The politics of fakery on European immigration

Immigration makes some people crazy. And crazy, as a general rule, is a bad basis for policymaking. (Marc Brost et al, Tage des Irrsinns Die Zeit 04-05.07.2018)

With both Putin and Trump eager to weaken the European Union, the EU countries are floundering on the twin dilemma of a "the obscenity of a currency union which imposes a strict system of rules to the benefit of its strongest member states but does not in compensation provide the latitude for joint political action on the European level" (Jürgen Habermas, Die Zeit 06.07.2018) and the inability to set up an effective and fair system for handling refugees and asylum-seekers.

The EU continues to deal with the problems of the eurozone by what amounts to magic conjuring with the holy phrases of Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economics. And with the immigration crisis by staging bad theater. But since we're dealing with major government policies here, the fakery comes with real costs to real people.

In a recent lecture, Jürgen Habermas described how Angela Merkel's nationalistic posturing during the debt crisis fed nationalistic sentiments in the EU, a process that is backfiring on Germany in visible ways (Sind wir noch gute Europäer? Die Zeit 04.07.2018; English: Are We Still Good Europeans? 06.07.2018):

If you listen closely to the German chancellor, it is striking that she makes rather peculiar use of the words "loyalty" and "solidarity." During a recent appearance on a talk show hosted by Anne Will, Merkel demanded joint political action on asylum policy and in the tariff conflict with the United States, and in this context called for the "loyalty" of the EU partners. Generally, it is the boss who expects loyalty from her employees, while joint political action generally requires solidarity rather than loyalty. Depending on the constellation of interests, it is sometimes the one, sometimes the other, who must subordinate their own interests to those of the whole. When it comes to asylum policy, for example, not all countries – because of their geographical locations, for example – are equally affected by migration nor do they all have the same capacity to take people in. To take another example, tariffs on automobile imports threatened by the U.S. would hit some, Germany in this case, harder than others. In such cases, joint political action means that one party takes the interests of others into consideration and takes on its share of responsibility for the jointly approved political resolution. Germany's interest is obvious in these two examples, just as it is in the insistence on a joint European foreign policy.

The fact that the chancellor speaks of "loyalty" in such cases is likely a consequence of her having spent years using the world "solidarity" in a different, strictly economic context. "Solidarity in return for each country's own responsibility" is the euphemistic slogan that became familiar in the course of the [debt] crisis, a reference to the conditions imposed on credit recipients by those granting the credits. What I am getting at is the conditional redefinition of the term solidarity: that is the semantic breaking point where cracks are now showing in the certainty that we Germans are the best Europeans. Contrary to the raving clamor about transfer payments, which have never actually come to pass, what is slowly creeping into the public awareness is both the lack of legitimacy and the dubious effects of investment-hampering budgetary constraints, along with labor market reforms that result in entire generations being jobless. [my emphasis]

Habermas refers to the nationalistic demagogues and policies that are currently threatening the EU's existence as "the Trumpian dissolution of Europe."

There was a political confrontation the last few weeks between German Interior Minister Ernst Seehofer (CSU) over a narrow slice of the current set of immigration and asylum issue in which Austria's Chancellor Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz intervened in a reckless way that was over an issue whose substance seems almost esoteric. (Wolfgang Münchau, German refugee compromise ignores underlying issues Financial Times 07/05/2018; Andrea Böhm, Europas Flucht vor der Realität Die Zeit 07.07.2018; Max Fisher and Katrin Bennhold, Germany’s Europe-Shaking Political Crisis Over Migrants, Explained New York Times 07/03/2018)

But too much of the immigration debate - far, far too much - depends on symbolic posturing that translates into headlines the xenophobes can exploit for their own demagoguery.

I saw a small example in a local insert for the state/province of Upper Austria from the Austrian Neues Volksblatt ", Hoamatland for July 2018, which is associated with the politics of the Chancellor's conservative People's Party (ÖVP). The second half of page 6 carries three headlines: "Christliche Werte zu OÖ!" ("Christian values appertain to Upper Austria!"), "Zwei Moscheen in OÖ geschlossen" ("Two mosques in Upper Austria closed"), and "Bevölkerung für strikten Kurs" ("Population for a strict course"). Christian values, closing mosques, a strict course against "migration" - all are favorite framing constructs for Austrian xenophobes.

But if the reader bothers to look closely, something odd is happening. The first is a report about a new "integration" policy statement for immigrants by the Upper Austrian state government, featuring the leading government officials of the government coalition, Landeshauptmann (Governor) Thomas Stelzer (ÖVP) and deputy governor Manfred Haimbuchner, together with representatives of the opposition SPÖ and Greens, the same photo featured in this story at Volksblatt.at, „Kompass für das Zusammenleben“ 04.07.2018. It's about the release of a general policy statement called Integration Verbindlich Gestalten - Zusammenhalt Stärken. The "Christliche Werte" article certainly leaves the impression that all parties in the state Landtag were endorsing a policy that specified "Christian values" as government policy, which is understood in the present context as a anti-Islamic framing.

But the Hoamatland article doesn't include the quote cited in the headline. Nor does the longer Volksblatt are includes a statement supporting "Christian values and traditions," in a context which quotes the title of the Integration Verbindlich document and leaves a clear impression that it includes a Bekenntnis ("profession" or "allegiance to") "our Christian values and traditions." Here's the paragraph in German:

Unter dem Titel „Integration verbindlich gestalten — Zusammenhalt stärken“ bringe das neue Leitbild Ziel und Aufgabe der Integrationspolitik zum Ausdruck und stelle einen Handlungsrahmen für die zukünftige Integrationspolitik und Integrationsarbeit einschließlich des Förderwesens im Land auf, heißt es in einer Stellungnahme der Landesregierung. Und, so wird betont: „Wesentliche Grundlagen und Schlüsselfaktoren für ein gelungenes Zusammenleben sind unter anderem das Bekenntnis zur gemeinsamen Sprache Deutsch, das Bemühen um Selbsterhaltung und die Teilhabe am Arbeitsmarkt sowie das Bekenntnis zu unseren christlichen Werten und Traditionen.“

But the thing is, the Integration Verbindlich statement on the Upper Austria official website does not say that. A simple Cntl-F search shows 25 instances of "Werte" (values) in the 20-page document, none of which are identified as "Christian". Or "Islamic" or "Muslim" or "religious". The same combination of Windows keyboard, Adobe Acrobat, and my own eyeballs search combination finds only one reference to "Christian": "Österreich ist ein offenes, christlich geprägtes Land,
das dem Humanismus und der Aufklärung verpflichtet ist." ("Austria is an open country shaped by Christianity and which is committed to humanism and the Enlightenment.") And the document is explicit about what it assumes to be Austrian values in a section called "Central Basic Values":

• Democracy and the rule of law ("Demokratie und Rechtsstaatlichkeit")
• Separation of church and state/religious freedom ("Trennung von Staat und Religion/Glaubensfreiheit")
• Integrity of body and spirit ("Körperliche und geistige Unversehrtheit")
• The individual right to shape one's life and freedom of opinion ("Recht auf individuelle Lebensgestaltung und Meinungsfreiheit")
• Equality of the sexes ("Gleichstellung der Geschlechter")
• Educational opportunities and educational responsibilities ("Bildungschancen und Bildungspflicht")

In other words, like any official document passed through endless committees and designed to be acceptable to the entire ideological spectrum of the parties in a state legislature, it's a safely bland statement of general liberal democratic values of tolerance and mutual respect.

So why present the story with a headline that makes the whole thing sound like a defiant declaration of the primacy of Christianity as such in Austrian identity? Even allowing for Austrian journalistic practice of putting quotation marks in headlines around summary statements that aren't exact quotes, it's an odd presentation. I was unable to locate the quote from the Hoamatland headline in a Google search.

Briefly, the other two headlines have similar issues. Two mosques in Upper Austria were closed, it reports, a move announced in a June 8 press conference statement Chancellor Babyface, Vice Chancellor HC Strache, and Interior Minister Herbert Kickl. The article leads with a quote from Landeshauptmann Stelzer to crow about fighting "political Islam," hostile subcultures ("Gegengesellschaften"), radicalization, and violence. All associated with the closed mosques.

In reality, there was much less to the June 8 announcements that the PR hype suggested. The announcement was about withdrawing official recognition from some small Islamic associations. As Austrian specialist on rightwing extremism, Thomas Rammerstorfer, explains in Der große Schmäh mit der bösen Moschee Falter 13.06.2018, not only were the grounds for the closures practically and legally questionable. But also their practical effect on Islamic affairs and "political Islam" in Austria is to strengten the relative prestige and influence of groups friendly to Turkey's authoritarian President Tayyip Erdoğan, which were not touched by the actions. Erdoğan is a favorite bogeyman for the Austrian far right despite the similarities between his autoritarian leanings and theirs. Turks form the largest group of Austrian Muslims, all of whom are regularly trashed by rightwingers. None of that would be conveyed by the Hoamatland piece.

