Populism (part II): The United States

In my previous blog I focused on populism in Scandinavia – which also, by the way, is characteristic of how populism works in several countries further south. This time I want to consider US populism.

American populism is a well-known historical fact, in particular from the beginning of the previous century. Populist movements are also quite active in the US today (“Occupy Wall Street”, for example, or the Tea Party). But is the term “populism” recognizable the way it is used in Scandinavia and Northwestern Europe, as a pejorative term, to shame people for “irresponsible” political ideas and behavior? Without really having conducted any closer study of the matter, it seems to me the answer must clearly be no. Why? Because in the US, populism in the European sense is the norm, it is normal politics.

First of all, I believe it can be said that the United States has been structurally “designed”, from the start, all the way back in the late 1700s, to be open to challenges from below. This is not populism defined by what it says, but by how it works.

The British political scientist Margaret Canovan, who has written extensively on populism, notes the initial difficulty faced by anyone approaching the subject because of its indistinct nature. She suggests that we should "... shift our attention from the ideology and policy content of populist movements and concentrate instead on structural considerations. Populism in modern democratic societies is best seen as an appeal to 'the people' against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values of the society.” (*, p. 3.)

In other words, it doesn't matter who is in government or who the populists are (left or right). The point is the opposition raised by populists to the powers that be, those that are "inside the Beltway." In every US election this epithet appears.

This links back to my previous blog about the fear-driven campaigns of established Scandinavian political parties against any political challenge from outside their control, no matter how disorganized. The curious point about the United States in this context is that the powers of government in Washington DC show little or no fear of populism; indeed, the United States has arranged itself constitutionally to be maximally open to popular challenges from below. Let me just point out a few characteristics of the system that embody this quality:

• the US Constitution's design for the House of Representatives, notably its 2-year term – exceptionally short for a major legislature - and single-member districts, qualities which forcefully push the incumbents' attention to the concerns of their constituents;
• the 1^st Amendment to the Constitution, which is probably the strongest instrument protecting freedom of speech existing anywhere in the world;
  
• the 2^nd Amendment protecting the right to organize citizens' militias and hence the citizens' right to bear arms; a veritable implicit “right to revolt”;
  
• the widely shared and strongly held values regarding individual rights and the collective foundation of the constitutional system (“we, the people ...”)
• the deeply inculcated and widespread popular attitudes regarding the people's rights.

All of these structural characteristics function together to make up a political system that takes populist tendencies for granted, and which is unsurprised by novel proposals and “outrageous” ideas steadily being fed into the institutional setup from below. Its size and complexity also mean that very few populist challenges come to anything more than pinpricks against the system, although the Tea Party in recent years has shown that it is possible to wreak havoc with sufficient funding and determination.

In short, this is why the “charge” of “populism” has very little relevance in US public debate, and why at the same time populism in the US is alive and kicking at all hours of the day and night. US grassroots movements are myriad and unstoppably active all over the country.

This is not to say the country is governed by populism, more that it is governed by the “populism” of the North European mindset, the unpredictable and messy kind of politics produced by political actors “out of control” by responsible political parties, and well funded.

In other words, the “noise” emerging every day from the bottom layer of the US political system is vastly greater than in Europe, where political parties always have to be mediators before the tiny squeaks from below can be heard at the top. Indeed, the unpredictable nature of US politics and the steady appearance of ever new 'loonies' on the American political scene is exactly what makes political elites in Northern Europe so nervous about the United States, their major ally. Just imagine one of these characters winning the next presidential election!

With Europe being as much affected by US policies as they are, such fears are far from idle. And they may have something to do with why “populism” is so vehemently opposed whenever it appears in Stockholm or Oslo.

*Margaret Canovan, “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy”, Political Studies (1999), XLVII, 2-16.

Populism and Ostracism

(NOTE: Revised version. The previous version with an unfinished section on US politics has been withdrawn.)

Populism - a name, a category of politics, sometimes used with positive connotations, sometimes neutrally, but mostly pejoratively. Princeton web defines it as “the political doctrine that supports the rights and powers of the common people in their struggle with the privileged elite”. Basically it has to do with allowing “the voice of the people” to be heard – and heeded - in government. It is a call for power to be given to the great masses, a call made by unorthodox politicians driven by a fundamental dislike, or even hatred, of the elites in power. Populists are those who make the call, but not many of them call themselves populist.

In Latin America successful populist politicians like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and before them Peron, have become in effect dictators, manipulating their followers into a frenzied kind of support that continues for years. The special character of Latin American societies, with large impoverished masses without education and vast gaps in wealth, makes these countries vulnerable to the rule of demagogues. It can easily occur in other parts of the world where similar conditions obtain. In Europe today we have seen it in Berlusconi's Italy, and in Lukashenko's Belarus. In Asia, Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra is a clear example. But populism in power has not usually been a Western-industrialized phenomenon.

What concerns me here is not successful populism, but the use of populism in political manipulation, as it is found in Scandinavia. The tendency of this region is that political elites defend their position by ostracizing people and ideas they fear or don't like, using the label “populist”. And this is effective, a banishment from the "good society" as strong as the old Greek method. Many Scandinavians are actually intimidated to refrain from voicing their true views.

Politics in Northern Europe – and in particular in Norway - is tightly fixed to the center. Therefore, when the recent Norwegian elections were won by the conservative right, international media paid much attention to what was called Norwegian right-wing populism, in part because of the mass killer who in 2011 went on a rampage taking over 70 lives in the name of right-wing, quasi-nazi ideas. Inevitably, his actions have been linked by some to the party closest to his deranged ideas, the liberal/right-wing Progress Party, which is currently about to enter the government in coalition with the Conservatives. There is no basis for such a link.

The Progress Party is sharply critical of the dominant social democracy, with high taxes, heavy bureaucracy and a very liberal immigration policy. For 30 years the Progress Party has polled around 15% of the votes, but always been kept out of government coalitions – until now. Clearly, the appeal of the Progress Party among the voters is a threat to the mainstream parties. So the latter have gone for the ostracizing option, the populist bogeyman, to defend their position. 

The populist bogeyman is nothing new in Nordic politics, he has been around for a long time. While in US politics populism has more of a positive ring to it (which actually protects the loonies), in Norway and Sweden when “populism” is used in public discourse it is routinely framed as a threat to public health, or worse, marking dangerously popular ideas, such as tax cuts and other opportunistic causes likely to endanger the Scandinavian welfare state. Many call these parties xenophobic or racist for their critical view of liberal immigration policies. Since 2009 the Norwegian Progress Party for the first time has a Swedish fellow party of similar views, the Sweden Democrats. The media in these two countries have spared no ink in smearing these parties' views, which would hardly be called extremist in other countries. In Denmark, by contrast, critical views of welfare and immigration are much more widely held than in Sweden and Norway.

Consider, in Denmark, the following view of immigration offered by a well-known party: “It will do nobody any good that Denmark receives more foreigners than society can absorb. It will do nobody any good that unemployed immigrants are allowed to walk around without anything to do – and it will do nobody any good that we, out of misunderstood kindness, allow values like freedom, equality and democracy to be undermined.” (Translation: OFK.) Says who? Right-wingers? No, the Danish Socialist People's Party, to the left of the Social Democrats.

In Norway, we find roughly the same view held by the right wing Progress Party: “Norwegian immigration policy must take as its starting point that demands are made on immigrants who come to settle here. Participation in the work force, in language courses, and showing respect for Norwegian law are central elements in a successful policy of integration. Equal treatment of Norwegians and immigrants is decisive for the prevention of conflicts, which means that special arrangements for immigrants must be terminated.” (Trans.: OFK) Racist? Xenophobic? 

