We will see

Islamism Fills the Vacuum Left by Socialism

By David Warren

The message that "we will see" is not what readers turn to pundits for; yet it has to be said before proceeding to general observations on the advance of Islamism through the "Arab Spring." Everything I know about the world tells me that what looks like good news often proves lethally bad; and sometimes vice versa. On balance, pessimists place much safer bets.

We have now had the first open general election in Tunisia, in recorded history, won fairly decisively by what the media describe as the "moderate Islamist" party, Ennahda.

Tunisia is where the Arab Spring started, and where it shows most hope. This is largely because the outgoing dictatorship of Zine el Abidine was itself "moderate" by regional standards, and agreed to be ousted with the minimum of fuss.

It was among the more humane Third World dictatorships. This is because those who participated in it seem chiefly to have occupied themselves in making money. Corruption is not good, but it is the least among the many evils to which tyrants are prone; and when it is the consuming focus of their efforts, they are inclined to leave other things alone. They will suppress liberties only to the degree necessary to advance their own financial interests.

Tunisia had, for instance, one of the freest media environments in the region, and the beginning of a semblance of a free-market economy, with conscious government efforts to unknot the strangulating cat's cradle of socialist regulation that had been woven by its founding dictator (the celebrated Habib Bourguiba). The country is still encumbered with counter-productive state enterprises, but had experienced spurts of dramatic growth in the spaces around them.

It was considered a fairly reliable place by foreign investors; and foreign investment does have the effect of raising living standards, or at least wage incomes. Tunisia has been left by its dictatorship with an economy that includes the manufacture of car parts, as well as oil and phosphate extraction. It was a regional model of economic liberalization, achieving many of the things which, for instance, Hosni Mubarak failed to achieve in Egypt, with better opportunities.

One of the marks of economic advance is, alas, a plunging birthrate, and in this respect Tunisia has been at the cutting edge of the Arab world. The demographic doomsayers of the West have overlooked this phenomenon. The same trends that swept the rest of the world are now sweeping through the Muslim realms; last, perhaps, but hardly least with a view to the more distant future.

And, one or two-child families make a huge difference to the form of "Islamism" that is likely to take hold. Tunisians, like Europeans, have become focused upon personal material comfort. The very selfishness that follows from this, subverts any religious appeal. And a competitive economy has the paradoxical effect of enhancing national feeling against religious universality, for people identify with their country as a corporate unit.

The alternative before Tunisia's electorate was a well-organized Islamist party, which cannily identified itself with economic liberalism and social continuities; and a slew of rather dated, left wing parties, identified with no positives and only vaguely with anxieties over Shariah.

At the crudest level, this reflects the situation throughout the Arab world. Islamism presents itself as the only possible future, given political cultures in which secular parties only point toward the "Nasserite" and economically disastrous past. Opposition to Islamism comes from the ideological leavings of past dictatorships, and there has never been an opportunity for secular parties to develop except under this unfruitful shade. Islamism now fills the ideological vacuum left by socialist failures.

But Tunisia may be unique in its relative freedom from the tribal rivalries that rack every other Arab state. It is relatively small, and its population relatively homogeneous. Through relatively high emigration to, and frequent re-immigration from Europe, it is also Europeanized to a greater degree than its neighbours. The Ennahda party has been able to cite the Turkish model with real plausibility. It will now preside over what looks like an intelligently-organized constituent assembly to draft a "moderately Islamist" constitution, with further elections to follow. Good luck to them.

There are no comparable advantages in neighbouring Libya, where the interim government has surprised its gullible NATO allies by making a bid for a Shariah based constitution, before anyone has had the luxury of voting.

There, and elsewhere, the strength and brutality of tribal rivalries will mould Islamism into more coercive forms. I shudder to think what will emerge in Libya, where the model of Somalia now seems most plausible.