The third article is an uncritical paragraph saying that 83% approve of German classes for children who haven't managed German sufficiently for their grade level in school. This sounds perfectly harmless, a liberal and generous measure. But the current national government has been pushing for a particular kind of German classes in publisc schools for foreign children that would tend to segregate them in schools from their native German-speaking peers, a position means to promote stigmatization of immigrant children and make it even harder for them to integrate successfully into Austrian society. That really is just a filler article. But it fits with the other two in promoting a very superficial picture of current policies on immigration and their practical effects.

There's quite a bit of discussion in American politics right now about whether countering far-right Trumpist with facts is effective, or even counter-productive. But as these Austrian examples illustrate, the left and pro-democracy centrists have to counter these propaganda claims with facts. But they also have to be very mindful of countering the framing of the issues as well. When the right peddles with deceptive framing and appeals to fear and hatred, their opponents also have provide attractive framing and persuasive emotional appeals at the same time as countering false claims with facts. A big part of the advantage of advocates for "reality-based" understandings and advocacy for realistic policies based on facts is that reality has a persistent ability to impose itself on crackpot theories and policies.

Jürgen Habermas on classical German philosophy, the Young Hegelians, pragmatism, and communicative reason

"Our capitalist democracies are about to shrink to mere façade democracies. These developments call for a scientifically informed enlightenment." - Jürgen Habermas, Critique and communication: Philosophy's missions (an interview with Michaël Foessel) Eurozine 10/16/2015

That interview with Habermas covers a lot of ground with a surprising amount of substance in the (digital) space it takes up: Habermas' early philosophical concerns, his issues with Heidegger, pragmatism, his own communicative theories, neoliberalism and resistance to it. This excerpt gives a flavor of it:

With the paradigm shift from the philosophy of the subject to the philosophy of language you touch upon an important issue. Hegel was already aware of the symbolic and historical embodiment of reason in the forms of the “objective mind”, for example in law, state and society. But Hegel then sublates this objective mind after all in the dematerialized thoughts of the absolute mind. By contrast, J.G. Hamann and Wilhelm von Humboldt or the young Hegelians, i.e. Feuerbach, Marx and Kierkegaard, regard the transcendental achievements as being realized only in the performative acts of subjects capable of speech and action and in the social and cultural structures of their lifeworlds. For them, apart from the subjective mind there is only the objective mind left, which materializes itself in communication, work and interaction, in appliances and artefacts, in the living out of individual life stories and in the network of socio-cultural forms of life. But in the process, reason does not lose the transcendental power of spontaneously projecting world-disclosing horizons. This “creative” power of imagination expresses itself in every hypothesis, in every interpretation, in every story with which we affirm our identity. In every action there is also an element of creation.

Pragmatism and historicism were involved in the development of this detranscendentalized concept of reason just as much as phenomenology, philosophical anthropology and existential philosophy. I myself would grant a certain precedence to language, communicative action and the horizon of the lifeworld (as the background context of all processes of communication). The media in which reason is embodied, i.e. history, culture and society, are symbolically structured. The meaning of symbols, however, must be shared intersubjectively. There is no private language and no private meaning that can be understood only by a single person. This precedence of intersubjectivity does not mean, however, that – to return to your question – to some extent subjectivity would be absorbed by society. The subjective mind opens a space to which everyone has privileged access from the perspective of the first person. This exclusive access to the evidence of one’s own experiences may not, however, belie the structural correlation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Every additional step in the process of the socialization of a person, as they grow up, is simultaneously a step towards individuation and becoming oneself. Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships can we develop the interiority of our own person. Only by marching in step with the communicative entanglement in social networks does the subjectivity of the “self”, i.e. of a subject that assumes relationships to itself, deepen. [my emphasis in bold]

Habermas' distinctive contribution in the field of philosophy was his work on communicative reason. I was acquainted with his political and historical work, particularly his role in the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s, where he took the lead in criticizing contemporary effort to rehabilitate aspects of the National Socialist regime and its horrific policies, before I more recently dig into understanding his work on communications. I've also been very impressed with his writing on the European Union. He definitely falls into the left-leaning Eurocritical camp, as distinct from the rightwing "Euroskeptic" one.

In that interview he talks about Martin Heidegger's philosophy and politics. He's written at some length about the latter. He really has Heidegger's number. But he is careful to recognize Heidegger's more constructive contributions to contemporary philosophy, including in this interview:

... I’m still convinced that the arguments of Being and Time, if read with the eyes of Kant and Kierkegaard, retain an important place in the history of philosophy. In spite of the political ambivalence of the style, I regard this work as a result of the long history of detranscendentalizing the Kantian subject: by appropriating the methods of Husserlian phenomenology in his own way, Being and Time also digests an important legacy of American pragmatism, German historicism and the kind of philosophy of language that originates from Wilhelm von Humboldt.

He also notes, "My friend Karl-Otto Apel always insisted that only in 1929 with Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics did Heidegger set the course for his fatal late philosophy – and subsequently assigned to himself a privileged access to the “destiny of truth”. From that point on, Heidegger increasingly abandons philosophical argumentation and becomes a private thinker." (my emphasis) He has made the latter point in a considerably more blunt fashion elsewhere. Even in this interview, he reminds us that Heidegger "had become a convinced Nazi long before 1933. The fact that he had remained an unrepentant Nazi, however, could be known by 1953 at the latest." Heidegger had been publicly active in support of the Nazi Party in 1933-34. He was notably less public in his role after that. But he retained his Nazi Party membership right up until 1945. Heidegger was literally a Nazi.

His description of the Frankfurt School tradition of which he is considered the leading Second Generation figure is also informative, particularly in his connection of the Frankfurt School perspective with "Austromarxism":

From its inception the Frankfurt Institute was anti-Stalinist – and all the more so after the war. There are also other reasons why I was never tempted by orthodox Marxism. For example, I was never convinced by the centrepiece of political economy, the theory of surplus value, in view of the intervention of the welfare state in the economy. During my youth I was certainly more closely aligned with left-wing activism than I was later. But also the early project of “Realizing Philosophy”, to which you’re alluding, was more idealistic and inspired by the young Marx. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which was my post-doctoral thesis under the supervision of Wolfgang Abendroth, the only Marxist to hold a chair at a German university, at best points in the direction of socialist democracy. If you like, I was always a parliamentary socialist – in this respect I was in my early days influenced by the Austrian Marxists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. My attitude to Theory and Practice has not significantly changed since I wrote the introduction to the new edition of this book in 1971. Academic studies are always written with the reservation that all research is fallible. This role must be clearly separated from the other two roles of a left-wing intellectual – from his involvement in political discussions in the public sphere and from the organization of joint political action. This separation of roles is necessary even if the intellectual attempts to combine all three roles in one person. [my emphasis in bold]

The Frankfurt School's contemporary attitude toward the Soviet Marxism of the 1930s ("Stalinism") was more complicated than this passage might suggest. Focused as they were on the menace of German Nazism which they had fled and the threat of war, their famous Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung did not focus on critiquing the Soviet model directly. Nor did they indulge in the Trotskyism of the day. Privately, some of their leading figures were very critical of the Soviet situation, others more supportive.

Politics was complicated in the 1930s, just as it is in the 2010s.

Confederatre "Heritage" Month 2017, April 23: Establishing a taboo against slavery

I've recently read a couple of articles by the philosopher Seyla Benhabib dealing with issues relating the theories of Jürgen Habermas on the development of "public space" and agreements within it. I won't try to summarize Habermas' theories here. But see the article by by James Bohman and William Rehg on Jürgen Habermas Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2014.

The reason I mention this here is because Benhabib's articles set me to thinking about how such theories could be used to describe the process by which chattel slavery became taboo, taboo in the sense that it became something that was completely and permanently off the political agenda. Habermas' stresses the role of interpersonal communication and dialogue in not only coming to agreement on practical measures but also to establish basic norms.

In this passage from "The Utopian Dimension in Communicative Ethics" (New German Critique 35:1985), Benhabib calls attention to the concepts of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas in developing normative standards through a process of communication by which a rational norm is established:

There are two premises shared by Rawls and Habermas. I will call the first the "consensus principle of legitimacy" and define it as follows: the principle of rational consensus provides the only criterion in light of which the legitimacy of norms and institutional arrangements can be justified. More significantly, Rawls and Habermas share the meta-theoretical premise: the idea of such rational consensus is to be defined procedurally. Rawls maintains that his theory of justice provides us with the only procedure of justification through which valid and binding norms of collective coexistence can be established. Habermas argues that the "ideal speech situation" defines the formal properties of discourses, by engaging in which alone we can attain a rational consensus. The fictive collective choice situation devised by Rawls and the "ideal speech situation" devised by Habermas are normative justification procedures serving to illustrate the consensus principle of legitimacy. [my emphasis in bold]

Here I have only some general thoughts about how such a theory might be used to explain the abolition of slavery. Because it clearly didn't happen by a consensus built through rational dialogue.

But values did change. And the new, post-Civil War value that slavery was unacceptable was incorporated into the US Constitution with the 13th Amendment. But it was only the catastrophe of the Civil War that ended the institution itself. The process of the Civil War convinced a big majority of Northerners that slavery really was an abomination that could not be tolerated.