Indeed, there is a gap in Nordic political culture between Denmark to the south and its two northerly sisters. While keeping “populist” parties out of the circle of clean-nosed politics has been a common project of all centrist and center-left parties in Norway and Sweden, Denmark is a different story. Here a succession of populist parties have had a strong minority position since the 1970s. The frank Danish manner of speaking is shocking to the refined ears of more northerly politicians, who would never condone a socialist party having an immigration policy like the one just quoted. Hence the slight pariah-stamp on Danish politics as seen from Sweden or Norway, where everybody is supposed to be a social democrat at heart. 

It is perhaps time for the nervous social democrats of the center-left in these countries to recognize that in the forgotten everyday politics behind the scenes, nobody has come from more populist roots than the labor movements. Ultimately, I would hope, Scandinavian political elites can find the courage to admit the legitimacy of all of "the people" - regardless of what opinions they hold.

Catalonian Independence Day: Can Artur Mas be Tamed?*

As a citizen of Norway, a country that won its independence by seceding unilaterally in 1905 (from Sweden), how can I not be rooting for Catalonian independence? The background stories are largely the same. A militarily imposed union. Attempts to make the union work within a democratic framework. Economic grievances. A distinct language. Both Catalonia and Norway have had these experiences. (For more background on Catalonia and independence, see my blogs in October 2012 and May 2013.)


Still, Catalonia and Norway are different. Just for one crucial thing, popular support was vastly stronger in Norway in 1905 than it is in Catalonia today. In Norway the referendum held on the issue of independence was decided by a whopping 99,95% in favor. In Catalonia the most positive result expected would appear to be around 60%, possibly less. To end up with a minority against independence as large as 40% would make the whole project politically a dead duck.


This is not what you heard on Catalonia Day 11 September – la Diada Nacional de Catalunya. A human chain of hundreds of thousands of Catalonian nationalists, holding hands, symbolically linked their hopes and demands for freedom, in an event said to be inspired by the way the Baltic populations marked their demands for freedom from Soviet oppression in 1989.


As someone who spent some time in the Baltics back in those days, I can only say the comparison is vastly overblown and indeed grotesque. The Balts were under totalitarian oppression, not allowed to use their own languages, not allowed freedom of expression, not allowed the ordinary Western democratic freedoms that Catalonia along with the rest of Spain has enjoyed since 1975. 

As if to top it off with a transition from the grotesque to the farcical, Latvia's Prime Minister Dombrovsksis on this occasion makes a statement of Baltic support for the "hypothetical" case of Catalonian independence, and Spain's Minister of Foreign Affairs Margallo declares Catalonia has a point and should be treated more leniently. Not exactly Mariano Rajoy's week, as the stolid Prime Minister of Spain was preparing his belated response to the circus.

During the past six months the Catalonian leadership semed to have been brought to its senses by Madrid's low key policy of private persuasion and constitutional pressure, along with the straits of Catalonia's economic hardship. But Artur Mas is not so easily tamed. The President of Catalonia, who rode high a year ago on nationalist sentiment, peaking with an immodest declaration of sovereignty by the Catalonian parliament in January 2013, conceded to private talks with Premier Rajoy in the spring.


Those talks have recently been resumed in the summer of 2013. They initially appeared to have a beneficial effect, when on September 5, President Mas declared that the promised referendum on independence, previously scheduled for 2014 regardless, is now only going to be held if it can be done «legally». If it cannot be held legally, it will be postponed until the next scheduled Catalonian elections of 2016, Mas said, and will then be designated as a plebiscite on independence. 


By the time Independence day came along the following week, Mr. Mas had changed his mind again. Mas now insists he still intends to have the referendum in 2014. 


Prime Minister Rajoy, trying to manage this process from Madrid, has just given his public response in a letter to the Catalonian president on September 14. Dialogue is the only way, he says. No direct comment is given on the desired referendum, though implicitly it is rejected again.

Mr Rajoy is not wrong to insist on respect for the Spanish constitution, but he disregards the urgent need for a long-term overhaul of the constitutional structure of Spain. Catalonia's crisis is a chance to effect a change covering all of Spain's autonomous regions («states»), not just Catalonia. No doubt about it, a constitutional revision in the direction of federalism would be a good thing for a country that already is a de-facto federation. The Socialist Party (PSOE) now has made federalism part of its program. So far Rajoy has refused to let his Partido Popular open up for even a debate on these issues. His most recent letter to Mas indicates he is not about to change his mind. 


We need an end to Rajoy's stasis, and to Mas's slippery shifts, to put us beyond the current fiscal, financial and administrative mess of the Catalonian circus. Had there been a clearcut response in Catalonian public opinion, this case could have been much simpler.

(*Revised September 16 from the first version of September 10.)

Demilitarize Gibraltar, Ceuta and Melilla!

Why does a NATO ally, the UK, insist on keeping a military base on the territory of another NATO ally, Spain, against the latter's will? And why does Spain insist on doing the same in two locations in its neighboring country Morocco? The visit of a UK naval vessel, the HMS Westminster, in Gibraltar at the height of a diplomatic storm only a week ago recalled ridiculous associations with 19th century gunboat diplomacy.

Gibraltar, Ceuta and Melilla - tiny, militarized colonial enclaves - all are, in equal measure, historical anomalies that should be done away with - the sooner the better. They serve no purpose other than to aggravate local relations and maintain needless animosities across artificial borders. It is hard not to see all the involved parties in the wrong here. Of course, there is money involved, in particular in the case of Gibraltar.

Also, these supposed geopolitical strong points watch over the Straits of Gibraltar, but the strategic significance of the Straits is not what it used to be. There are no longer any guns in place with the range to cover the passage. The passing merchant ships are hardly fewer or smaller than before, nor are the naval vessels. But securing the freedom of passage there has very little to do with who controls the enclaves. The NATO navies are in command. In such a case the US navy will be in the vanguard jointly with Britain and Spain and NATO allies Portugal and France, among others.

There are parallels which suggest demilitarization. At the approaches to St Petersburg, the Åland Islands have since 1800 successively been under Swedish, Russian and Finnish sovereignty. A strong fort in the islands, Bomarsund, built by Russia in the 1830s, was subsequently destroyed by Britain and France during the Crimean War. In 1856 the islands were demilitarized after Britain and France had defeated Russia in the Crimean War. The islands were once more occupied and remilitarized by Russia in 1916, then again demilitarized after World War I. Today the Åland Islands are demilitarized and have extensive autonomy under Finnish sovereignty, including a favorable special tax status under the EU.

Another parallel is Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic that the Soviet Union claimed after World War II. Svalbard was at that time already governed by an international treaty (1925) which limited Norwegian sovereignty and demilitarized the islands. The Norwegian government dismissed the Soviet claim in 1947 and normal relations ensued in which the USSR developed a considerable mining activity. When Norway joined NATO in 1949 Svalbard remained outside the deal. During the Cold War the US remained highly suspicious of Soviet intentions in Svalbard - the Soviet manpower there seemed much greater than required by the mining activity. Thus, during the 1980s the US was claimed by some to have been prepared to undertake a preventive attack to throw the Russians out, in which case Norway would just have been left dangling. Be that as it may, the demilitarized status of Svalbard has remained intact and - like Åland - answers many difficult questions before they can be raised.

Hence, demilitarization is a live option that should be examined more realistically in these three cases. Raise it in an ad hoc multilateral forum. Join that move to the introduction of a wide-ranging autonomy in each locality, and sovereignty loses its sensitivity. If a local parliament can run the “country” pretty much as they please, the question of national sovereignty becomes moot.