And I shudder to think what will happen in Egypt, where the choice is already between a successor military dictatorship, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter aspires not only to rule, but to recover Cairo's ideological hegemony in the Arab world. Egypt's army has already abandoned Mubarak's timid programme of economic liberalization, and the Muslim Brotherhood shows little inclination to take it up.

Luddites oppose free markets

The Real Luddites

By David Harsanyi

Have you noticed that any person who exhibits any skepticism about global warming alarmism will, sooner or later, be called a Luddite?

“Are you a Luddite, a troglodyte? Are you a part of ‘The Planet of the Apes’ that doesn’t want science? Where would you place yourself in this argument?” newscaster and anti-simian Chris Matthews “asked” a congressman a few years back. “Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention,” warned columnist Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post this week.

And so on and so forth.

The Luddites, as you all know, were a 19th-century social movement that protested, often by violent means, the encroachment of the Industrial Revolution on their lives, fearing that it would leave them without their jobs and destroy their communities.

But Luddites weren’t challenging the veracity of some scientific theory; they just weren’t crazy about the options progress offered them.

So global warming skeptics — call them anti-science if you like — are not Luddites. Luddites have an irrational fear of development in a seemingly chaotic world. This is capitalism. Today’s Luddite fears that we have too much energy, too many people, too many choices, too much bad food, too many cheap knickknacks. Today’s Luddite believes that the free movement of money and economic productivity are immoral and that if your slice is too big, someone else’s slice has to be too small.

For example, Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. recently claimed that the iPad was “responsible for eliminating thousands of jobs,” you know, just like the modern-day automated loom. What, he wonders, will happen to “all the jobs associated with paper?” Surely, a remark as deeply juvenile as that one matches anything offered by those wild-eyed skeptics.

Or take President Barack Obama, who earlier this year — and not for the first time — claimed that “structural issues with our economy” have nothing to do with politicians. The problem, in his opinion, is that “a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient,” making the workforce smaller. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM. You don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

Those aren’t structural issues; they are productivity issues. And rather than kill jobs, efficiency drives output and growth and improves performance and the quality of goods and services — along with our lives. Perhaps if this administration weren’t busy trying to create morally pleasing but temporary and unsustainable jobs through bailouts, subsidies and “stimulus,” we could all hit that ATM more often.

Today’s Luddite also adamantly opposes a mythical institution called Wall Street, a place where a few players act illegally, some act recklessly and some team with government to undermine healthy competition. But the vast majority of companies create new technologies, services and products that make modern life possible. If they don’t, they fail.

Or at least they used to.

Luddites on the streets of Manhattan can demonize big oil, big food and big pharma all day long. They can decry profit as if Satan himself invented the notion. Yet when the multinational firm GlaxoSmithKline announces, as it did last week, that it has come up with the first effective vaccine for malaria, you can bet that it would never have happened in the system they propose. And if the vaccine is successful, the company will have done more good for the world than a million marches about the evils of capitalism could ever hope to produce.

What irks Robinson, Matthews and others like them is not that people do not accept “science,” but that they won’t accept the statist solutions tied to that science. Moreover, a Luddite opposes capitalism. A skeptic only asks questions.

Amputating the invisible hand

How To Create Shortages In An Abundant World

By B. Frezza

An old cold war joke asks a Russian, a Pole, an Israeli, and an American the following man-on-the-street question. “Excuse me, what is your opinion of the meat shortage?” Each reply reveals the essence of that country’s political economy at the time. The American’s answer was, “What’s a shortage?”

As we abandon the economic system that made this joke funny (other replies below*), Americans are beginning to experience the sting of shortages firsthand.

Exhibit number one is the crisis faced by many hospitals that can’t get their hands on a growing list of both routine and life-saving drugs. Doctors have resorted to rationing, forcing patients to either go without or use inferior substitutes. Clinical trials are being interrupted, wreaking havoc on the approval of new and more effective drugs. Shady black markets have emerged to fill the gap – a worrying trend given the importance of purity and proper handling. The whole thing has a certain third-world feel to it.