And after the war, the Southern planters accepted that slavery as an institution was gone for good and that advocating its return was a political dead end.

But the norm wasn't established unequivocally. Apologists for the Confederacy to this day continue to defend the antebellum institution of slavery. See: Sean Quinlan and William Ramsey, Southern Slavery As It Wasn’t n/d; Aaron Rupar, Bill O’Reilly: I Wasn’t Defending Slavery, Just Saying Slaves Weren’t Treated So Bad Think Progress 07/27/2016

And there were many lingering effects of slavery and its ideology, from white racist attitudes in general to concrete discrimination against black citizens. Some aspects of the prison system from the end of the Civil War until the present have continued slavery in an explicit way. "Involuntary servitude" in the Thirteen Amendment is specifically allowed for punishment of crimes. And in the postwar South, both the prison system and the sharecropper system continued conditions in which people were confined in a status that was chattel slavery or "involuntary servitude" but wasn't exactly "free labor," either.

I don't have any strong conclusion here about what this says about Habermas' theory of public space and the rational derivation of norms via interactive communication.

But it does seem to me that it's very difficult to separate out the development of the narrative around the shifting norms on slavery from the very contentious political battles, including violent ones and ultimately war, to which the narrative was connected.

French Politics leading up to the 2017 Presidential race and rightwing populism

France is now in the process of their Presidential election, the final round of which will come in the spring of 2016.

The conservative, Gaullist party is now called the Republican Party. Last Sunday, former conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy came in third in the Republican primary. There will be a runoff on November 27 with François Fillon, who got the largest plurality on Sunday, and Alain Juppé. Juppé is thought to be more moderate than Fillon, who once served as Sarkozy's Prime Minister and who seems to be a real piece of work (Sarkozy defeated in primary for French right's presidential candidate Guaradian 11/20/2016):

Fillon has called for a rapprochement with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Syria. After the US election, he welcomed a new alliance between Putin and Trump. Asked early in the campaign whether France should cooperate with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to fight Islamic State, he said France should unite with all possible forces, “democratic or not”. He told the website Atlantico in October: “De Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt allied with Stalin to defeat nazism.”

Fillon said the French people “wanted authority” and his was a “powerful project” to reform France.

Now, I'm not on board with the New Cold War talk. But viewing the Islamic State as analogous to Hitler is the kind of comparison that encourages the worst kind of threat inflation. Hitler was the head of the militarily most powerful state in the world at that time. He could not be appeased ("appeasement" before 1938 just referring to concessions in a negotiation), he could not be contained and he was bent of military aggression. The Islamic State is a Sunni terrorist group heavily funded by Saudi Arabia and hardly qualifies as a "state" at all, even though that's what it calls itself.

I can't say I'm thrilled at the strong possibility that a new French President eager to find New Hitlers to fight might be taking office next year.

The main contender against the Republican candidate is expected to be Marine Le Pen, head of the French Deplorable Party, more formally known as the National Front.

The current Socialist President François Hollande is currently held to be a sure loser, who likely won't make in into the final round of next year's Presidential vote. Leaving the final choice for French President as one between the Republicans committed to Angela Merkel's stone-conservative Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economics and Le Pen and her Deplorables.

Hollande is one in a growing set of Socialist leaders who managed to blur the distinctions of his party's positions to the point that they are scarcely discernible any more compared to the conservatives. Pro-EU reformers who wanted to see a change in eurozone economic policy to one that made macroeconmic sense were heartened in 2102 when Hollande was elected on a platform of opposing the Fiscal Compact, and disastrously bad proposal of Merkel's that would effectively ban any economic policy that actually did make any macroeconmic sense from being used by the eurozone. It's formal name is the European Stability and Growth Pact. But Fiscal Suicide Pact would be a much more descriptive name. (See my Irish referendum today (Thursday) on eurozone fiscal suicide pact 05/31/206 for more on that misbegotten agreement.)

Hollande had promised to force Merkel to renegotiate the Fiscal Suicide Pact if elected. But once in office, he capitulated completely on the agreement, which he endorsed and Parliament ratified. In accord with neoliberal/Merkel/Brüning economic policies including the Fiscal Suicide Pact, he supported Merkel and the Troika in their brutal economic retaliation against Greece in 2015 for the offense of electing a government of which Frau Merkel did not approve. And Hollande has spent much of 2016 pushing for reducing the protections of current labor laws, provoking huge protests by, well, members of the Socialists' labor base.

Gosh, I wonder if that has something to do with his poor standing in the polls?

The Inside Story episode reports on the politics in France; although it's dated 11/20/2106, it was clearly recorded before Sunday's election results were called, Who can stand up to the National Front? Al Jazeera English 11/20/2016:

This is part of the problem Jürgen Habermas addresses in his interview, , Für eine demokratische Polarisierung Blätter 11:2016/For A Democratic Polarisation: How To Pull The Ground From Under Right-Wing Populism Social Europe 11/17/2016:

The economic globalisation that Washington introduced in the 1970s with its neoliberal agenda has brought in its wake, measured globally against China and the other emergent BRIC countries, a relative decline of the West. Our societies must work through domestically the awareness of this global decline together with the technology-induced, explosive growth in the complexity of everyday living. Nationalistic reactions are gaining ground in those social milieus that have either never or inadequately benefited from the prosperity gains of the big economies because the ever-promised “trickle-down effect” failed to materialise over the decades. ...

Since Clinton, Blair and Schröder social democrats have swung over to the prevailing neoliberal line in economic policies because that was or seemed to be promising in the political sense: in the “battle for the middle ground” these political parties thought they could win majorities only by adopting the neoliberal course of action. This meant taking on board toleration of long-standing and growing social inequalities. Meantime, this price – the economic and socio-cultural “hanging out to dry” of ever-greater parts of the populace – has clearly risen so high that the reaction to it has gone over to the right. And where else? If there is no credible and pro-active perspective, then protest simply retreats into expressivist, irrational forms. ...

In my estimate, domestic politicians mishandled right-wing populism from the start. The mistake of the established parties lies in acknowledging the battlefront that right-wing populism is defining: “We” up against the system. Here it matters hardly a jot whether this mistake takes the form of an assimilation to or a confrontation with “right-wing”. Take either the strident would-be French president Nicolas Sarkozy who is outbidding Marine Le Pen with his demands, or the example of the sober-minded German justice minister Heiko Maas who forcefully takes on Alexander Gauland in debate – they both make the opponent stronger. Both take him/her seriously and raise his/her profile. A year on we here in Germany all know the studiously ironic grin of Frauke Petry (AfD leader) and the demeanour of the rest of the leadership of her ghastly gang. It’s only by ignoring their interventions that one can cut the ground from under the feet of the right-wing populists.

I would dissent from Habermas' description there about the problem in dealing with the populist right for the left-center parties has been "acknowledging the battlefront that right-wing populism is defining: 'We' up against the system."

The basic political construction of populism is the People vs. the Elite. How the narrative is formed around which the popular coalition is formed against the Elite matters a lot. Occupy Wall Street was identified with the oligarchic One Percent. Which really does exist. And really does act in collective ways to push governmental policies that further enrich themselves at the expense of the well-being of the broader public, the Ninety-Nine Percent in the Occupy construction. John Judis points out a very important distinction between the right and left varieties (All The Rage New Republic 09/19/2016):

The central feature of all these [historical] populist campaigns has been the attempt to champion “the people” against an elite or establishment. But how the people and the elite are defined has changed with the campaigns. The People’s Party represented “the plain people” against the “plutocracy,” Huey Long the “poor man” against the “money power,” Wallace “the man in the street” against “big government,” Trump the “silent majority” against the “special interests,” and Sanders “we the people” against the “billionaire class.”

But there is another element of populism that is less understood, one that divides the tradition into two distinct political strains. In the left-wing strain, epitomized by Long, Perot, Occupy Wall Street, and Sanders, populists champion the people against the elites. In the right-wing strain, it’s also the people versus the elites — but the elites are attacked for coddling and subsidizing a third “out group,” such as African Americans (Wallace) or immigrants who have entered the country illegally (Buchanan, the Tea Party, and Trump). [my emphasis]

The latter variety can be usefully characterized as "sucker populism." (See: Jim Hightower, Don't Be a Sucker—Donald Trump Does Not Have a Populist Bone in His Body Alternet 09/21/2016.)

But maybe Habermas is just using a overly-broad characterization there. Because the more specific point he's making there is that centrist parties are making a serious mistake in trying to outdo the rightwing populists in pandering to fear and hatred of those third party out-groups that Judis references. We certainly see that mistake in France, which Habermas cites. (See: Philippe Marlière, French politicians are now marching to Marine Le Pen’s immigration tune Guardian 11/19/2016)

Habermas is right about the direction the solution has to take. In Europe, the pro-EU but anti-austerity voters need parties with a clear pro-EU but anti-austerity position. The social-democratic parties for years and years now have been offering only a vaguely different variation on the conservative assumption of TINA: There Is No Alternative to Hoover/Brüning economics:

... the political scene is predominantly grey on grey, where, for example, the left-wing pro-globalisation agenda of giving a political shape to a global society growing together economically and digitally can no longer be distinguished from the neoliberal agenda of political abdication to the blackmailing power of the banks and of the unregulated markets.

