Posts by NickOttens:
By Nick Ottens.
Big multiethnic cities and university towns support the treaty with Ukraine. The rest of the country does not.
Originally published at the Atlantic Sentinel, April 7, 2016.
Wednesday’s referendum in the Netherlands about the European Union’s association agreement with Ukraine is best understood as another battle in the continent’s “blue-red” culture war.
The Atlantic Sentinel has argued that the Dutch “no” had less to do with Ukraine than a general sense that the EU has been making decisions over the heads of ordinary voters — from the proposed EU constitution in 2005, which was rewritten as the Lisbon Treaty after being rejected by voters in the Netherlands and France, to the bailouts of Greece, which a majority of Dutch people opposed.
The outcome on Wednesday was similar to the 2005 referendum. 62 percent voted down the EU constitution then. 61 percent voted against the Ukraine treaty this week.
But the “no” vote was not evenly spread across the country.
City Elites
In only 22 out of 390 municipalities did proponents of the treaty outnumber opponents. But those 22 included some of the biggest cities in the country. 52.5 percent voted for the treaty in Amsterdam. In Utrecht, the fourth-largest city in the Netherlands, 57.4 percent voted in favor.
University towns like Groningen, Leiden and Wageningen also backed the pact by wide margins, as did some of the wealthy suburbs around Amsterdam, Haarlem and Utrecht.
In more working-class Rotterdam, by contrast, 64 percent voted down the treaty. Opposition was even higher in some rural municipalities.
Culture Wars
Such city-countryside divides are not unique to the Netherlands. Nor is the Netherlands, despite being one of the most densely populated and probably one of the most liberal places in the world, so unique as to not have them.
The average denizen of multicultural Amsterdam will be better educated, more worldly and wealthier than her compatriot in a small town in Zeeland, so her political opinions are more likely to be liberal and pro-European.
Andrew Sullivan, a British blogger, has described this as Europe’s “blue-red culture war over modernity.”
“Blue Europe,” he argues, is “internationalist, globalized, metrosexual, secular, modern, multicultural.” It favors European integration and votes for parties that are either green or pro-business but anyway socially liberal.
“Red Europe,” by contrast, “is noninterventionist, patriotic, more traditional, more sympathetic to faith, more comfortable in a homogeneous society.” It is less mobile and struggling to maintain its living standards in an era of rapid economic and social change. It votes for parties on the far left and the far right that are nationalist, protectionist and defenders of the welfare state.
Fringes
In the Netherlands, only the Socialist Party on the far left and the Freedom Party on the nationalist right rejected the association agreement with Ukraine: both “red” in their own ways.
The biggest supporters of the treaty were the liberal Democrats; a party that — going by Sullivan’s definition — could scarcely be “bluer”.
All three are in up in the polls. The Freedom Party benefits the most from the anti-EU sentiment whereas the liberal Democrats, and to a lesser extent the Greens, have consolidated the Netherlands’ “blue” vote.
The challenge is for those parties in the middle, including Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s right-wing liberals, his Labor Party allies and the opposition Christian Democrats, whose voters are divided. All three supported the association agreement with Ukraine and called for a “yes” vote, but a poll last week showed that 15 to 50 percent of their supporters were determined to vote “no”.
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February 17th, 2016
By backing the Kurds in Syria, Russia is driving a wedge between Turkey and its NATO allies.
Originally published at the Atlantic Sentinel, February 16, 2016.
By throwing its support behind Syria’s Kurds, Russia has succeeded at driving a wedge between Turkey and its NATO allies.
Kurdish fighters have recently taken advantage of Russian airstrikes in the north of Syria that have targeted Arab and Turkmen opponents of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Kurds now control almost the entire frontier with Turkey.
Turkey has responded by shelling Kurdish positions on the other side of the border, alarming its Western allies who see the Kurds as the most effective fighting force against the self-declared Islamic State.
Turkish fears
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dismissed Western criticism of the shelling of Tuesday, saying the Kurdish militias in Syria were a creation of Assad and his Russian protector.