You don't believe me? Let them try it.

Remember Helmut Kohl, Mr Rajoy?

The former German Chancellor retired from his post as party chairman in 2000. He did so after serious allegations were confirmed in the press in increasing detail that he and his conservative party CDU/CSU had been receiving large amounts of illegal money. The contributions came primarily from sources in German business and industry.

Since he was not in office when the scandal peaked, his exit may appear to have been less onerous than had he been obliged to step down as head of the German Government. Still, Mr Kohl was honorary chairman of his party and was a highly respected politician not only in Germany, but in Europe as a whole. He did the right thing and retired, making way for Angela Merkel to succeed him as party chairman.

Considering the evident facts of your situation, Mr Rajoy, it seems you are in a very similar tight spot and should take Mr. Kohl as your example. Indeed, the alleged facts in your case date exactly from the period when Mr. Kohl was struggling to keep the news hounds at bay. But either you would not, at the time, believe the German stories about the recipient of the Prince of Asturias prize of 1996, or you may simply have thought it would be easier for you to get away with it in the lax atmosphere of Spanish politics.

Well, the Spanish public is not so forgiving any more, as you may perhaps have noticed. Your conservative party's former treasurer, Mr. Barçenas, cannot be left alone carrying the burden of this case. He received the money from the industrialists, duly noted the amounts and how they were subsequently doled out in monthly sums to yourself and other members of the Aznar government of the Partido Popular.

Political corruption may be widespread in Spain, and not only in Spain, but that does not make it okay. Mr. Rajoy, it is time for you to go.

Between Theocracy and Democracy: Egypt in Transition*

Most of us would probably prefer to see their elected leaders sit out their term or being ousted in formally correct ways. That was my first reaction to what happened in Egypt last week. We have also, most of us, at times been governed by useless leaders who should never have been elected. But most industrialized governing systems have survived somehow intact, and so have we, their citizens. A seasoned democracy like, say, France, has not succumbed under its many incompetent presidents. Other countries have had their fair share of the same. That experience is part of what democracy is all about, which makes the opposition to the coup in Egypt easy to understand. 

To me, the intervention seemed hasty. At the same time, it must be recognized that Egypt, to say the least, is not a sturdy democracy. Indeed, as democracies go, Egypt is a momentously fragile case. But that is perhaps also another reason why a coup should be a last resort. What keeps Western critique in the aftermath from being more harsh is, I suspect, the fact that the intervention was (evidently) forewarned to the West and actively sought and supported by respected Egyptian leaders like Mohammad El Baradei. One would have liked to see him chosen under more legitimate circumstances.

Furthermore, if the ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi had had a hum of what he was into from the day he was elected, he might have fared better, maybe even still have been in power. While the challenges would perhaps have been too great for any mortal human, this man came to his office without any outstanding record or relevant experience to build on, whether in politics or administration. Morsi's one outstanding advantage was that he had been elected by more than half the electorate. He clung to that single qualification with such tenacity that it apparently kept him from looking squarely at the problems he had in front of him. He seems not to have listened to advice from outside his own narrow Brotherhood circle. He was deeply mistrustful of the remaining officials from Mubarak's days, and they were many in that huge administration of Egypt's governance - not just military and police, but judges and other educated officials who ran the state and kept it from collapsing - sort of. Even at the very low levels of the administration Morsi appears to have had a hard time getting accepted. They later turned out to be dead set against his rule in any case (see below). While several attempts were made by top opposition people during June to get him to make a move to stabilize the situation, apparently he would not take that route. He was the elected president, and he would decide, on his own.

From the start there had been two huge complexities of widely differing character facing Mr. Morsi - on the one hand the enormous problems of Egyptian daily life (bread, water, electricity etc); on the other, the deep political divisions of the population that had elected him. Only by making some headway on solving the first and at the same time bridge-building to overcome the second, could he have avoided the backlash that came with the military coup / intervention which put him out of office after just a year.

Morsi opted for solving his political survival the only way he saw how - by pandering to the islamist party and its ideological allies that had put him into power. That was a dangerous road to take, because it nourished the natural expectations of his religious brethren. For a democratically elected religious movement it is very tempting to make its victory permanent. A minor constitutional change would see to that. Egypt was not yet a theocracy, but the danger was clearly there. That anticipation, in turn, also triggered the military intervention.

Whoever now takes over faces the same challenges as Mr. Morsi did from his entry in 2012 to his exit a year later. The lack of bread, clean water and predictable government for 80 million people must come before the issues of sharia law. The religious concerns of Egyptians (and Tunisians, Libyans, Syrians, ...) must be set aside, simply put. 

Solving practical issues will be the only way to contain the frustrations repeatedly vented in the religious fury of Egyptians upon the Copts and other minority sects. And it will be the only way to make Egypt and the Middle East a governable part of the wider world of the 21st century.

ADDENDUM

The New York Times this morning (July 10) brought the story of the 'miraculous' recovery of the Egyptian system for delivery of gasoline and electricity, just in time for the opening of Ramadan. Police were suddenly patrolling in the streets after months of being nearly invisible. Suddenly the shortages were gone, overnight.

This is more indicative of a conspiracy against Mr. Morsi while he was still in power, than a demonstration of his incompetence, says one of the Egyptians interviewed by the NYT. I agree. The sudden correction of systemic failures makes the military intervention last week even more obviously a coup, indeed, the culmination of a months-long subversive campaign against the elected leadership. The Egyptian system has shown itself open to a degree of manipulation that is instructive to all of us. It also will bring self-criticism to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies for their naive belief in a democratic system. So much the worse for the hopes of some degree of democracy in Egypt.

Egyptian governance, for which democracy was a gamble from the start in 2011, is now on its way to making a more fundamental choice: abandoning the Islamic democracy of 2012 as an experiment which could not deliver on basic needs - and angle instead for a pragmatic kind of limited democracy, which delivers the goods, but doesn't respond to the ideological demands of the Islamist part of the population.

Barring a future descent into chaos and civil war of the Syrian kind, and having gone through the experience of the last two years, Egypt now seems much less likely than before to become anything resembling a Western liberal system. What is needed is not a system of the kind that prioritizes political participation, but one that favors the production of real change.

*(Events in Egypts have obviously moved on later, back to another military dictatorship.)

OECD Stumbles Into the Immigration Debate

In a major study published last week, the OECD has concluded that the costs and contributions of immigrants in most OECD member countries sum to a net positive outcome. That is to say, that in most OECD countries the benefits of taxes, v.a.t. and other payments by immigrants into the economy amount to more than the cost of pensions, child care and other elements of social welfare that immigrants receive.

This encouraging message hides the less comforting truth that the data the study uses to reach its conclusions does not distinguish between the countries of origin of the immigrants. They are merely classified as either “native-born” or “foreign-born”. However, it so happens that the countries of immigrants' origin tend to be of basically two rather different kinds: 1) countries more or less similar to the receiving country, e.g., immigration to European countries from other European countries; 2) immigration from non-OECD (mostly third world) countries. 

It is well known that immigrants from the first group have come to find work and are usually qualified for it, hence are overwhelmingly contributors to their host country. Large numbers of immigrants from the second category are poorly qualified for the labor markets of OECD countries, even though many have come for work or economic betterment, and so represent mostly costs. 