The FDA’s own drug shortage page indicates that 2010 was a record year, and 2011 is on track to be even worse. According to the Drug Shortage Research Center, the number of critical drug shortages, mostly of clinical injectables, has nearly tripled since 2006. The FDA maintains an ever growing list of drugs – including anesthetics, antibiotics, nutritional supplements, and chemotherapy agents – that have all become scarce for reasons that basically boil down to “supply does not meet demand.”

What is going on here?

Congress has held hearings to determine what additional authority should be given to the FDA or other federal agencies, in order to give them more power over manufacturers. The paucity of attempts to understand the root cause of the problem reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of that approach. Dr. Howard Koh, Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, testified that, “industry consolidation, shortages of underlying raw materials, changes to inventory and distribution practices, difficulty in producing a given drug, quality and manufacturing problems, production, discontinuations for business reasons, and unanticipated increased demand” have all come together in a perfect storm.

Funny, but those sorts of challenges occur every day in a wide variety of industries without causing chronic shortages. None of them require a czar in Washington to make their market work. What makes these drugs so special?

No, these are not high priced biologics. They are largely generic drugs. Many have been produced for years, even decades, without any issues. The problem doesn’t seem to be occurring in retail pharmacies, just in hospitals. In fact, shortages are getting worse every year as more drugs come off patent and are replaced by generics.

Don’t look now, but in the world of drug distribution someone amputated the invisible hand.

Supply and demand achieve balance in every other industry, over time and across disparate locations, by adjusting the price. High prices call forth more supply as vendors chase profit opportunities. Excess supply motivates price cuts to clear inventory. Hard-to-service customers in challenging locations pay more to ensure a steady supply. Large volume users command top discounts. The most complex multi-vendor distribution networks operate in a completely distributed, self organizing fashion, products flowing in one direction with information flowing in the other as prices reflect changing conditions. When was the last time you saw a Web page for tracking shortages of wide screen TVs?

Fix prices by government fiat by specifying a certain level of Medicare reimbursement (which also sets a benchmark for private insurers), and the reverse information flow is destroyed. Remove the ability to raise prices when demand exceeds supply and shortages will follow as sure as night follows day. Policies that keep prices too low for too long incentivize suppliers to exit the business. Consolidation follows, making the supply chain more prone to disruptions. And disruptions become more likely, as prices can’t rise to encourage survivors to invest in updating and maintaining their manufacturing systems.

If you want to see the future of our pharmaceutical industry operating under such a regime, look at some old photos of the South Bronx during the heyday of rent control.

There is no magic here. You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to understand. Adam Smith explained it all back in 1776, the same year thirteen colonies embarked on a unique experiment in freedom coupled with responsibility.

That American experiment is not failing in the health care industry. Rather, it has been abandoned, with worse to come when, and if, Obamacare kicks in. Doctor shortages. Insurance shortages. And now drug shortages. This is the price we are paying as we continue to federalize one sixth of our national economy.

* The Russian man-on-the-street answered, “What’s an opinion?” The Pole, “What’s meat?” And the Israeli, “What’s excuse me?”

Small Businesses Vs Big Government

Better In Rwanda

By IBD Editorial

Commerce: The U.S. has slipped again in world rankings that assess the ease of starting a new business. If we're to bring down our stubbornly high unemployment rate, this trend has to be reversed.

According to the World Bank's "Doing Business 2012" report, America is 13th among 183 countries ranked in the "Starting a Business" category. In the 2011 report, the U.S. ranked 11th. The year before, it was No. 8.

In 2009, the U.S. was ranked No. 6. It was fourth in 2008 and third in 2007.

In the 2012 ranking, the U.S trailed such job creators as Macedonia, Georgia, Rwanda, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Armenia and Puerto Rico, which are ranked No. 6 through No. 12.

Big companies aren't usually founded as multinational corporations. Most begin as small businesses. And it's small businesses — which employ more than half of the domestic nongovernment workforce — that generate the bulk of new employment opportunities.