“Right now Russia’s brutal operation, along with the Syrian regime targeting civilians, is underway,” Erdoğan said, referring to an offensive of Assad loyalists around Aleppo, the last rebel stronghold in the north.
Their aim, the Turkish leader alleged, is to create a corridor for Kurdish “terrorist organizations.”
Erdoğan’s government sees a link between the Kurdish militias in Syria and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey, a far-left paramilitary group that fights for Kurdish independence.
Ankara fears that the emergence of a Kurdish republic in the north of Syria would exert inordinate pressure on its own Kurdish population to secede.
Partitioned
Assad has mostly left the Kurdish minority in his country alone since the civil war began five years ago.
With the help of Russian airstrikes, his regime is consolidating control of the more heavily populated western parts of Syria.
The Islamic State, a fanatical Islamist group, controls much of the eastern deserts as well as territory across the border in Iraq — where it is opposed by Kurds as well.
Priorities
The West is in the awkward position of supporting two enemies of the Islamic State who are also at war with each other: Turkey and the Kurds.
Russia, which is also on the other side of European countries and the United States in a proxy war in Ukraine, is exploiting this situation by aiding the Kurds in Syria.
It also has a score to settle with Turkey, which shot down one of its warplanes on the Syrian border last year.
There is no obvious way out of this dilemma, because the West’s allies do not share its priority of defeating the Islamic State.
Turkey’s priorities are suppressing Kurdish nationalism and hastening the fall of Assad, whom it considers — with some justification — the source of all its recent troubles. The Islamic State might even be a useful last-ditch asset against the Syrian dictator.
The Arab states supporting the rebellion similarly put bringing down Assad first, given that he is the only Arab ally of their nemesis Iran.
The Kurds, the world’s largest stateless people, naturally put defending their own land ahead of defeating the Islamists.
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February 12th, 2016
By Nick Ottens.
Few mainstream right-wing parties in the West are doing well.
In Canada, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives lost power in November after almost a decade. In Portugal, a center-right leader had to make way for a coalition between the center-left and the far left. A similar alliance could come to power in Spain. In Germany and the Netherlands, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Mark Rutte have seen their popularity go down. In France, Marine Le Pen, the nationalist party leader, could beat the mainstream right into third place in next year’s presidential election. In the United States, Republicans are unlikely to take back the presidency in November if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee.
There has been one exception to the rule: In Britain, David Cameron not only won reelection last year but grew his party in the process.
What’s his secret?
Economic success
James Forsyth argues in that part of the explanation must be Britain’s growing economy.
“The economic recovery means that there isn’t the same level of anti-establishment rage in Britain as there is in the United States,” he writes.
It certainly hasn’t hurt Cameron. But America’s economy is actually growing at a healthy pace as well — although you wouldn’t know it from listening to the Republican Party’s presidential candidates. The economies of Portugal and Spain both recovered thanks to right-wing austerity policies, but the parties responsible for those programs still lost their majorities.
Right-wing split
Cameron has also benefited from something that looked like a failure at first, Forsyth argues: a split on the right.
When senior Republicans visited London after their party’s 2012 defeat, the sense was that despite the loss, their long-term outlook — with the insurgent Tea Party wing still inside the party — was better than that of the Tories. It had seen members go off to join UKIP and the right was divided for the first time in British political history. Senior Tories feared that this analysis was right; that Cameron’s legacy would be a split that would leave the Tories struggling to ever again win a majority under the first-past-the-post system.
They were wrong. The defection of nativists and social conservatives to the United Kingdom Independence Party allowed Cameron’s party to become more attractive to centrist voters.
It also meant that Cameron wasn’t trying to sound as angry and as frustrated with modern Britain as these defecting voters.
In May, his Conservatives gained more support from those who had backed Labour or the Liberal Democrats in 2010 than they lost to UKIP.
Elections are won in the center
So it turns out Cameron’s success only affirms what politicians on the far left and the far right have been denying for decades: that elections are won in the center.