Hence, the OECD is misleading and confusing the debate about immigration policy by treating European (or: “industrialized world”) immigrants and third world immigrants as if they were comparable units. The report occasionally refers to the lack of separate data for third world immigrants as a technical statistical problem, but I have little doubt that with the use of a little more imagination this problem could have been solved. As it is we now have a 400-page study with lots of superficially relevant statistics, but less of the incisive analysis that this problem requires.

A policy that regards country of origin as immaterial is bound to overlook the challenge of insufficient resources in the receiving countries, and of injustice to the remaining (non-emi/immigrating) third world population who stay at home. This debate is of course continually being suffocated by the stereotypical charges of racism, exclusivism, anti-islamism etc. With the OECD now so generously helping out, there seems to be no way out, only further rounds of irrelevant talk, in this “benevolent” circus of immigration debate.

See: http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/social-issues-migration-health/international-migration-outlook-2013_migr_outlook-2013-en

Secession - in Catalonia and Elsewhere

The lure of secession is evidently more common these days than some of us might have thought. Texas has for some time been fuming with the secessionist sentiment of 125 000 citizens seeking to escape the oppression of President Obama. All told 47 states of the US have since last year petitioned the Federal Government to be allowed to secede, probably all in reality on Obama-related grounds, though the formal reasons given may be different. The petitions have all been rejected, but were evidently taken seriously by the White House, which responded (briefly summarized) that the question of secession was settled in the United States Constitution (1789) and again with the Civil War 150 years ago. Democracy obviates any call for secession, according to the White House.

Generally, unilateral secession is not regarded as permissible whether by international law or by most other legal systems. Curious exceptions have been found, though.

Restrictive views of secession are held in most countries, but most neurotically in quasi-democracies or countries that are major holders of real-estate like Russia and China. Even  Spain, though a democracy, is in this very restrictive class. In these countries the threat of secession is guarded against with great determination and harsh constitutional clauses. The Soviet Union in its day had a remarkably liberal constitution which guaranteed all member republics the right to secede. Only, (surprise!) it wasn't true. The only Soviet republics allowed to secede were the three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (forcibly annexed in 1940) who managed to pocket Moscow's concession four months before the USSR collapsed in December 1991. 

Others were less fortunate. That same year Slovenia discovered the gravity of its decision to secede when it promptly found itself at war with Yugoslavia, its old mother country. All the other Yugoslav republics met a similar fate when they followed Slovenia's lead, and Yugoslavia predictably disappeared from the map. When Catalonia had a similar idea last year, there were ominous rumblings heard in the Spanish military (see my blog last October).

So what should be required for a part of a country to reasonably and legitimately be allowed to secede and seek recognition as a sovereign country on its own? Canada and its province Quebec have been through more iterations of this issue than most other countries and their experience offer some instructive ideas on how to think. A workable procedure according to international law would include a negotiated path to a referendum and a process in which both populations concerned agree on every step along the way. If they cannot agree, there will be no secession. The legal basis of the process would have to be within the constitutional framework of the country from which a region wants to secede. Next to Canada, the best current example of this kind of a cool approach to such a hotly disputed issue is the case of Scotland, where a referendum will be held in 2014. When the Scots found that their rules of "devolution", or self-government, did not allow them to call a referendum on their own, they appealed to the United Kingdom government to grant them that right on this particular occasion, and the appeal was granted - on specific, tight but not contested, conditions.

In Catalonia, you may have noticed something happening almost every week since the euphoria of independence broke headlines in September of last year. And still, nothing much has really happened after all. The government of conservative CiU's Artur Mas, who lost his former majority in the November elections and resumed power with the uncertain support of radical ERC, was formed chiefly on the premise that a referendum on independence was to be held before the end of 2014. Euphoria last fall meant "Independence now!". The attraction at that time of a possibly separate EU membership for Catalonia - much written up in the Catalonian press and encouraged by similar feelings in Scotland - may have been a spur to extra enthusiasm. That was ultimately quashed by the EU's Barroso, who offered the stark message that a unit seceding from a current member will not be regarded as part of the EU any more, but will have to reapply for membership, kewing up at the end of the line. In spite of this, Catalonia's early euphoria peaked with a resounding declaration in January of not merely 'the right to decide', but of Catalonian sovereignty as well, voted by a clear majority (though less than two-thirds) of the Catalonian Parlament.

Later, the mood in Catalonia appears to have shifted to a slightly more sober reflection. Critics called for moderation and negotiation. Catalonian President Mas and Spain's Premier Rajoy met, and a process of talks behind the scenes got underway. In April there was a minor shock when Spain's Constitutional Court ordered a temporary suspension of the January declaration and whatever steps the Catalonian government was taking to act upon it until a more definite decision could be rendered by the Court. Reflection, by early summer 2013, means, apparently, "we have a right to voice our opinion" and "... maybe we should discuss this."

But the recognition that Spain's Constitution of 1978 does not allow such referenda has only come quite late. As in the UK, special legislation needs to be enacted for a referendum of this sort to be conducted. This has not been evident judging from the statements of Catalonia's President, Mr. Mas. Others around him apparently have more sense. In a glimpse from the submerged talks in Madrid the CiU's spokesman in the Spanish Congress stated yesterday that he was convinced the Government of Rajoy would come around to allowing the Constitution's clause for exceptional legislation to be employed to allow a referendum, the way it was done for Scotland in the United Kingdom. He may be wrong, but the path is there towards compromise.

If so, the prospects of an orderly process in Catalonia are better than they have been in a long time.

Krugman, Reinhart-Rogoff, and Austerity

The recent debate surrounding the studies by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff of public deficits and economic growth shows how alert academic critique can make a strong research finding fizzle down to a somewhat interesting footnote. By now we know that it does not matter a whole lot whether a country's public debt level exceeds 95% of its GDP. (I must add my own footnote here, see below at the *) Yet I am amazed at the level of influence initially ascribed to the 2009 Reinhart-Rogoff study, advocating austerity, until it was challenged. The US is a country where politicians – and conservative politicians in particular - are not exactly enamored of intellectuals. Somehow the claims of a scholarly article are said to have inspired the whole Republican stance in the congressional budget fights over the past half-decade. I find this overblown, and as Krugman suggests (April 29), there may be more to the story than just one academic article. But I am still puzzled by his conclusion that one side has won the debate.

Austerity, in Krugman's view, is simply wrong; stimulus is right. Still, I wonder what these terms mean, or more precisely, what they have meant in the public debates over the past four-five years. What is austerity? Strictly speaking it should be cutting or avoiding unfinanced spending; reducing public deficits. Yet this is not necessarily what all the rage in the streets of Europe has been about.

In Greece, austerity has meant people could no longer retire at 52, but had to wait until their early 60s like most other Europeans. It has meant stopping the payment of (public) pensions to thousands of people long dead. It has meant stopping the payment to persons unknown of salaries for government jobs held by nobody. It has meant reducing the salaries and pensions of public servants who have been living well above the medium standard of EU citizens elsewhere. It has meant Greeks suddenly had to begin paying taxes (- horrors! -) like ordinary people do everywhere else in the industrialized world.

In all Mediterranean EU countries, I have been hoping that austerity also should lead to fewer limos for elected officials, and no more life-long salaries for departed politicians, but I am not sure we're there yet. In Spain austerity means everybody now has to pay a certain (minor) share of the cost of their medication and of the cost of their medial treatment – like most people in northern EU countries have been doing for years. Austerity in Spain also has deprived people of free nosejobs and other cosmetic surgery, which has left me shocked.

Now, admittedly, the most sensitive part of austerity in Spain is that which is linked to unemployment. Austerity has reduced the number of government jobs in Spain. It has also opened the door for private companies to fire people they no longer need. So unemployment has increased.

