Predictably the European Council has taken an acrimonious look at the Irish referendum result and decided to do nothing about it until the fall. Unfortunately the harsh questions of purpose and power, now hovering over Europe’s capitals like birds of prey, will not be disposed of so easily.
“When I want to talk to Europe,” Henry Kissinger famously said, “whom do I call?”
At the time, the resounding silence that greeted his question scarcely mattered. Eastern central Europe was imprisoned in the Soviet bloc; the western half of the continent sheltered beneath the capacious skirts of its superpower protector.
Even the end of the cold war and the implosion of the Soviet Union made surprisingly little difference to the fundamentals of Europe’s place in the world or its understanding of itself. Europeans no longer needed the protection of the US against the Soviet threat, but in the unipolar world that took the place of the bipolar world of the cold war, they still lived in the shadow of overwhelming US power. Their inability to speak with one voice in world affairs was humiliating, but not humiliating enough to force them to put their geopolitical house in order. In any case, the triumphant launch of the euro, and the somewhat questionable triumph of helter-skelter enlargement, gave them more than enough to do.
However, unnoticed by many of Europe’s leaders and most of its peoples, times have changed, and the pace of change is speeding up. The unipolar world of the 1990s and early 2000s — the world of overwhelming US predominance, with no other superpower in sight — is not yet dead, but it is certainly dying. A more complex and infinitely more dangerous multipolar world is coming into existence, with China, India and perhaps a revitalized Russia as superpowers alongside the US.
For the foreseeable future, the US will be the strongest of these superpowers, but it will not be the only one. Economically, it has already ceased to be a hegemon. In different ways, China’s authoritarian capitalism and continental Europe’s social market economies have both turned out to be more successful than the hyper- individualistic capitalism of the US. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US’ huge military arsenal and sclerotic military doctrine have turned out to be unfit for purpose. The US is today going through a painful process of relative decline as fleeter, slimmer rivals begin to catch up with it.
We cannot know how this new, multipolar world will evolve, but there is little doubt that it will be an unkind place, riven by quarrels over constrained resources and the divergent impacts of climate change. The great question for Europeans as it takes shape is brutally simple. Do we want our children and grandchildren to live in a world run by the Americans, Chinese, Indians and perhaps Russians, or are we prepared to make the qualitative leap towards the federalism that Kissinger’s question implies, and become at least a quasi-superpower in our own right?
By a tragic irony, the Lisbon treaty that the Republic of Ireland rejected made a tiny, rather half-hearted gesture towards the second alternative. That was the meaning of the full-time president and the foreign policy supremo. In voting against the treaty, the Irish were voting for Europe to remain a fat, rich political pygmy, in a world dominated by potentially predatory giants.
According to the conventional wisdom, the Irish vote shows that Europe’s elites pay too little attention to their peoples. The truth is very nearly the opposite. For the most part, our elites have succumbed to a kind of bastard populism that makes courageous political leadership virtually impossible.
Seemingly, they have forgotten that the statesmen who launched the European project 50 years ago were taking immense political risks, and that if they had submitted their project to a referendum, it might well have been defeated. In France, the Communists and Gaullists were hostile; in Germany, the Social Democrats were at most ambivalent.
Today’s European elites, by contrast, have been frightened of their publics. In their innermost souls most of them probably know that the institutional changes envisaged in the Lisbon treaty were, if anything, far too modest to give the EU even a modicum of the political clout it will need as the 21st century progresses. But they were afraid to say so. Indeed, their treaty was expressly designed not to say so.
The result was that, except to skilled Brussels watchers, the treaty was virtually incomprehensible. Although nobody can be certain, the most probable end to this inglorious chapter in European history will be another helping of fudge, slapped over an even less adequate agreement.
Yet Kissinger’s question will not go away. Sooner or later, Europe will have to find an answer. We cannot know when or how it will do so, but I don’t think there’s much doubt that during the course of the next 20 or 30 years, the core countries of the EU — broadly speaking, the eurozone — will in effect federate. What the rest will do is unknowable at this stage, but I suspect that more of them will join the core than the current conventional wisdom envisages. The moral of the past 60 years of European history is that bold steps by a few eventually win over the timorous many. My only real doubt is whether Europe’s leaders will find the courage to lead. I console myself with the thought that even small men and women can be capable of great deeds in times of crisis.
David Marquand is a former member of the British parliament and a visiting fellow in the department of politics at Oxford University, England.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
RSS