Britain’s Labour Party seems determined to test that theory again by electing an unrepentant Marxist and peacenik, Jeremy Corbyn, as its leader — when the only time in recent history it won the support of middle England was under the more centrist Tony Blair.
Both parties in the United States have their true believers.
On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist, claims he can make America look more like Denmark by encouraging working-class and young voters to turn out.
On the Republican side, Ted Cruz, a far-right senator from Texas, says that his unforgiving type of conservatism can win if only evangelicals voted in greater numbers.
They are both wrong. The voters who are going to decide the 2016 election are mostly middle class and live in swing states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. They tend to be more socially liberal than the average Republican and less trustful of big government than the average Democrat; not too much unlike the sensible Britons, in other words, who gave Cameron a second term last year.
Originally published at the Atlantic Sentinel, February 7, 2016
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July 28th, 2013
By Nick Ottens.
Germany’s upcoming federal elections have put European plans to form a banking union “on ice,” less than a week after the Dutch government announced that “the time of an ever-closer union in every possible policy area is behind us.”
The two countries, which are among the wealthiest European Union members, have repeatedly resisted ambitious economic and political integration schemes since the start of the debt crisis that has left their voters increasingly frustrated after being asked to bail out profligate states in the eurozone’s periphery while seeing their own budgets and economic growth rates cut.
While both countries remain far from leaving the eurozone, almost half of Dutch and German citizens believe joining the single currency was a mistake. A recent Gallup Europe poll conducted for De Telegraaf in the Netherlands found 39 percent of respondents favored leaving the body altogether. The anti-European Freedom Party is the largest in the polls.
Unlike her Dutch counterpart Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel doesn’t face a formidable Euroskeptic opposition. However, her own right-wing voters are growing restless. She can ill afford to embrace far-fetched plans for “economic governance” in the eurozone, as French President François Hollande suggested last year. Neither can she afford to push for a banking union, the latest proposal to remedy the currency union’s woes.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine’s Nikolas Busse suggests the only ones who still believe in an “ever-closer union” are those employed by the EU in Brussels. “In most member states,” he wrote June 27, “any sense of European romance is lost.”
The Netherlands took a particularly dispassionate view toward future European integration in a memo released June 21 when it identified dozens of areas in which the EU shouldn’t interfere, ranging from food safety laws and social security systems to working conditions and the media. The government also criticized plans to harmonize tax rates across Europe, a proposal that is backed by Germany, likely for the purpose of lowering rates in the less competitive member states. Germany and the Netherlands have among the lowest business taxes in Europe.
The Netherlands’ resistance to deeper European integration must have startled some of the English-language press that last year predicted the incoming Labor-Liberal coalition would pursue a more pro-European policy. The Financial Times described the parties’ spectacular performance in elections that year as “a decisive and surprising rebuke for populist Euroskeptic politics.” The Guardian predicted the country would tilt “the balance of power in the eurozone toward President François Hollande’s socialists in France and away from Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.”
Far from it, the nation of almost 17 million has leaned heavier on German leadership in Europe and, if anything, strengthened ties with Britain and Sweden, countries outside the single currency that regard warily the eurozone’s steps toward closer integration.
German Euroskepticism (or perhaps more appropriately, euro fatigue) is similarly underestimated. When the European Central Bank signaled last year that it was willing to finance highly indebted eurozone states’ deficit spending, it was to many Germans’ alarm. Their newspapers forecast “nightmares” and “economic catastrophe.”
Even the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung warned a “red line” was being crossed. “In a community governed by law, the ends cannot justify the means,” it argued. “A European community that is based on the breach of contracts will always be based on fragile foundations.”
As two of very few European nations with a pristine credit rating, Germany and the Netherlands will not be strong-armed into integration schemes they dislike. If proponents of an “ever-closer union” fail to recognize that popular sentiment in two of the EU’s founding member states are increasingly tilted against it, the planned banking integration is doomed.
http://ottens.co.uk/nick/2013/07/germany-netherlands-resist-ever-closer-union/
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