While the first of these measures (cutting government jobs) is a must for a country dangerously in debt, it is not clear to me that Spain is really in that situation. The question is more what kinds of jobs are being cut. My impression from public offices in Spain like the mail service, public health centers and the public documentation services is that their slow-moving, impolite and haughty employees have no idea how privileged they are when compared to their colleagues in northern EU countries. Public money should - and can – simply be better spent.

As for private sector jobs, no company can survive a downturn without being able to lay off unneeded employees. These kinds of lay-offs for longer-term employees are now gradually becoming legalized in Spain, so there is no wonder unemployment increases. It will stay that way until the hoped-for upturn comes along.

In short, the debate about austerity in Europe, at least, has been confused by a lack of clarity as to what is meant by austerity. To me austerity should mean being strict about the kind of public spending one allows (and on that I continue to insist), but not requiring necessarily that there be no deficit in the budget. Deficits in the EU, at least, have to be limited, as required in the eurozone, otherwise euro countries will have to continue being bailed out by their neighbors. For this reason I see managing the public deficit as a macroeconomic task that cannot just be ignored in the name of the stimulus. It is an EU-member government's overarching responsibility.

Which again means we are in the hands of the politicians. Given the quality of politicians these days – whether in Europe or the US – we can only pray.

* Now that Reinhart and Rogoff have published their corrected figures, their original claim seems to hold up. A 1% difference separates growth in countries indebted above 90% of GDP (lower growth) from countries with a lower indebtedness (higher growth).

After Syria

The past two years the news out of Syria have been so dismal that I have not been able to face it, even in the minimal sense of writing about it. One reason: There can be no quibble about what the great powers have decided to do - they are wisely staying out of the fray. All of them. Their motives may differ considerably. But in such a situation there is nothing much anybody can do from the outside. This is another reason why there is not much to say - it only proves the old, tough lesson that a people must gain its freedom - and preserve it - on its own. 

Libya may have proven the opposite, acording to some. That is to say, that the West saved Libya from the Gaddafi clan. The Nato intervention was fairly clearcut, to me an action as legitimate and well-founded as anybody might wish. Beyond that, I believe Libya was sufficiently chaotic to prove nothing about such matters. There were interventions from a number of different parties, actors, or sides, whatever you prefer to call them. Some were invited. Others not. There was strong action from inside. Nevertheless, the main thing in Libya was - and is - that there was no real inner core, no cohesive group big and strong enough to gather a force transcending the clans and tribes, which is why the instability continues. Is it much different elsewhere in the Middle East?

The collapse of the Arab spring should not be over-interpreted. Granted, Tunisia has advanced farther along the way, yet has its own troubles. Egypt even more so. There can be little doubt that attitudes inculcated by Islam is the main source. As long as no strong voice is courageous enough to take whatever there is of humanity in Islam and merge it with some sense of moderation, the Middle East mess will continue, and be even worse than it was before Tunisia took to the streets and Mubarak fell. One strong, courageous voice can do much. We have not heard that voice yet.

So where is the glimmer of hope in all this?

Most of the governments of the Middle East are against Assad. Still, they cannot do much more about it than the great powers. Except prepare their own nation for a better fate. In the meantime, we can all watch - as we no doubt are doing - while Assad and Syria self-destruct. The only further hope I can see is the lesson that Syria must be the last Arab nation to go to the dogs like this. Those dogs, unfortunately, are home bred. 

My Anti-Russian Bias

Is Russia a bunch of good guys manipulated by a bad guy? Or is it more complicated than that? Let's start at the simple level. Why is it that I get this feeling of uneasiness whenever a Russian crosses my path? I tell myself it's silly, there is no rational reason for this, but it keeps recurring. Worse, too often my suspicions are confirmed. Let me give you an example.

In my neighborhood, many houses are just for vacation use, owners are absent for long periods, and neighbors often use their parking spaces. So it happened one day a year or two ago that a Russian-registered car, a nice new BMW X6 SUV, turns up in this absent neighbor's car port. “Good going”, I thought, “Russians doing well and establishing themselves in our area. - Still,” I thought, “what a long drive!” But after a couple of weeks, as I'd been walking my dog past the Russian car every day, it occurred to me I hadn't seen any Russians, and the car hadn't moved, it was just sitting there gathering dust, more by the day. A month goes by, two months, no change, just more dust. So finally I ask the German lady in the next house if she knows who owns the car. “Someone I know,” she says vaguely, and leaves me standing there. The next day the car is gone; I've never seen it since. (It may be added that, as far as I know, there are no Russians living in our neighborhood, only other expatriates and the odd Spaniard, including this surly lady friend of the BMW “owner's”. She now has an E-minus in my book.)

There has been a steady stream of emigrants from Russia in recent years. Not merely to the Greek-orthodox EU tax haven Cyprus (where they tend to bunch up), but also to the US and Canada and parts of Western Europe (Britain, France, Spain, and Greece among them). Of course, retirees seek the sun more than anything. And they are welcome in the south, bringing their money to the wobbling Mediterranean economies. But then there is this curious fact about them: most of the recent Russian arrivals seem to be young swingers, not exactly retirement age. And they are always well supplied with cash. A local businessman tells me he has more and more Russian customers - “--- they pay cash for everything, leafing their bills out of big wads of money,” he says. “And they gladly pay everything in advance.”

I am curious as to how it is that these young folks are not back home in Russia helping Mr. Putin run his (their?) country – or simply working at an ordinary job in the roaring raw materials economy of the beloved Motherland, instead of working at shipping money out of it. In the new post-Cold War international environment in which Russians are free to do things they never could before, they have a few favorite activities: foreign investment (often in somewhat odd activities); bank accounts abroad; freewheeling spending as they travel. Western financial commentators are drawn by the money flow to pay attention to such facts, less to asking where all this money comes from. I can only guess.

During a year I spent in Paris 1997-98 I always passed a Russian restaurant on my way to and from work, a small bistro elegantly decorated, attractively lit. During that year I never once saw a guest in that place, except for a Christmas party. Obviously it was part of a money-laundering scheme. Of course, this is just anecdotal. Yet, somehow I believe repeated random examples are to some extent indicative of a larger phenomenon. Russian business abroad is in no small measure about money-laundering.

Of course, I am biased. Because, if you lift your glance from the personal-anecdotal to a broader view of international politics, Russia is doing well, back in positions of power, rebuilding its influence after the soviet breakdown. In its own eyes, if not in those of others, Russia is playing the role of a great power the way Russians always wanted and felt entitled to. The once powerful soviet military – which turned out to be a potemkin village of rusting equipment - is now being restored to a more usable (Russian) version of its former glory. The export of raw materials is obviously what pays for this, but that extractive business is also what Putin is using to bait his trading partners into long-term relationships of supply and dependency.

Diplomacy is a central part of this offensive. In the old days, Soviet negotiators were hard to beat, brought up as chess players, able to sit for hours and hours without a break, and - according to a Norwegian Russia expert of that period - without saying a word either, if that was required. In Russian, he said, the expression of approval was “steel ass”.

Today, with international law less beholden to power plays, Russian negotiating skills and steel asses are less productive. Also, Putin's government has little patience for negotiations. The priority is for Russian gas and oil exports to get to their markets without delay, and especially without the delays of dealing with transit countries for pipelines or transshipment. Trouble-making intermediaries (such as, especially, Belarus) have been cut out without mercy. Old gas and oil pipelines from soviet times have been carefully rerouted to escape bothersome transit partners like Latvia, Belarus, Poland and Estonia. Oil shipments through Latvia were quickly done away with when the Latvians faced down angry Russian expat pensioners in Riga in 1997-98. By an incredibly rapid effort the Russians built several large new oil transshipment terminals near St Petersburg. After those started operating from 2001, the Latvians were left sitting there with nothing to show for their previous precious asset, the old soviet era oil terminal at Ventspils, once the biggest on the Baltic.

