Tag: identity

Just how far right (and how far wrong) can we go?

I put articles that I’ve read that interest me to one side. It’s the New Year. Time to review them. And it’s as if they are no longer connected to the world. So much is in flux.

I’m attempting here to describe the situation as it is at this moment. In a few months the world may, it almost certainly will, look very different.

So many starting points. How the focus on identity has, in Yascha Mounk’s words, become a trap, race and gender, pushed too far, and the backlash has empowered the right, and with a more than equal intolerance, and extraordinary gall and vanity, they’ve taken over the driving seat. The climate crisis has got caught up in the tailwind. And they have the media and money behind them, and a truculence and intolerance which has caught the mood of the moment. Free speech has been redefined, with an anti-intellectual and anti-academic bias. Don’t think too hard, don’t try for a balanced argument, follow instinct.

Where now history? For the far right it is at most a matter of a few years, and it can only be interpreted one way. Where will my kind of balanced, investigative history be in ten or twenty years’ time, the way things are going?

Where would we be now without Trump? Thinking South America, Javier Milei in Argentina has been re-elected, bolstered by American emergency guarantees, and now Jose Antonio Kast, far right by most definitions, has been elected the new president of Chile. Kast has signed up to the Madrid Charter, put forward by Spain’s far-right challenger party, Vox.

One of the Kast’s strongest pitches in the recent election was on immigration. Refugees from Venezuela have flooded across the Bolivian border into northern Chile. Kast is threatening to dig a trench to match Trump’s wall. Immigration, some kind of racial purity, is at the heart of the new conservatism.  Walls and trenches may yet impose some kind of control in the Americas.

For Europe, with open waters between it and Africa it’s not so easy. We’ve a notion of ‘Judaeo-Christian civilisation’ under threat. What’s more – it’s an Arab/Muslim takeover plot. Immigration is an extraordinary problem, manna from heaven for the far right, and with massive increases in African populations forecast, it won’t easily go away.

Capitalism has embraced social conservatism. Think back to the open arms of the early years of the Schuman Plan and the Common Market, and the post-war rules-based order. Oil and financial crises have blown it apart. Enterprise and business are as much a part of a social democracy as an out-and-out capitalist state. But it’s the latter, in the Trump mould, ruthless, deal-making, always a winner, and a loser, that’s won out.

Brute capitalism seen from this perspective is the American way, and it’s never been better expressed than Trump seizing Maduro and claiming that he’s running Venezuela. Labelling Maduro as a narco-terrorist is a diversion: what the USA wants is Venezuelan oil. The same line of argument applies in the Middle East: Israel will sooner or later take over Palestine, rename it, and leave the Palestinians as a subjugated people, in their own land, or exiled, the 1948 nakba (displacement) re-run in an even more terrible way.

The Americas, under an extended Monroe Doctrine (let’s avoid talk of a Donroe Doctrine), are lined up by Trump as the American sphere of influence. Where next for Mexico and Canada? He’s threatening Colombia, a country it could be argued currently more open and democratic than the USA. (The real narco problem lies of course with the American consumer.) And what next for Greenland which is, as I write, directly in Trump’s sights.

In the Middle East, Trump’s USA has Israel as a proxy, with the Saudi and Gulf States brought onside by way of arms deals, and Iran being primed for regime change, with further Israeli bombing threatened if street demonstrations are repressed.

Europe is in every sense the old world, with no dominant power. It used to be Spain, then France, then UK. Germany, of course, had aspirations. Post-war and within NATO Europe has been within the USA’s sphere of influence, but for how much longer? The Trump administration is curiously indifferent to Europe’s fate. It’s as if the idea of power divided 27 ways, between 27 countries, is anathema. Let there be one strong state, strong leader, socially conservative, a good (but malleable) trading partner, and let it look after itself. And if it can’t do so, and part of Europe comes under Russian sway, so be it. NATO is dispensable.

We’ll battle of course over tariffs. No more a rules-based order. No more rules. Just the dictates of a brute capitalism. Get your production, your prices, your margins right – you’ll rule the world.

Autocracy is the new American mindset. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, how will he respond come the mid-terms terms in November, and how will he, or Vance, or another acolyte, respond if they lose the 2028 election? Europe under Russian sway wouldn’t, one suspects, upset Trump’s America too much. They’d shrug. It was Europe’s own fault. See where liberal democracy will get you, notions of individual rights, and equality. Fraternity and compassion are for losers. God is on the side of the winners.  There will be winners and losers. Accept it.

Where next for Ukraine with the USA all but indifferent to its fate? Trump will act to help only insofar as he needs to in order to save face and to garnish his reputation as a peace-maker. He’s clearly so much more at home with Putin than with any European leader. And what next for Taiwan? If Trump could engineer some kind of economic and face-saving deal (with Trump cast, if in his eyes only, as a hero) with China, then he would. He wouldn’t be too worried about Taiwanese democracy, or their human rights. But he would want Foxconn and chip manufacturer TSMC to continue exactly as they are now.