One would therefore have to make contrasting political programmes recognisable again, including the contrast between the – in a political and cultural sense – “liberal” open-mindedness of the left, and the nativist fug of right-wing critiques of an unfettered economic globalization. In a word: political polarisation should be re-crystallised between the established parties on substantive conflicts. Parties that grant right-wing populists attention rather than contempt should not expect civil society to disdain right-wing phrases and violence. Therefore, I regard as the greater danger a very different polarisation towards which the hard-core opposition within the CDU is moving when it casts a leery eye on the post-Merkel period. In Alexander Gauland it recognises anew the pivotal figure of the Dregger wing of the old Hesse CDU, or flesh of its own flesh, and toys with the idea of winning back lost voters by way of a coalition with the AfD. [my emphasis]

More on Habermas' call for democratic polarization

Wolfgang Münchau (Habermas on the role of the left in the rise of the right Eurointelligence 11/18/2016) was also impressed with the argument made by the "Second Generation" Frankfurt School philosopher and German public intellectual Jürgen Habermas in an interview I posted about yesterday:

Jurgen Habermas has, in our view, nailed the issue of why we are seeing a rise of what he calls "the authoritarian international". It is fundamentally a political failure of the centre-left to look after the interests of its own constituents, and a failure to bring about effective global governance regimes to counter the rise of the global transactional financial capitalism.

The interview from which Münchau quotes is For A Democratic Polarisation: How To Pull The Ground From Under Right-Wing Populism Social Europe 11/17/2016. My comment on it is Habermas on the need for democratic polarization 11/17/2016.

Habermas on the need for democratic polarization

Blätter 11:2016 has an interview with Jürgen Habermas, Für eine demokratische Polarisierung ("For a democratic polarization").

Social Europe has just published an English translation, For A Democratic Polarisation: How To Pull The Ground From Under Right-Wing Populism 11/17/2016.

The interview begins with Habermas reflecting back on the "end of history" moment that Franccis Fukayama famously announced around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Soviet Union in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992). His initial essay titled "The End of History?" was first published in the Summer 1989 issue of The National Interest.

He saw that the world was then looking at the "total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism" and the kind of consumerism associated with American and European capitalist societies. And therefore we were looking at " the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an 'end of ideology' or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism."

It addresses the rise of the rightwing populist parties and movements in Europe and the US, including the Trump campaign. Habermas focuses on the widespread adoption of a very similar neoliberal economic/cultural outlook by both center-left and center-right parties particularly since the early 1990s. Because the neoliberal gospel of deregulation, privatization, reduction of government services other than military, security and intelligence (and even significant privatization there), depolitization of economic policy to be "technical" questions not appropriate for public debate, chronic austerity policies (for the 99%), growing extemes of maldistribution of wealth, liberating the wealthiest from the terrible burden of paying taxes to support their countries and communities, weakening the bargaining power of labor, reduction of public and private pensions - this produces a more restricted life for the majority, and real distress for large portions of the population. And, as we saw in the 2008 crash and its aftermath, it removes much of the political and institutional safeguards that prevented such a crash in the Northern Atlantic countries since the Great Depression.

Much of economic and social policy in this approach comes under the scope of the Margaret Thatcher/Angela Merkel approach of "There Is No Alternative" (TINA). And therefore no discussion must be allowed, even if, as in the case of Greece, it means maintaining brutal and destructive neoliberal policies that means overriding the democratic choices of the people.

What Habermas wants for the immediate future is to see the left parties create a more explicit political debate over economic and social policy:

Man müsste also politische Gegensätze wieder kenntlich machen, auch den Gegensatz zwischen der – im politischen und kulturellen Sinne „liberalen“ – Weltoffenheit der linken und dem ethnonationalen Mief der rechten Globalisierungskritik. Kurzum: Die politische Polarisierung müsste sich wieder zwischen den etablierten Parteien um sachliche Gegensätze kristallisieren. Parteien, die dem Rechtspopulismus Aufmerksamkeit statt Verachtung widmen, dürfen von der Zivilgesellschaft nicht erwarten, dass sie rechte Parolen und rechte Gewalt ächtet. Für die größere Gefahr halte ich deshalb jene ganz andere Polarisierung, zu der der harte Kern der Opposition innerhalb der CDU zu tendieren scheint, wenn diese auf die Zeit nach Merkel schielt. Sie erkennt in Alexander Gauland den Flügelmann des Dregger-Flügels der alten Hessen-CDU wieder, also Fleisch vom eigenen Fleische, und kokettiert mit dem Gedanken, die verlorenen Wähler auf dem Weg einer Koalition mit der AfD zurückzugewinnen.

One would therefore have to make contrasting political programmes recognisable again, including the contrast between the – in a political and cultural sense – “liberal” open-mindedness of the left, and the nativist fug of right-wing critiques of an unfettered economic globalization. In a word: political polarisation should be re-crystallised between the established parties on substantive conflicts. Parties that grant right-wing populists attention rather than contempt should not expect civil society to disdain right-wing phrases and violence. Therefore, I regard as the greater danger a very different polarisation towards which the hard-core opposition within the CDU is moving when it casts a leery eye on the post-Merkel period. In Alexander Gauland it recognises anew the pivotal figure of the Dregger wing of the old Hesse CDU, or flesh of its own flesh, and toys with the idea of winning back lost voters by way of a coalition with the AfD.

I would have translated that first setence as, "One must therefore make political differences recognizable again, including the opposition between the - in political and cultural senses "liberal" - tolerance (Weltoffenheit) of the left criticism of globalization [neoliberalism] and the ethnic-nationalist version of the right."

He also says, "Leuten, die solchen Parolen nachlaufen, eigentlich nur eine Lehre ziehen: Sie sollten diese Art von „besorgten Bürgern“, statt um sie herumzutanzen, kurz und trocken als das abtun, was sie sind – der Saatboden für einen neuen Faschismus." ("The only lesson democratic parties should draw as regards handling people who are keen on such terms is: they should stop pussyfooting around with these “concerned citizens” and dismiss them curtly for what they are – the breeding ground for a new fascism.") I find the Social Europe translation off just enough to be annoying.

The title phrase "For a democratic polarization," even though it's in quotes, doesn't appear in exactly that form in the published text of the interview. But it's a fair characterization of Habermas' position.

He views the big picture for Western countries this way:

Man kann sich fragen, warum die linken Parteien den Kampf gegen soziale Ungleichheit nicht offensiv, auf dem Weg zu einer supranational koordinierten Zähmung der unregulierten Märkte führen wollen. Als vernünftige Alternative – sowohl zum Status quo des verwilderten Finanzmarktkapitalismus wie zum Programm des „völkischen“ oder des linksnationalen Rückzugs in die vermeintliche Souveränität längst ausgehöhlter Nationalstaaten – bietet sich aus meiner Sicht nur eine supranationale Zusammenarbeit an, die das Ziel einer sozialverträglichen politischen Gestaltung der wirtschaftlichen Globalisierung verfolgt. Dafür reichen internationale Vertragsregime nicht aus; denn ganz abgesehen von deren zweifelhafter demokratischer Legitimation können politische Entscheidungen über verteilungsrelevante Fragen nur in einem festen institutionellen Rahmen implementiert werden. Daher bleibt nur der steinige Weg einer institutionellen Vertiefung und Verankerung einer demokratisch legitimierten Zusammenarbeit über nationale Grenzen hinweg. Die Europäische Union war einmal ein solches Projekt – und die Politische Euro-Union könnte es immer noch sein. Aber dafür sind die Hürden der innenpolitischen Willensbildung eben sehr hoch.

Die Sozialdemokratien sind seit Clinton, Blair und Schröder auf eine im ökonomischen Sinne systemkonforme Linie eingeschwenkt, weil das im politischen Sinne „systemkonform“ war oder zu sein schien: Im „Kampf um die Mitte“ glaubten diese politischen Parteien, Mehrheiten nur auf dem Weg der Anpassung an den neoliberalen Kurs gewinnen zu können. Dafür haben sie die Tolerierung der langfristig wachsenden sozialen Ungleichgewichte in Kauf genommen. Inzwischen ist offenbar dieser Preis – das wirtschaftliche und soziokulturelle „Abhängen“ immer größerer Bevölkerungsteile – so weit gestiegen, dass sich die Reaktion darauf nach rechts entlädt. Wohin auch sonst? Wenn eine glaubwürdige und offensiv vertretene Perspektive fehlt, bleibt dem Protest nur noch der Rückzug ins Expressive und Irrationale.