The subsequent project to build a gas pipeline along the seabed of the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany (“Nord Stream”) was a stroke of geopolitical genius – all the intermediaries, potentially 3-5 bothersome governments, were swept aside at one go. Who could object to such a convenient routing scheme? Of course, the neighbors did their best. When the Russians asked permission (as they legally had to) for their pipeline to cross the others' maritime exclusive economic zones, the neighbors pulled out all the stops, throwing up legal objections to the best of their ability. But if this “harassment” of the Russians had some success, it was only passing. Eventually the Russians tackled the obstacles, one by one. After that, when the pipeline had been built, there was no longer anything to protest.

Elsewhere, there are projects for Russian oil, and especially gas, moving both westward and eastward, in several gigantic projects. Gas exports to China have been under negotiation for a number of years, and the first major Russian oil pipeline to China has been operating since 2011. (China is not self-supplied with oil and gas.) To the west, the South Stream project towards southwest Europe is a copy of the Nord Stream pipeline, similarly stretching across the ocean floor, in this case the Black Sea. The project is a competitor to the simultaneous (non-Russian) Nabucco pipeline project, offering gas to Europe from Azerbaijan piped via Turkey and Bulgaria. In geopolitical perspective, Russia seeks to tie the EU to Russia for the long term, while Nabucco is designed to relieve the EU of such Russian dependency.

These projects show that Russian policymakers have learned something important from the failures of the Soviet system: Economic ties don't have to be kept in place by military means; in fact, things work much better without the clumsy tools of violence; economics has its own incentives and its own sanctions.

Still, behind all of these projects is the same old geopolitical thinking. Geopolitics is a Russian favorite worldview, an idea that makes sense to them, more than to most other nations, except perhaps the Chinese, who seem lately to have discovered it too. Power is linked to territorial control, in whatever way you can achieve it. Russia discovers, now that the receding Arctic ice is opening a new, shorter sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there are new geopolitical advantages becoming available to them all around. The Northern sea route drastically shortens the maritime connection between Europe and East Asia. Also, of necessity it passes close to the Russian coast all the way from Northern Norway to the Bering Strait, close enough to check or block transits on demand. The same goes for the Trans-Siberian Railway, now functioning as a major cargo link between east and west.

Of course, you and I would never think about trade in terms of control and blocking potential. But if you think the Russians don't, you should think again. The thing is, it's not just the blessed little father in the Kremlin who does all the geopolitical thinking and scheming. It's a major bureaucratic undertaking. And it's everyman's pipe dream. We are not talking democracy here, it's not as if the State Duma invents these schemes based on popular opinion of geopolicy. Rather, the public – minus the still vigorous anti-Putin opposition (bless them) – are the cheering spectators, loving every minute of the carousel ride Mr. Putin offers them.

What Russian democracy under Boris Yeltsin never achieved, a stable economy and regular payment of pensions, has been achieved by Vladimir Putin, not because Mr. Putin is more honest, but because he understands the risk of not performing on these scores. Besides, he has much more efficient control of the cleptocracy centered in the FSB that runs his regime than Mr. Yeltsin had of the cleptocracy that ran his.

So much for the country that many of us had high hopes for in 1990 or thereabouts. We have learned, not just from the Russian case but from others even more complex, the dangers of thinking a deep culture of governance can be turned around just by a snap of the fingers (say, an election), or just by helping them throw off existing fetters.

The deep culture of voluntary authoritarian government is well chained and anchored wherever it's found, and it is widely spread around the globe. Hence, my anti-Russian bias is misdirected; it is too narrow. But Russia is a heck of an example of things that are wrong in the world. So I suspect my anti-Russian bias - like Russia itself - won't change in the foreseeable future.

Myths – just myths?

I dislike myths, or more correctly: I dislike stories that people call myths. I distrust them. You might laugh at that and say, "That's their point!" Well, listen up. They used to fascinate me. Now I've had enough.

Here's where I started in my innocent youth: A myth was a legend or story, usually of the distant past, that nobody was able to prove or disprove, though many may have believed in it, but it did not matter in practice whether it was true or not. Like the legend of Atlantis.

Those simple days are gone. Today things are different. Now myths are tools of manipulation - pedagogical, rhetorical or political. Notice first that when someone uses the word myth, it always implies that the user believes – indeed, claims to know - that the idea referred to is false. “Let me tell you a famous story that's actually false.” When one of my colleagues in the social sciences promises to expose a myth, it is either an easy task using relevant and previously unknown data, or (as I usually suspect) something he or she is not really sure of, like “the myth of nations”.

This is where the manipulation comes in. The word myth carries an unstated premise - and promise - that its secret separates a knowing minority from the illiterate mob. By learning, and accepting, the story the listener joins a select in-group. Some of these stories mark significant boundaries in public debate, ultimate borders to cross or not to cross. Do you believe in the (myth of the) holocaust that eradicated Jews and other minorities during World War II? Do you believe in the (myth of) evolution? Do you believe in (the myth of) global warming? Gradually, by accepting some stories as truth and rejecting others you take on a certain personal profile. And so a myth to you is the truth to someone else.

It shouldn't be like that. Myths have lost something along the way. Over time, the core idea of a myth has lost one of its basic criteria, namely the lack of proof. A myth is a story that could just as easily be true as false, because there is no proof. Instead, these days a myth can be any idea one does not like, but which large numbers of people seem to take seriously. Or it is an idea someone wants to expose as false, whether or not it really is false.

Myths should be kept separate from superstitions. Superstitions are provable falsehoods, ideas known to be false that people nevertheless believe in, like horoscopes, “evil eyes”, ghosts, or - in certain African countries - the idea that sexual intercourse with an infant can make a grown man immune to AIDS.

Still, some of the common uses of “myth” are innocent and even useful. The New York Times writes (Jan 31, 2013) about “myths about obesity and weight loss”. According to the writer, these stories (here labelled myths) are “... misinformation pretending to be fact ...”. Not a bad definition, but it should be superstition, not myth. We are talking about misinformation whose falsity can be proven. Exposing it is a useful and important exercise.

Data will debunk superstitions, but as long as there are no data, we have … myths. Let's leave it at that.

Culture and Christmas

I am not a Christmas person. Basically I am a religious agnostic - someone who just does not feel a strong urge to believe in what I cannot know. I find religions sometimes fascinating and sometimes just disgusting. Of course, I enjoy Christmas traditions in the family - up to a point. But it may be worth pondering that the Mass for Christ is not only a great celebration for the Christian church and a wonderful experience for our children and family, it is also part of a loosely spun structure that gently controls the Western world, just like other invisible behavior codes control other civilizations.

I am not talking about the Christian religion, because the church and its many denominations and sects is a narrower set. My reference is to all the people who tend to follow patterns of behavior typical of the Western world. That is most of those born into it. They – we - follow these patterns because we have learned that this is what you should do and how you do it. In the widest sense, traditions and social habits – or culture - are what Clifford Geertz called “sets of control mechanisms” (1973). Instead of instinct, which humans hardly possess, Geertz argues that culture serves that function for us. To keep us from becoming unpredictable and even dangerous to each other we need simple, basic guidelines in all of our daily lives that nudge us back onto the beaten path whenever we are apt to wander. The church and other religions have those rules written down, and usually have a long list of sanctions for transgressions (“sins”), but many other cultures do not work that way. The unwritten rules of a culture – whether religious or just social - are much less explicit than the law, but often there are social sanctions instead of courts, such as being frozen out.

