handpicked Albert Einstein instead). Turkey is caught between two worlds, like Janus, the Roman god of doorways and new beginnings, depicted as having two heads facing opposite directions; one head looks back at the last year while the other looks forward to the new, simultaneously into the future and the past, to the west and the east (Janus being the namesake for the month of January, which begins each new year). Walking around Istanbul, one of the first things that struck me was the vibrancy and energy of the place. It has a street level buzz, like New York City, Paris, or Berlin. Traffic was gridlocked and there was a hustle to the place, like a beautiful con game going on, someone trying to sell you something around every corner. One taxi driver ripped us off with a clever little ruse, and we were boggle-eyed enough to fall for it. I got drawn seductively into the give and take of a Turkish carpet trader, and by the end of the session was out more money than I could have imagined but was the proud new owner of a stunning hand-woven work of Kurdish floor art. In the Grand Bazaar and Spice Market thousands upon thousands of vendors are jammed in, their shops practically shoulder to shoulder, hawking their sparkling wares but what was even more remarkable was that the same vendor conversed one second in English (with me), the next in French, then German, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, each shop owner knowing multiple languages of commerce, each a Marco Polo of the Levant (Polo passed through Constantinople, I am told). Adding to the edge of the place, a suicide bomber detonated his terror in the middle of Taksim Square, one of the main thoroughfares, only a few blocks from where we were staying. Our taxi driver happened to be in the square when it went off, and through his halting English we could see that he was still shaken from the experience (I wrote about this earlier in this blog, see here). I was thrilled to be accompanied in Istanbul by my partner Lucy Colvin and my mother-in-law, Barbara Colvin. Barbara, all of 83 years wise and from Minneapolis, wrote this about her maiden voyage in Istanbul: I was impressed with the size of the city, and then learned there were 14 million people and so much traffic and so many cars and so many taxis. That was my first impression. And then I remembered the Turks were the Hittites that used to fight the ancient Egyptians. They are quite an attractive people. Many of the women on the streets were especially beautiful. Some people spoke good English including a few of the taxi drivers. At the Spice Market and Grand Bazaar all of the shop keepers spoke good English to us and then they turned to the other customers and spoke other languages. So it seemed to me that everyone gave the impression of being well educated. The food was delicious and attractive, including the Turkish coffee I had heard was so strong. I thought it was very delicious. The breads and rolls were outstanding. The city was beautiful. It looked very modern but so much was very, very old. The ancient walls and mosques were at least 1500 years old, still very beautiful and in good shape. It seemed more foreign than other places I’d visited but obviously quite westernized. I am so pleased to have had the privilege of being there. It’s a place I really wanted to see and was not disappointed. My favorite place was the old mosque/church called the Hagia Sophia (dating from 500 AD), as well as the Spice Market. And I loved the boat ride on the Bosphorus and seeing all the beautiful homes and palaces along the shoreline. It appeared that most people in Istanbul proper lived in apartment buildings because there is not enough room for all to have houses. I enjoyed going to the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art too, it was so lovely overlooking the Bosphorus, and the sun was sparkling on the water. That is probably the best selection of modern art I’ve seen in one place. I was impressed with hearing about Atatürk and how he wanted Istanbul to be as lovely as other western cities and so he sent many artists to study modern art in France and then added this museum. I have read two of the novels by the Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk which is helping me have more background on the city. Thank you Barbara. Like Rome (sort of), Istanbul's nickname is The City on Seven Hills because (like Rome) the city was built on seven hills. And Barbara gamely walked up a good chunk of those hills. It was a short first visit, but filled with many highlights. I gave a lecture and was interviewed twice, first by a reporter from Today’s Zaman, which is the leading English-language daily in Turkey (one of two English-language dailies, the other being Hurriyet Daily News). The interviewer focused on issues related to the European Union, but also focused extensively -- relentlessly even -- on issues related to Israel, which is embroiled at the moment with Turkey over various Middle East disagreements. One of those disagreements is over Israel's tragically violent and unjustified attack of the humanitarian flotilla that tried to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip on May 31, 2010, which resulted in nine people being killed by Israeli soldiers. After completing our interview, the Today’s Zaman reporter told me that his photographer (who had been snapping photos of me throughout the interview) had been present on the ship that had been boarded by the Israeli soldiers. I asked the photographer a few questions, and in his broken English he responded. Yes, he had been injured by the soldiers, though not seriously. Yes, it was very scary. Yes, he was glad he was there and he would do it again because the Israeli blockade is wrong and hurting many innocent people. But he didn’t seem eager to talk about it, so finally we shook hands and said good-bye. The article written from that interview was published on Today’s Zaman front page, below the fold. Here is a link to the article. "United States too uncritical of Israel, says American author" The second interview I gave was to an Iranian journalist who was living in Istanbul. The conversation focused a lot on relations between Iran and the United States, as well as with Europe. But what was vividly memorable about this interview is that, during the usual type of give and take between interviewer and interviewee, it came out that this journalist had been a political prisoner in Iran; indeed, he told me he had been tortured by the Iranian authorities. To be honest, at first I was somewhat skeptical. I don't know why, perhaps it was a mixture of a natural wariness I have learned from my travels of claims that strangers make, combined with a lack of personal familiarity with the subject. Torture is just not part of my daily, quotidian frame. So I asked him, hopefully not too challengingly, but also perhaps out of a privileged sense of curiosity, "What did they do to you?" I won't forget anytime soon the look on his sudden, pained face as he described his treatment. The details of his response aren't what stick in my mind -- they were banally evil, as these things go, to borrow from Hannah Arendt -- instead what I remember is how his face twisted up as he recalled those harrowing moments. In the close gap across the wooden table at which we sat, as I observed his breath lower and his jaw line twist, I tried to comprehend the totality of what he was saying, and I realized how much torture is psychological as well as physical. The sheer terror of being in someone else's grip, totally in their control and not your own, knowing that they have complete god-like power to determine how much pain you have to endure, how many hours and times a day, how arbitrary your life will be lived. While I reacted with the appropriate amount of horror and condemnation for the Iranian authorities, silently I cursed myself and my thoughtless skepticism for making him relive that, and the privilege of distance and the distance of my privilege. I was an envoy from the Western comfort zone, and soon we shook hands and I departed back to it. What else could I do? —Steven Hill 4:43 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (0)December 12, 2010
“EUROPE'S PROMISE” INTERVIEWS FROM THE TOUR, PLUS A VIDEO OF MY SPEECH IN ATHENS AT THE FOREIGN MINISTRY…My speaking engagements in Athens attracted some media attention, including interviews and a YouTube video of one of my talks. I thought some readers might find these of interest: Interview in Vima, the leading daily newspaper in Greece Video of my talk at the Foreign Ministry of the Greek government: An article in a Greek publication reporting on my talk at the Foreign Ministry Here is another interview in an Italian publication, following my lecture in Rome at Fondazione Fare Futuro A book review of Europe's Promise in the Vienna Review (English-language, Austria) December 4, 2010
MY INTERVIEW WITH GREEK PRIME MINISTER GEORGE PAPANDREOU…FROM THE TOP OF THE ACROPOLIS…My interview with PM Papandreou was preceded by one with his Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Spyros Kouvelis. I was ushered into a pleasant yet not extravagant office, decorated tastefully with various artworks of Greek culture and personal artifacts. The Deputy Minister was joined by some of his staff. After introductions, Mr. Kouvelis opened with an assessment of his country’s situation, which of course he subtly pinned on the government of the previous Prime Minister, Costas Karamanlis, which had hid the full extent of Greece’s debt. Deputy Minister Kouvelis told about attending what has become a legendary meeting of the then-newly elected Prime Minister George Papandreou and his team, in which each department head and Minister reported to the PM about the state of affairs inherited from the previous government. As they went around the room, the deficit grew larger and larger as each department had discovered that the situation in their respective area was much worse than had been reported. Mr. Kouvelis talked about the look on all their faces as they realized the magnitude of what they had inherited. When the true size of Greece’s deficit was revealed to the world, the bonds markets went berserk. The interest rates on Greece’s sovereign debt spiked to unheard of proportions, threatening the solvency of the government, and the rest is history. “It was clear that the previous government had not told the truth,” said Mr. Kouvelis in a calm, even-tempered manner. He did not belabor the point to score political points, but his overall message was sobering. Indeed, the deficits were so big, he says, that Prime Minister Papandreou was forced to go to the European Union and tell them, "It's not just Greece that is on the line...Europe and the euro zone are on the line too," because it raised the unprecedented possibility of a eurozone member having to default on its debt. Moreover, much of that debt is held by banks in other European countries, so even though Greece’s economy is only two percent of the overall E.U. economy, there was the chance of other dominoes falling, or as it has been called, “contagion.” And indeed, Papandreou was correct about that. The European Commission already had been providing money to Greece for development for many years, for infrastructure-building and other growth-encouraging projects, and so it was already heavily invested in Greece’s welfare. Little did anyone realize then how much Greece’s fellow eurozone members would be called upon to “invest” in their Aegean partner. Greece’s plunge into near bankruptcy shattered the bonds of trust and agreement that had prevailed in the eurozone and by extension in the European Union. Part of the rupture resulted from the fact that Greece’s crisis was not just economic in origin. As Professor Takis Pappas from the University of Macedonia has written, “The crisis has its origins in grave pathologies of [Greece’s] political system over the last three decades, so recovery will require much more than wise economic management. It will in fact require the remaking of Greece’s whole political and institutional system.” Specifically all of Greece’s major political parties had gotten into the habit of winning elections by giving away the candy store, providing subsidies and government jobs to their constituencies. What resulted was an uncompetitive economy with a huge percentage of government employees, a diminished private and manufacturing sector, and ballooning government deficits compounded by huge numbers of people from all income levels who didn’t pay their taxes. That had become the Greek “development model,” much like a declining manufacturing sector combined with a financial industry on steroids and a housing bubble had become the U.S. development model. In both countries their unsustainable ways came crashing down. Now, with its economy in ruins, could Greece figure out how to do things differently? That’s what I was interested in assessing from those I was interviewing -- did they have a plan to fundamentally change Greece? Or were they looking to band aid over this latest crisis, as so many previous governments had done? I asked a question to the Deputy Minister. “Given that economic experts are saying that Greece needs to increase its exports, and make its economy more competitive, what does Greece have now or what will it have in the future, that the world wants to buy?” (a similar question could be legitimately asked to the Obama administration). In response he said that Greece was looking to focus development in the following areas: high quality tours and culture (which makes sense, Greece’s peerless historical and cultural attractions had long been a big money maker for the country); renewable energy and green development (taking advantage of copious amounts of sun and wind); and shipping (a longtime core Greek industry). But perhaps most interestingly Mr. Kouvelis discoursed at length about the advantages of Greece's "geographical position." By that he meant that Greece’s location would allow it to play a key role as a gateway between the west and the east, between Europe and the Arab world. He talked about Greece being a regional hub for the Balkan countries and Turkey’s fast growing economy, and using that position to attract foreign direct investment. It sounded plausible, even convincing. But one of the people with me, Alec Mally, was a former long time American employee of the U.S. embassy in Greece. He expressed skepticism. “This is not the first time that the Greek government has proposed regional projects like this, and being a regional hub,” he said. “But in the past those plans didn't work because of so much bureaucracy and corruption. How will it be different this time?" That’s a key question. The large-scale patronage that I referred to earlier, besides causing a large and ineffective state, also has been responsible for a paralyzed bureaucracy. And the corruption had become so widespread that a Brookings Institute study showed that patronage, bribery and other corruption costs Greece 8 percent of its GDP per annum. Another study by Transparency International showed that in 2009 the Greeks had paid an average of about $1800 in bribes for such services as speeding up the obtaining of a driver’s license or building permits, getting admitted to public hospitals, or manipulating tax returns. What about it, Mr. Deputy Minister? Can you reverse these trends? The Deputy Minister made the case that the linchpin for changing Greece fundamentally was “getting people off the public payroll and on the private sector payroll." This in turn would shrink the size of government and the slice of the budget so dependent on patronage, i.e. handing out jobs to bought-off constituencies. Coming from a high-ranking member of the PASOK government, this was a statement worthy of attention. PASOK is the socialist party of Greece begun by the current prime minister’s father who was probably more responsible than any other figure in fashioning the patronage state. This was Nixon going to China, to have PASOK tackling this issue. "Now we have a fast-track program," said Deputy Minister Kouvelis, trying to sound convincing. "The current crisis has given us more momentum for making the changes that need to happen.” As proof, he reported that for the first time ever this Greek government took the first survey of government employees to find out how many they had. “Previous governments did not even know how many public employees were on the payroll.” They found that there are 760,000 public employees, or 18 percent of the overall workforce (compared to the United States where about 9 percent of the workforce of 155 million workers is public employees). Deputy Minister Kouvelis also talked about how, as a way of further reducing costs, they are consolidating government in significant ways. For example, there used to be 1050 municipalities, with a lot of overlapping jobs and positions. Now there are 335 municipalities, and a lot of the overlapping jobs have been abolished. My Greek sources who attended this interview with me were nodding their heads in approval over the depth in his responses. I asked him a question that I think doesn’t get enough attention (and that I wrote about in a previous blog post), namely the downsides of having so much of the economy based on an informal sector of family and social networks. That also lends itself to barter and covert exchanges of money, which easily heads in the direction of graft and corruption; that in turn makes it difficult for the government to count things, to know how much its revenues and expense are. “Do you have a plan for bringing that under control?” He reframed this into a discourse about the "family welfare system,” which sounds warm and fuzzy and was starting to look like an evasion. But he recovered nicely, saying “The ‘gray economy’ is a problem, but grandmothers taking care of their grandchildren is good. How do we get rid of the downsides of the gray economy without getting rid of the social aspects that we believe are good? That's what we are grappling with.” In sum, he said that the E.U. partnership is getting better, as everyone has been making compromises to find solutions. At the moment, he is feeling hopeful about the current situation. “We are safe from a crash of the global economy. And we are ready to build a new future for Greece as part of a strong Europe.” My interview with Prime Minister Papandreou.The next day I interviewed Prime Minister Papandreou. Prime ministers are generally pretty busy people, especially when you are the prime minister of a country in the middle of a historic crisis in which much of the capitalist world seems to believe that your tiny nation could be a domino that brings down the rest of them. So I was not surprised when the PM’s press office told me in response to my initial request, “We will have to wait until just a day or so beforehand to decide, depending on his schedule and any late-breaking situations.” The day before I was informed that “unfortunately his day is turning out to be quite busy, back to back meetings. The best we can offer you is a telephone interview, at approximately 15:00 (3 pm).” I immediately accepted, but it put me in a bit of a quandary: that afternoon was the only time I had left to climb to the top of the Acropolis, one of the most revered classical sites in all of Greece, and explore it before leaving Athens the following day. What a choice, the prime minister or the Acropolis? Then I thought, What the heck, I can take the PM’s call from the top of the Acropolis…assuming there is cell phone reception up there, since it’s located on a 500 foot tall mount in the center of Athens! The Acropolis of Athens is the best known of its kind in the world. Although there are many other acropolises in Greece, this is the only one know as THE Acropolis. The Acropolis in its current form was constructed under the leadership of Pericles during the Golden Age of Athens. It sits on a flat-topped bluff jutting above the city, with a surface area of about 3 hectares. Its archaeological remains are vast and iconic, and one of Greece and the world’s most famous tourist attractions. Indeed, the Acropolis was formally proclaimed as the pre-eminent monument on the European Cultural Heritage list of monuments in March 2007. The climb to the top of the Acropolis proceeds along a winding, gently sloping trail. Along the slope are the remains of two different ancient theaters built into the sides of the hill. Here, some of Athens’ leading dramatists like Sophocles, Aeschylus and Aristophanes premiered their most recent plays. Climbing through the skeletal remains of ancient Greek architecture is sobering…a chance to reflect on the rise and fall of civilizations, on the plate tectonics of human affairs that grinds up the past and deposits it in the future, transformed into little more than dust and a few artifacts of a time long gone. The entrance to the Acropolis is a monumental gateway called the Propylaea. It’s imposing and impressive, or rather the Greek government has done an impressive job of rebuilding it. Using one’s imagination, one can see how these structures were meant to convey grandeur and power, circa 500 B.C. The highlight of the Acropolis is the most famous, most photographed, most recognized and most admired ruin in the world -- the Parthenon, or Temple of Athena Parthenos (Athena the Virgin). The Parthenon dominates the Athens skyline, and can be seen from practically every point in the city; I could see it from my hotel balcony in the Plaka district, day or night, since the Parthenon is brightly lit at night and radiates over the city like a second full moon. Myth, religion and war are all embodied at this site, and in its heyday it housed the city's treasures and showcased a gold and ivory statue of Athena Parthenos. It is renowned as an example of Classical Greek architecture, with its famous distinctive columns, eight on each of its shorter sides, and 17 columns on two longer sides. The history of the Parthenon is the history of Greece itself: built between 447 and 438 B.C., in the 5th century A.D. transformed into a Christian church, before becoming a mosque under Turkish rule in the 1460s. The building was attacked and almost destroyed in 1687 during a siege of the Acropolis by the Venetians to remove the Turks. A British nobleman named Thomas Bruce (otherwise known as Lord Elgin) caused more damage when he looted it in the 19th century, selling much of its contents to the British Museum. The Parthenon underwent restoration in the late 19th and 20th centuries and today is considered one of the most important symbols of ancient Greece, having been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. I was standing right in front of this magnificent building, admiring its history and architecture when, at 15:20 (3:20 pm), 20 minutes later than scheduled, I received a call and a distant voice said: “Please hold for the Prime Minister.” A few moments later a second, softer voice was on the phone, saying “This is George Papandreou.” His understated voice didn’t have to say it, but it was immediately and implicitly clear to me, that this was the latest scion of one of the two families that had dominated Greek politics for decades. He had been educated - ‘groomed’ is the more accurate word - for this slot as a leader, attending the world’s best schools and living much of his life abroad, including in the United States, rubbing elbows with the young elites of the world. He had grown up in a rarefied world that few could enter or understand, and it is said that his English is better than his Greek. Certainly his voice on the other end of the phone spoke better English than many of my relatives. I started my end of the conversation by greeting him and explaining that I was, at that very moment, at the top of the Acropolis, perched in front of the Parthenon. “Somehow it seems very appropriate that I should greet you from here,” I said. He got a chuckle out of that, he appreciated the coincidence, and he was friendly and easy to banter with. But we soon got down to business. "Your government is under enormous pressure, Mr. Prime Minister, do you think you can retain the support of the Greek people? Will you be able to hold on?” I asked him. He responded by heaping great praise on his fellow Greeks. “I am amazed at the support we are seeing in such difficult circumstances. Keep in mind that right now we are living through the worst of it, people are experiencing the cutbacks but none of the benefits that won’t come until later. And of course people are protesting, that’s understandable. But even some of the protesters are telling me, ‘Keep going, keep going, we know that Greece needs to change.’ So everyone is in this incredibly difficult position, afraid to go forward but knowing we have to. I am really proud of my fellow Greeks, and so far I feel they are supporting my team and what we are trying to do.” Opinion polls as well as a recent local election confirm that the prime minister’s party, PASOK, is enjoying support as well as a sizable 14 point lead over its main opponent; Papandreou himself retains fairly high ratings. But that flowed naturally into a rather obvious question: What exactly are you doing to rectify the situation? This part of the conversation repeated some of the same ground I went over with his Deputy Minister, Spyros Kouvelis. He stated some of the same themes about rooting out corruption. He spoke about how, shortly after coming to power in October 2009, he was obliged to admit that the Greek public sector suffered from “systemic corruption,” and identified cracking down on it as necessary for reducing the country’s public debt. But he also talked about his visions for Greece’s future, reiterating some of the same themes as Deputy Minister Kouvelis, i.e. Greece as a regional hub, boosting their green economy and green tech. “For example,” he said, “The prime minister of Turkey is coming this weekend to participate in a regional conference on global warming and green economy. We are trying to position Greece as major players in this region for those issues.” He also said that Greece’s position as a regional hub is perfectly located to attract foreign direct investment. “Chinese investors are here in Athens next weekend, and they are extremely interested in investing in our shipping and other industries where we are well-positioned to expand in the private sector if we can find sufficient investment capital.” Suddenly, much to my chagrin, our phone connection went dead. Cell phone reception at the top of the Acropolis was spotty, and I had been pacing to and fro among the ruins and tourists, so perhaps that contributed to losing reception. But fortunately he called right back and we resumed our conversation. I asked him a question about the Greek military. “Greece spends the highest percent of GDP on its military of all European nations, about 3.6 percent (the U.S. spends at least 4 percent, but other European countries spend less than half that amount as a percent of GDP). Given the crisis, given the budget deficit, doesn’t it make sense to reduce that spending?” He was cagey on that one. Precisely because of its location as a crossroads between east and west, Greece has been involved in numerous military conflicts over the centuries; in the last century Greece was invaded by the Nazis and the Ottomans/Turks, with the military itself becoming a powerful special interest during periods of dictatorship within Greece. So reducing military spending taps into a lot of historical baggage. And ongoing fear of Turkey’s army has led Greece to become the European Union’s biggest military spender as a share of GDP. But last May, during a visit to Athens Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the neighbors and strategic rivals should work to cut military spending. And naturally matching cuts from Turkey would help Greece make the reduction in military expenditures. It seems like this is on the track to becoming a reality at some point, but PM Papandreou was not about to make any major announcements or commitments to me over the phone. He discoursed a long version of “We are looking into that.” He asked me how things looked in the United States, and I told him it varied from place to place, but that some parts of the country had been hit really hard. In California, where I live, the state government had to issue IOUs in 2009 to pay its bills and prevent default. State and local governments have been slashing social programs and government jobs, while many communities have been swamped by foreclosed homes. A recent study found that 25 percent of Californians have no health insurance, and California has a higher unemployment rate than Greece. While both Greece and California are in major belt-tightening mode, at least in Greece all families and individuals still have access to healthcare and a long menu of other supports that Europe is known for. But in California, even before the crisis millions had no health care, and now more have lost their jobs and their health insurance, with little in the way of a support net which further reduces consumer spending and weakens the economy. The Greek economy is only about 2 percent of Europe's economy compared toCalifornia's economy, which is about 14 percent of the United States, truly” too big to fail.” On top of that, for a couple of decades for every dollar in federal taxes that Californians have sent to Washington DC, they have only received back about 70 cents. Where did the other 30 cents go? To states like Alaska, Wyoming and other low-population, conservative "red" states who complain about big government and taxes even as they are heavily subsidized by large "blue" states like California and Illinois. Yet when the Golden State requested assistance from the Obama administration, the subsidized states complained vociferously and the White House rejected the request, forcing California to issue IOUs. I pointed out the irony: in the U.S., which has the laws and precendent for the federal govt to act as a financial backstop and bail out states that get into financial trouble, the federal govt refused to use that power; but in the European Union, which has no history, tradition or even laws to allow some member states to bail out another, they had figured out how to do just that. He appreciate the irony, and concluded with a rather remarkable statement, a “glass half full” kind of statement that may not be fully shared by his fellow European leaders. “Greece has given Europe the opportunity to fix a defect in the euro zone, that is the fact that we did not have a fiscal union. Now steps have been taken to begin that process. And there is more solidarity from nation to nation, and that is a good thing. That has been Greece's gift to Europe.” That sounded familiar and a moment later I learned why: PM Papandreou told me he had quoted from one of my articles saying the same thing, in a speech he gave to an audience at the Foreign Policy Association in New York City (read the speech here). I concluded by telling him that I have been impressed with the steps his government had taken not only to deal with an extremely difficult situation handed to him by his predecessor, but also to reinvent Greece from the inside out. We both agreed there was a long way to go. At that point our connection went bad again, but the conversation had come to a natural conclusion, and he didn’t call back. —Steven Hill 2:09 AM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (2)November 28, 2010
ATHENS, BIRTHPLACE OF DEMOCRACY...DEMOCRACY, THE CORE OF THE WESTERN CANON...One of the places I had been most eager to visit in Athens is the Agora, the 2,500-year-old birthplace of democracy. Located at the base of the Acropolis and just across the rail tracks from the tavernas and cafes of the Monastiraki district, the ancient Agora site today is only a few sparse acres hemmed in by a modern city. But its importance looms large in the western canon. A few of the Agora’s ancient buildings have been reconstructed, but most of the site is still in ruins, with stubs of columns, old walls, and headless busts poking out from the earth that has swallowed them. You have to use your imagination a bit to visualize it. I came to this ancient place to see if these old stones and walls would talk to me. These shards hold a secret I wished to unlock, a pulsing in their mortar and fragments that I can feel when I touch my palms to their gritty gray surface. “Agora” means “assembly place,” and this spot was a crucial intersection for a throbbing polis that began over two thousand years before the first settlers reached what would become the United States. Physically the Agora was a large public square flanked on several sides by major civic buildings, inside of which merchants sold their goods and services from shops and stalls amid the colonnades. It was a beehive of commercial activity, with everything from fruit and livestock to perfume, hardware, money-changing, and even slaves trading hands. But the Agora also was where Athenians gathered for the exchange of ideas as well as goods. Among the hive of stalls, a ferment of debate over philosophy, ethics, democracy, and politics unfolded on a daily basis. Philosophers, statesmen, orators and dramatists, little known outside Athens at the time but who were to become giants of the western canon, traded ideas and policies at the Agora. Pericles, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Alcibiades, Aristides and Themistocles were regulars. Socrates was a constant presence there. “He was always on public view,” wrote the historian Xenophon, “for early in the morning he used to go to the walkways and gymnasia, to appear in the agora as it filled up, and to be present wherever he would meet with the most people.” This hotbed of intellectual and commercial bustle was fed by a particular innovation in human organization that had appeared on the scene just a few years before. After several million years of human anatomical evolution, and a few tens of thousands of years of social evolution, at this moment in history something ground-breaking appeared, a revolutionary game changer: democracy. Around 508 BC the nobleman Kleisthenes organized Athens into 10 tribes. Each of the tribes were empowered to choose by lot fifty of its citizens who together comprised a 500 member Boule (Senate). The Boule prepared legislative bills to be voted on directly by an Assembly of All Citizens (Ekklesia of the Demos). Some 30,000 adult males of Athenian birth were eligible to vote out of a total population of around 250,000 men, women, and children, free and unfree. Of those 30,000, perhaps 5,000 might regularly attend one or more meetings of the Assembly of All Citizens, of which there were at least forty a year in Aristotle’s day. Those at the Assembly did not elect representatives to vote on their behalf, they voted directly on legislation and executive bills. I stood before the sparse skeleton of one building, which once stood in a row of administration buildings on one side of the main square. This building was the meeting place of the 500 member Boule. Next door is the remains of one of the more significant public buildings of the Agora, known as the Tholos. Originally an enclosed circular structure with six interior columns, today all that is visible is the circumference of the foundation. But it was the headquarters of the 50 citizens who served as administrators for 35 days, after which they were replaced by citizens from another tribe. By the end of the year’s rotations, representatives from all 10 tribes had a turn in the administration. No petty partisans or special interests trying to prevent the other side from governing, or trying to claw their way into power by hook or by crook -- no, in ancient Athens they took turns. Perhaps Kleisthenes , who is considered the father of Athenian democracy, understood something essential about how to avoid the balkanization and polarization that plagues U.S. democracy. Rotation of power ensures compliance with the golden rule, “Do unto others…”, because you know that those over whom you are lording today will soon lord over you. Not far from these buildings stood a pedestal once decorated with bronze statues of the mythical heroes of each of the 10 tribes, and a relic of it is in situtoday. On the sides of this pedestal hung wooden boards with announcements for the citizens of Athens, including legal decrees coming up for a vote, forthcoming lawsuits, lists of citizens conscripted into the army, civic or honorary distinctions and the like -- their version of a central kiosk or internet message board. At the time, Athenian democracy was cutting edge stuff, but all was not rosy from a modern perspective. Women were totally excluded, this was a men’s club; foreigners, especially unfree slave foreigners, were excluded as well. The citizen body was a closed political elite with a small electorate, similar to America at its founding in 1789 when only white men of property could vote and many of the founders owned slaves who they agreed would be counted as 3/5 of a free person. And of course, Athenian democracy showed its limitations when it condemned Socrates to death in 399 BC just because he asked too many blunt questions to those in power. The site of the jail where the pesky inquisitor (“the gadfly,” as Plato described him) was imprisoned and suffered his sentence -- death by hemlock poison -- also is located here, occupying an out of the way corner from the central square of the Agora. The ebb and flow of the democratic tide. Standing there in the dusty middle of what is left of the Agora, scanning the column nubs and half statues that look like rows of broken teeth, I was visited by the ghosts of the past. Down the tunnel of time I thought I could hear the distant cacophony of traders and merchants hawking their wares, and see the ghosts of Pericles’ entourage pushing through the crowds, and spy Socrates off to one side with a knot of impressionable young males gathered round (one of them looking like Plato). I felt momentarily dizzy, lost in a contemplation of democracy’s centuries-long sojourn. Beyond Athens, Europe’s ancient cradle is scattered with nascencies and power spots that mark the ebb and flow of the democratic tide that eventually led to American shores. I have visited many of these democracy birthplaces during my own travels, my personal pilgrimage to the temples of democracy and representative government, and they always inspire and move me. Instead of a pilgrimage to St. Peter’s, Santiago de Compostela, or Mecca, these are the stations of the cross for a different kind of religion: the worship of a free people who cherish equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are the ancestral sanctuaries that led, eventually, to the American experiment launched in 1789 and which, by the early 1830s, was so buzzing with pluralism that the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville described it as a “tumult” of democracy. But I digress. There must have been something in the Mediterranean air around 500 BC, because contemporaneously with Kleisthenes’ new code, ancient Rome took its first halting steps toward democracy. It began with the overthrow of a monarch also around 508 BC, followed by the launch of the structures that became the Roman Republic. While the Roman Republic and its representative democracy was dominated by wealthy families and eventually collapsed into dictatorship, for a time it was more representative than any of our modern-day republics. That’s because it granted an explicit “representation quota” to its poorest citizens. In the early Republic’s Centuriate Assembly (where all male citizens of military age were enrolled in one of five voting groups based on economic class), the poorest classes were able to have their say. While the voting was weighted in such a way that the wealthier elements could always outvote the poorest, at least the poor were at the political table. In the middle Roman Republic, the poorer classes exclusively elected ten high-level leaders, called the tribunes of the plebeians, who could use their office to take up the causes of the poor. So even in the oligarchic Roman Republic, class was distinctly recognized and formally incorporated into the voting practices and institutions, yet today the idea of such affirmative action along class lines is ridiculed. Instead, poor people pretty much have opted out of politics in the United States, since there are no class quotas, no tribunes like the Gracchi brothers to speak for them, and little hope that a viable political party might arise that can represent their interests (the poor in Europe, however, vote in higher numbers due to different electoral rules creating multiparty democracy that provides more choices to voters). Rome’s republic ebbed and flowed, reacting to the times, until it was subverted during a series of civil wars and finally collapsed into an empire when Caesar crossed the Rubicon at the head of his army. But it lasted in one form or another for 482 years. Considering that the American republic has been around for less than half that time, Rome provides a cautionary tale that democracy cannot be taken for granted, it must be renewed and re-nourished by every generation. The legacy of Luther and Cromwell: political democracy. Continuing on from Rome with my democratic pilgrimage, one of my favorite treks was to a place located twenty miles outside of London. There lies a large, verdant green pasture that goes by the name of Runnymede. The River Thames winds through it, just a silver sliver this far from its mouth, but history rolls down the river from here to London and beyond. Runnymede is a hallowed place and name, it also is one of the birthplaces of modern democracy. Here, in the year 1215, somewhere in this water meadow -- the exact spot is unknown -- King John put his seal to what is known as the Magna Carta, an agreement that required the king to accept that his will could be bound by laws and to respect certain legal procedures. The Magna Carta is considered one of the most important legal documents in the history of democracy, having influenced many common law documents since that time, such as the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and many European constitutions. As I walked around the field at Runnymede, avoiding the cow pies and mud while lost in a reverie regarding democracy’s earthy roots, I saw its trajectory as if it were written across the sky: Athens in the fifth century B.C., the Roman Republic until the time of Christ, then, the trail goes cold for a long period until Runnymede. After that it slowly gains steam until it emerges in an unlikely place: Wittenberg in eastern Germany in 1517. That’s when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church’s door, protesting papal abuses and championing the radical notion that an individual needs no priestly intermediary between himself and God. Within months Luther’s petition had spread like wildfire, sparking the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church hierarchy, one of the first controversies fanned by mass publication via the recently invented printing press. While Luther’s name and deed loom large historically, few have recognized how his defiance of religious authority, as well as his championing of individual conscience and spiritual enfranchisement, advanced the pre-attitudes necessary for the rise of the democratic spirit. His religion was informed by a philosophy of equality, one that Alexis de Tocqueville later described as one that “proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven.” That men like Cromwell, Calvin, and Luther -- who shared much with those known today as fundamentalist Christians -- acted as forefathers of Jefferson, Madison, Locke, Montesquieu, and others in the pantheon of liberal democracy’s champions, comes as a bit of an irony. Europe’s centuries-long coalescing of the democratic spirit never was a straightforward path but rather one filled with hypocrisy, violence, and setbacks (Cromwell, for example, was a devout anti-papist who massacred thousands of Catholics at Drogheda and Wexford). Throughout Europe’s bloody history and the push-pull of revolution and counterrevolution, the forces of progress too often transmogrified into ones of empire, suppression, and violent authority. The 17th through the mid-20th centuries saw in Europe a long meandering trail of democratic startups and remissions, with the inexorable march gaining significant steam with the establishment of the American republic in 1789. Finally, following World War II, with the continent in rubble, western Europe at long last managed to conquer its political demons: democracy gained firm footing in most of the western part of the continent, triumphing over centuries of monarchs, dictators, fascism, religious fanaticism, and the most barbaric of internecine wars. By the 1970s, the democratic spirit had spread to Greece, Spain and Portugal, and following the Berlin Wall’s collapse in 1989, it spread in rapid progression to the former communist dictatorships of east and central Europe. Democracy’s future. While democracy can be noisy and messy, and can sometimes result in confusion and inefficiency, if implemented fairly with the right institutions the human experience shows that it is capable of fostering remarkable things. Democracy confers the advantage of popular legitimacy to a government, and is the best match for the animal spirits of capitalism since it allows the “genius of millions” to flower even as it harnesses that economic potential for the good of all. It’s not always perfect, of course; it was George Bernard Shaw who said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” And the details of specific institutions and practices are important, since in a true democracy the political system must rule over the economic, not the other way around. In the current era, some see China’s “consultative dictatorship” as a new political model that is challenging the primacy of western-style democracy, but I think they are quite wrong. Over time China will also become more of a representative democracy, even China’s current leadership of president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao have made statements to that effect. China already holds more local elections than any other country in the world (though many of those elections don’t live up to western standards of fairness) yet progress at the national level remains slow. Chinese democracy undoubtedly will be a unique Sino version; one innovative proposal by a Chinese academic calls for a tricameral legislature, with members of the third house selected by Confucian standards of meritocracy. It's intriguing to contemplate China evolving into some sort of innovative democratic experiment, since even China’s highest leaders recognize that it’s no coincidence that most democracies have resulted in higher standards of living and a more broadly shared prosperity. Winston Churchill perhaps said it best when he groused, in characteristic fashion, “Democracy is the worst form of government -- except for all the others that have been tried.” Better than China or any previous authoritarian government, a newly democratic Europe has been able to harness capitalism’s extraordinary ability to create wealth in such a way as to better support families and workers, and to foster a more broadly shared prosperity, ecological sustainability and a new type of quiet global leadership based on regional “peace and prosperity” partnerships. The European democracies, despite all their faults, have accomplished this more than even the American democracy (which badly needs to update its 18th century political institutions). These are truly outstanding achievements, historic even, and as I stand here under a bright blue Athens sky, gazing at the shards of what once was, I can’t help but marvel that it all began here, at the Agora, 2500 years ago. November 25, 2010
ARRIVAL IN GREECE, EPICENTER OF THE (DEBT) EARTHQUAKE… As I arrived in the airport in Athens, it struck me that I had now been on the road for five weeks, and had trekked my way clear across Europe, from the far west to central to the far east. Greece was to be my next to last stop (Istanbul the final), and as I made my way past news stalls boasting racks of newspapers and magazines from every corner of Europe, with mastheads and headlines blaring as colorfully as the European currencies of old before the days of the drabber Euro, I reflected for a moment over the places I had visited on this journey. I began my tour in Budapest, once the capital of a grand Hungarian empire which lasted nearly a thousand years. Then it fell to the Ottomans, followed by the Habsburgs, then formed half of another empire with the Austrians, lost 70 percent of its territory and a third of its people in the treaty settling World War I, fell under Soviet domination, staged an unsuccessful revolt against that domination, and covertly opened its borders to Austria in 1989 and accelerated the Soviet dominators’ collapse. Now it has settled into the wobbly life of a democratic but troubled social capitalist nation, slowly inching towards its new destiny at the geographic heart yet still at the economic periphery of a peaceful and prosperous yet itself newly formed union of European nations -- nearly all of whom had fought horrific wars against each other not that long ago. From there I traveled to France -- a place that has been one of the world’s major powers for centuries and now is proudly trying to learn how to balance that rich history with its current possible futures. A place where there is evidence of human habitation going back hundreds of thousands of years. Vaguely familiar cave ancestors who, through a mysterious and unknown evolution, became the Gauls, the Celts, the Franks, the Romans, Charlemagne, Caesar, the Cathars, the Huguenots, the cardinals and Kings Louis, Henry and Charles, names that roll off the tongue like a schoolbook nursery rhyme. The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, French revolution, the hard-fought battles for ideals and principles which it turns out you can eat as surely as you can devour baguettes and brie -- and which quickly transmogrified into guillotines and Napoleon, the Thermidorian reaction, the swing back of the pendulum that is sharp-edged like the blade of the executioner’s ax that can take off your head if you don’t learn how to duck. That’s what has preoccupied everyday people for much of human history, learning how to duck, how to avoid the next capricious whim of the empire’s courtiers about to knock on your door. France’s tale, from beginning to end a major chapter of Western civilization, is a cautionary one, full of lessons that cannot be appealed to a higher court. From France I had moved on to Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, back to France, then over to Germany, then Austria, then Italy. At every stop it was immediately apparent, in an almost visually surreal way, that each of these European nations has an emotionally-charged yet remarkable past, evidenced in the bricks and mortar of the many houses of history that still remain, the castles and churches, the towers and parliaments, the villages and ancient roads, still casting the same shadows over passersby as they did centuries ago. This is a past that stretches back so far into the human memory that it has become part of our DNA (DNA = Descendants ‘N Ancestors). The great historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote, “Countries have characters that are as distinctive as those of human beings,” and that is surely true, it explains why I see in my dreams nations that appear as immense individuals, as Olympian demi-gods that stalk the land lording over all the little people pulsating like the cells of these giant beings, with the tragedies , wars and crimes of passion akin to our collective domestic violence, the victories and treaties akin to our shared celebrations, the royal weddings that are our own matrimony to each other, the harvests and cornucopias of bounty our dinner table of plenty, the famines and droughts our depressions that rip apart the ties that bind, each national episode burned into “We, the Cells” and stored inside our collective carapace. To the extent that those of us of European stock all have psychic sinews