Our own research shows that small businesses create more than 80% of the new jobs in this country. This isn't some fantasy we've cooked up. It's been confirmed in the New York Times by reporter Steve Lohr, who wrote in September that it's an "irrefutable conclusion" that small businesses are this country's job creators.

"Two-thirds of net new jobs are created by companies with fewer than 500 employees," Lohr wrote, "which is the government's definition of a small business."

But job creation is more than a function of size. Lohr cites a National Bureau of Economic Research report that says the age of a business is the biggest factor.

"Start-ups," says John C. Haltiwanger, a co-author of the study and an economist at the University of Maryland, "are where the job-creation action really occurs."

Yet it's the small and new businesses that are being choked by government policy. The capital gains tax rate on investments held more than a year, Lohr wrote, directly impacts angel investors' role in providing seed capital for startups. This is a rate that the administration wants to hike from 15% to 20% on households earning more than $250,000 a year.

That's just a single instance of poor public policy. There are many more in the 160,000 pages of federal regulation and in the web of state and local rules that squeeze small businesses and start-ups so tightly that they simply cannot hire. Until this burden is lifted, America's jobs problem isn't going to get any better.

Something is amiss

EU referendum: democracy is not a ‘distraction’

 We cannot suspend democratic debate about Europe’s future while watching the political elites bungle the economic crisis.

by Mick Hume

When all of Britain’s elitist, unrepresentative and interchangeable political leaders unite behind an issue in the name of ‘the national interest’, it is a sure sign that something is amiss. Exhibit A: the united front presented by Tory prime minister David Cameron, his Lib Dem deputy Nick Clegg and opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband against the demand for a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the European Union. When this unappealing triumvirate is being cheered on by many in the high-minded media, alarm bells should really be ringing.

The official line from the Lib-Con government and the Labour opposition this week, as party leaders sought to marshal their MPs to vote against the parliamentary motion calling for an EU referendum, was that to have a national debate about the UK’s membership of the EU just now would not be in the national interest; it would be ‘a distraction’ from coping with Europe’s desperate economic and financial problems. As Cameron put in on the day of the vote, ‘it’s the wrong time to have this debate’ because ‘we’re in the middle of dealing with a crisis in the Eurozone’. A referendum now would be ‘rash’.

Turn that front-bench consensus on its head. It is precisely because of the parlous state of the Euro economy, and the paucity of solutions being offered by our rulers, that now is exactly the right time to have a major public debate on the future of the UK and Europe. The real ‘distraction’ that the Euro-elites fear today is democracy.

It was often true that the right-wing’s obsession with Europe through the 1990s could be seen as a side-issue of internal Tory power-struggles and, yes, a distraction from more important economic and political problems. Some of the Conservative MPs who rebelled against Cameron and voted for a referendum on Monday night may still be suffering from those old Little Englander delusions. That does not alter the fact that a public debate about where Europe is heading now – which a referendum campaign would surely facilitate – is needed far more urgently than any private deal among the Euro-elites.

Cameron and his opponents/allies insist that a political conflict over the future of the UK and Europe would get in the way of dealing with the economic and financial crisis. That represents an accountant’s view of the world, where democratic debate is seen as a sort of expensive, time-consuming sideshow while the real decisions on what is necessary are taken by Those Who Know: the experts and authorities operating behind closed doors.

But in truth you cannot so easily separate the question of politics from the economic crisis, as if having our democratic say is somehow at odds with their need to fix the financial system. There is a clear two-way relationship at work here, and we are getting screwed both ways.

First, the economic crisis is being exacerbated by the lack of democracy in the EU. As noted here three weeks ago, if there is one thing that worries the Euro-elites even more than their out-of-control finances these days, it is their uncontrollable electorates. From the first, the isolated and unpopular authorities across Europe have treated the financial crisis as a private affair, to be sorted out by central bankers, International Monetary Fund mandarins, EC bureaucrats and government officials at endless meetings and summits without reference to the electorate.