Among the many social control mechanisms in the Western world there is Christmas. Ideas about how to celebrate Christmas guide your doings from Christmas Eve (or even from the beginning of the Advent season) until January 6 – or perhaps even January 13. You do not just do things haphazardly. You follow tradition, although tradition has otherwise mostly seemed to have vanished from our lives. Within the traditions there are sub-traditions, and these can be like worlds apart. Christmas in my home country, Norway, for example, is strongly defined by what you eat for dinner on Christmas eve. I grew up with fresh boiled cod, which is a strong coastal tradition. But other parts of the coast eat mutton (“pinnekjøtt”) and inland they eat “lutefisk”. To move from one of these cultures to another (as when people marry) can be a painful experience. You lose your bearings, somehow.

All of this is a matter of course, just something we don't think that much about. But shift it to the more general level of rules, not for a holiday season or a religious feast, but rules for living as it is during the rest of the year for most people – and you see the outline of something much more consequential. Geertz insisted that humanity is not one global entity, it is multiple. There is no underlying global humanity, he argued. There is just this large number of different cultures – different sets of control mechanisms – that we find coexisting around the world.

Or better, they need to coexist, to find ways of living with each other. But they have a hard time of it, the more they meet the more they quarrel. Fanatics seem to win out. What puzzles me under these circumstances is the curious lack of influence of Geertz' notion of culture in later writings on that subject. I suspect it is because Geertz rises above them all, he makes each of them just one among many, and that is an offense to most of their adherents. He even refuses to recognize western liberal humanism as unique or as a standard for all.

I find his thinking refreshing even forty years later, when the ability of cultures to get along is much more on trial than it used to be.

Puzzle of Catalonia's Independence Elections Nov 25

Catalonia's extraordinary parliamentary elections on November 25 was a big let-down for the initiator, President Artur Mas. The point of having a snap election was to have his party benefit from a presumed new wave of support for independence from Spain. That has now proved a mirage. And Mr. Mas had really gone out on a limb during the campaign, promoting his scheme with bold words, raising unfounded prospects of immediate EU membership for an independent Catalonia and offending the Madrid government along the way with brazen statements – all of which now puts his failure in an even worse light.

As it turned out, his center-right party, CiU (Convergència i Unió), lost dramatically, dropping from 62 to 50 seats in the 135-seat parliament. At the same time the leftist republican independence party ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya) had a very good election result, doubling their number of seats and recapturing the strength they had before 2010.

For two parties with the same main goal to come out with opposite results is, indeed,  strange. It becomes even stranger by the biases at work in the reporting. Many news headlines in Spain and around the world pronounce CiU the winner. Of course, CiU does come out way ahead of all other parties, twice as big as the next party. The only thing is, CiU was even bigger before.

What is remarkable in these election results is that CiU, the strongest independence party, finds itself rejected, while there is still a majority of seats won by parties in favor of independence. Actually, the proportion is almost exactly the same it was before the elections (independence parties CiU + ERC 72 seats until Nov 25, 71 seats after). The strength of independence opinion is also seen in the shares of votes cast: about 57% in favor of independence from Spain if you add in the smaller parties - ICV-EUiA (Greens) with 10% of the vote, and CUP (Candidatura Unitat Popular) 3,5%. Previously, during the election campaign the figure 57% in favor of independence from Spain was measured in polls conducted during November. (Hence, my previous blog on this subject was in error regarding this statistic.) There is, in other words, an undeniable sentiment favoring independence in Catalonia, and it has not become weaker. 

Nevertheless, given all the loud campaigning in favor of a push for a referendum, this election must be deemed a failure for that cause. No wonder Mas has called for a moment of reflection.

In the meantime Catalonia needs a government. There are three other parties that have enough seats to bring about a majority, but only one of those (ERC) is in favor of independence. That is, conservative CiU has no other potential partner to govern with than leftist ERC. The latter's leader, Oriol Junqueras, sounds like he is favorable to a collaboration with CiU, despite their ideological differences. The project of a referendum on independence is still one on which the two parties have the same view. They also have it within their power to bring it about, although such a coalition itself would be unprecedented.

However, the future for an independent Catalonia no longer seems as bright as before. EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso has said in no uncertain terms that a new state seceding from an existing EU member state will not automatically become an EU member. It will first have the status of «third country» with respect to the EU, and will have to apply for membership like any other non-member. New members will need the affirmative vote of all existing members, including Spain. Obviously, a runaway former province of Spain will not receive that crucial vote.

Wisely, by this announcement the EU has dampened the independence zeal of many a discontented province in its member countries, among which may currently be counted at least Scotland and the Flemish part of Belgium.

The GOP in US Politics: Where Do Old White Elephants go?

63 per cent of the over-60 white vote qualifies for that distinction. But off to die in the elephants' graveyeard? Wishful thinking – or needless fear, as the case may be. Early Republican despair at the loss of the presidential election was slightly excessive, as if their side had been the more likely winner. Many leading Republicans now call for party reform (see, e.g., William Saletan, Washington Post, November 18). Here is a transatlantic view of the outcome of November 6, 2012.

I doubt the GOP will go into reform. The loss was by no means that serious, and the party core is too entrenched. In particular, the closeness of the race reveals the continuing strength of the Republicans and the depth of the division in the country – very much one of culture – between Obama's voters and Romney's. Obama's win was only by 50.66 per cent to 47.69 per cent. A 3 per cent loss for Romney is hardly a landslide for Obama, only just enough to be a convincing victory. Then, of course, the House of Representatives remains solidly Republican and in control of the all-important budget.

Many Republican bloggers suggest ways in which the Republicans can make themselves more attractive to younger voters in the future. Go for the gay vote (which evidently was a significant help to Obama); court the immigrants, pursue the women's vote. Such ideas may make theoretical sense, but I don't think these groups are likely to be more favored by the GOP in the future than they have been until now, unless there is a GOP candidate who personally embodies such values. At most there might be a female candidate - in the Palin mode? Hardly a winning card. Condoleezza Rice? Not unthinkable, but a long shot for the nomination in a party that still hides a lot of racism. Other types of off-the-beaten-track Republican candidates seem unlikely to me.

As for religion and abortion, one cannot shift the GOP stance on questions like these without undermining core Republican convictions. All told, it seems that when the Republicans score, they do so less on issues than on basic ideology and appealing to people's aspirations to be rich some day. As many have already pointed out, if this had been only the party of the rich it would hardly have had a chance to win this election. In sum, my guess is that GOP reform is not going to happen.

There is another reason why I think so. The present mode of inside GOP politics is (to my guess) more in tune with the Tea Party people and the huge jungle of lopsided right-wing media reporting than any reformed party platform is likely to be. The Republican Party had a dominant elite in the 1950s and -60s that was intellectual and moderate in its leanings. It is pretty clear that this former moderate Republican consensus at the top was broken gradually during the two decades before 1980. What I believe happened was that a widespread set of fundamentalist populist views started simmering up from the Republican small-town and countryside communities, first to the state level - most prominently in California with Governor Ronald Reagan during the 1970s, then moving on with Reagan to the national level. This is no research finding, just a collection of personal impressions.