that stretch backward into this grand and tragic past, we are all victims suffering from post-traumatic stress. It’s not only the lines of the map that have changed, but the lines in people’s minds. And we are left, we little people, to cope with it all as best we can. So after leaving Rome, after taking leave of the skeletal architecture of that once powerful empire poking out of seven hills, and the imperious, pious grandiloquence of Catholic basilicas clothed in marble stolen from that empire’s ruins, I finally touched down in Greece, that most ancient of western lands, the cradle of what is known as “western civilization,” located far to the eastern skirt of the west. Unlike the other countries I have visited where “the fear of the crisis has turned out to be worse than the crisis itself” (as one commentator told me), in Greece the impact of the economic crisis has hit like a small tsunami. My colleagues in Athens talked about declines in service, in the quality of health care and other dents in the Greek system that they had been experiencing. Large and militant protests had rattled the nerves of just about everyone. The government of Prime Minister George Papandreou had ordered sizable budget cuts and the layoffs of tens of thousands of public employees. The Greeks are in a complaining mood, for good reason, and so they bitched pettily that PM Papandreou, who hails from one of the two longtime ruling families that rotate in power and who had studied abroad most of his life (including in the U.S.), spoke better English than he did Greek. This is seen as an apparent indictment of sorts, even though his approval ratings remain remarkably high. Most Greeks acknowledge that some kind of change is necessary, so ambivalence has become the bitter brew that they all drink around the cafes and tavernas. On the other hand, this is Greece we are talking about. The place still has gorgeous weather, stunning landscape and health care for all, spotty as it is (compare it to California, where a recent report found that 25% of Californians don’t have any health care, and where the unemployment rate is higher than Greece’s). One of the qualities holding Greece back from enjoying the benefits of a more modern economy is its reliance on an informal economy of family and social networks which too often translates into nepotism, back room deals and tax dodging. But during an economic crisis like this, those networks become valuable means of support so that people don’t fall so far through the cracks. It’s easy to forget that Greece is a country that was plagued throughout the 20th century by bitter schisms between monarchists, democrats and communists, with dictators and elected governments rotating in complicated power alignments right up to the 1970s when the last military dictatorship withdrew and the monarchy was abolished. So while Greece is the ancient birthplace of demos kratia, its modern democratic incarnation is surprisingly young. Not paying taxes to the corrupt honchos who ran things for so long and relying instead on an informal sector of family and social networks became the fiber holding it all together, a well-founded Greek tradition, even celebrated nostalgically in films like Zorba the Greek. During the crisis, those networks can act as a safety net; longer term, they will prevent the modernization of Greece because in a modern economy designed to provide for a mass society you have to be able to count things: revenues, expenditures, imports, exports, surpluses and deficits, these things have to be tracked as accurately as possible. But if everything is being done hush-hush, on the sly, in backrooms, without receipts or records, stored in cookie jars, under mattresses, in brassieres and petticoats, with a bit of payola in the right palms for looking the other way (“there’s your ‘tax’”), you can’t count anything. You can’t be sure of how much your government has to spend because you can’t be sure how much revenues it has taken in. So you just make up figures and hide that too, deficits become surpluses with a few whisks of the computer mouse. That got Greece into a heckuva lot of trouble last year when it was discovered that its budget deficit was much larger than it had disclosed, and suddenly the bond markets got spooked and turned and attacked. But it’s not only that the previous government was using the services of Goldman Sachs and others to hide its debt, but that in Greece there is a long-standing tradition of doing everything with a wink and a nod. And that “system” pervades at every level of society, right down to the neighborhood and household levels. In that way it shares much with the corrupt housing mortgage system that came to pervade America, from Main Street to Wall Street, from your local bank handing out mortgages people couldn’t afford to the large investment banks taking those mortgages and bundling them into derivates and credit default swaps and reselling them again and again until they became seeded like “financial weapons of mass destruction” (as Warren Buffet called them) throughout the global financial system. In both Greece and America the dysfunctional systems provided economic stimulus for a time, with nearly everyone sucking from the teat -- until the house of cards came crashing down. Yes, Greece and America have more in common than Americans want to believe, and I don’t just mean that both have large budget deficits. It’s actually far worse: both Greece and the U.S. have development models that no longer work. Yes, in many ways America is just a bigger Greece. But that needs to change if Greece is going to have any chance of not only solving its current debt dilemmas but also of developing into a modern economy. I met with many Greek officials, including journalists, a deputy minister of the Papandreou government, and finally I interviewed Prime Minister Papandreou himself. I consistently emphasized this message to them, that “It’s important in a modern society that you’re able to count things;” I gave a speech at the Greek Foreign Ministry (which is like their Secretary of State) and articulated this viewpoint there as well (see an article from the Athens press about my FM talk, linked here, but it’s in Greek so you will need to have your Google translator turned on). I think they get it, my interview with Papandreou was extremely interesting. He has a vision not only for the immediate crisis but for a new Greece (more on my interview with PM Papandreou in a future post). Yet the old Greece has deep roots, like weeds and crabgrass, and it is not going to be that easy to dig them up. November 22, 2010
MERKEL, GERMANY, OVERTHROW OBAMA, U.S., AT G-20...I wrote an oped that was published recently in the International Herald Tribune/New York Times. The media missed what really went down at the Group of 20 meeting in Seoul, South Korea. That meeting has emerged as a game changing moment. Not only did President Barack Obama suffer a loss of face, but America’s economic leadership took a major hit. Following America’s catalytic role in bringing the global economy to the brink of disaster, and waging two wars in the Middle East that have revealed military mediocrity more than strength, followed by the Obama administration’s weakened political position after the November 2 election, the U.S. now is losing the global argument over the best development model for the 21st century. The "Washington consensus" appears to be dead, or certainly on life support. Read more about it my oped, linked below: Germany Speaks Out November 19, 2010
THE MYTH OF THE OVERTAXED EUROPEANS AND OTHER MODERN FABLES… I’m always amazed at the stereotypes about Europe that so easily roll off the tongues of Americans: Europeans are socialists, they have weak, noncompetitive economies, their populations are dying off, they are being overrun by Muslims, the list goes on and on. One of the most prevalent stereotypes is that the poor Europeans are overtaxed serfs. I ran into this stereotype in the form of a know-it-all American who happened to attend one of my lectures in Berlin. He tried to contest some of my observations, and raised the tax bugaboo. “‘No taxation without representation’ Americans would never pay taxes as high as Europeans pay,” he said. Americans like him always give me a chuckle. They sound so dogmatically sure about things, even when they don’t know much about the subject. I remember attending a seminar in Washington DC along with a couple dozen Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who invited several members of Congress to participate in their discussions about the global economy, the recent crisis, and the role of China. This one member of Congress, a Republican from Virginia, showed up and rather than participating in a broad discussion along with everyone else seated around a large table, instead he stood to command the floor and proceeded to hold forth. He lectured the MEPs, and the sum total of his erudition was that the problem with China is that -- ready for the punch line? -- it does not have freedom of religion. Say what? These MEPs, all of whom were highly educated people, who speak at least three or four languages, some of whom had been freedom fighters behind the Iron Curtain during the struggle against communism, sat there with eyebrows raised. I sat there holding my breath, mortally embarrassed for my country. So at my talk I suddenly was confronted by this latest example of the breed, standing in front of me, an American guy smiling out of context, grinning apropos to nothing, over his insistence that Europeans pay so much more in taxes than Americans. So I replied to him, perhaps a bit testily. “Actually, if you break it down, Americans pay out just as much as Europeans do, we just get a lot less for our money. The fact is, in return for their taxes, Europeans are receiving a generous support system for families and individuals for which Americans must pay exorbitantly, out-of-pocket, to enjoy the same level of support. That includes quality health care for every single person, the average cost of which is about half of what Americans pay even as various studies show that Europeans achieve better results, health-wise. Unfortunately, these sorts of complexities are not calculated into simplistic analyses like Forbes’ annual Tax Misery Index, a ‘study’ that purports to show that European nations are the most ‘tax miserable.’ Sure enough, there are the European countries at the top of the list, while down there near the bottom, happy as a clam, is the United States right next to Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. That’s because the Forbes Tax Misery Index only takes into account income tax, Social Security or retirement tax, sales tax or VAT and a few other minor taxes. It doesn’t consider the vast amounts that Americans are paying out of pocket, nor what people are receiving in terms of supports for families and individuals. So Europeans receive these supports for families and workers at an affordable price, but most Americans do not, unless you pay a ton of money out-of-pocket, which many hard-working Americans can’t afford. Or unless you are a member of Congress, which of course spare themselves nothing and provide European-level support for themselves and their families. Interestingly, an American acquaintance of mine who lives in Sweden told me that, quite by chance, he and his Swedish wife were in New York City once and ended up sharing a limousine to the theater district with one member of Congress, a U.S. Senator and his wife. This Senator, a conservative, anti-tax southern Democrat, asked my acquaintance about Sweden and swaggeringly commented about “all those taxes the Swedes pay.” To which this American replied, “The problem with Americans and their taxes is that we get nothing for them.” He then told the senator about the comprehensive services and supports that Swedes receive. November 13, 2010
AMAZING GERMANY…DECLINING UNEMPLOYMENT…HOW DO THEY DO IT?...The Wall Street Journal reported not that long ago that Germany is benefiting from its lowest unemployment in 20 years. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which uses harmonized unemployment rates (the same methodology for all countries) reports Germany’s unemployment rate at 6.7percent (in the United States, unemployment has climbed to 9.6 percent). What is as impressive as the low unemployment rate is that in Germany unemployment actually has declined since the start of the economic crisis, whereas in the U.S. unemployment has nearly doubled. It used to be that U.S. pundits and economists would wag their fingers and shake their heads disapprovingly at Germany, calling it “weak,” “sclerotic,” an “old man,” and “the land of double digit unemployment.” For years, Germans and other Europeans had to withstand snide economic lectures from the Americans. But now the shoe is on the other foot: Germany, which is the world’s fourth-largest national economy and second largest exporter (perhaps the leading exporter, it’s hard to know if you can trust China’s numbers), now is leading the U.S. Yet neither the U.S. media nor policymakers have examined closely this Deutschland miracle. It’s as if we are determined not to learn from anyone else, because if you admit you have something to learn then you also have to admit that you are not the best. And if there’s one thing that Americans like to be, it’s the best. So how has Germany done it? How has it managed to dramatically drop its unemployment rate in the middle of the biggest economic crisis in 80 years? The answer is that the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel not only pursued different economic policies than the Obama administration, but Germany also has a greater degree of economic democracy than the U.S. Indeed, Germany has essentially reinvented the modern corporation, and yet very few Americans are aware of it. These differences have given Germany a dramatic advantage. Kurzarbeit/short work. The first of these policies is called Kurzarbeit, or “short work,” in which, instead of laying off millions of German workers, firms trimmed the hours of all employees. Workers were cut back to, say, 90 percent of full-time, but would still receive 95 percent of pay with most of their lost wages being made up from a special fund squirreled away by the government during more prosperous times. In essence, instead of the government and employers paying unemployment benefits to laid-off workers, they paid to keep workers at their jobs, but at reduced hours. It was a brilliant strategy, producing a win-win-win. For workers, having a job that has been reduced to 90 percent of full time is vastly better than being unemployed, as it keeps them engaged in the workforce and puts far more money in their pockets than if they were living on unemployment alone. For employers, it keeps the workforce intact and ready for an economic upswing. And for the government, supporting a worker whose hours are reduced is much less costly than paying full unemployment benefits. Furthermore, with more Germans having money in their pockets, it lessened the decline in consumer spending which is one of the primary drivers of the economy. Finally, the policy prevented the utter devastation that occurs to families and communities when the primary breadwinner is laid off, along with the increase in social ills that accompany lay-offs such as home foreclosures, alcoholism, drug addiction, and domestic violence that results from the stress of unemployment. Despite the many concrete benefits of this policy, when Larry Summers, one of Barack Obama’s closest economic advisers, was asked why the president didn’t pursue short work to stem the economic bleeding, he dismissed the idea, saying the White House wanted to create new jobs, not preserve old ones (as if there’s a conflict between the two!). Co-determination and economic democracy. Beyond its short work policy to respond to the immediate economic crisis, Germany has evolved over several decades one of its greatest contributions to the global economy -- a degree of economic democracy. Institutions that are unfamiliar to Americans, with obscure names like co-determination, supervisory boards and works councils, have been crucial in helping to harness German capitalism’s tremendous wealth-creating capacity so that its prosperity could be broadly shared. This is one of the pillars of Europe’s “social capitalism” which has proven to be more stable and efficient than America’s “Wall Street capitalism.” To understand codetermination, it’s helpful to contemplate the following questions: The corporation, even with all its considerable warts, is the greatest wealth generator that humans have ever devised, but its success raises the questions: Who gets to control that wealth? Whose pockets should the wealth flow into? Codetermination is Germany’s response, and it is a potent one. Co-determination has several features, one of which allows workers in a corporation to elect a certain percentage of that business’ board of directors. Known as supervisory boards, they then oversee company managers, who handle day-to-day operations. In Germany, fully half of the boards of directors of the largest corporations--Siemens, BMW, Daimler, Deutsche Telekom and others -- are elected by workers. To understand the significance of this, imagine the impact if Wal-Mart were legally required to allow its workers to elect half of its board members, who would then oversee the CEO. Imagine how much that would change Wal-Mart’s behavior toward its workers and supply chain. It’s hard for Americans even to conceive of such a notion; indeed, when I ask Americans at my lectures how many of them have heard of worker-elected supervisory boards, usually no hands go up. Yet most European nations employ some version of this as a regular feature of their economies. Germany has been the most important leader in developing European-style social capitalism. That social capitalism has both produced and benefited from a broader “culture of consultation,” which has also contributed to the creation of cooperatives (like at Mondragon in Spain) and resulted in a vibrant small-business sector that produces two-thirds of European jobs, compared with only half of U.S. jobs. Indeed that culture of consultation, fostered by practices like codetermination (both works councils and worker-elected boards of directors), can take substantial credit for Chancellor Merkel agreeing to adopt Kurzarbeit/short work. In effect, Europe, led by Germany, has reinvented the corporation. Yet the latest critiques of capitalism by leading authors like Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and the producers of the popular film The Corporation tend to view all corporations and all capitalisms as the same. American progressives, while searching for effective responses to globalization, appear to be mostly unaware of these intriguing European inventions. Movements to revoke the charters of offensive corporations, while having gut-level appeal, have failed to recognize that European corporations are fundamentally different animals from their “disaster capitalism” U.S. counterparts. When I asked a leading globalization critic from the Economic Policy Institute his opinion of co-determination and works councils, he replied dismissively, “Bah, those just lead to company unions,” a demonstrably false claim. And of course, the American right rejects co-determination as socialism incarnate, ignoring its potential to renew capitalism and support real family values. “Mr Blair, we still make things.” Another factor in Germany’s economic success has been that is has continued to emphasize manufacturing and industrial policy over the financial industry. German chancellor Angela Merkel once was asked by then-British prime minister Tony Blair what the secret was of her country’s economic success, which includes being the world’s second largest exporter and running substantial trade surpluses in recent years. She famously replied, “Mr Blair, we still make things.” Harold Meyerson, Washington Post columnist, has explained further. “In Germany, manufacturing still dominates finance…German capitalism didn’t succumb to the financialization that swept the United States and Britain in the 1980s” (though Germany’s banks and financial sector did get snared in the Wall Street web). This focus on manufacturing, as well as on quality and long-term performance over short-term gain, is precisely what is reinforced by Germany’s codetermination. By giving workers a sizable stake in the health of companies and the economy in general, a symbiotic relationship lumps everyone into the same boat. A rising or ebbing tide affects everyone together. So when assessing the Obama administration’s performance in getting this economy going again, remember that the remarkable resilience of the German economy is directly attributable to shrewd policies and more efficient institutions that have been pursued and that have better stimulated its economy. The Obama administration also could be pursuing these policies and institutions, but it has declined to do so. —Steven Hill 11:13 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (8)November 9, 2010
SO HOW’S EUROPE DOING? AN UP CLOSE LOOK…One of my goals during this trip has been to assess the impact of the economic crisis in those parts of Europe I am visiting, which by the end will amount to 12 different countries. Is the highly vaunted European social capitalism, which has provided so well for families and workers even as it has cut its carbon emissions to half that of the US, in danger of erosion? If it were possible to sum up what I have heard and observed, the most telling comment was made by, curiously enough, an American living for many years in Slovakia. I was chatting with him in the Frankfurt airport after both of us got bumped from our flights due to a screw-up by Lufthansa Airlines (which is usually so efficient). While cooling our heels awaiting a rebooking, we fell to talking. I asked him about the impact of the economic crisis in Slovakia, and Europe in general, and after pausing thoughtfully he replied: "The fear of the crisis has turned out to be worse than the crisis itself." Indeed, in France, Germany, Sweden, Italy and most of the other countries I have visited, the economic crisis has nibbled away at the edges of everyday people's lives but it has not bitten into the bone. Not by a long shot. Certainly there is worry, and a degree of pessimism setting in, but the Germans and the French in particular tend to be pessimistic people anyway, in my experience. Unemployment in most places has remained at manageable levels, and people still have their very generous (by American standards) workfare supports for families and individuals to shield them. These supports really are both a material as well as psychological comfort during times like these, as well as they provide ongoing consumer stimulus to the broader macro-economy. So the overall picture is it mixed one, yet that nuanced snapshot is not what you read or hear day after day from the mainstream media in the US. The New York Times recently published a series of short interviews called "The Austerity Zone: Life in the New Europe" in which viewers get to listen to the plaintive personal stories of woe from a handful of people from Greece, Spain, Britain, Germany and France. The Times also wrote recently that, “Whether in Spain, France or Italy, European nations remain saddled with heavy welfare obligations — ones that inevitably must be curtailed to meet ambitious deficit targets, even as their tax revenue is constrained by low economic growth.” Yet I have seen another story playing out here, one that is more complex and laced with silver linings as well as green shoots of recovery. But it does vary from country to country, just as economic recovery in the US varies from state to state. And the fear of the future continues to hang like a specter over the continent, as the biggest impacts of the deficit cutting measures being enacted by most governments won’t be felt until 2011 sometime. So that creates a degree of uncertainty that is feeding the pessimism. Here’s a country by country breakdown of the countries I have visited: Germany. Europe’s leader and economic engine, Germany is one of the few countries where the unemployment rate actually has declined during this economic crisis to an 18 year low of 6.7 percent (in the US, unemployment has nearly doubled during the crisis to 9.6 percent, according to the OECD’s harmonized unemployment rates). Germany’s exports have soared over the past year, providing a sizable trade surplus and leading the way to its still fragile economic recovery. In the last month and a half I have visited Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt and Heidelberg. Munich, Frankfurt and Heidelberg all seem to be doing fairly well, based on my talks with public officials, elected leaders, as well as people in the street, shopkeepers and taxicab drivers. Here and there you see a vacant shop window, yet several shopkeepers told me that things are better this year than last. In Berlin, which has long been poorer than the rest of Germany due to its point position in integrating the formerly communist East Berlin/East Germany, some of the people I talked to complained about cutbacks in city services, a decline in health care quality, and having less disposable income in their pockets. But the amount of homelessness and begging on the streets is still minor compared to any similar-sized U.S. city. Even with their cutbacks, the average Berliner still has a lot more to fall back on than the average American, in terms of the types of supports that people need today in this economically insecure age. Luxembourg. I had never visited this small, wealthy country before, it’s the size of Rhode Island with as many people as Wyoming or the District of Columbia. It has the world's highest GDP per capita and an unemployment rate of only 5 percent. It benefits greatly from location, as it is surrounded by Germany, France and Belgium, and workers as well as shoppers from these three countries pour into the capital city Luxembourg on a daily basis to take advantage of still-thriving businesses and fine shopping