The question is why left-wing parties do not go on the offensive against social inequality by embarking upon a co-ordinated and cross-border taming of unregulated markets. As a sensible alternative – as much to the status quo of feral financial capitalism as to the agenda for a “völkisch” or left-nationalist retreat into the supposed sovereignty of long-since hollowed-out nation states – I would suggest there is only a supranational form of co-operation that pursues the goal of shaping a socially acceptable political reconfiguration of economic globalisation. International treaty regimes are insufficient here; for, putting aside completely their dubious democratic legitimacy, political decisions over questions of redistribution can only be carried out within a strict institutional framework. That leaves only the stony path to an institutional deepening and embedding of democratically legitimised co-operation across national borders. The European Union was once such a project – and a Political Union of the Eurozone could still be one. But the hurdles within the domestic decision-making process are rather high for that.

Since Clinton, Blair and Schröder[,] social democrats have swung over to the prevailing neoliberal line in economic policies because that was or seemed to be promising in the political sense: in the “battle for the middle ground” these political parties thought they could win majorities only by adopting the neoliberal course of action. This meant taking on board toleration of long-standing and growing social inequalities. Meantime, this price – the economic and socio-cultural “hanging out to dry” of ever-greater parts of the populace – has clearly risen so high that the reaction to it has gone over to the right. And where else? If there is no credible and pro-active perspective, then protest simply retreats into expressivist, irrational forms.

Long-festering problems in the EU

The unsolved major problems of the EU and the eurozone continue to snowball in a way that makes the survival of the former and even more so of the latter more problematic all the time. Cooperation within the EU has broken down over the refugee problem and the influx of refugees is providing a newly growing target for far-right parties. Germany has joined its very junior EU/eurozone partner France in participating directly in the Syrian civil war, the prolongation of which will worsen the refugee problem. France may use its war costs to demand loosening of its requirements under the stone-conservative Fiscal (Suicide) Pact of 2012, which could lead to further conflict with Merkel and the stone-conservative Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economic policies to which she is committed. Not to mention the incredibly complex and risky politics of the Syrian civil war itself.

The devastating extent of the post-2008 depression in the eurozone "peripheral" countries like Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain is largely due to the effects of the Hoover/Brüning policies Merkel imposed on them. Especially Greece. Merkel's insistence on the Hoover/Brüning policies led to various "regime change" operations in pursuit of them, including actual regime changes in Greece in 2011, Italy in 2011, even in Greece of 2015. The Merkel-bot President of Portugal in 2015 tried to block a majority left coalition from taking power after they won a majority in the elections. We'll see what happens in Spain as the new left majority there seeks to form an anti-austerity government. Such high-handed efforts to dominate and impose on other "partners" a highly destructive and massively discredited economic policy has naturally given reason for them to suspect the value of German domination of the EU and the eurozone.

Now Merkel needs other countries in the EU to support her refugee policy, which is a genuinely European problem. In particular, the Germans want Greece to do a better job in retaining refugees from outside the Schengen Area there so they won't come to Germany. But they are getting the best cooperation from their partners! Who could have foreseen such a thing?

All these problems are the culmination so far of Merkel's nationalist approach to EU affairs, by which she insisted on retaining maximum influence and advantage for Germany at the expense of the "partners." And which led to her characteristic approach to EU and eurozone problems, "extend and pretend." Postpone reaching a substantive and permanent solution to the problem, whether it is bank regulation, refugees or the unending euro crisis. Just to mention a few.

The euro crisis is still likely to be the one that provokes formal splits. Wolfgang Münchau continues in his weekly columns to point out the various reasons for his. (Daran wird der Euro zerbrechen Spiegel Online 25.12.2015

But it can't be seen in isolation to the other problems. The crass xenophobia against Greece and other "periphery" countries encouraged and in a real way propagated by the German government, including Merkel's junior coalition partner the SPD, was picked up not just by the Stammtisch (good ole boy opinion) but by both the boulevard and the "quality" press. The Austrian government was as extreme in promoting nationalist hostility as Merkel's has been. But a very similar process took place in Austria.

That nationalist sentiment carried over to the refugee crisis, which in turn reinforced it. It has led to new border controls, which partially removes one of the most concrete benefits most people have seen from the EU. Münchau puts it even more strongly: "The influx of refugees into Germany and the terrorist attacks in France have put a de facto end to Schengen. National border controls have been reinstated in many places." (Fighting Brexit with fear will backfire Financial Times 12/20/2015) Even new walls along national borders, like in the good old days of the Berlin Wall, though so far with less lethal enforcement. And the increased nationalism presents a problem for security cooperation among EU members against terrorism, while terrorist attacks increase xenophobia against immigrants, which in turn strengthen nationalism and xenophobic fear.

You're doing a heckuva job as EU leader, Angie, a heckuva job!!

Jürgen Habermas has been a sympathetic critic of the EU for a long time. In the conventional political vocabulary, "Eurocritic" has referred to supporters of the Union who argued for urgent reforms to integrate the members countries more; "Euroskeptic" has referred to usually nationalist/rightwing opponents of EU membership. After Germany's handling of the Greek negotiations in 2015, it is clear that as long as Merkel remains in powers and/or her austerity doctrine in force, any country seeking to put an end to austerity for themselves will need to be prepared to leave the eurozone if they don't get agreement. Because without a thoroughly credible threat to exit, they have to expect to be crushed like Greece was.

A 2006 article by Habermas, "Die Bewährung Europas" Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 12/2006, serves to illustrate the long-standing and chronic nature of the EU's current problems. The euro crisis hadn't yet broken out, and it is not on Habermas' 2006 list. A number of economists had warned that the construction of the eurozone was flawed from the start in a way that made it particularly unsuited to deal with a depression crisis like the one that struck in 2008. But Habermas pointed to real problems that today are intertwining with the euro crisis. In a perceptive observation, he described there nine years ago how neoliberal economic assumptions were already promoting a nationalism among EU nations that has now become toxic to the point of threatening the entire "European project," as it is called:

Die Rückwendung zum Nationalstaat hat in vielen Ländern eine introvertierte Stimmung gefördert: Das Europa-Thema ist entwertet, man beschäftigt sich lieber mit der nationalen Agenda. Bei uns umarmen sich in den Talkshows Großväter und Enkel in der Rührung über den neuen Wohlfühlpatriotismus. Die Gewissheit heiler nationaler Wurzeln soll eine wohlfahrtsstaatlich verweichlichte Bevölkerung für den globalen Wettkampf „zukunftsfähig“ machen. Diese Rhetorik passt zum gegenwärtigen Zustand einer sozialdarwinistisch enthemmten Weltpolitik.

[The return to the national state has promoted an introverted mood in many countries: The theme of Europe is devalued. One prefers to concerns themselves with the national agenda. With us [Germans], grandfathers and grandsons hug each other with emotion over the new feel-good patriotism. The certainly of healthy {heiler} national roots is expected to make an welfare-state-produced effeminate population "ready for the future" of the global competition. This rhetoric belongs to the present situation of an unleashed Social Darwinist world politics.]

Habermas nine years ago pointed to the following visible, major problems in the construction of the European Union:

1. The "democratic deficit," the phrase Habermas uses here. More and more decisions were being take at the EU level that were obligatory on the members without the same kind of meaningful electoral input the citizens have at the national level being in effect at the EU level.
2. The failure to achieve a cohesive foreign policy. Only a united Europe could successfully lead the pressure on the United States for "die Fortentwicklung des klassischen Völkerrechts zu einer politisch verfassten Weltgesellschaft" ("further development of the classical international law to a politically secured world community.")
3. The ongoing "Unterminierung menschenwürdiger sozialer Standards" ("undermining of humane social standards.")
4. The culturally fundamentalist divisions within Europe and within EU members states. This is a reminder that integration of national, ethnic and religious minorities as well as the handling of new immigrants certainly didn't first become evident in 2015: "Es geht darum, die Angehörigen fremder Kulturen und fremder Religionsgemeinschaften gleichzeitig in ihrem Anderssein zu respektieren und in die staatsbürgerliche Solidarität einzubeziehen." ("It has to do with respecting the members of unfamiliar cultures and unfamiliar religious communities in their difference and bring them into the solidarity of citizens.") And he makes the important point that the success of social integration of minorities within member countries also contributes to the success of international integration within the EU.
5. Habermas doesn't make the following a separate point, though in my mind it needs to rank with the others as (5): "Wir sollten George W. Bush nicht auch noch in der Militarisierung des westlichen Geistes folgen." ("We [Europeans] should also not follow George W. Bush in the militarizing of the Western spirit.")

Habermas' comment on the intersection of the second and third problems is revealing:

"Erst eine Europäische Union, die außenpolitisch handlungsfähig würde, könnte auf den Kurs der Weltwirtschaftspolitik Einfluss nehmen. Sie könnte die globale Umweltpolitik vorantreiben und erste Schritte auf dem Wege zu einer Weltinnenpolitik machen. Damit könnte sie anderen Kontinenten für den Zusammenschluss von Nationalstaaten zu supranationalen Mächten ein Beispiel geben. Denn ohne Global Players dieser neuen Art kann ein Gleichgewicht zwischen Subjekten eines gerechteren Weltwirtschaftsregimes nicht entstehen."