What has all this high-powered skulduggery achieved? Almost nothing. Europe’s governments and its cliques of unelected officials have proved incapable of doing anything of substance, making a rational decision or reaching an agreement. So paralysed do they appear to be that the latest ‘crucial’ meeting of finance ministers did not even happen. Top-level ‘make or break’ meetings have been declared a failure before they even start, with nobody taking charge and key issues dropping off the agenda.

The absence of democratic life and political conflict around our isolated, insulated, irrational rulers has made a bad economic situation far worse. It means that they are under no external pressure from their constituencies to act decisively. It means that there are no alternative strategies being demanded or debated, no seriously awkward questions being asked about what they are (not) doing and why. As a result they are able to bumble on towards the edge of the precipice, assuring one another that all will be well if they can only hold another summit or stick another few zeroes on the end of the fantasy bail-out fund. The absence of democracy from the Euro-crisis threatens to plunge us all into the gloom of a depression.

And that is only half the problem. The second aspect is that the Euro-elites’ bungling attempts to fix their system are further exacerbating the crisis of democratic politics. The consensus which now reaches almost all parts of the European political class, including even our allegedly Euro-sceptic Tory ministers, is that the financial crisis demands more fiscal integration across the Eurozone – which will put greater power in the hands of the European central bankers and EU accountants, none of whom ever have to dirty their hands in the messy business of democratic politics.

As international officials take effective control of under-pressure economies such as Greece, the (unelected) president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, has already boasted that ‘We can now discuss member states’ budgetary plans before national decisions are taken’, allowing the Euro-crats to bypass parliaments and the public and impose their useless plans. The schemes for creating new financial institutions and central powers now being discussed at the Eurozone’s top table could emasculate European democracy further still. You only need to see the outrage with which the Euro-elite greeted the Slovakian parliament’s rejection of the latest Greek bailout plan (how dare these elected representatives actually represent the will of their people!) to see which way the wind of change is blowing.

The result of all this is that, in the midst of the economic crisis, we need a democratic debate about the future of Europe more than ever. Yet we are assured by all the UK party leaders that anything as grubby as a referendum would be an unwanted distraction from their noble efforts to solve the crisis. It is a remarkable testimony to how far the capitalist economy has been de-politicised. From the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth century, issues to do with how the economy should be organised, how society’s wealth should be produced and distributed, were the great divisive questions of political life. Now major economic matters have effectively been removed from the political agenda to such an extent that the very idea of holding a vote in the EU is seen as being somehow at odds with managing the economy.

There is a pressing need for a public debate not just in the UK but across the EU. A referendum is rarely an ideal vehicle for political change, and no doubt one framed by Tory Euro-sceptics would be in danger of not posing the wider questions we need to discuss. And spiked’s longstanding attitude of being ‘For Europe, Against the EU’ means we do not fit easily into any of the traditional camps.

But the public campaign around a referendum, however it was couched, would at least allow the possibility of forcing open a more democratic debate about the future of Europe. Otherwise we in the UK are not due to be offered a say on anything much until the General Election that Cameron and Clegg have generously timetabled for 2015, when we can choose between all of the fools who united against the ‘distraction’ of democracy this week. And who knows what sort of a desperate mess the increasingly isolated, insulated, unaccountable Euro-elites might have got us into by then?

Praise the globe

Cult of Global Warming Is Losing Influence

By Michael Barone

Religious faith is a source of strength in many people's lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous -- or disastrous.

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered "the great disappointment" when it didn't happen.

In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children's Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn't, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery.

In 1898, the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords, believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren't, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.

A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists.

They have an unshakeable faith that manmade carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate, causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science -- which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Albert Einstein's theory of relativity -- but on something very much like religious faith.

All the trappings of religion are there. Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.

The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.

Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.

Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet-fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.