opportunities. It also benefits from many good government jobs, as it is the seat of the European Parliament's secretariat, as well as the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Auditors, the European Investment Bank and several departments of the European Commission. A former walled city, today it is a quintessential European city filled with a German-style industriousness that mostly seems unfazed by the economic crisis that they see as happening somewhere else. Netherlands. I only visited Amsterdam, but it seemed to be its usual pulsating self. The restaurants, bars, cafes, pot shops, and plazas were teeming with people. No one I spoke with seemed to think the crisis was biting too deeply. One friend who was unemployed was in no rush to find work; he was “weighing his options” and seemed to think that when he was ready, jobs would be available. Unemployment rate: 4.4 percent (less than half that in the US, which is at 9.6 percent unemployment). Belgium. I was in Brussels for only a few days, which is probably not representative of the rest of the country since it has a huge number of permanent jobs resulting from its status as the seat of the European Union and other international organizations. Belgium's unemployment rate has increased during the economic crisis from about 8 percent to 8.7 perent, and people I spoke with said that the crisis had made people tighten their belts more. But on the whole, rush-hour traffic jams were still hellacious, usually a good sign that tons of people are commuting back and forth to work. Sweden. Like Germany, Sweden is another country that has pulled through the economic crisis in fairly decent shape. It didn't have a hyperventilating housing market like the US (and Spain, Ireland and Britain), so it has not suffered the same degree of economic ravaging. And Swedes have an excellent support system for families and workers, which results in consumers having more money in their pockets which helps drive the macro-economy. For example, the people giving me my ride to the airport to catch my flight to Oslo happened to be heading out of town on vacation. In addition to receiving paid vacation (i.e. regular full-time salary while on vacation) the government deposits into their banking accounts a vacation bonus to make sure they have enough money to enjoy themselves. Talk about a "vacation nation!" The unemployment rate is about 8.2 percent, which actually is a tad lower than before the start of the economic crisis. But things around the edges are sufficiently anxiety-producing that for the first time in Swedish history a populist, far right party squeaked above the 4 percent threshold necessary to win seats in the national parliament. This of course threw the justice-loving Swedes into a bit of a tizzy, an overreaction to a fairly typical occurrence during economic downturns, i.e. the rise in popularity of populist parties (see my previous comments in this blog on the recent rise of "far right" populist parties in Europe which, in many ways, are to the LEFT of the Democratic Party in the United States). Norway. What can you say about a country that, in the midst of a global downturn, has a 3.3 percent unemployment rate? If you have a lot of oil reserves, like Norway does, recessions are events that mostly happen somewhere else. Oslo is a jewel of a city, perched on a glistening fjord, and a land of winter sports, sculpture (including the amazing Vigeland sculptures, written about elsewhere in this blog), Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Munch and Norse hardiness. The people I spoke with didn't think the recession had been much of a factor there. Austria. Its unemployment rate has barely changed during this economic crisis, still at 4.5 percent, less than half the U.S. unemployment rate. Indeed, this Alpine studded jewel seems to have barely noticed the economic recession. There are signs of the downturn here and there, including a sizable increase in popularity of the populist Freedom People's Party during the municipal elections in Vienna to 27 percent of the seats (written about elsewhere in this blog). But construction cranes seem to lord over several parts of the city, including at the site of a massive new central train station funded in part by European Union money. Salzburg, several hours to the west near the German border, remains a quintessential European fairyland, a place that time passes by leaving it in a time warp of prosperity and healthy Austrian living. However looming on the horizon across Austria, especially in Vienna, is the slow but steady rise in the ethnic population, especially Muslim Turks, with all the tensions and challenges that implies. Hungary. In Budapest, the largest city in Hungary with nearly two million people, the post-crisis situation appears fairly “EU normal.” I don’t see any obvious signs of deep recession, i.e. numerous shops vacant, more homeless people, empty cafes, restaurants and bars. Quite the contrary, these seem quite full and teeming; I was in Budapest a year ago and I don’t detect any obvious differences between last year and this year. But looks can be deceiving, so I chat with a few shopkeepers, people in cafes, my taxi driver, a bartender (most of whom speak decent English), and some Hungarian politicians at the conference I attended. The consensus seems to be that the crisis was worse last year, that this year things are better. But certainly not all better, unemployment has increased since the start of the crisis from 8 percent to about 11 percent. In 2008 it became the first EU country since the UK in 1976 to take a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. But as one of the politicians tells me, “In Hungary, people are philosophical about it. As crises go, compared to what Hungary (a formerly Communist country) has seen in the past, this has not been a big one.” France. Yes, protesters are in the streets nearly everywhere. I witness a slow, dirge-like labor march in Toulouse, and a protesting parade of roller bladers in Paris (see more on the latter elsewhere in this blog). I also visit the working-class port city on the Mediterranean, Marseille, France's second-largest city with about 1.6 million people; the sun-splashed tourist city of Nice; the rural town of Lautrec outside Toulouse; and the European Parliament home in Strasbourg, near the German border. Despite the image of France exploding with labor strife, in every place I visited things look pretty "EU normal." In the bigger cities there are a few vacant storefronts here and there, and its unemployment rate has increased from 7.8 percent before the economic crisis to about 10 percent today (not that much higher than U.S. unemployment at 9.6 percent). But the protests and strikes to me seem like a healthy response to a fear that this economic crisis will be used by wealthy interests to erode France's social capitalism model. The front lines of that battle right now has been over the recent increase in the retirement age, which in actual fact only brings it more in line with other countries like Germany and the US. But the French wonder, "Why aren't more Americans out of the streets defending their social contract?" I couldn't agree more. Italy. It's hard to say with Italy, I only get to Rome, one of my favorite cities anywhere, and the Eternal City of the Seven Hills has always had its rougher edges, more panhandlers, more pesky motor bikers spewing exhaust, less tidiness than the Germanic countries. But things don't look any different to me than the last time I was here before the economic crisis, though unemployment certainly has increased, from 6.8 percent to 8.3 percent. One interesting experience seems worth noting: I gave a lecture at a center-right policy institute there called Fondazione Fare Futuro and the audience is a high level one, with some elder statesmen in attendance who have been advancing the cause of the EU within Italy for decades. These old war horses make impassioned statements about the declines they see around them and their fears over the future. But afterward I went out to dinner with five younger Italians, thirty-somethings, who attended my lecture. I asked them about the gloomy statements of the elders of their organization, but to my surprise they just laugh it off. "Oh, those old people, they are always sounding like that. They are gloomy by nature.” They shake their heads and say that they think Italy and the EU, on the whole, are doing just fine. Their optimism is refreshing, the pasta and red wine absolutely delicious, and by my estimation Rome still maintains its position as one of the world's great cities. The previous year, in August 2009, I had been in Slovenia, Croatia, Slovak Republic and Hungary. A listlessness was evident in the Slovak Republic, no doubt stemming from its 12 percent unemployment (as high as California's). Slovenia's unemployment stood at 6 percent and Ljubljana still retained the vibrancy of a quintessential European capital, but this year its unemployment climbed to over 7 percent. Unfortunately I did not get to three of the so-called PIIGS countries, Spain (20 percent unemployment, the highest in Europe), Ireland (14 percent unemployment), or Portugal (10.5 percent unemployment). Nor did I travel to the UK, where unemployment has climbed from 7 percent to 8 percent and conditions appear to be fragile, as the new Conservative-led government there prepares for drastic cuts in public spending. But on the whole, I found the parts of Europe where I traveled to be coping reasonably well, considering that we are in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. But next, I am heading to Greece, the epicenter of the PIIGS sovereign debt crisis earthquake, where I will be giving lectures and interviews to the media, and will have a chance to interview Prime Minister George Papandreou -- from the top of the Acropolis! —Steven Hill 5:42 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (2)November 5, 2010
OSLO’S ASTONISHING VIGELAND SCULPTURES -- A CELEBRATION OF HUMAN BODIES AND THE CYCLE OF LIFE…In Oslo, unfortunately, I ran into some bad weather in the form of steady rain and the first cold breaths of winter coming on. But that did not prevent me from having a revisit with the amazing Vigeland sculptures located in Oslo’s Frogner Park. The Vigeland sculptures are the apotheosis of a distinctly Scandinavian sensibility regarding health and human bodies. Oslo is a land of sculpture, and every park, many street corners, even private dwellings, seem to be studded with sculptures, old and new, traditional and modern, with a fair number of them showing naked figures, reflecting the Norwegian sentiment that reveling in the flesh is a sign of health, not license. This refreshing esteem for human bodies shorn of pretense and artifice is expressed in surprising ways. One day in Oslo I saw the front page of a daily newspaper with a huge color photo showing ten bust-baring, smiling women. But this was not a Hugh Hefner product or a Rupert Murdoch, page-three cheesecake photo, like those that marinate many British dailies. No, most of these women were at least sixty years old, many of them older and wizened. A new form of erotica for the elderly, I wondered? Hardly. Each of the women was missing one of her breasts. All of them were breast-cancer survivors who were unabashedly sharing their stories during a week of breast-cancer awareness. And their topless group photo was right there on the front page of a major daily newspaper, surgical scars and all. These modern-day Amazons smiled into the camera unashamedly, fearlessly, because health and naked bodies are Norwegian values that are inextricably entwined. There is something about it that smacks one as being very balanced, sane, and, well, healthy. The Vigeland sculptures are the pinnacle of these cultural representations of health and the human body. My first encounter with the Vigeland sculptures several years before had been near to a religious experience, basking in the presence of genius. My return visit accompanied by my Oslo friend Chris Skovsgaard did not disappoint, despite having to view everything through a veil of rain and from under the dome of a large umbrella. The park contains 192 separate sculptures with more than 600 human figures, all life-size or larger, by the brilliant sculptor Gustav Vigeland. Vigeland expertly rendered his human figures, casting them into bronze or carving them in granite, over a period of nearly four decades, between 1907 and 1942. The outstanding signature of his monumental body of work is the way the hundreds of sculpted men, women, and children are portrayed in various stages of life—male and female adults, young adults, adolescents, toddlers and infants, even a fetus, and finally the elderly and a decomposing skeleton of death. The entire cycle of life is represented, from birth through adolescence through maturation to demise, in all its multiple joys, sadness, and eternalness. All of the sculptures are naked, not a stitch of clothing on any of them, yet the display is modest and appropriately engaging, not lurid in the least. The females are sturdy and solid, the males robust but tender. Male and female genitalia are in abundance. The figures are frequently clustered together in allegorical groups, showing adolescents playing leapfrog, or a mother and father with their child, or a mother with her son or a father with his daughter; or two bodies linked in a sort of yin-yang apposition, or two lovers in a state of bliss, foreheads touching tenderly, and another two lovers in a state of conflict. Some of the figures are arrayed around a large, grand fountain portraying the cycles of our lives, others line up evenly on either side of a bridge. Still others are scaling a giant granite obelisk jutting into the sky, and they are writhing but not in despair, unlike those in Rodin’s Gates of Hell, instead there is a sense of togetherness, of carefully supporting one another, on their way toward some kind of resurrection or salvation at the summit, which is covered by sculptures of small children. I walked among these nearly two hundred sculptures as if through a forest of human bodies, overwhelmed and awed. Vigeland’s artistic achievement is on the scale and magnitude of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia, and Monet’s Water Lilies series. While his sculptures have not received the recognition of those famous works, they are nothing less than an artistic giant’s monument to humanity—to life, love, health, and human relations in all their multiple forms. The Vigeland sculptures are unmistakably ideological in that they represent a celebration of our bodies, female and male, and a celebration of the cult of life as opposed to the cult of death which ravages so much of our oversexed, overly violent media and world. Something about the Vigeland Sculpture Park struck me as distinctly Scandinavian, and European as well, in the sense that it was about health and vitality, a particular idiom of la dolce vita, infused with the mentality of slow food, organic agriculture, urban gardens, and bike paths, but in this case manifesting as these magnificent concrete expressions in granite and bronze. And it was about not only bodies but bodies that are au naturel, lacking embarrassment or modesty, yet not salacious, their nakedness just a normal part of life. The Vigeland sculptures are a source of great pride for Norwegians. This was apparent when I mentioned the subject to one stoic taxi driver, a typical older Norwegian who had white-streaked hair and a chiseled chin, wore square aviator eyeglasses, and gave one-word or one-line responses and an occasional smile. But his face lit up when I praised the Vigeland sculptures. “Thank you,” he smiled more widely, bowing slightly but in a prideful way that meant he thanked me on behalf of his country. These were just a few of the many manifestations of the attitudes and policies toward health that I found in Europe. Sometimes the Europeans remind me of hobbits, with a love of leisure, nature, relaxation, good food, a stimulating glass of wine or dark, earthy beer, and steeped in the values of health, family, and quality of life. It is these values and this outlook that they bring to their workfare system and their social capitalism, instilled into them in both intent and design. It’s also the values they inject into their formal health care system, which mostly is based on a principle of "people instead of profits," unlike the U.S. healthcare system which is run as a for-profit commercial enterprise and dominated by corporations and CEOs making hundreds of millions of dollars in annual salary and bonuses. The various European health care systems put people and their health before profits -- la sante d'abord, “health comes first,” as the French are fond of saying. So if you ever are in Oslo, make sure to check out the Vigeland sculptures in Frogner Park, you will be in for an amazing experience. —Steven Hill 3:13 AM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (1)November 1, 2010
BOMBS, BOMBS EVERYWHERE; EUROPE PONDERS AMERICA’S RETURN TO BUSH-LITE…Yesterday when I was in Istanbul, a bomb went off in Taksim Square, not far from where I was staying. As Taksim is one of the one of the main thoroughfares of this energetic city of 13 million people, chaos ensued and suddenly police were everywhere. My taxi driver, speaking only a few words of English, was able to communicate that he was in Taksim when the bomb went off. “Grand BOOM!” he says, shaking his head, looking grave. He indicates that it was a Kurdish suicide bomber who attacked a police stand, killing 10 cops, but news reports are not so certain. There is much speculation that it could also be an Islamic radical, and the initial news reports say either two, or possibly zero people are dead, but quite a few are injured. Yet within an hour or so, people seem to be back to “shopping normal” in the trendy areas around Taksim Square, though Taksim itself remains shut down. Later in the day I arrived in Frankfurt airport to the headlines that the German police had found a bomb on a cargo plane (it was later determined that the flight passed through Germany on its way to the UK, where the bomb actually was found). In both the Frankfurt and Istanbul airports the security seems to be about the same, no extraordinary efforts visible to the passing eye, which is surprising but also a relief. Airports already are such a hassle to get through, a constant reminder of the advantage of taking trains in Europe whenever practical distance-wise, since the security is less draconian and you don’t have to arrive an hour or more in advance. Any Americans who think that Europe’s efforts in the war on terror (perceived as inadequate by many Americans) results from them not understanding or appreciating the impact of the September 11 attacks in New York City aren’t appreciating the fact that Europeans have lived with this kind of low intensity conflict for years. Indeed, blowback from unwise American foreign policy decisions in the Middle East during both the Obama and Bush administrations washes up on Europe’s shores first, since it is in much greater proximity to the zone of conflict. Europeans have learned to live with this kind of insecurity in a way that Americans are still getting used to. Europe contemplates America’s return to Bush-lite.For the past couple of weeks there has been much speculation in the European media about the U.S. election on November 2. I also have received a lot of questions about it during my speaking tour, both from audiences and journalists. Europeans are perplexed, to say the least: how could Americans have turned away so dramatically, with the election of Barack Obama, from the policies of the Bush-Cheney administration, only now to contemplate a return to them? They also are puzzled by the Tea Party movement, which seemingly wants to roll back the last two years and return to how things were at the end of the Bush-Cheney years, which Europeans pretty uniformly regard as a disastrous time, both economically and foreign policy wise. Even conservatives in Europe are scratching their heads over their transatlantic allies (“What, Americans don’t want health care?”). Asked one Swede, “How can these Tea Party people say ‘Get government out of my Medicare -- don’t they know Medicare IS a government program?” If Europeans could vote in America’s November 2 election, there is no doubt how they would vote. This in some ways is the greatest measure of the divide in the transatlantic alliance. Even the so-called “far right” in Europe is nowhere near as conservative as the Tea Partiers or GOP Congress members; indeed, in most ways the far right is to the left of the Democratic Party, which is fairly startling to contemplate. So it has been one of my tasks to have to explain to puzzled Europeans what is happening to American politics. My view is that it mostly boils down to the overuse and abuse of the filibuster in the Senate, which has fostered a toxic obstructionist politics. The filibuster has been used by Republican Senators on average twice a week to stall everything, but it used to be deployed only a few times a year. Obama hasn't even appointed numerous positions a president typically appoints because the Republicans would have filibustered those nominations, thereby clogging the Senate's calendar and leaving less time for his legislative agenda. Paralysis has become the norm. In my view the obstructionist filibuster is the single greatest reason for the gridlock that is frustrating so many Americans. As proof, I would offer this thought experiment: imagine how different things would have been if Obama only needed 51 out of 100 Senators’ votes instead of 60. The health care bill wouldn't have been so weak, AND wouldn't have taken so long to pass, leaving more time for the rest of his legislative agenda. The same with financial re-regulation; the climate change bill would have passed; as well as possibly a second (smaller) stimulus more precisely targeted at infrastructure, shovel ready jobs, etc. I don’t believe that many Americans agree strongly with the hard core Tea Partiers who grouse about a “government takeover of health care, return of big government,” etc. What most Americans are upset about is the sense that not much has been done for them personally or for people they know (at this point just about every American, or someone they know, has lost their job or their house or both). There’s a feeling that the noose is tightening , even as banks and auto companies got bailed out. The banks and CEOs have returned to raking in handsome profits, but virtually none of it is trickling down. And that has led to a great sense of frustration, anger, even betrayal that Fox News/Tea Party types have exploited effectively (a type of populism that is not all that surprising -- recall the early 1990s recession, which gave a boost to populists like Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan and his "peasants with pitchforks" speeches, etc, -- we should EXPECT to see an increase in populism at this point in an economic downturn, whether in the U.S. or Europe. Their influence will last no more than one or two election cycles unless this downturn proves to be particularly long lasting). For example two of my GOP family members voted for Obama, even though they didn’t necessarily agree with him on everything; but because generally speaking they saw him as the best candidate for moving the country past the Bush years, i.e. in a new direction. Now they are upset at Obama, not necessarily because they disagree with what he has done but they view him as INEFFECTIVE. To people like them, the Tea Party is a thumb in the eye to the system, a pox upon both the Dem and Rep houses. They are not very tolerant of excuses e.g. "blame the filibuster," and the fact that throwing out Dems brings back the same crowd they voted out last time requires a depth of thinking that they aren't willing to engage in. That's the problem with populism/"thumb in the eye" politics -- it's a gut level response that lacks any memory or historical insight. Like a coyote chewing off its own leg. But the Tea Partiers have little in the way of solutions to offer toward the challenges that America faces. It’s mostly a nostalgic movement, looking backward toward some golden age that never existed. And so the American electorate is going to careen from one side of the aisle to the other, not finding satisfaction, and will only get more frustrated and angry. The best metaphor for understanding the American electorate right now is that of a coyote with its leg caught in a trap, suffering in pain, so now it is chewing off its own leg to get out of the trap. Grisly, I know, but that's about as accurate a description as I can think of. And just think, much of this situation could have been avoided if only 51 votes were needed in the Senate. I am not generally so reductionist in my thinking, but in this case I really do think the filibuster is the elephant in the living room, in terms of understanding what has dragged down American politics into the current cesspool. That’s what I have conveyed to my European audiences. —Steven Hill 11:40 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (1)October 28, 2010