Here the failure of the one-time center left parties, the Social Democrats, is a central component of this interweaving of problems. With reference to Germany, Albert Scharenberg wrote in 2007 ("Dem Morgenrot entgegen?" Blätter 5/2007):

Die regierende Sozialdemokratie brachte durch ihre den Sozialstaat deformierenden „Reformen“, insbesondere durch Hartz IV, ihre ureigenste Klientel gegen sich auf – Gewerkschafter und Arbeitslose.

[The ruling Social Democracy through their "reforms" that deformed the welfare state, especially with Hartz IV {that allowed for lower-paid and less secure jobs than before in Germany}, turned their most basic supporters against them - unions and the unemployed.]

This is not just true of the German SPD, but also of the social democrats in France and other countries, including Spain. The latter party, the PSOE, has the chance to form a government in Spain after this month's elections. But their ability to do so and their ability to successful press an anti-austerity program in office has been significantly compromised by their previous embrace of Merkelnomics. (Antoio Avendaño, Un muerto viviente llamado Pedro Sánchez Andaluces.es 27.12.2015)

Jürgen Habermas on the new Bad German phase initiated by Angela Merkel #ThisIsACoup #merkelstreichelt

Jürgen Habermas is not pleased by German Chancellor Angela Merkel's handling of the Greek crisis (Philip Oltermann, Merkel 'gambling away' Germany's reputation over Greece, says Habermas Guardian 07/16/2015):

“I fear that the German government, including its social democratic faction, have gambled away in one night all the political capital that a better Germany had accumulated in half a century,” he told the Guardian. Previous German governments, he said, had displayed “greater political sensitivity and a post-national mentality”.

Habermas, widely considered one of the most influential contemporary European intellectuals, said that by threatening Greece with an exit from the eurozone over the course of the negotiations, Germany had “unashamedly revealed itself as Europe’s chief disciplinarian and for the first time openly made a claim for German hegemony in Europe.” [my emphasis]

Obviously, in the latter he means the first time in the history of the current Federal Republic.

Habermas added: “Forcing the Greek government to agree to an economically questionable, predominantly symbolic privatisation fund cannot be understood as anything other an act of punishment against a leftwing government.”

Yes, it was.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras obviously wound up accepting a humiliating defeat. But his months-long fight to negotiate a reasonable deal with Iron Chancellor II

Joanna Slater reports (Germany is remaking the euro zone in its own image Globe and Mail 07/16/2015):

Helmut Kohl, Germany’s former chancellor, had a favourite maxim about his vision for the future, inspired by the words of the famous writer Thomas Mann. The ultimate goal, Mr. Kohl said, was “a European Germany, not a German Europe.”

Now, as Greece implements the bitterly fought agreement reached Monday with its creditors, the deal underlines the new reality of the euro zone: Germany is remaking the currency bloc in its own image.

It’s a place where the focus is on spending cuts, implementing structural reforms and abiding by the rules. It’s also backed by an implicit warning – if a country veers off track as Greece has, it will pay dearly or face a calamitous ejection from the currency union. ...

Some observers despaired of the way Greece’s predicament has been presented in Germany. “If you are breastfeeding Germans newspaper headlines about lazy Greeks,” that has an impact on public opinion, noted Ulrike Guérot of the European School of Governance in Berlin. “We need to deconstruct these arguments,” she said. “We are the biggest benefiter of the whole European project.”

By losing sight of that fact, she said, Germany risks its historical role as the country that was willing to do and pay a bit more to move the project forward – a kind of benign hegemon. These days, “we are doing hegemony without the benign-ness.” [my emphasis]

Merkel's cruel real face is being highlighted by the #merkelstreichelt Twitter hashtag.

As The Independent reports (Lizzie Dearden, Angela Merkel makes Palestinian girl facing deportation from Germany cry on television 07/16/2015):

Angela Merkel has been heavily criticised after appearing to make a Palestinian refugee cry by telling her she could not stop her family's possible deportation.

The girl was among a group of school pupils gathered in the city of Rostock on Wednesday for an appearance by the German Chancellor. ...

“As long as I don't know how long I can stay here, I don’t know what my future will be,” Reem said, in fluent German.

“I really want to study in Germany - it is unfair to watch while other people can enjoy life and you can’t enjoy it with them.”

Having expected a routine question-and-answer session for the government’s Gut Leben in Deutschland (Living Well in Germany) programme, Ms Merkel appeared momentarily thrown by the change of direction.

“I understand that, however I have to… sometimes politics is hard,” Ms Merkel said.

“You’re a very nice person but you know that there are thousands and thousands of people in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and if say 'you can all come,' and 'you can all come from Africa,' and 'you can all come,' we just can't manage that."

If Bill Clinton's trademark style was "I feel your pain," Angie's is more like, "I spit on your pain!"

Here's a video with English subtitles, Angela Merkel makes Palestinian girl facing deportation from Germany cry on television:

I'm surprised she didn't tell the little girl, "And I suppose you also expect me to spare your little dog, Toto, eh, my pretty? Bwaahahaha!"

Angie has lost her her cuddly "Mutti" image, it seems. Too bad, kid, we're gonna deport you. But "sometimes politics is hard." So stop your whining or I'll give you something to really cry about! Ask the Greeks what happens to people who mess with me, you little crybaby!

It's become obvious that Thucydides is one of Angie's favorite political theorists: “the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.” That includes you, whiny little girl!

Tsipras too:

Amanda Taub comments on this revealing performance by Merkel in Angela Merkel should be ashamed of her response to this sobbing Palestinian girl Vox 07/16/2015:

If it feels unjust to see one of the most powerful people in the world tell a crying child that her future dreams have to be destroyed because "politics is hard sometimes," that's because it is unjust. Germany's attitude toward refugees is wrong, and it's hurting innocent people. And Merkel knows that — she's just not used to being confronted with evidence of it on live TV.

In her response, Merkel was trying to imply that if Germany treats this girl and her family leniently, it will somehow be obligated to accept the entire world’s refugees. But that’s disingenuous. There is no mechanism by which that would happen. There is no rule that says that if Germany grants asylum to a family in Rostock then it has to accept every Palestinian in a Lebanese camp, or everyone from "Africa." There is no slippery slope here because there isn’t a slope at all. Right now, Germany has a legal obligation to protect refugees who are inside its borders, and no legal obligation to protect those who are outside them. Granting this girl and her family refugee status, visas, or even just temporary relief from deportation wouldn’t change that in the slightest.

What Merkel really means is that there are currently millions of people in the world who could have valid asylum claims, and she's worried they'll all come to Germany if it seems even slightly welcoming. So Germany deports people like this young Palestinian and her family to set an example that's just cruel enough to serve as a deterrent.

José Pablo Feinmann on why he rejects postmodernism

José Pablo Feinmann explains his own reckoning with postmodern philosophy in Vattimo, dialectos y transparencias Página/12 22.03.2015. He does so in the context of commenting on the thought of Gianni Vattimo, a postmodern philosopher who was recently visiting Argentina.

Feinmann quotes Vattimo to give a description of the aspect of postmodernism on which he focuses in this brief but dense essay. The development of the media of communication, in this postmodern model, allows for the abolition of the Cartesian ego and of the unity of opposites in the Hegelian philosophy, which latter Feinmann references here as the One:

El mundo de la comunicación permite el desarraigo de la dictadura de lo Uno y la liberación de las diferencias. A esto le debemos llamar, dice, el dialecto. Ya no hay una razón. Hay racionalidades locales, dialectos. “Minorías étnicas, sexuales, religiosas, culturales o estéticas, como los punk, por ejemplo” (Ibid, p. 17). Esto no es una manifestación irracional de la espontaneidad. Las diferencias se manifiestan, se emancipan de la dictadura de lo Uno.

[The world of communication permits the uprooting of the dictatorship of the One and the liberatio of differences. This we can call, say, the dialectic. But there is no Reason. There are local rationalities, dialectics. "Ethnic, sexual, religious, cultural or aesthetic minorities, like the punks, for example." {Vattimo} This is not an irrational manifestation of spontaneity. The differences manifest themselves, they emancipate themselves from the dictatorship of the One.]

Feinmann responds with a contemporary Hegelian argument, one based in actual history. He looks at the end of the Cold War circa 1989 and the subsequent enormous expansion of neoliberal "globalization" and argues against what he views as a conservative tendency in postmodernist philosophy:

Voy a decirlo de una vez por todas: los intentos posmodernos han fracasado estrepitosamente. El sujeto cartesiano y el sujeto hegeliano están, hoy, más centrados que nunca. Nadie descentró al sujeto. Nadie lo adelgazó. Nadie lo deconstruyó. El sujeto absoluto es hoy el Sujeto del Poder Bélico Comunicacional. (Así: con mayúsculas fascistas, porque es de derecha y colonialista.) Este sujeto está globalizado y coloniza día tras día las subjetividades de los ciudadanos de este mundo. Su constitución ha sido reciente. Ni Sartre ni Foucault lo vieron. Y los posmodernos, que presenciaron su surgimiento y consolidación, lo interpretaron idílicamente, como el fruto maduro de una democracia comunicacional por cuyo medio se expresarían las distintas, mútiples voces de la libertad, sobre todo una vez caído el coloso comunista. ¿Error, ingenuidad o colaboracionismo? No son – arriesguemos – filósofos del “neoliberalismo”. Pero son –sin la menor duda– filósofos de la caída del comunismo, expresada en el colapso de la Unión Soviética. La distancia entre una cosa y la otra es demasiado estrecha.