Corporate elitists, like General Electric's Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not to. And if you're clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.

Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.

But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom -- and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.

If carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate, the global-warming alarmists would be right. But it's obvious that climate is affected by many things, many not yet fully understood, and implausible that SUVs will affect it more than variations in the enormous energy produced by the sun.

Skepticism has been increased by the actions of believers. Passage of the House cap-and-trade bill in June 2009 focused politicians and voters on the costs of global-warming religion. And disclosure of the Climategate emails in November 2009 showed how the clerisy was willing to distort evidence and suppress dissenting views in the interest of propagation of the faith.

We have seen how the United Nations agency whose authority we are supposed to respect took an item from an environmental activist group predicting that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 2350 and predicted that the melting would take place in 2035. No sensible society would stake its economic future on the word of folks capable of such an error.

In recent years, we have seen how negative to 2 percent growth hurts many, many people, as compared to what happens with 3 to 7 percent growth. So we're much less willing to adopt policies that will slow down growth not just for a few years but for the indefinite future.

Media, university and corporate elites still profess belief in global warming alarmism, but moves toward policies limiting carbon emissions have fizzled out, here and abroad. It looks like we'll dodge the fate of the Millerites, the children's crusaders and the Mahdi's cavalrymen.

Good riddance to a bad idea

The End of the Euro?

by Bruce Thornton 

The champions of the European Union once touted it as a “bold new experiment in living” and “the best hope in an insecure age.” But these days “fear is coursing through the corridors of Brussels,” as the B.B.C. reported in September. Such fear is justified, for the nations of Europe are struggling with fiscal problems that challenge the integrity of the whole E.U.-topian ideal. Greece teetering on the brink of default on its debts, E.U. nations squabbling about how to deal with the crisis, debt levels approaching 100 percent of GDP even in economic-powerhouse countries like Germany and France, and European banks exposed to depreciating government bonds are some of the signposts on the road to decline.

A monetary union comprising independent states, each with its own peculiar economic and political interests, histories, cultural norms, laws, and fiscal systems, was bound to end up in the current crisis. All that borrowed money, however, was necessary for funding the lavish social welfare entitlements and employment benefits that once impressed champions of the “European Dream.” Yet, despite the greater fiscal integration created by the E.U., sluggish, over-regulated, over-taxed economies could not generate enough money to pay for such amenities. Now, the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, admits, “We can’t finance our social model.”

This financial crisis means the government-financed dolce vita lifestyle once brandished as a reproach to work-obsessed America is facing cutbacks and austerity programs immensely unpopular among Europeans otherwise used to amenities like France’s 35-hour work week, or Greece’s two extra months of pay, or England’s generous housing subsidies that cost $34.4 billion a year.  No surprise, then, that from Athens’ Syntagma Square to Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, austerity measures attempting to scale back government spending have been met with strikes, demonstrations, boycotts, and protests, some violent, on the part of citizens for whom such government entitlements have become human rights. In fact, such transfers of wealth have been formalized as rights in Articles 34 and 35 of the E.U.’s Charter of Fundamental Human Rights.

Meanwhile, the solutions to the debt crisis all involve solvent Eurozone countries agreeing not just to finance some form of a bailout fund, but to institute even closer fiscal and political integration. This is something the citizens of those nations are loath to do, and sure to punish their politicians for attempting. Just look at Germany, where polls show that two-thirds of Germans oppose further aid for bailouts. The ruling party there has lost six state elections in a row. Or Slovakia, where the average worker earns $1,000 a month, and is in no mood to guarantee the debt of richer nations like Greece or Portugal.

Economically sounder Eurozone countries may approve stopgap measures such as increasing the European Financial Stability Facility by $600 billion, as happened recently. But they will find it politically difficult to cede even more national sovereignty and control over their economies to Brussels in order to find a long-term solution to the structural problems bedeviling the Eurozone economies. As economist Robert Samuelson says of this crisis, “Political paralysis meets economic drift.”