ANCIENT TRANSPORTATIONS: WALKING AND BICYCLING TO HEALTH...As I have made my way across Europe by train, my frequent companions have been the many strangers, visible outside my train window, who can be seen traversing a vast network of bike paths and walking trails that crisscross the cities and countryside. Europeans of all ages, including seniors, can be seen pedaling from home to town and back again with their daily bread in their handlebar baskets. I am constantly struck by the number of senior citizens pedaling along the bike paths on the side of the road. Yet they are not out for a leisurely jaunt, this is their transportation for errands. One of the ironies of Europe is that, while it is leading the world in high-tech transportation innovations, such as high-speed bullet trains and fuel-efficient autos, it also specializes in low-tech options. Whether in Amsterdam, Athens, Prague, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Stockholm, Oslo, Barcelona, Budapest or any of the thousands of small towns that dot the countryside, bicyclists and pedestrians are on the go. When I was in Umea, Sweden, a smallish city several hundred miles northeast of Stockholm, I saw people of all ages, noticeably the elderly, pedaling their bikes around town and along the riverbank. In Amsterdam I saw so many bicyclists that you have to be just as wary of bikes as of automobiles when you cross the street, particularly because bicyclists aren't as loud. In Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany, where I stayed once for several weeks, I went walking every afternoon along the numerous Wanderwegs -- walking paths -- that crisscrossed the brilliant yellow fields and blossoming hills. And I had plenty of company: it seemed that for many Germans, walking and bicycling are more than hobbies, they are a way of life. Europeans seem to be literally biking and walking their way to health, and research bears this out. One study found that whereas walking and cycling account for less than a tenth of all urban trips in American cities, they account for a third of all such trips in Germany and an incredible half in the Netherlands. The average was 36 percent of all trips across eight different European countries, compared with 7 percent for the United States. Perhaps most striking are the large differences in transportation behavior among the older populations of various countries. Walking actually increases with age in both the Netherlands and Germany. The Dutch and Germans who are seventy-five and older make roughly half their trips by foot or bike, compared to only 6 percent of trips for Americans age sixty-five and older. Cycling is almost nonexistent among the American elderly, but it accounts for a quarter of all trips made by the Dutch elderly. This activity not only provides the Dutch and German elderly with valuable physical exercise, but it also assures them a level of mobility and independence that greatly enhances their quality of life. In the U.S., walking and cycling are discouraged by living environments that are geared for automobiles. A range of poor public policy choices have made walking and cycling inconvenient, unpleasant, and, above all, unsafe. The most obvious symbol of better European policy is their massive and ever-expanding network of bike paths, which provide completely separate rights-of-way for cyclists; Amsterdam alone has more than three hundred miles of bike lanes. One Dutch city has five bicycle parking garages, one of which can hold five thousand bikes. Just as important, the bike paths and lanes in the Netherlands and Germany form a truly integrated, coordinated network, covering both rural and urban areas. Unlike the fragmented cycling routes in the United States, Dutch and German bikeway systems serve practical destinations for everyday travel, not just recreational attractions for young cycling enthusiasts. Other nations besides Germany and the Netherlands have embraced bicycling, both for its health benefits and to lower reliance on autos for transportation, especially in cities. In 2007, Paris followed the lead of Amsterdam and other cities and introduced a highly successful program that put over twenty thousand bicycles on the streets, rented from a thousand unmanned kiosks located around the city. The rental cost is about a dollar, plus a $200 deposit paid for with a credit card to ensure the bicycle’s safe return. You rent the bicycle from one spot, ride it to work, and drop it at another kiosk nearby (and then your deposit is credited back). Commuters have taken to the program with enthusiasm, prompting one journalist to write that Paris, the land of the Tour de France, has gone “cycling mad.” These bike-sharing programs now can be found across the European continent, from Vienna to Barcelona, from Rome to Oslo. Pedestrian-only zones have become so widespread that they can now be found in virtually every European city. In large cities, such zones often encompass much of the city center and the expansive public squares, providing sizable areas where pedestrians have their own right-of-way. Of utmost importance in a densely populated settlement, the square preserves a sense of openness and light in the living environment. Many of the main streets and cozy alleyways terminate at or crisscross the central plaza, so the urban design literally channels the feng shui energy of the city into a focal point or hub, like a magnifying glass focuses sunlight. This gives a particular sense of space, an energy flow, to the living environment. The concept of a square is ancient, and for hundreds of years every European village had its own square or commons, and most still do. These ancient spaces still linger, even as they have been nearly decimated in the United States by the car culture and shopping malls. Most American towns don’t have a center anymore, and few American cities have a grand central plaza (though many have nice parks scattered here and there). The disappearance of the central square is an unquantifiable loss, for this sense of the ancient harkens back to our deepest human longing for community and contact, of shared, womblike physical space as opposed to atomized and individualized space. Besides the overall urban design, other features sensitive to the needs of European pedestrians and bicyclists help create an environment friendly to them. These include extensive use of traffic-calming techniques in residential neighborhoods (speed bumps and narrow traffic lanes, for example), rigorous traffic education of motorists, and strict enforcement of regulations protecting pedestrians and bicyclists. Dedicated pathways and route systems help insulate cyclists and pedestrians from motor vehicles, which are involved in most bicyclist and pedestrian deaths or injuries. Denis Baupin, the transportation chief of Paris responsible for the City of Light's hugely successful bicycle-sharing program, also has reduced auto speed limits to just nineteen miles an hour on a thousand streets and closed many to cars altogether. Baupin has changed the face of mobility in Paris, making it easier for pedestrians, bikers, and users of public transportation, and less accessible to car drivers. All of these efforts are guided by a philosophy that recognizes that efficient and affordable low-tech transportation methods are crucial to the democratization of mobility. But in the car-dominant United States, authorities have made only a few halfhearted attempts to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety, with most measures falling far short of the need if they cost much money or would inconvenience automobile drivers. A lack of political will and vision have prevented Americans from enjoying the health, transportation, and quality-of-life benefits that result from more walking and cycling and less car travel. —Steven Hill 4:23 PM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (2)October 27, 2010
THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION (THE MOST IMPORTANT BODY YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF): “WE THOUGHT WE COULD LEAD BY EXAMPLE”...Despite its perennially gloomy weather (imagine foggy San Francisco most of the year, instead of just in the summertime), Brussels has become a major world capital, the Washington, DC of Europe. It is home to most of the major political institutions of New Europe, including the European Parliament, which has the distinction of representing 500 million people (the largest democracy in the world outside India). The Parliament’s partner in this endeavor is the most important body that Americans (and far too many Europeans) have never heard of, called the European Commission. The Commission, as it is called (a rather bland, faceless, government-issue moniker, to be sure) is the executive body of the European Union; the president of the Commission, Jose Manual Barroso, is the closest thing Europe has to a Barack Obama figure (though there are key differences in their respective offices). The European Union is a confederation of 27 nations that stretches from Portugal in the west to the Russian border far to the east. Within the expanse of this geography is the most important experiment occurring today in human governance and economic development. The E.U. is the greatest attempt by humans to fashion institutions and practices capable of harnessing the capitalist engine so as to foster not only a more broadly shared prosperity but one that is ecologically sustainable and carbon efficient. More than anywhere else, the European continent is addressing the most important challenges of the 21st century. So I approached my impending lecture and lunch meeting at the European Commission with a good deal of enthusiasm, mixed with curiosity, and a bit of nervousness. I had been asked to give the Jacquemin Seminar lecture by the Bureau of European Policy Advisers, one of the 27 departments of the Commission, and present would be many senior staff of the European Union. In addition, I would lunch with highest level senior staff, including several directors general who are the heads of each Commission department (sort of like the chiefs of staff for each of President Obama’s Cabinet members). I had gained the attention of the Commission because in recent months, as a result of my book, Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age, and numerous opeds written for publications in the U.S. and Europe (see oped links at Steven-Hill.com), I had come to occupy a niche that I had not sought: an American author/commentator who has nice things to say about Europe. But during the Commission lunch, I suddenly found myself thrust into a different role: that of the straight talking American. After formal niceties and a sumptuous meal, a vigorous discussion ensued in which I asked them a rather direct question: “Why is it, do you think, that Europe is losing the public relations battle to China?” I explained further: there is so much G-2 hype today in the media, casting America as the existing superpower and China as the up-and-coming superpower. Where is Europe in all this, since it has a vastly superior standard of living compared to China (and even compared to the U.S.), has an economy that is nearly as large as the U.S. and China combined, more Fortune 500 companies than the U.S. and China combined, is the largest trading partner with BOTH the U.S. and China, has done far more to rein in carbon emissions and reduce the impact of its mass society…in short, Europe is a leader in just about every way we count these things today… yet Europe is getting little respect, indeed is viewed lower on the geopolitical totem pole than China, a place people try to flee, if they can (and that tells you a lot). Why is Europe getting so little recognition, I asked them? Some discussion ensued about how the headlines regarding PIIGS and the Greek debt crisis had made Europe appear weak and disorganized, but beyond that they really didn’t have much of a response. That was a little surprising, so I offered some thoughts of my own. “Not many people know about your successes because you don’t tell anyone about them. You don’t have a public relations machine like Hollywood movies have been for advertising the American Way; nor have you created any public relations apparatus of your own that helps even your own citizens to understand the importance of Europe, much less Americans, Chinese or anyone else. And because the media is used to reporting on individual nations, and economists measure output on national levels, they aren’t sure how to report on this transcontinental “union” -- so they fall back on lazy journalism and inadequate research methodologies which assume that the U.S. and China are the two dominant national powers. So what are you doing to overcome this narrow media/expert vision and inertia?” Their responses, again surprisingly, lacked much substance, but they evolved into a discussion about what happened at the Copenhagen summit over global warming, during which President Obama had left Europe looking like a jilted bride at the altar. Europe had offered to reduce its carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020, and to increase reductions by 30 percent if other countries (notably the U.S., which is by far the world’s largest per capita carbon emitter) would match them. Europe had put a bold initiative on the table, showing real global leadership, and was looking for partners, especially from Obama. But instead, Obama came to the table with virtually nothing -- only a 4 percent carbon reduction, because he couldn’t get 60 votes for anything more in a “filibuster gone wild” Senate. Then, with the Europeans out of the room, Obama shook hands on a deal with the Chinese to do next to nothing -- what I have called a coalition of underachievers. At that point Copenhagen collapsed in failure. Yet the media headlines, especially in the U.S., didn’t blame Obama; they blamed Europe, typically portraying it as weak and impotent. Bizarrely, Obama was portrayed as somewhat of a hero for brokering a deal -- however ineffectual -- with the Chinese. Yet it was Obama who had caused the summit to collapse because if the U.S. isn’t willing to do more, then certainly China isn’t going to. I asked my lunch companions: “Did you consider holding a press conference and exposing Obama and China for obstructing Copenhagen?” They said they did consider that, that there was much intense discussion among Europe’s leaders as they considered what message they should issue as the summit crumbled. They ultimately decided not to go on the offensive or to blame their erstwhile American partner. It was in this context that one of them said something that was incredible to me: “We thought we could lead by example. We thought that if we showed a quiet leadership on this issue, showed that we were willing to make the necessary sacrifices and adjustments to our economy and technology, that others would follow our lead.” I was amazed, at both their admirably sincere authenticity, as well as at their breathtaking naivete. I have been one of those applauding Europe’s “quiet revolution” (as I call it in my book) and use of its “smart power” rather than U.S.-style” hard power” -- using investment, trade and Marshall Plan-like aid rather than a “big stick” military as a development model for the world. But leaders have to project effectively their trajectory and influence, and they have to inspire those whom they wish to lead with their vision and a demonstrated capacity for success. Leadership by “quiet example,” without the means to communicate your example, tends to get ignored -- or even worse, shoved around -- on the world’s stage. I expressed my surprise over their naivete (though I used a more diplomatic word). “You have a product here,” I said to them, “let’s call it Brand Europe. Yet you don’t advertise your brand, your product. So why would you expect that people, either in Europe, the U.S. or anywhere else, would understand what that brand is? And if they don’t understand your brand, why would you expect anyone to follow your leadership, whether ‘quiet’ or otherwise? In the U.S. we have a saying: ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?’ No one is going to hear you because you aren’t making any noise.” Marketing Brand Europe. I gave them an example. “European companies are employing about 2.5 million Americans in the United States in the midst of this economic crisis. Providing good jobs that pay better than average wages and provide health care benefits. Yet no Americans know about it; all they hear about is PIIGS and the Greek debt crisis, and lately strikes in France.” I continued. “In Dick Cheney’s Wyoming and Sara Palin’s Alaska, as well as in Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, Idaho and Alabama, European companies supply over 65 percent of all foreign investment. In George Bush’s Texas, European companies have invested over $50 billion, more than American investments in all of Asia. Across the U.S.A, Europeans accounted for nearly three-quarters of all foreign investment, being the top foreign investors in 45 states with over $1.4 trillion in investments. AND YET NO AMERICANS KNOW ABOUT THIS. You get no respect because no one has a clue about what you are doing. The tree has fallen in the forest, but no one is hearing it. “Why don’t you run TV advertisements in the U.S., telling Americans these things?” I asked them. You can have ads with visuals of American workers on the job, building autos, working in grocery stores and hospitals, with a voiceover, saying ‘We believe in taking care of our American employees. It’s the European Way.’ Cue the closing visuals, two flags, side by side, one the Stars and Stripes, the other the European Union’s royal blue with a circle of twelve gold stars, like a halo. Fade away. Or how about a full page ad in the New York Times that shows visuals of green hills and sparkling ocean. Children at play, fields of golden grain, with a storyline reading: “Europe is the leading innovator in preparing for global warming. Widespread deployment of conservation practices, and ‘green design’ in everything from automobiles, buildings and solar and wind power to light bulbs and toilets. Our innovations have reduced our ecological footprint to half that of America’s.” More visuals, showing windmills, solar panels and trains. “A European uses half the electricity and emits half the carbon of an American. It takes 40 percent more fuel to drive a mile in an American car than in a European one. And Europe’s green industry is exporting its innovations to the world, and has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs. That shows that jobs don’t have to be pitted against the environment. “Europe: doing our fair share to ensure humanity’s future. And looking for partners, wherever we can find them.” At the bottom of the ad, a flash of President Obama’s grin. I ran these and a couple of other promotional ideas by them. It was like a tutorial in the ABCs of marketing, yet it was apparent that they had not thought much in these terms. Occasionally next to an E.U.-funded project in Hungary, Spain, Greece or wherever you see a sign posted saying “Paid for in part by funds provided by the European Union,” along with an insignia of the E.U. blue flag and gold stars. But that’s about it, in terms of ongoing E.U. promotion. Most other interactions that Europeans have with the E.U. is when they are bureaucratically scolded with regulations that prohibit them from making bread, beer or cheese in ways they have been doing for centuries. And European too have read the headlines about the PIIGS, causing more worry. Seldom do Europeans get to reflect on the many good things that the E.U. or their national governments are doing for them. And certainly a contributing factor is that E.U. officials either are unwilling -- “quiet leadership” -- or incapable of telling them about it. Europe is suffering from, as they say in the advertising biz, poor branding and low product appeal, resulting from a lack of visibility. Europe is like the early Apple/Macs before they became sexy, losing market share to the vastly inferior Windows PCs. And it’s completely unnecessary because there is no place on this earth that has more to brag about than Europe. Yet European leaders are seemingly stuck in a mentality that still views themselves as the junior Cold War partner. In the post World War II era, Europe sat in the backseat while America sat up in the front, driving the vehicle. That was a convenient arrangement. When you’re sitting in the backseat, you don’t have to take as much responsibility for the direction of the vehicle. You can always defer the hard questions to the driver. Now that American leadership is adrift -- having mired the Western alliance in the twin ditches of a Wall Street-induced economic collapse as well as the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq -- it is really time for Europe to put forward more boldly its own brand of leadership,vision and development model. Yet, just as Americans are stuck in a Cold War mentality that always sees America as the best, and so can’t stop acting out of that mentality even as the Pax Americana fades into history’s twilight, so are the Europeans apparently stuck, perhaps comfortably so, in their junior status mentality. Yes, it can be easy to let someone else take the lead. Europe has been George Harrison to America’s Lennon-McCartney, happy to stay out of the limelight because that kept the pressure off. But that mentality, perhaps more than anything else, is what is preventing Europe from winning the respect it deserves on the global stage. It’s not the lack of unity, or the aftermath of the Greek debt crisis, or the tensions between Merkel and Sarkozy, or the UK’s stodgy ambivalence, or the cultural and language differences, or a dozen other excuses that is holding Europe back. Because at the end of the day, what they share as Europeans more closely identifies themselves with each other than with any other part of the world. And all of them will benefit from a rising tide floating all boats if the world follows their leadership. “If you believe in what you are doing,” I told them, “then you should tell the world about it. There is a void in global leadership right now…who is going to fill it? China? The United States? Not likely. Now is the time to step up, into the limelight, and show to the world this remarkable European Way. Because this European Way represents the best hope the human race has for bringing the world together around the twin challenges of global warming and enacting a worldwide economy that can provide a decent standard of living for 6.5 billion people. Those are the two biggest dilemmas facing the 21st century. If Europe doesn’t lead, who will?” Some nodded in agreement with me, others resisted. “Why should we care what the U.S. thinks about Europe?” said one official with a wave of his hand, breezily dismissing the transatlantic relationship. I replied: “The U.S.-European relationship has been the most important in the world in the post-World War period. I still think it has much important work to do. But it won’t function effectively unless Americans value and understand Europe, and vice versa. Unfortunately you can’t rely on the media to tell your story…you will have to do that for yourselves.” I left that lunch meeting a few minutes later to give my lecture inside one of the Commission’s elegantly vast meeting rooms, with translation occurring in five languages. But the luncheon had left me with a vague uneasiness. Clearly the E.U.-U.S. relationship is a work in progress, and now is a critical time as both sides re-evaluate -- and re-value -- what it’s worth to them. The world is poised at a grave juncture. Let’s hope the vision and drive of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic don’t fail us. October 25, 2010
HOPE FOR MULTICULTURALISM IN SOUTHERN FRANCE…AND PORTABLE TEA BAGS…The e-mail below is from Angela Shaw, an American friend of mine who has lived in Toulouse, France for many years. Angela grew up in New York City and was one of the first African-American females to graduate from Harvard Law School. She has lived in China, Belgium and now France, and has worked as a lawyer for IBM, the FCC, the NAACP and Hofstra University. As an entrepreneur she started her own broadcasting company, Spectron Broadcasting and Applied Communications Technologies. Angela is one of the people I turn to when I want to get a read on how race relations in France and Europe are going. Having grown up black in America, her antenna is attuned acutely to both the large injustices as well as the smaller things beneath the radar that others don’t see. Her e-mail below is a tonic for the recent rash of anti-immigrant headlines and loud claims that "multiculturalism has failed." Perhaps France is making slow progress, inch by inch. Time will tell. But as the history of race relations in the U.S. shows, progress often is incremental and takes time. Patience is advised. From Angela: Georges [her husband] and I were invited to an annual multi-cultural festival in the banlieue (akin to the American projects, but not as sinister and menacing) yesterday. While much of it was mired in political correctness, at one point of this French choir's singing, I turned to the seat behind me and saw the passionate singing of a 40-something woman from Cameroon. There at once, all the political correctness and feigned sincerity was lost within a sea of authenticity. For this woman there was a real life behind her voice, there were real villages of people in her eyes and for that one moment in time in the south of France, we brought home to a woman who was so far away from her village. Sometimes I am just so overwhelmed by the pride I have in belonging to such a human race that can be so empathetic. Probably no one else (of all those singing) but that single Cameroonian woman understood those lyrics and understood the context from which the song emerges. For their reckless abandon, I love the French, even though I am frustrated by sights of piling garbage in front of my favorite cafes. (Thankfully, this Sunday morning the sanitation workers cleaned our block for the first time in about 5 days. Hallelujah!) It just made me so proud to see such a host of the worlds' cultural expressions all coming together in this typical urban community center. My mom spent 33 years of her professional life in New York City public housing and I would accompany her to more than my fair share of community centers all over NYC. This was a community which not only hosted people with varying medical disabilities in the audience but on stage as well. Everyone was patient and complimentary and supportive of each contribution of talent that was offered. The stereotype of the urban gangster was nowhere on display. Indian women dancing in their saris. Muslim women were in their hijabs. Spanish women were in their flamenco dance attire. In this very Latin culture [in the south of France], I am so pleased that women could organize such a treat not only for other women but for children and for a very few men as well. Slowly, very slowly I could barely recall my youth in my mom's NYC public housing community centers. I had almost forgotten how much fun and excited I had there as a young child. It's too bad that Steven Hill wasn't with me yesterday. I'm sure that the experience would have affirmed his faith that the future of Europe holds so much promise. Lots of love, Angela Portable tea bags. On a slightly different note -- let’s file it under “European minutia too juicy to pass up” -- I have got to tell you about the most important development in human gastronomical affairs since the Dutch East India Company first brought tea to European shores. I discovered it on the marvelous high speed TGV train from Paris to Brussels, which whisks passengers along -- comfortably -- at 180 mph (forget it Acela-Amtrak, you ain’t even in the big leagues). I had ordered tea, and the waiter handed me a cup of hot water and what looked like a short, thick plastic straw. He indicated that the tea was inside the straw, so I began trying to tear open the straw, first with my fingers and then finally with my teeth. He looked at me with wide-eyed alarm, like a gourmand would an uncouth barbarian invited to his table. His English wasn’t good, but he gestured with his hands, then grabbed the straw from me and stuck it into the water. Immediately the clear water began turning familiar tea brown, and I realized that the bottom half of the straw was constructed of permeable material that allowed the tea inside to soak through. It was like a portable plastic tea ball, and I could take the tea straw out of the water when the strength was sufficient, easily saving it for a second cup later. No more soggy tea bags to deal with! It was a small moment of pure epiphany, the clouds parted and the sun came out on my day, as my mind played out the brilliance of this invention and the wars it might have prevented in centuries past. The world has always detested mushy tea bags, one of life’s little annoyances that have contributed immeasurably to the bad moods of kings, queens, generals and bankers. Yes, I had no doubt that I was in the presence of a work of pure genius, and such a simple one too. Simple genius can be the most pleasant kind. October 23, 2010