I remember being very surprised during my first year in the US (1961-62) to encounter the fundamentalist Republican views typical of my small, friendly Iowa host town. My surprise was due to their fairly uniform and rigid views on «socialism» («socialized medicine» especially) and religion, which to me seemed very different from the impressions I had had of the public image of Eisenhower Republicans at the national level. Then, two years later, along came Barry Goldwater, the Arizona fundamentalist representing the Republicans opposite Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential elections. The controversy within the Republican party over the Goldwater candidacy and his poor showing was immense. Such primitive views, one gathered, were not to be launched again by the GOP in a nation-wide campaign.

Also indicative of the moderate stance at this time was the fact that the term «conservative» was not in use in Republican US politics, except by the curious phenomenon William Buckley, who showed up in the talk shows in the late 1960s. He turned out to be much before his time (though many of us then thought the opposite). And true enough, Nixon won in 1968 with a much more subdued Republican message than Goldwater four years before. Not until 1980 did the small-town, Goldwater brand of conservative Republicanism reappear, this time making a smashing success. The personality of Ronald Reagan was of course very much part of the reason for this success.*

Since then, the fundamentalist base has ruled the GOP. Demographic change is eroding it, but it is still very much alive. Just look at the states Romney won. There is still plenty of space between the coasts for Republican fundamentalism. 

One reason why Republicans might also look to the future with some confidence at this time could be that the midterms of 2014 are not so far away. The Five-Thirtyeight Blog of the New York Times gives figures (November 18) from US mid-term elections since 1946. These simple statistics show convincingly that the President's party – Republican or Democrat – almost always loses the House of Representatives in the subsequent mid-terms. Good news for the GOP, uncertainty for the US as a whole.

Clearheaded leadership is required not just from the President, but also from those who oppose him and hold the key to a sensible way out of the jam they have all been in for too long. Even we on the outside are getting tired and dismayed by the long trend of fundamentalism in US politics, which is distracting the country from playing constructively in world politics. 

Fortunately, good sense won at least the top post in this election. And it is reassuring to learn along the way that there are still people around who call themselves «liberal Republicans» - and who voted for Obama.

* See also "How the Republicans Got that Way" by Sam Tanenhaus, New York Review of Books, May 24, 2012.

Catalonia's Challenge to Spain

Is this a soap opera? Four Spanish EU parliamentarians send a letter to the EU Commissioner Viviane Reding asking for protection by the European Union against the Spanish government – their own government! We Europeans know about the claims to independence of Basques and Catalans. These are claims of considerable minorities in the Basque Country and even of a majority in Catalonia, if we discount the wide split between Catalan parties of the left and parties of the right.(*) These claims have been heard for decades, nay for centuries. Their fate has been like that of any other political demands that keep being repeated, but are ultimately not acted upon. Such claims may be (as in these cases they are) respected as legitimate, but in the end not taken seriously; they are filed away as curiosities. This is how Europe has dealt with the aspirations of the Basque Country and Catalonia whenever they have turned up.

So what is different this time? How can an admittedly major region of a major European country suddenly raise such a ruckus about its autonomy that threats of countermeasures of all kinds – bar none, even military intervention - begin to fly?

The notice of Catalan President Artur Mas of an advance election to the Catalan legislature, el Parlament, on November 25 has injected additional nervousness into Spanish politics at a time when there already existed intense pressure from street protests and the hardship of the economic crisis in the country at large. The jittery state of the reactions has to do with the election being a step in the reassertion of the old Catalan claim to independence, previously never taken completely seriously. This time, however, it appears to be different, not least due to Spain's exposed situation in the euro crisis.

The background is the fact that the Spanish system for collecting taxes and dividing authority between the central government in Madrid and the regional governments in the 19 autonomous communities was only sketchily designed from the start (in the 1978 constitution). The legislation and executive provisions of the financial authorities seem at a glance to be adequate, but have obviously not been followed up in practice. This gap in executive follow-up has allowed the regions and their underlying governing levels – the provinces and the municipalities - to amass debt, way beyond what they should have. As long as the economy was booming there was no visible problem, but after the turn of the tide that is all different. The fiscal system has been put to an extreme test in the current hardship and appears not to be able to survive it without major revision. And coping with crisis and revising the system at the same time is not a good approach.

Most of the autonomous communities (regions) of Spain are currently unable to service their debt. Madrid this year set up a sizable relief fund to help them out. Catalonia and most other regions have requested a share of that fund, which they will probably receive. However, Catalonia has later come back and asked for as much more, which would, if granted, leave them in possession of more than half of the entire fund. That second request has (understandably) been denied. Then Catalonia asked for – and was denied – the same fiscal status as two other autonomous communities, Pais Vasco (the Basque Country) and Navarra, who for historical reasons have a so called “fiscal pact” with Madrid.

This is where Spain is most at fault at the central level, and where the constitutional system fails. Catalonia claims to be a victim of an unjust system because they pay much more to the central government than they get back. But for starters, this is a much used system in developed industrialized countries. Among countries with a similarly decentralized structure as Spain, Germany has it, Switzerland has it, Canada and Australia have it. Moreover, in more simply structured, smaller centralized countries like Norway, Sweden and others, rich municipalities pay into a redistribution system that benefits the poorest municipalities. In all of these countries, the richer communities pay more into the country's governmental system than they receive back. Mind you, many of them don't think it is fair, and they all grumble. But it is standard governmental practice within the OECD. Moreover, studies of well-being in the Spanish autonomous communities show that Catalonia's living conditions place it among the four best endowed regions in Spain (figures for 2000 and 2006, Jurado & Perez-Mayo, Social Indicators Research, 2012). It is thus not surprising that they are asked to contribute more to their less favored compatriots.

A cross-national comparison of five countries with similar systems of redistribution (Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain and Switzerland) shows Spain to be quite ordinary among the rest, and indeed less harsh than other systems. In fact, Spain has the second softest of the tax transfer arrangements among these five countries. On the other hand, the monetary effects of these transfers are also less than in the four other countries except Switzerland. In other words, Spain has a fairly benign system with comparatively less impressive transfer results. (See the study by Hierro et al, Revista de Economía Aplicada, 2010.)

What is the problem then? Is Catalonia complaining without reason? Not as I see it. The complaints are just aimed at the wrong target. Where the Spanish system has gone wrong – in addition to not overseeing the communities' observance of the rules in force - is in allowing some of the regions, for historical reasons, to have a more advantageous organization than the others. The foral system has left Pais Vasco and Navarra in what one study has characterized as a “scandalously favorable” situation (Ángel de la Fuente, “Sobre el Pacto Fiscal y el sistema de Concierto.” Fundacion SEPI, 2012).

Although Angel seems to be speaking Catalonia's case, he is actually giving a quite even-handed evaluation in which his first judgment is that no government in a similar situation has allowed its subordinate regions to decide on their tax collection system by themselves. All other Spanish regions have offices of the central tax ministry (Hacienda) located throughout their territories. Not Pais Vasco and Navarra. Their agencies collect the taxes on behalf of the central government. The central government, therefore, is not participating in these communities' tax collection process. Hacienda are just handed over the money bags “at the border”, as it were.

My conclusion is therefore that Catalonia has a point, but the resolution is not to give them the same exceptional system. Rather, the solution must be to remove the foral system in Navarra and Pais Vasco and instate instead the one in force in the rest of Spain. That, of course, would be to challenge all the forces of nationalism in these regions and unleash a new battle of the regions.

Poor Spain.

(* Correction here of previous text. Catalan opinion favoring independence according to polls in November 2012 is 57%, similar results found in election of November 25, 2012, though  people holding this view were split between four parties of both left and right.)