As for China, Trump and Xi Jinping are of one mind. Let there be three (Russia qualifies as a nuclear power), maybe four, if we include India, big players in the world, let them each decide their own form of government, and agree not to dictate to each other. South Korea and Japan will have to sooner or later come to terms with their proximity to China, and accede to its influence. Myanmar has already. For Malaysia and Thailand, give it time. That leaves Africa (where the Sahel is an almost forgotten battleground), and China already has a strong investment-driven presence there.

This is an intentionally pessimistic overview. Trump and Trumpism may implode. Europe, the EU and Ukraine may hold their own. The Arabs will only play along with Trump so far. Attempts to intervene in Mexico or Colombia could implode for Trump. Any takeover of Greenland would be reversed by a future Democratic administration.

It may be that liberal values, human rights, minority rights, are just too firmly rooted. Trump is simply too much a shouter, his base too shallow when the veneer or power is shattered.

 But we are in a crazy would, far crazier than any of us could have imagined.

Europe or America – too much ‘us against them’

Europe v America

Do you lean more to Europe or to the USA? What does your instinct tell you? I remember the question being posed in a radio debate a few years ago. It caught my attention then. It’s more than ever relevant now, as Brexit disparages and attempts to sideline Europe.

Why for so many is there an instinctive hostility to the EU? Is it just to the institution? Or does it reflect the way we engage with European culture and history? At a bumptious Boris Johnson ‘I can sing Ode to Joy’ level, or at a level more woven into our soul – into our identity?

Are we a European people, one of many, an outlier, but integral nonetheless? Or are we to all intents and purposes, though we wouldn’t admit it, just another state of the USA, just doing things a little differently.

We’re uneasy about the USA, it’s brashness, its noise, its superiority complex – but we go with it – it is, we feel, an exaggeration of our own character, the same substance, lacking the finesse. But they’re our comfort zone – not Europe.

Brexiteers by default lean to America, to trade agreements which will of course be on American terms. They hide this behind ‘global’ aspirations, and a maritime, ‘old Commonwealth’ identity.

I’d argue we are already global – and we are as engaged with the USA we need to be. Trump’s penalties for companies and banks breaking US-imposed sanctions against Iran underline the point.

 

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Europe v the world

So we’ve widened it. It’s no longer Europe v America, it’s elided into Europe v ‘the world’. We’re going global. As if we need to assert one identity at the expense of another. I’m proud to be a citizen of the UK – of Europe – and of the world.

Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, trespasses onto this territory when (I’m quoting from The Economist) he criticises liberal Tories such as [Amber] Rudd ‘for misinterpreting Brexit as a vote for closing the borders rather than embracing a more global future’.

There are countless other such statements. The likes of Nelson have set up and pursued a false dichotomy, pitching a European against ‘a global future’. We were there of course already. The Brexit strategy will indeed involve (the shenanigans of current Cabinet debate on the subject will go down in history as farce) some kind of closure of our border with Europe, against a pie-in-the-sky chance of signing trade deals with further-flung countries that offset the damage that closure will cause.

Countless pages, articles, tomes have been written on both sides of the argument. It’s that deeper and false sense of a divide that concerns me here. The Brexit debate, and Brexit supporters for decades before the 2016 vote, have polarised ‘European’ and ‘global’, pitched one against the other, and we’re digging the divide deeper all the time.

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Don’t for heaven’s sake claim you’re an intellectual

I’m hardly saying anything new but it’s also an anti-intellectual debate. Don’t rely on argument, rely on instinct – it’s become a matter of belief. There’s a new book out about the French intellectual (The End of the French Intellectual): at least France has had such a person as the public intellectual. A species who in this country should expect to get as little appreciation from the likes of the Daily Mail as members of the House of Lords or the judiciary.

Leaping across the pond, we have Scott Pruitt, head of the American Environmental Protection Agency, barring scientists who have received federal grants from the EPA from sitting on boards advising the EPA on the grounds of ‘conflict of interest’. There are no restrictions on scientists who work for the industries the EPA monitors. Again, independence of mind is under threat.

And finally, that Ruth Lea, a long-time public figure, arguing that ‘the economics ‘establishment’, including the Treasury, were utterly wrong-footed by our economic performance after the Brexit vote in June 2016′. The economics ‘establishment’ – ‘commissariat’ is another term I’ve seen used. In other words, the great majority of economists. Maybe Ruth Lea hasn’t noticed how our performance has significantly lagged the rest of Europe – and taken on board the reluctance abroad not to let the UK slide too far – for in whose interests is that? Yes, arguments were too apocalyptic, attempting to match the Brexiteers’ approach of promising the earth.

The way is still down, it’s just taking far more turnings. As long as we inhabit this falsely polarised world that won’t change.