FRENCH PROTESTERS: "WHERE ARE YOU AMERICANS?"...The headlines are ablaze with reports of strikes in France, and the strikes are getting increasingly intense. As the date arrived for the Senate to vote on the legislation to increase the retirement age (the lower house, the National Assembly, already had passed it), things began coming to a head. Protesters blockaded Marseille's airport and strikers shut down fuel depots, which in turn caused a quarter of the nation's gas stations to run out of fuel. More young people joined the fray, barricading high schools and taking to the streets nationwide. Some of them were masked and hooded, raising fears of a replay of the banlieue youth riots back in November 2005 in which 10,000 cars were burned. Vehicles have been set on fire and overturned. Police turned to teargas and helicopters to try and control the situation as the Senate vote loomed (update: the Senate passed the legislation on Friday October 22, but the unions, students, and other protesters say their direct actions will continue). A couple of weeks ago, when I was in Paris, things were not quite this heated but you could feel the momentum building, could see that the kindling piling up. I witnessed one protest of sorts; I was standing on a street corner, on a beautifully sunny fall day in Paris, when all of a sudden the boulevard was filled with hundreds of rollerbladers! They whisked by in earnest, chanting slogans, some of them were dressed in colorful wigs, brightly painted faces, theatrical props and costumes. Their protest didn't feel threatening, in fact the mood mostly was festive. It was kind of like watching a Critical Mass bicycle ride in San Francisco or other US cities. The faces of the protesters reflected a mixture of joy and determination, but the carnival atmosphere in no way diminished the seriousness of their challenge to the political authorities. The street was paralyzed and motorists were honking their horns. The media has been reporting that the French are protesting the increase of their retirement age from 60 to 62, but this is only part of the proposed legislation. It also raises the age for retirement with FULL benefits from 65 to 67. Most of the French retiring early do so with only partial benefits. This is an important distinction, yet most media outlets have stubbornly refused to report it. It seems that they have decided that the French are whiners and complainers -- come on, is 62 years old for retirement really such a bad deal? -- and want their news audiences to think that too. But that's not the entire story, many French effectively are having their retirement age increased to 67, not 62 as widely reported. It's amazing to me that the media can't get this simple distinction right. Perhaps they don't want to. Anyway, as I was standing on the street corner watching this critical mass of rollerbladers, I saw a few of them stop at a nearby Tabac for a quick drink. I decided to talk to them and crossed the street to do so. They were quite friendly, the English of one of them sufficient to carry on a conversation to which the others added a few words and an occasional head nod. Dressed in his bright red striped lycra, he looked to be in his 20s and responded to my questions with replies that perhaps could best be described as “protest normal,” mostly unremarkable and unsurprising. But then he said something that grabbed my attention. He said it after he began asking me about the situation in the U.S., which I quickly summarized - workers’ wages flat for two decades, the wealthy pocketing a greater share of national wealth, 50 million Americans without health care (nearly the same as the population of France), 45 million - and 20 percent of children - living below the poverty line, and great frustration and anger over all this as well as over the bailout of the banks that are back to making handsome profits even as the rest of the country remains stuck. He translated into French for the others, and they all shook their heads. That's when the one with the accented English blurted out, “Where are you Americans? Why aren't Americans out in the streets? If Americans are angry, why aren't they out in the streets like we are?” He said something quickly to his comrades in French, then reverted back to English. "It's like Americans have gone to sleep or something. You used to have many protests." I explained that most of the protests over what is going on are coming from the right -- from the Tea Party movement, Fox News, Glenn Beck's protest at the Lincoln Memorial. But that even those are quite small, for the most part. There is no mass movement in the U.S. protesting the theft of their country, i.e. the massive transfers of wealth from working people to the wealthy. I explained how the left mostly has been neutralized because it is afraid to appear to be anti-President Obama. They mostly are putting their effort into getting Democrats reelected on November 2 and retaining Democratic majorities in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. In any case, the left has not mobilized in any major way since the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Neither the Iraq invasion nor the presidential election debacle in Florida in 2000 inspired mass protests on the left. They looked grim and shook their heads. They said something back and forth in French. It was time for them to roll on and we said our goodbyes. But it left me walking down the street, muttering to myself, "Yes, where is the American left?" Not only is it mostly quiet, it's pretty fractured, not necessarily into warring camps but each into its own kaffeeklatsch comfort zone. You have the labor left, the limousine liberal left, the Huffington Post left, the rainbow/ethnic minority left, the green left, all of these and more calling themselves "progressive" today. They flexed their muscles, or so they thought, in pushing Barack Obama past Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary and then past John McCain into the Oval Office. Those were heady days, never was it better than during the interregnum between that magnificent election -- celebrated around the world -- and the swearing-in ceremony of the first black president in US history. It was like Obama was president of the planet during those early days, so much was he regarded as a transformative figure not seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the progressive left forgot the crucial words that FDR told labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph when he met with the president and urged him to take action against discrimination. “I agree with you,” said President Roosevelt. “Now go out and make me do it.” The left didn't mobilize to make Obama do anything. Nor did it mobilize to pressure any of the foot dragging conservative/Blue Dog Democrats. Instead, the left sat back and waited for Obama -- who was viewed as a kind of savior -- to do it. And when all-too-human Obama was hit with the buzzsaw of Republican filibusters in the Senate -- turning a majority body into a near-super majority legislature where 60 out of 100 votes is needed instead of 51 to get anything done -- that was the formula for a mediocre first two years. Of course Democrats are trying to say they had a magnificent two years -- health care reform, financial reregulation, preventing a depression. But it's pretty easy to argue just the opposite, that the first two years are a disappointment -- health care reform, financial reregulation, preventing a depression by handing the keys to the treasury to the banks and financial industry CEOs. Health care and financial regulation reform both became watered down because President Obama couldn't find 60 votes in the Senate to tackle the biggest challenges -- "too big to fail" in terms of financial reregulation, and "cost control" when it comes to health care. Truth be told, his health care reform started us in the right direction but does not take us even half way there. It was a major step -- sort of -- toward providing universal coverage, but still to come is reining in costs. To accomplish that will require corralling for-profit healthcare corporations, which will be much more difficult to do than passing a law which simplistically mandated that all Americans must buy health care by 2014. Given the outrageous premiums that these greedy, gouging healthcare corporations charge, that's like trying to end homelessness by mandating that everyone must buy a home. In addition, there has been little accomplishment on climate change (again, Obama did not have 60 votes to move forward with the House bill already passed, and as a result went to the Copenhagen summit empty-handed, leaving the Europeans looking like a jilted bride at the altar). And of course looming out there is Afghanistan/Iraq/Gitmo, and the ongoing blowback of American foreign policy. With an election approaching, it's understandable why "the left" has had to hold its nose, drink the Kool-Aid and try to reelect Democrats. But in the words of that famous American and former slave, Frederick Douglass, "Power concedes nothing without a demand, never did and never will." The left has given Obama a free pass and it seems to me that it hasn't helped the left or Obama. And it hasn't provided a clear answer to that poignant question posed by one French rollerblader: "Where are you Americans?" Yes indeed, where are we? October 19, 2010
SALZBURG:"WHY DON'T YOU HAVE THESE THINGS FOR YOUR PEOPLE?"...Tonight I am giving a talk in Salzburg, Austria, and it is fitting that I should return here since this was the place where I once engaged in an impromptu conversation that opened my eyes about the European Way vs. the American Way. It was one of those conversations that starts out innocuously and in the middle of quotidian musings delivers a sudden epiphanic punch. As Americans, we learn from the time we are in the cradle that the United States is “the best,” whether in the economy, the Olympics or on the world’s stage, and if you believe you are the best you aren’t very interested in learning from others. But in Salzburg I met someone who pushed my reset button, and things haven’t been the same since. But before I retell that conversation, I should establish the scene for you like a set designer does for a play. Salzburg is the birthplace of Mozart, and a quintessentially picturesque European town with a touch of the medieval and the modern rolled into one. There is a huge castle high on the hill, combined with a rabbit's warren of shops, homes, alleyways, plazas and markets below, packed into fairly compact quarters between the castle’s steep-walled mountain and the nearby river. High narrow houses about six stories tall form a grid of canyons, tucked together amidst colorful courtyards with archways and flower baskets (To discourage sprawling American-type ranch houses, centuries ago many European cities began taxing by the width of the house; thus, the tax-evasive Europeans cleverly constructed their houses tall and thin). It is a feng shui pleasure to walk among the maze of nestled buildings, jigsaw pathways, cobbled streets and tunnel-like alleys that honeycomb through the quaint architecture. But as a testament to how “the times they are a changin’”, Salzburg’s quaintness masks the fact that historically it has been one of Austria’s and Central Europe’s most important and powerful cities. Salzburg traces its roots back to the Romans, and perhaps even earlier; archaeologists believe there were settlements here in the Paleolithic age. Salzburg’s two palaces are the massive remnants of its seat as a once-mighty Catholic power. The grandest is the Hohensalzburg fortress, the one towering in late Gothic splendor over the city since 1077 and today providing a fairy tale feeling fit for postcards; and the other is the Mirabel Palace and Gardens which in the 17th and 18th centuries was the residence of Catholic archbishops who lived in divinely inspired luxury even as they were busy driving off the Protestants and Jews in brutal fashion. The Salzburg Archbishops derived their power from their control of the salt trade, transporting over a hundred tons of salt every day by boat and cart all over central Europe. In fact Salzburg derives its name from the German word for salt -- “salz.” In medieval times, salt was known as "white gold" because it was so valuable for preserving food in the absence of refrigeration, which in turn eliminated dependency on the seasonal availability of food, allowing travel over long distances. Unlike today, salt was a vital food additive for more reasons than mere pleasure for the palate. So salt became the subject of political power plays and even war. Roman soldiers actually were paid with salt, which is reflected in the word “salary.” Salt was considered so precious that it was traded ounce for ounce for gold, and throughout Europe the salt routes over which the white gold was transported became the most important trade routes. The names of many cities bear testimony to this time: Salzburg, Salzgitter or Bad Salzuflen, as well as the Celtic word for salt, “hall,” incorporated into names like Bad Reichenhall, Friedrichshall and Hallein, indicating salt deposits at these locations. So Salzburg is a place where one can contemplate the rise and fall of empires. Throughout history, different political-economic systems have been deployed, whether feudalism, monarchies, tribal societies and now the modern capitalist mass democracies. In the type of Catholic theocracy that once dominated Salzburg, the Archbishops ruled in a cruel fashion and an individual’s success greatly depended on their membership in the correct religion. More recently, communist state bureaucracies ruled, sometimes brutally, over an economic machine where democracy was deemed irrelevant; in China today, democracy still is a sideshow, all emphasis being given to economic output. In social capitalist Europe meanwhile, they have created the most democratic political institutions the world has ever known, and consequently their economy also is more democratic, families and individuals have more support and share in Europe’s great wealth. And the United States? The fact that we have not yet figured out how to extend things like health care and other social benefits to millions of people is a sign of a huge democracy deficit, political as well as economic. Wall Street capitalism has resulted in a trickle down economy that has failed to deliver for everyday Americans in far too many ways. “American, right?” he said to me in his thick, German-tinged English. How do they always know, I wondered. I nodded and smiled cordially, hoisting in salute my glass of hefeweizen with a lemon wedge. He was friendly in a gruff sort of way and within minutes had offered his opinions on all manner of subjects. Since this was May 2003, only a few weeks after the U.S. invasion of Baghdad, the conversation soon drifted there. In fact, I had the feeling that’s where he had intended it to go all along. “Who could object to getting rid of Saddam?” he said. “And a half-dozen others like him? But U.S. cannot do it alone. Big mistake.” He puffed on a cigarette with a heavy, curling lower lip. It turned out his name was Matthias. His English was halting but good, and I was later to find out he had learned a lot of his English growing up close to a U.S. military base near Frankfurt, interacting with the soldiers who shopped in his family’s store. The conversation soon moved on to other topics, steered by me and my perennial probing of all things European. I was in a philosophical mood, spurred in part by the splendid afternoon, with its sunlight reflecting off the bright yellow of Mozart’s house at Number 9 Getreidegasse and glinting off the fashionable patrons strolling along the bustling alleyway that makes the Hagenauerplatz a great place to people-watch. I tossed Matthias the big question. What do you think, I asked him, is the main difference between Austrians and Americans? He kind of laughed, a thick guttural snort. He pulled on his cigarette, his lips gripping the filter, pausing thoughtfully before he responded. “You know what the difference is, the main difference?” he said. “Between you Americans and Austrians, and Germans and French and Italians too?” He paused dramatically, again drawing heavily on his cigarette. “As an American, I wonder if you can even imagine what it must be like to live in a country where every person has health care. And a decent retirement. And day care, parental leave, sick leave, education, vacation, job retraining. For every plumber, carpenter, taxi driver, waitress, executive, sales clerk, scientist, musician, poet, nurse, of all ages, income, race, sex, whatever, not worrying about those basic arrangements. Can you imagine what that is like?” At first I didn’t see where he was going with this. He spoke with such passion to point out the obvious. But then suddenly the light bulb went on. I had never really thought about it before: what impact does it have on an individual’s psyche—and by extension on all of society and our feeling of extended family, which is after all the “sticky glue” that holds us all together—to know that certain basics will always be taken care of because you are a stakeholding member of that society, entitled to certain benefits? Certainly it is hard for an American, raised as an atomized individual in the “ownership” (i.e., “on your own”) society, to step into the shoes of a European and imagine what that sense of security must feel like and how it affects your overall outlook. Matthias squinted his eyes and nodded his head. “In America, you are so rich,” he said. “Why don’t you have these things for your people?” He stared at me with his big St. Bernard eyes, and I suddenly felt defensive. I searched for a response, muttered something about Americans being against big government. But in truth, I didn’t have a good response. I often wondered that same thing myself. But Matthias’s next point was even more profound. “Don’t you think this has something to do with why America is so violent?” My blank stare caused him to laugh. “Look, when everything is taken care of, don’t you see how that decreases each person’s anxiety and aggression? And how that has an overall effect on all of society?” A light bulb went on again. It made complete sense. All these supports aiding individuals and families would lessen not only inequality but also individual anxiety and aggression and, sure, the anxiety and aggression of the overall society as well. And a society in which more individuals have a stake, an investment in its future, is a society in which nonviolence is logical. A society in which so many are not stuck on the lower rungs, and in which individuals on the middle rungs don’t have to constantly scamper so fast up the ladder to maintain their place in the world, is a society that can be built more on cooperation, nonviolence, and solidarity. That psyche becomes the foundation for a more consensual society instead of the winner-take-all, “if I win, you lose,” dog-eat-dog society we have in the United States. Not surprisingly, the United States has become plagued by the steady corrosion of its unequal society. Various studies have demonstrated that unequal societies tend to result in more violence, lower levels of trust, less involvement in community life, and more racial and gender discrimination. No wonder America is the world’s leader in murders and other violent crimes, suicides, and imprisonment rates (the U.S. imprisonment rate is seven to ten times higher than the rates of European nations, depending on the nation). We spend more money on constructing prisons than we do on universities. In the United States, violence of all kinds—street violence, domestic violence, entertainment violence, official state-sanctioned military violence—has become a way of life, the sea in which we swim. Later when I reflected on this conversation, I realized what an epiphanic moment it had been. That’s when it really struck me what a failure the American Way is. Here we are, the lone remaining superpower, the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, with the most powerful military the world has ever seen, and yet we have not figured out how to ensure that the lives of Americans are not so filled with anxiety and fear. Despite all our wealth and military power, for too many Americans there is no security. Europeans, meanwhile, have a more stress-free attitude that perhaps can be summed up best in one word, a Danish word—hygge (pronounced hooga)—which describes a relaxed state of conviviality that involves close friendships and family bonds. One American expat who has lived in Denmark for more than thirty years tried to explain the sentiment. “The gist of it is that you are not supposed to have anything to do except let go,” she said, describing a nearly zen timelessness where the present doesn’t worry so much about the future. Wrote another American who had been living in the Netherlands, “To comprehend this system is to enter a different state of mind.” Matthias crushed out his cigarette, as if to underscore his final words: “Europe has the right system for its people . . . it’s what all nations should strive for . . . to take care of its people. Isn’t that obvious?” His point had penetrated deeply. He had touched on the core of something important, but my defensive comments only served to absolve the United States of any responsibility for having failed to live up to this European standard. In truth, whether and how to take care of its people is a fundamental choice about values and budget priorities that every society has to grapple with. The fact that we have not yet figured out how to extend things like health care, child care, paid parental leave, adequate retirement benefits, paid sick leave, sufficient vacation time, and free (or nearly free) university education to tens of millions of Americans is a sign that something is very askew about the American dream. It shows something warped about our idea of “family values.” And when you factor in that Europeans really don’t pay more than Americans to receive all of these benefits—and that only the president, members of Congress and their families, and employees of the most prosperous U.S. businesses receive the full range of European-level workfare supports—the tragedy becomes perverse. Just a fraction of the bloated U.S. military budget would pay for all of this. Why is this so hard? What’s an economy for, anyhow? So now, whenever I am in Europe, whether in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Stockholm, London, Rome, Prague, Oslo, Berlin, Vienna, Barcelona, Ljubljana, Budapest or elsewhere, at some point in my journey I always make a point to stand on a street corner and stop and look around me at all the people milling about. I watch them for a few minutes, take a deep breath, and, remembering Matthias’ words I think to myself, “Everyone I see, all those people walking by, no matter their age, gender, religion, or income, has the right to go to a doctor whenever they are sick. They have a decent retirement pension waiting for them, and parents can bring their children to day care, or stay home to take care of themselves or their sick loved one, and get paid parental leave and job retraining if they need it, and an affordable university education.” Of course I realize that not every European country, or every region or city within each country, lives up to every aspect of this menu 100 percent of the time, particularly since economic fluctuations will always result in contractions and expansions of the social agenda. That’s to be expected. But all of them, even the poorer countries among them, achieve a far higher level of success than the United States can muster. That is the “concept” of Europe, the social contract between all of the European peoples and their governments. It’s worth contemplating as I stand on street corners in Europe, with the memory of Matthias’s words ringing in my ears: “In America, you are so rich—why don’t you have these things for your people?”