[I'm going to say once and for all: the postmodern intentions have failed ostentatiously. The Cartesian subject and the Hegelian subject are today more central than ever. No one removed the subject from its central place. Nobody slimmed it down. Nobody deconstructed it. The Absolute subject is today the Subject of the Communicational Power of War. (Thus: with fascist capital letters, because it is rightwing and colonialist.) This Subject is globalized and day after day colonizes the subjectivities of the citizens of this world. Its construction has been recent. Neither Sartre nor Foucault saw it. And the postmodernists, who were present at its upsurge and consolidation, interpreted it idyllically as the mature fruit of a communicational democracy by whose medium the multiple voices of liberty express themselves, above all when the Communist colossus fell. Error, naivety or collaborationism? There are no - we'll take a risk to say - philosophers of "neoliberalism." But there are - without any doubt - philosophers of the fall of Communism, expressed in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The distance between one thing and the other is too narrow.]

There's a nice word play there in the sentence, "Nadie descentró al sujeto." I translated it above as, "No one removed the Subject from its central place." It could also be translated, "No one put the subject off its game."

In my reading - to use the polite postmodern expression! - Feinmann is arguing that postmodernism as derived from Heidegger and Foucault has a tendency to remove any intellectual basis for challenging the established order because it effectively gives up the concepts of Reason and objective truth. It does rule out efforts to change. But it puts the claims of the powerful on the same level normative as those of the weak, the claims of the tyrants on the same normative level as the claims of their subjects demanding freedom.

Feinmann isn't willing to give up the Hegelian historical subject, nor the Enlightenment standard of Reason, nor the Humeian/Hegelian goal of perceiving objectively material reality accurately.

Feinmann here is on the side of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Gary Aylesworth in his 2015 entry on Postmodernism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the criticism that "second generation" Frankfurt theorist Jürgen Habermas makes of postmodernism:

Habermas argues that postmodernism contradicts itself through self-reference, and notes that postmodernists presuppose concepts they otherwise seek to undermine, e.g., freedom, subjectivity, or creativity. He sees in this a rhetorical application of strategies employed by the artistic avant-garde of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an avant-garde that is possible only because modernity separates artistic values from science and politics in the first place. On his view, postmodernism is an illicit aestheticization of knowledge and public discourse. Against this, Habermas seeks to rehabilitate modern reason as a system of procedural rules for achieving consensus and agreement among communicating subjects. Insofar as postmodernism introduces aesthetic playfulness and subversion into science and politics, he resists it in the name of a modernity moving toward completion rather than self-transformation. [my emphasis]

Habermas and other Frankfurt School theorists are not only very much aware of the "nightmares of reason." They have been leaders in pointing them out. But they haven't abandoned Reason and the necessity of understanding empirical reality in doing so.

Feinmann also makes his own reckoning with Hegel's unifying concept of the One in the context of Islam's role in world history in El estruendo de los fanáticos Página/12 22.03.2015.

There are also Spanish-language lectures of his on YouTube from a Canal Encuentro series on Michel Foucault (1926–1984).

T2 CAP 11: Foucault [1]:

T2 CAP 12: Foucault II:

Also one on postmodernism more generally, T2 CAP 13: Los posmodernos:

Jürgen Habermas on the line of Hegel's philosophical influence

Jürgen Habermas, who has been one of Germany's leading public intellectuals for decades, offers this description of the long-lasting influence of Hegel's philosophy, from the European Journal of Philosophy 7:2 (1999), "From Kant to Hegel and Back again – The Move Towards Detranscendentalization":

We could describe the history of the most interesting currents of post-Hegelian philosophy as a movement towards detranscendentalizing the knowing subject, in one version or another. But we would not include Hegel in that movement in spite of the fact that nobody did more to set the stage for it. Hegel was the first to put the transcendental subject back into context and to situate reason in social space and historical time. [Wilhelm von] Humboldt [176-1835], [Charles Sanders] Peirce [1839–1914], [Wilhelm] Dilthey [1833–191], [John] Dewey [1859-1952], [Ernst] Cassirer [1874-1945], and [Martin] Heidegger [1889–1976] are among those post-Kantian philosophers who were or, if we think of [Ludwig] Wittgenstein [1889-1951], could have been influenced by Hegel in their attempts to treat language, practice and historical forms of life as dimensions of the symbolic embodiment of reason. In his Jena period, Hegel did in fact introduce language, work and symbolic interaction as media through which the human mind is formed and transformed. Considering Hegel’s notion of spirit, it is difficult to understand why we are hesitant to describe Hegel as a protagonist of detranscendentalization. One might suppose, perhaps, that his rationalism separates him from the following generations. But though linguistic philosophy, pragmatism, and historicism undermined the status of a noumenal subject beyond space and time, they do not necessarily lead to the kind of contextualism that has given rise to the familiar debates concerning the ethnocentricity or incommensurability of rationality standards. [my emphasis; links added]

Habermas writes further about Hegel's situating of reason in history:

The choice of the term ‘Geist’ [for "Spirit"] reminds us of the origin and rise of the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ after 1800. Though the great works of the founding fathers – of Leopold Ranke [1795-1886], Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm [1785-1863 and 1786-1859, respectively], Carl von Savigny [1779-1861] and the others had not yet been published, a new historical consciousness and a philosophy of historicism already formed a background for the emerging disciplines that would revolutionize the classical concept of the humanities in the course of Hegel’s life-time. They were already manifest in the earlier works of Justus Möser [1720-1794], Gottfried Herder [1744-1803] and Johann Georg Hamann [1730–1788], of Friedrich Schleiermacher [1768-1834], Wilhelm v. Humboldt, and Friedrich Schlegel [1772–1829]. With this historical mode of thought, three dimensions gained philosophical significance for the first time: (a) the historicity of the human mind, (b) the objectivity of symbolic forms and (c) the individuality of actors and their historical contexts. [my emphasis in bold; links added]

Habermas is the best-known figure of what came to be known as the "second generation" of the Frankfurt School, who framed their perspective as "critical theory."

Their philosophical approach is heavily rooted in the classical German philosophical tradition, of whom Kant and Hegel were the leading figures.

Axel Honneth, a "third generation" Frankfurt School thinker and, as head of the Insitute for Social Research, the formal head of the "Frankfurt School," said in an interview in 1993 ("Critical Theory in Germany Today: An Interview with Axel Honneth," Radical Philosophy 65:1993), "in all the productive approaches of Critical Theory: it's always an ongoing tension between Kant and Hegel. I would say that the most productive element - one of the most productive elements of the Critical Theory tradition - is to be unable to decide which side you are on here." (my emphasis)

Jürgen Habermas on EU politics

The "second generation" Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas granted an interview to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on last week's European election, Jürgen Habermas im Gespräch: Europa wird direkt ins Herz getroffen 30.05.2014. He gives this following description of the drastic change in perspective of German leadership from one of promoting European integration to one of nationalist advantage-seeking:

In der Bundesrepublik hat seit der Wiedervereinigung ein politischer Mentalitätswandel stattgefunden. Deutschland fühlt sich wieder als ein normaler Nationalstaat – und unsere Regierung benimmt sich auch so. Damit hat die Europäische Union gerade in ihrer schlimmsten Krise die leise, aber beharrlich auf eine weitere Integration drängende Stimme der alten Bundesrepublik, die sich ihrer Ausgangslage nach 1945 noch bewusst war, verloren. Diese wichtige, über Tagespolitik und Machtopportunismus hinausweisende Stimme war nie so nötig wie heute. Statt den schwächsten, nur scheinsouveränen Gliedern der Europäischen Währungsgemeinschaft einen Kurs aufzunötigen, der Opfer nur von den anderen verlangt, hätte die deutsche Regierung unter Inkaufnahme eigener Vorleistungen die Politik von Adenauer, Helmut Schmidt und Kohl fortsetzen müssen.

Aber ungerührt von den obszön ungleichen Krisenschicksalen, hat Deutschland von der Krise auch noch profitiert. Dieses unsolidarische Verhalten muss auf uns zurückschlagen. Wir müssen aufhören, eine hochgefährliche halbhegemoniale Stellung, in die die Bundesrepublik wieder hineingerutscht ist, in alter deutscher Manier rücksichtslos auszuspielen. Sollten die Wahlergebnisse in anderen Mitgliedstaaten davon wirklich unberührt geblieben sein?

[Since reunification {1990}, a change of political mentality has taken place in the Federal Republic {Germany}. Germany against feels itself to be a normal national state - and are government conducts itself that way, as well. Because of that, the European Union precisely during its worst crisis lost the voice of the old Federal Republic, which was still conscious of its starting point in 1945 and which carefully but persistently pressed for further {European} integration. This voice, which went beyond day-to-day politics and opportunistic power politics, was never so necessary as today. Instead of requiring the weakest, only apparently sovereign members of the European currency community to follow a course that demands sacrifices of the others {i.e., besides the Germans}, the German government have to move forward the policy of {Konrad} Adenauer, Helmut Schmidt and {Helmut} Kohl, taking account of their own compromises.