October 14, 2010
THE PLIGHT OF THE ROMA MINORITY: SIGNS OF HOPE AMIDST THIS CHALLENGE TO RAINBOW EUROPE...Today I interviewed Professor Rudolf Sarkozi, a leader of the Roma ethnic minority and chairman of the Austrian Romani Cultural Society in Vienna, Austria, as well as his son Andreas Sarkozi, who is the organization’s secretary. It was a fascinating interview in which Professor Sarkozi, a recognized and sought-out European leader of the Roma, gave his frank opinions on the persecution of the Roma, the recent French president Sarkozy’s (yes, ironically nearly the same name! More on that below) policy of Roma expulsion from France, the general treatment of ethnic minorities in Europe and Austria, relations with other minorities such as the Turkish Muslim minority in Vienna, and more. The plight of the Roma is important, because in certain ways they play the role of the proverbial canary in the mine shaft. In recent decades, predominantly white and Christian Europe has seen an influx of immigrants and ‘auslanders’ (German for ‘outsiders’) and, like the United States before it, has struggled with the integration of minorities, whether those minorities are from North Africa, Turkey or eastern Europe. I have written extensively about the challenges of immigration and integration in my book "Europe's Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age" (www.EuropesPromise.org). There is little doubt that Europe’s future is that of a ‘rainbow’ continent, with a mixing and melting that is occurring before everyone’s eyes -- but not always smoothly or peacefully. The Europessimists have predicted that this ‘rainbow-ization’ of Europe will lead to its downfall, with the most extreme saying the continent is destined to become “Eurabia,” a colony of Islam. Alarmist anti-immigrant literature has become a genre unto itself, with titles such as these gracing bookstores: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within; The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?; Eurabia, the Euro-Arab Axis; Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’ s Crisis is America’s, Too; World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism. And of course the granddaddy of them all is Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which was a bestseller even as it drew the lines too starkly and distorted the discourse on an important subject. While some of these works have levied some thoughtful analysis, increasingly the genre has resulted in a kind of shrill, pop-chart alarmism which descends into hype and even silly nonsense. There are more immigrants in France from Portugal, for example, than there are from North Africa or Turkey, and there are no credible demographic projections showing that the number of Muslims or ethnic minorities in Europe will ever reach the level of minorities already in the United States (which currently is one-third minority). But facts are not important to the bashers and doomsayers of Europe. Ironically, the overblown stridency over new Muslim immigrants only has served to obscure the failure of Europe to integrate its longstanding ethnic minorities, most of whom are the children or grandchildren of immigrants and have resided there for years.The Roma are some of these longstanding ethnic minorities, and they are not Muslims. Also known as Gypsies, the Roma ethnic minority is one of the most discriminated in all of Europe. The Roma’s roots in Europe go back centuries, and they have been present in small numbers in most European countries for just as long. But today it is estimated that the Roma population is between two and five million, most of them living in Slavic-speaking countries such as the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania. Romania in particular, ruled by the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu until the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989, has been strongly criticized by human rights advocates as well as by the European Union for discrimination against the Roma. Romania has not even spent the millions of euros given to it by the E.U. to foster Roma integration, choosing instead to maintain difficult conditions so that the Roma will leave and migrate across Europe. And migrate they have, fanning out across much of the European continent with an industriousness that is admirable as much as it is alarming for the places where they arrive in significant numbers, often living in gypsy camps on the outskirts of towns. Locals as well as the authorities complain that a certain criminal element of petty thieves accompany the Roma influx, as a certain number live on the streets by stealing and deploying clever ruses designed to swindle people. When I was in Paris, I stood in the plaza outside the Musee D’Orsay and watched a small pack of Roma youth work the passersby with various premeditated schemes intended to separate people from their money. All of these issues came to a head in August and September when French President Sarkozy ordered the expulsion of many of the Roma, providing them free travel and a small amount of money ($382) to send them back to Romania and Bulgaria. This caused the European Commission to condemn Sarkozy’s policy as a violation of the EU charter against targeting an ethnic minority and a violation of the Roma’s human rights (as of early October, approximately 1,700 Roma had been expelled by this order, though thousands more had earlier been deported). In dramatic fashion, the plight of the Roma suddenly became front page news as well as an EU-wide challenge. And Professor Rudolph Sarkozi was in the thick of it as a spokesman for the Roma, sparring with his French presidential namesake. When I meet with him on a sunny October morning in his office, Professor Sarkozi is a stout man who looks to be about sixty five years of age, with a tousled, graying mop top of black hair and a thick moustache. He says that he comes from a simple background (that’s an understatement: he was born in a concentration camp in Austria, and after the liberation of the camp he returned with his mother to her home in Austrian). He has worked his way up over the years to a point of now being a recognized spokesperson for the Roma minority. He was pleasant though business-like in the interview, as was his son Andreas (the interview was conducted in German and translated into English by an interpreter). Sarkozi: We Roma are not a nomadic people. Rather, we are a persecuted people looking for a place where we can live and prosper. Were the first American colonists nomadic when they moved to America to escape persecution? Besides, in Europe there used to be a custom where trades people would move from place to place in search of work, and Roma were like that. Perhaps some adjustment is still occurring in that regard among some of the Roma. SH: What do you think about Romania’s policy toward its Roma population? Sarkozi: The Romanian government is pushing the Roma people out of the country. Instead of spending the EU money it is expelling people into the rest of the EU. It would be more effective if the EU gave this money directly to Roma groups and not to the Romanian government, which has no Roma representatives. There are many successful Roma businesses and organizations in Romania that could use this money, especially to hire Roma. It would be better to hire Roma even to do menial jobs, like sweeping, than just give them unemployment, since that would help them to develop skills and mentalities for working. SH: What would be the best EU policy for the Roma? Sarkozi: The EU should require that those nations and organizations receiving EU money for the Roma have Roma themselves as co-determinants in how that support is used, how the money is spent. They also should do more to draw the Roma in to the political process. Here in Austria (which he says has one of the best policies in Europe for Roma integration), two ministers in the Austrian government regularly seek out the views of Roma leaders, including myself. EU member states should all have a Roma representative in the European Parliament. We are fighting for a Commissioner at the EU level who will oversee minority issues. The EU is getting better in this regard, but the problems we are now experiencing was completely predictable and the EU was unprepared. When the eastern countries were added to the EU, and when free migration of people was allowed (under the Schengen agreement), it was clear that a persecuted people like the Roma would migrate in search of a better life. The EU didn’t prepare for this and now is playing catch up. SH: In the recent municipal elections in Vienna (which had occurred the previous Sunday, October 10), the anti-immigrant Freedom Party (FPO) won many more seats than previously, nearly doubling its total from the last election to 27%. Did the Roma feel a threat from their campaign and now their electoral success? Sarkozi: The FPO campaigned more against Muslims than against foreigners. And specifically Turkish Muslims, since other Muslims from Indonesia and other places have not had as hard a time integrating. Crises like the current economic downturn cause more people to vote for the Freedom Party. But the Roma were not caught up in this anti-Muslim wave. I have met with the FPO leaders, they are not anti-Roma. The integration of Roma has been more successful than of Turkish Muslims. SH: Why has the Roma integration been more successful? Sarkozi: The Turkish Muslim community is much larger than the Roma, and that makes integration more difficult. The Roma have been in Austria since the 17th century but Turkish Muslims only since World War II, so our roots are much longer and deeper. Austria also was conquered at one point by Turkish Muslims, and while that was a long time ago, memories are long. Sometimes some of their leaders say things that alarm people. For example, one Muslim leader said he could anticipate a minaret in every Austrian regional capital and that set off alarms throughout the country. The Turkish children, especially those recently arrived from Turkey, tend to have a low level of education and cannot speak German, so it puts a burden on the education system. And some of the imams say they follow sharia law and don’t always respect Austrian law. If I enter someone else’s country I expect to have to follow their laws. In addition, the Roma have done a lot to foster our own integration. I initiated my own fund for education of Roma youth, as well as parents. SH: Which countries are best for the Roma, which ones treat them the best? Sarkozi: Germany and Austria are the best (my note: Currently, there are around 30,000 Roma, largely settled, in a country of 8.5 million Austrians). Our leaders are consulted by their leaders, and many Roma living in these two countries have become successful. Also I don’t hear anything negative about the Scandinavian countries. Integration works best when ethnic minorities are active in the process, and in government. Austria has an advisory board for ethnic minorities which helps with integration. On October18 Austria will have a Day for Ethnic Minorities. SH: Do the Turks participate in these activities, like a Day for Ethnic Minorities? Sarkozi: Austria has six officially recognized ethnic minorities, and the Turks are not yet one of them (the others are Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes, Czechs and Hungarians). This is for historical reasons, “minority groups” must have been here for four generations and be Austrian citizens, and many of the Turks have not become citizens. But right now the political will doesn’t exist to make the Turks a recognized minority. The Turkish groups are not seeking that status, and if they did there would not be a parliamentary majority to grant that status. SH: I have one question I can’t resist asking. Your last name is nearly identical as French president Nicolas Sarkozy. I find that very ironic, that the person who is expelling Roma from France shares your last name. President Sarkozy is the son of Hungarian immigrants to France, is it possible he also is of Roma descent? Sarkozi: (he smiles and pauses, searching for a diplomatic answer) The similarity in our names is a happy coincidence (later it is pointed out to me that in central Europe, particularly in Hungary, the surname Sarkozy or Sarkozi is quite common among Roma families). SH: Are you hopeful about the future prospects of the Roma in Europe? Sarkozi: Yes, I am. SH: Professor Sarkozi, thank you for your time, it’s been a great pleasure. Best of luck with your important work. October 13, 2010
TRIAL BY FIRE: POPULIST PARTY MAKES GAINS IN VIENNA'S MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS; THE CHALLENGE OF RAINBOW EUROPE...On Sunday, electoral fireworks went off here in Vienna, Austria. I observed the municipal elections, and the populist, anti-immigrant Freedom Party (FPO) nearly doubled its vote total from the last election to 27 percent while the long-time governing Social Democrats (SPO) lost 5 percent since the last election, finishing with 45 percent and forcing them into a coalition government for the first time since the 1990s (since previously they had always won a majority of the vote outright). Their coalition partner will either be the Green Party (which also lost votes and finished with about 12 percent) or the center-right conservatives the People’s Party (which lost votes, finishing with about 13 percent). Curiously, Vienna recently began allowing 16 and 17 year olds to vote, and it had been presumed that young people would be more left than right. But the FPO had won a sizable number of votes from young people too (more on that below). On election night I wandered around the post-election campaign tents of the major parties, situated near the plaza in front of city hall (the Rathaus). The crowd at the SPO was pretty subdued, considering that they were the front runner by far and would be the leader in a coalition government. But sometimes life is not about what you have but what you have lost - it’s that ‘glass half empty instead of half full’ thing again -- and the SPO had lost its majority support for the first time in over a decade. For 'Red Vienna', a social democrat stronghold for decades, this was cold water in the face. The SPD leaders and rank and file were not in a mood to be consoled. But over at the FPO tent the crowd was giddily jubilant. I wandered around inside among the hundreds of supporters as the party's leaders paraded around onstage. Thick Germanic voices bellowed their victory chants and songs, shouting "F-PAY-EW, F-PAY-EW," and large mugs of yellow pilsner were hoisted high. The star of the show was the FPO's hunky telegenic leader Heinz-Christian Strache, who egged on the crowd. Strache's populism had struck an electoral chord, especially in some of Vienna's old industrial white working class areas, now heavily populated by immigrant families. He captured more than a third of the vote in some of these districts that usually had supported the Social Democrats. Strache ran strongly on banning minarets and Islamic headgear, familiar themes for anti-immigrant parties whether in Switzerland, Sweden, France and the Netherlands. With minor local variations, the campaign issues for populist parties across Europe continue to be Islamophobia and anti-immigration, which are closely connected to economic security and crime. After enjoying the hospitality of the FPO’s beer and apple strudel, I began interviewing many of its rank and filers under the big top. This was a random selection, not a scientific one, but I have to say that the people I talked to were mostly reasonable, not some foaming at the mouth neo-Nazi skinheads. There were some ‘baldies’ in the tent -- who may or may not have been skinheads -- but they were a tiny fraction of the hundreds there. The concerns vented by the people I spoke with raise important questions about how relatively wealthy societies (like Austria -- only 8 million people, about the population of New York City) can open up their borders and admit immigrants in a way that doesn’t threaten the high quality of life that they have. The Austrian support system for families and workers is very generous and comprehensive to a degree Americans can scarcely comprehend, precisely calibrated to ensure a healthy and productive populace but at the same time to prevent bankrupting the government. Austria’s social capitalism is cut from a different clothe than the American trickle down, Wall Street capitalism. All Austrians receive health care, paid parental leave (following the birth of a child), affordable child care, monthly kiddie stipends (to pay for diapers, baby clothes, food, etc), paid sick leave, inexpensive university education, ample retirement pensions, supportive elderly care, generous unemployment compensation, vocational training, efficient mass transportation, affordable housing, and more. They have an average of five weeks of paid vacation (compared with two for Americans) and a shorter work week, plus a plethora of religious holidays thrown in. But this is not a “welfare state” as Americans understand that term; this is not about people kicking back, on the dole, collecting government handouts. This is about how a society provides support for families and individuals so they can be healthy and productive worker bees. In other words, this is about WORKING, and Austrian workers are some of the most productive in the world. That’s why their standard of living is higher than most Americans, since only better-off Americans -- those who work for a wealthy corporation or are a member of Congress -- get Austrian level supports for families and individuals. Even ethnic minorities in Europe, including immigrants after a waiting period, benefit from the same generous workfare supports that native-borns enjoy, so they don’t generally sink to the desolate condition that can be found still today in many minority and immigrant communities in the United States, even among African Americans whose families arrived centuries ago. A country so precisely designed can’t simply open its borders and allow huge influxes of newcomers, since that would threaten to overwhelm and bankrupt their system. Austria has been willing to absorb smaller numbers of newcomers but even that process becomes controversial when the newcomers are perceived as being both culturally different and not wishing to “fit in” to the Austrian way, including speaking German. Fitting in is very important to Austrians, who are an admirable people in many ways but can be fairly rigid in their approach to life. Nevertheless, it seems to me that these are legitimate concerns and cannot simply be swept under the rug. The unfortunate part is that it takes a populist party like the Freedom Party to put these issues on the table, because they tend to do it in a provocative and unconstructive way (for example, I have been told that for a while the FPO included a link on their website to a video game where the player could shoot at and blow up minarets and mosques). But I think it’s worth considering for a moment the aggrieved case they make. As I talked to the FPO supporters, they bristled at the idea that they are racists. They reiterated over and over that Austrians are a generous people who are happy to help people in need, needing political asylum, etc. (and there is evidence that this claim is at least partially true; soon I will post an interview I did with a Roma leader in Vienna who claims that Austria has one of the best integration policies for Roma in Europe). But they claimed that “all they were asking for” was that the Turkish Muslims who came to live there become Austrians, i.e. learn to speak German, find jobs (Austria has a relatively low unemployment rate even during this crisis, only about 4 percent), respect Austrian law (instead of sharia law), stop stealing and intimidating people, and don’t simply “take take take” from the system. When I asked them “Do all Turkish Muslims act in this way,” each interviewee said “No, certainly not.” When I asked them “What percent act that way?” the responses ranged from “fifty percent” to “I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s too much.” In general, as is usually the case in these matters, there seems to be a lack of credible or widely available data about how big the problem is. What percent of Viennese Turks don’t speak German, what percent go to mosque, what percent don’t have jobs, what percent are involved in crimes, etc. Even some of the policy experts I asked don’t seem to have a good handle on this, and so average people respond with answers like “a lot,” or “too much.” So a good deal of this is based on public perception. One woman I interviewed spoke about being intimidated and once even threatened with a knife by young Turkish males. But she freely acknowledged in response to my question that not all Turkish males act this way, even that most don’t. Yet she is visited on a regular basis, as are many of her colleagues under the FPO tent, by an uneasy feeling that this “element” is taking over her city and country. Even if the facts happened to be widely available, her perceptions may be impervious to the facts. The case of 16 and 17 year olds voting for the Freedom Party perhaps best illustrates the challenge. They voted for the first time recently, and at first the perception was these youthful voters would overwhelmingly mark the Green or Social Democrat lists. But it hasn’t actually worked out that way, many are voting FPO. I did not see any youngsters there in the tent -- presumably they were home in bed since it was nearly midnight -- so had to settle for asking a few adults why they thought young people were voting for their party. Each person I asked gave the same resounding response: “Because young people in schools are bearing the brunt of this. Some schools and classes are 50 percent Turkish,” said one white man. “And many of the young Turks in schools are poorly educated, don’t speak good German and are troublemakers.” In Salzburg (in eastern Austria), when I asked some American associates living there about this question, one woman told me about how one day some young Turks threatened to beat up her son if he didn’t give them his hat. Others had similar stories. One gets the impression of a bit of a West Side story situation where the Jets and the Sharks are facing off in the schools, with the battle lines drawn along ethnic/cultural lines. So it seems to me that many of these grievances are legitimate, or at least legitimate-sounding. Perhaps these polite, anti-immigrant Venetians were just good at sounding reasonable. But what is also clear is that neither the FPO supporters nor their leaders have much to offer in the way of solutions. Possibly because there aren’t any easy solutions, and none that will solve this challenge in the short term. As the United States shows, the process of integration takes generations. It requires constant pressure to change the natural course of the stream, and it takes responsible leaders who over time craft responsible policy. Austria only passed its first anti-discrimination law a few years ago, so the political system has only begun the process of making the Turkish Muslims feel welcome. Not that long ago signs were widely displayed in shop windows that read “Auslanders need not apply” (Auslander = outsider = non-Austrians). And the media, especially the print media in Austria, Germany and elsewhere does not help. Their alarmist headlines obscure Muslims’ own grievances, as well as their motivation for living in Europe today: the vast majority go there to better themselves and to secure a brighter future for their children, not to promote a Taliban fantasy of reestablishing the Caliphate. Most Muslim immigrants, like people everywhere, simply aspire to their own version of the middle class dream, including its secularist-based quality of life. Most Muslims in Austria and elsewhere in Europe don’t even go to mosque, just as most Christians don’t go to church. Your average Muslim immigrants and their second- and third-generation children are law-abiding residents, lunch-pail Ahmeds and Ameeras, looking to find their niche. That’s why they endured the perils of immigration to begin with. In most ways what Austria and Europe is facing is an old, old story, a classic tale of a dominant mainstream trying to incorporate—or expel—newcomers in its midst. Ethnic minorities and immigrants have always been mistreated, across the world and down through history, and not until their sheer numbers reach a critical mass within the overall population is their condition ever addressed. The minorities appear to be suddenly living in their midst, even though most have been there for decades. It’s as if suddenly the blind can see, and they are shocked by what they have missed. At that point, a populist movement inevitably arises to deport them, only to find that it is too late to do so for any self-respecting democracy that supports human rights, since the immigrants’ numbers are too great and they inhabit a crucial economic niche as low-wage workers performing essential functions that native workers won’t do. So a parallel struggle emerges over how to integrate them or at least to tolerate them, and that process plays out across decades and not always according to design. In fact, as the history of immigration and integration in the United States shows, things can get downright messy. The United States, which has a far higher percentage of ethnic minorities than any European country has today or likely ever will have, long ago reached a demographic tipping point and began its stumbling efforts toward integration. But Europe never before has had to deal with the number of ethnic minorities who now have settled in. Only recently has that number reached this critical mass in which European nationals of North African, Turkish or Arab origin not only are more visible but also are starting to push for more rights. Once the racial demographics have changed beyond a certain no-return point, the minorities’ elbows become sharp enough for them to say, “Move over, I’m riding on the bus too.” Austria, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Britain, and the Netherlands, as well as many cities in other European countries, have reached this moment first, but it’s just the onset of an irreversible course. Now on the other side of the demographic tipping point, Europe increasingly is faced with some stark choices. Sealing the borders and cutting off immigration, or deporting existing immigrants, is not an option because of white Europe’s own shrinking population problem and the need to counteract that with increased immigration for the good of the economy. So that presents an even sharper dilemma: integration or apartheid. But no country that claims to be a democracy can long suppress its minorities by means of a discriminatory police state without losing its soul. So that leaves only one realistic option: integration. There simply is no other practical course. Europe, increasingly, appears to understand this. A Rainbow Europe is in the offing, but it’s going to be noisy and messy for years to come. And back in Vienna, the Freedom Party’s 27 percent of the vote will be overwhelmingly outvoted by whatever majority coalition emerges, headed by the Social Democrats, so none of their proposed policies will come to pass. They will comprise a noisy opposition, a thumb in the eye to the majority, and if the history of populist movements in Austria as well as in Europe and the US is any guide, they will see their support drop within a couple of election cycles as the economic downturn levels off and it becomes clear to more voters that the FPO doesn’t offer any practical solutions. But in the meantime, in their own quarrelsome way, they have identified a seismic fault line in modern wealthy societies, and that fault line will continue to open and close over the next few decades as societies shake out their nerves over the earthquake tensions of immigration and ‘auslanders/outsiders’ in a globalized world. Next: I will post a fascinating interview with a Roma leader in Vienna. And get this -- his last name is Sarkozi, nearly identical to that of French president Nicolas Sarkozy who recently began expelling Roma from France. Talk about coincidences. —Steven Hill 6:11 AM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (1)October 4, 2010
OKTOBERFEST: A “STAMMTISCH” OF THOUSANDS; SKEPTICISM OVER U.S. TRAVEL ADVISORY IN EUROPE...The German language has a word, “Stammtisch,” that really has no English equivalent. The closest translation is something like “regulars’ reserved table” or "regular get-together." Literally speaking, Stammtisch means a table in a bar or restaurant which is reserved for the same guests at the same time every day or every week, and no one else is supposed to sit there even when the regulars aren't present. In the most traditional German beer halls there is a large brass plaque above the table with the word Stammtisch printed on it in bold lettering, which conveys "don't sit here." When I visited the Hofbräuhaus in Munich for the first time, which is a massive beer hall that also has no U.S. equivalent, I made the mistake of sitting at someone else's unoccupied Stammtisch, raising eyebrows and eventually glares until I figured out my transgression. In the US, if a table is empty, it's fair game to occupy it, but not in traditional Germany. There can be all kinds of Stammtisch, whether for friends who drink together on a regular occasion, or those for specific interest groups, such as a "philosophy discussion Stammtisch" or a "stamp collectors Stammtisch," or a “learn to speak German or English Stammtisch,” etc. This is what US sociologist Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame) once called “social capital.” Adolph Hitler, who got his start by learning the art of oratory in Germany's large beer halls, had his own Stammtisch of sorts -- it became known as the Nazi Party. Understanding this word/concept is one way to appreciate Munich’s annual rite of beer swilling known as Oktoberfest. It's like a massive Stammtisch of hundreds of thousands of people who have a regular annual date in Munich. I had never attended Oktoberfest before but when the organizers of my lecture in Munich invited me to be their guest at Oktoberfest, it was too attractive an offer to turn down. Oktoberfest celebrated its 200 year old anniversary this year, and over the two-week period in which it unfolded approximately six million people passed through the gates. A large number of attendees were wearing the traditional Bavarian costumes, men in Lederhosen shorts and feathered caps, the women in the low-cut, cup runneth over, St. Pauli girl Dirndls. And just about everyone is holding an enormous flagon full of the specially made yellow lager beer known as Märzen (nearly two million gallons of which are consumed during the two-week festival). In other words, these Stammtischers (can I use this word as a noun?) are pounding down serious quantities of beer. Besides the amusement park atmosphere around the fairgrounds, they have enormous beer halls on the fairgrounds where the Stammtischers mount their libational assault on Kantian reason. Just in the beer hall in which I “stammtisched” (can I use it as a verb?) with my friends, I shared the revelry with about 10,000 other people in a single hall. It was an enormous structure and everywhere you looked there was a sea of people hoisting high their yellow flagons, singing along in thick, throaty tones to the oompa band in the middle. The more people drank, the more they climbed on their stools and benches, I suppose trying to get as high physically as they were getting blood-level wise. The singing too grew increasingly loud and paradoxically on-key, as the volkgeist found its harmony in both German- and English-language songs rolling over the crowd. Next thing you know, they are standing on the tables, higher still, and the singing by now was thunderous, bellowing like elephant seals. There's something about singing in large crowds that has always been appealing to humans, something about the communion that occurs when each individual joins with like-others to produce something harmonious; it's the exact opposite of politics, which is often one long argument that one can never win, except temporarily, and frustrates this innate need for agreement and consensus. Three voices joined in harmony is a delight, but ten thousand in unison is a wall of uplifting sound. Think of the magnificent chorus of dozens in Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," and multiply that by, oh, about a thousand. While I'm not particularly religious, I suppose there is something God-like in this pursuit, a sense of climbing higher and higher onto the stools, the tables, in beer content, in our attempts to reach some divine summit. Perhaps I had drank too much beer myself, but this loud bellowing mass suddenly seemed like something life-affirming and even sloppily beautiful, a Stammtisch of Thousands within this beer hall. Yet as I realized later (once the effects of the beer had worn off?), the flipside is that these sorts of rituals can and have been abused, whether during the patriotic "rally around the flag"-fest that occurred after the 9-11 terrorist attacks (when the number of Americans who were willing to support the use of torture spiked in the opinion polls) or during the Nazi mass rituals that used symbols and, yes, song to unite a people's will around a perverse destination. American Stammtisch of fear? Must be election time. On this same day I heard on the news that the US State Department had issued an extremely rare travel advisory telling Americans to beware of potential terrorist threats in Europe. The State Department warned that a small cell of potential terrorists from Pakistan is preparing an attack. Plotters could be planning to use "a variety of means and target both official and private interests," the State Department said, adding that Americans in Europe should be careful on trains, subways and other transportation systems, and in visiting hotels, restaurants and tourist spots. I couldn't resist asking some Europeans, as well as Americans living in Europe, what they thought of this warning. Without exception they all shook their heads and smiled. "There go the Americans again," said one. "This is nonsense. How are the terrorists supposed to distinguish between an American and other Europeans? Why would Americans be in more danger than anyone else here? Yet you don't see the German and French governments raising their threat levels." Indeed, the German and French governments downplayed the alleged threat, though the British government -- the usual American ally in these matters -- did raise its level. One German friend offered a rather unflattering explanation for the American government’s over-reactive posture. "It must be election time again," she said. "Your politicians always try to scare voters into voting for them." She pointed out how the Bush administration had excelled at using fear to rally voters’ loyalty, and wondered why the Obama administration would be tearing a page out of the Bush playbook. "They really must be worried about the November elections." The Americans I talked to, all of whom live in Europe, for the most part agreed. That got me to thinking. Another meaning of Stammtisch is “regular get-together,” and her comments caused me to wonder if terrorist warnings around election time have become an American Stammtisch, a regular ritual around which Americans all get together, using symbols, stories and "protect the family/fatherland" emotions to stoke electoral passion. Of course, if the Obama administration did not issue the travel advisory and something horrible did occur, they would be accused of negligence and/or incompetence. That charge would hurt their electoral prospects this November more than the charge of being overly cautious, or even over reactive and engaging in overkill. Is this then perhaps an example of "defensive medicine" practiced in the electoral arena, not taking a chance in case something worse might happen? Or…is it something else? Regardless of which it is, people here are scoffing, and that tells you a lot. After American warnings about weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, after missing an $8 trillion housing bubble that did exist, after Abu Ghraib, kidnappings, renditions, Katrina, and more, America’s credibility is lacking. Even with Obama as president, who remains popular among Europeans but who they increasingly see as having continued a number of Bush policies in this arena, Europeans use their own compass and do not immediately take the word of the Americans. That gave me a lot to think about when about 5 p.m I had to cut out of the Oktoberfest to catch a train to Strasbourg, France (a relaxing four hour trip through the German countryside, passed farms, green fields, pastures, many church steeples, solar panel arrays and windmills -- the trains really are a marvel here). I have to give a lecture the next day in Strasbourg, but Oktoberfest would continue throughout the afternoon and into the evening, and when it closed down for the evening at 10 p.m. it would roll into the streets and into the local bars. German Romanticism at work, a Stammtisch to remember. September 30, 2010
THE PRIME MINISTERS WEIGH IN; WHAT IS THE PROPER ROLE AND SOCIAL FUNCTION OF A BANK?…The panel on which I am speaking today is titled “Rebuilding confidence in financial markets: financial regulations, budgetary discipline, monetary stability.” Fellow panelists include Danuta Hübner, Member of the European Parliament and former European Commissioner (equivalent to a former presidential Cabinet member in the US); Ingrida Simonyte, Lithuania’s Minister of Finance; Jacques Delpha, a member of the French prime minster’s economic advisory committee; Olivier Lacoste, Director of Studies, Confrontation Europe; and Ross Walker, UK Economist at Royal Bank of Scotland. This panel got really down in the weeds about the nitty gritty of financial reform, but for my 10 minute contribution I had decided to take a different tack. I pulled back to the 30,000 foot level to survey the broader landscape, titling my talk "Principles to live by during an economic crisis."I delivered a somewhat tongue-in-cheek perspective, hoping the humor would translate across the Atlantic. “We live in a time of great uncertainty,” I began, “and so we need some principles to guide us. But I must warn you, these principles may turn out to be completely unreliable. So use them at your own discretion.” From the mostly blank stares I received from the 100 or so people attending that panel, I’m not sure they “got” the irony. My comments were being translated into six languages simultaneously, and the translation can take a couple of seconds, so it’s hard to say. No matter, I plunged on. My first principle: Only trust those economic experts who tell you “I don’t know what’s going on”. I proceeded to make the case that the economic profession has been discredited. “Keep in mind, the ‘experts’ missed an $8 TRILLON housing bubble in the U.S.” They clearly have a shaky handle on how the economy actually works. “Economists are like a chef who not only burned the meal but burned down the entire restaurant, yet the cook wasn’t fired. How many economists have lost their jobs?” I then laid out a two decade long track record during which economists have been wrong more than they are right on the big issues (here’s a link to an article I wrote about this theme called “Shorting Economists: The Economists Keep Getting it Wrong”. “We are flying blind, lost in the fog, when it comes to redesigning the financial architecture, and it is important that we admit this.” The room of course is filled with economists, as I knew it would be. Do I detect an uneasy shifting of chairs? The heart of my speech was this principle: Values-based banking and finance - what are the right values for a banking and financial system? I explored how we could turn banks and the financial industry away from the casinos they have become and make them into responsible institutions. “What is the proper role and social function of a bank? It seems that as a society we have lost sight of the crucial difference between productive investment and gambling, between the banker and the bookie, and between the insurer and the speculator.” Watching the audience’s faces from the podium, it didn’t seem like my comments were going over real well. I felt suddenly like a comedian who was dying up there, not connecting with his audience. But during the Q and A I received a lot of head nods from the audience, and afterward quite a few people thanked and even praised my comments for “telling it like it is.” In particular they liked my suggestion that Europe should employ traditional means of public relations, including advertisement in US newspapers, TV and radio, to help Americans appreciate “Brand Europe.” European companies employ about 2.5 million Americans throughout the United States, and have invested more than $50 million in the state of Texas alone, more than U.S. businesses’ investments in all of Asia. Yet no Americans know about it (You can read more of my thoughts about this at this article). So all in all, it was a “good show,” as they say. Spotlight on the Prime Ministers and the European Parliament President. The highlight of this day’s events undoubtedly was the final plenary session featuring most of the heavyweights at the conference. These include Jerzy Buzek, President of the European Parliament from Poland (the equivalent of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi); Yves Leterme, Belgian Prime Minister, now holding the rotating presidency of the European Union; Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of the Republic of Hungary; Joseph Daul member of the European Parliament and chair of the European People’s Party Group; and Jaime Mayor Oreja, member of the European Parliament, Vice-Chairman of the European People’s Party in the European Parliament. Hungary’s Orban is a particularly interesting figure. Ruggedly handsome like the former football/soccer player that he is, he swept into office earlier this year with a populist campaign that brought him an unprecedented two-thirds parliamentary majority. This is one European leader that stimulus hawk Paul Krugman would love, since Orban has resisted the International Monetary Fund and is the first major European leader to challenge the German-led orthodoxy of budget cuts and structural reforms that has swept Europe since the Greek debt crisis. Orban has won public support by announcing plans to reverse an IMF-imposed increase in the retirement age, proposed a one-off tax on the country’s banks and trumpeted a mini-stimulus plan. His criticisms of foreign banks, speculators and most recently the European Union and the IMF certainly are more in tune with the sentiment in the European streets, as protests have swept across the continent in opposition to budget cuts and bank bailouts. While such an approach is crowd-pleasing in Hungary and elsewhere, it also runs the risk of alienating European allies and foreign investors. His policy choices are an explicit rejection of those trumpeted by most of those in the room, so I am curious to hear what he will say to this audience. “Europe has changed before our eyes,” begins Orban. He calls for greater regulation of financial speculation and says economic growth and job creation should be the main goal of Europe and the EU. He cautiously treads familiar center-right turf, saying nothing controversial and playing the role of local host to leaders from the corners of Europe. But in one small jab at the European Union he says “People are fed up with grandiose plans that mostly lead nowhere,” and combines that with an appeal for an acceptance of each country steering its own independent path. But then he lapses back into “diplomat speak,” keeping things polite. Hungary is not using the euro, having retained its own currency the forint, but his prescription is exactly contrary to the tenor of the times in Europe, since the eurozone nations have been promoting greater fiscal union, i.e. convergence and harmonization of budgetary rules as a reaction to the Greek/sovereign debt crisis. Indeed the speaker right before him, Joseph Daul, who is a member of the European Parliament and chair of the European People’s Party Group, calls for greater convergence over retirement age, number of hours worked, and more. “We need a balance between security and liberty,” says Daul. But this difference of opinion will have to be argued through another day, since this evening everyone is on his or her best behavior. That is often the case in these forums, a diplomatic exchange of differing viewpoints. And with the economic “experts” themselves divided over stimulus vs. deficit reduction as the best strategy at this point in the economic crisis, there is little point in being too fundamentalist or passionate in one’s opinion. European splendor along the Danube. That night, the conference has a private dinner inside the fabulous Hungarian Parliament building. Like its impressive exterior, the interior of the Parliament is a masterful work of architectural design. Once inside, visitors walk up a grand staircase and are suddenly uplifted inside the womb-like ambience of a stunning grand hall, glittering with gold artifacts, archways, trim and ceiling. Very impressive. Between the gold craftsmanship are stained glass and glass mosaic paintings. As one ascends the stairs, one is greeted by all the magnificence that the Austro-Hungarian empire once had to offer. The effect is dazzling. At the top of the stairs is a famous hexadecagonal (sixteen-sided) central hall, with huge chambers adjoining it, including the Lower House (where the National Assembly meets) and the Upper House. Other rooms shoot off to the left and right, the whole effect like a regal honeycomb. The Holy Crown of Hungary is displayed in the middle of the rotunda of the central hall, inside a glass case. The food is as exquisite as the building -- these European leaders know how to treat themselves well at these conferences. This marks the conclusion of this conference, and tomorrow, I am off to give a lecture in Luxembourg, followed by Paris… |
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