But unmoved by the obscenely unequal fates during the crisis {of other eurozone countries}, Germany even profited from the crisis. This unsolidarish conduct has to bounce back onto us. We must stop playing out in the old German manner a highly dangerous, half-hegemonic position into which the Federal Republic has again slipped. Should the election outcomes in other members states really not be touched by that?

Habermas talks about the horse-race aspects of the contest for the Presidency of the EU Commission. This basically has to do with whether Jean-Claude Juncker
the lead candidate of the party with the largest plurality in the EP elections, the conservative (pro-Europe/pro-austerity) European People's Party (EPP), will be chosen as the EU Commission President. The EU Council actually chooses the Commission President. They are required to take account of the results of the EP vote, but not required to select the top vote-getter as President.

To take an example from one type of parliamentary system, like those of Germany and Austria. Normally, the head of state (the elected President in those two cases) would "invite" the party winning the largest vote to form a government. If the largest party has a majority, that's pretty straightforward. If they have a minority, they have to work out deals with other parties for a coalition, like the current Grand Coalition (GroKo) in Germany, headed by Angela Merkel and her CDU, with the SPD as the junior partner. If the lead party is unable to form a government, then the head of state would as the second-largest vote-winning party to form a government.

Merkel has toggled back and forth over whether she will support Juncker as Commission President, even though her CDU is part of the EPP and he was the EPP's candidate. Reportedly he was also Merkel's top choice for that role. Late last week, Merkel's was taking a classica Mugwump stance: «Wir haben Jean-Claude Juncker für das Amt des Kommissionspräsidenten nominiert. Die ganze Agenda kann von ihm, aber auch von vielen anderen durchgesetzt werden. Daran habe ich keinen Zweifel.» ("We nominated Jean-Claude Juncker for the office of the Commission President. The whole agenda can be put through by him, but also there are many others who could do it. Of that I have no doubt.") At a Brussels summit this past weekend, Juncker's candidacy faced headwinds from some of his nominal supporters in the election: British Prime Minister David Cameron, Hungary's authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. (Juncker gerät bei EU-Gipfel zwischen die Fronten Lausitzer Rundscahu/DPA 28. Mai 2014)

By Monday, Von Merkel the Great had decided to back Juncker. (If only to show she can slap down Cameron and Orbán?) Her junior coalition partner, the SPD, supposedly pushed her in the direction of backing the European popular vote. How much of this is a genuine difference between Merkel and the SPD and how much political Kabuki is hard to say.

Habermas, who has long been very concerned and outspoken about what's known as the "democratic deficit," puts a high value on the Council respecting the EP vote in this regard. In the interview published Saturday, he was pretty sour about Merkel's posture on Juncker's selection: "Merkel, die Patronin der Geberländer, will das Fenster, das sich mit der frischen Luft der Europawahl für einen solchen Politikwechsel geöffnet hat, möglichst schnell wieder schließen." (Merkel, the patron of the giver countries {the northern European countries in the eurozone}, wants to close the window as soon as possible that was opened for the fresh air of such a political change by the European election.")

Habermas also takes a dig at the quality of the EPP's own "pro-Europe" credentials:

Zum ersten Mal erfährt das Europäische Parlament eine tatsächliche Legitimation – gerade dadurch, dass die Europagegner nach scharfem Meinungskampf Sitz und Stimme erlangt haben, um so die schlappen Europafreunde wachzurütteln – und die Böcke von den Schafen trennen. Man fragt sich ja, auf welche Seite eigentlich eine EVP-Fraktion gehört, die sich nicht einmal zu ihrem eigenen Kandidaten Jean-Claude Juncker zu bekennen wagt. Während sich die CDU zu Hause immer noch als europafreundliche Partei aufplustert, denkt deren Parteienfamilie im Europaparlament offensichtlich nicht daran, „Parteifreunde“ wie die offen europafeindlichen Orbán- und Berlusconi-Abgeordneten aus ihren Reihen auszuschließen.

[For the first time, the European Parliament is experiencing an actual legitimation - precisely thereby, that the enemies of Europe {anti-EU nationalist parties} after a sharp battle of opinions gained a place and a voice, in order to shake the flaccid friends of Europe awake - and to separate the sheep from the goats. One must certainly ask on which side the EPP caucus, which isn't even trying to support its own candidate Jean-Claude Juncker, actually belongs. While at home the CDU puffs up its feathers as a Europe-friendly party, their party family in the European Parliament clearly isn't thinking about removing from their ranks "party friends" like the openly Europe-hostile representatives of Orbán {Hungarian authoritarian conservatives} and Berlusconi {Italian plutocratic conservatives}.]

Italy's social-democratic Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has been making anti-austerity noises recently, which Wolfgang Münchau seems to take seriously. (Stunde der Schuldenmacher Spiegel Online 26.05.2014) "Renzi weiß, dass er nicht gleichzeitig sparen und reformieren kann." ("Renzi knows that one cannot at the same time pursue austerity policies and put through reforms.") Just how seriously Renzi is about opposing Merkel's austerity drive remains to be seen. It's a surprise to see he's doing this much.

Renzi over the weekend announced his, not opposition, but skepticism to Juncker as EU Commission President. As Ian Traynor reports for The Guardian, Italy's Matteo Renzi joins stand against Jean-Claude Juncker for European post 06/01/2014:

On Sunday, the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, signalled that Juncker may not be acceptable to him. And after losing the elections in France to the far-right Front National, François Hollande is also said to oppose Juncker, allegedly telling the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, that the job should go to the French, preferably his former finance minister Pierre Moscovici.

Merkel, Europe's most powerful leader, is seen as the pivotal figure in seeking a compromise over the commission post. She has remained equivocal over Juncker's prospects, although formally, as Germany's Christian Democratic leader, she supports him.

On Renzi's position, see also Lizzy Davies, Is Matteo Renzi the man to save Europe's soul?
The Guardian 05/31/2014; Andrea Bachstein, "Wir sehen Deutschland nicht als Gegner, sondern als Vorbild" Süddeutsche Zeitung 31.05.2014.

Renzi seems to be tying his reserve on Juncker's EU Commission Presidential candidacy to his anti-austerity gestures. I want to see more before I start sharing Münchau optimsim about hims. As Davies notes, "His critics say it has barely begun, and, where it has, for instance in modest labour reform, it threatens to change the country for the worse, not the better." Althoug in the article she links, the grumping seems to be about Renzi not doing enough to push down living standards, which is a major goal of what is called "reform" in the neoliberal vocabulary: Gavin Jones, Italy's modest labor reform shows Renzi's momentum faltering Reuters 05/15/2014. If by "faltering" that means he's not doing enough to promote destructive neoliberal austerity, that's may be a good sign!

In any case, Habermas thinks it would be a very bad thing if neither of the two leading candidates were actually selected for the EU Commission Presidency. "Wenn diese Runde wirklich eine andere Person als einen der beiden Spitzenkandidaten vorschlagen sollte, würde sie das europäische Projekt ins Herz treffen." ("If this round really puts forward another person besides one of the two leading candidates, that would strike at the heart of the European project.")

Although Habermas has no sympathy for the xenophoblic program of the actual anti-Europe rightwing nationalist parties, he does encourage the supporters of the EU to think carefully about the strong performance of such parties in the EP election:

Ich finde es gut, dass die Europagegner ein Forum gefunden haben, auf dem sie den politischen Eliten die Notwendigkeit vor Augen führen, die Bevölkerungen selbst endlich in den Einigungsprozess einzubeziehen.

Der Rechtspopulismus erzwingt die Umstellung vom bisherigen Elitemodus auf die Beteiligung der Bürger. Das kann dem europäischen Parlament und seinem Einfluss auf die europäische Gesetzgebung nur guttun. Anders verhält es sich mit den Auswirkungen auf die nationalen Szenen in den Mitgliedstaaten. Hier mag in einigen Ländern die Gefahr entstehen, dass sich politische Parteien einschüchtern lassen und auf einen Anpassungskurs à la CSU umschwenken.

[I take it as a good thing that the opponents of Europe have found a forum in which they are bringing before the eyes of the political elites the necessity of finally bringing the population itself into the unity process.

Rightwing populism requires the adjustment of the elite mode up until now on the participation of the citizens. That can only do good {!!} for the European Parliament and European lawmaking. There is a different effect with the implications in the national scenes in the member states. Here there could develop the danger in some countries that political parties could allow themselves to be frightened and veer toward a course of accommodate à la the CSU.]

The CSU is the especially conservative, traditionalist Bavarian sister party of the CDU, which normally acts together with the CDU on the national level. They are known for resorting to anti-immigrant demagoguery and other hardline gestures to prevent any party from developing political strength to their right.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, italy, jürgen habermas, matteo renzi