The reason for this paralysis exposes the fundamental flaw underlying the E.U.––the notion that nationalist loyalties and identities could be subordinated to a transnational institution run by elites unaccountable to the citizens. Long before Nazism demonstrated the destructive excesses of nationalism, the idea arose that a “federation of free states,” as Immanuel Kant imagined in his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” could create global peace and order by transcending the zero-sum interests of different states and peoples.

In the nineteenth-century, communication and transport technologies like the telegraph, railroad, and steamship facilitated a global trade and exchange of ideas that seemingly brought people together into a “solidarity which unites the members of the society of civilized nations,” as the Preamble to the First Hague Convention put it in 1899. For many, what Kant called the “progress of the human mind” meant creating a global community of shared values and aims that could be codified in international laws and institutions presumably superior to the parochial cultures, irrational customs, and retrograde values of any individual country or people.

Unfortunately for the idealistic internationalists, the mass of humanity refused to go along with this project. Most people lived and found their identities in the local and particular cultures that they were now supposed to progress beyond. Indeed, from 1914-1918, millions of Europeans slaughtered each other on behalf of those national loyalties. In 1918, G. K. Chesterton explained why:

Nobody has any such ecstatic regard for the mere relations of different people to each other, as one would gather from the rhetoric of idealistic internationalism. It is, indeed, desirable that men should love each other; but always with the recognition of the identity of other peoples and other men. Now, too much cosmopolitan culture is mere praise of machinery. It turns ultimately upon the point that a telegram can be sent from one end of the earth to the other, irrespective of what is in the telegram.

In the end, Chesterton says, “Men care more for the rag that is called a flag than for the rag that is called a newspaper. Men care more for Rome, Paris, Prague, Warsaw than for the international railways connecting these towns.”

Our collective identities and loyalties are necessarily local and distinguished from those of other peoples, an existential fact that no amount of technological advances can change. This means that we want to be ruled by people like us whom we can hold politically accountable. And it means our nation’s interests and aims will necessarily be different from those of other states, and sometimes those different interests will lead to conflict.

After World War I, advocates of transnational integration did recognize the power of national and ethnic self-determination. At the same time, the Versailles Treaty created the supranational League of Nations as an instrument of global peace and order designed to avoid a reprise of the nationalist-driven carnage of the Great War. It enshrined the notion of what Woodrow Wilson called “national aspirations.” The two ideals were contradictory, since sovereign nations were loath to surrender their sovereignty to a body that would at times have to pursue aims contrary to those nations’ interests.

The dismal history of the League in the two decades between the wars, when it failed to stop the escalating state violence that paved the way for World War II, illustrates the truth expressed by George Washington: “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation can be trusted farther than it is bounded by its interests.”

Given this contradiction, then, between national sovereignty and transnational idealism, it is not surprising that the first Kantian “federation of free states,” the League of Nations, and its progeny, the United Nations, both failed at enforcing a global consensus of interests. Each instead degenerated into a forum for states to pursue their own interests. Yet these failures did not inhibit the creation of the E.U., yet another “federation of free states” whose purpose is to subordinate national interests to loftier goals. The current crisis in the monetary union has not led many European leaders to question the flawed assumptions behind greater integration, which limits each state’s own interests and authority, at the same time that those states retain their sovereignty and thus an ultimate veto power over E.U. policy.

Many leaders do understand that the fiscal crisis has put at risk the whole E.U. project. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel recently warned her parliament, “The euro is much, much more than a currency. The euro is the guarantee of a united Europe. If the euro fails, then Europe fails.” Yet rather than question the assumptions behind “a united Europe,” leaders are proposing even more economic and political integration, and short-term fiscal fixes, such as the $600 billion European Financial Stability Facility, which require significant transfers of wealth from successful economies to those near bankruptcy. But as the New York Times writes, both the short-term and long-term solutions “require a sacrifice of sovereignty that seems to exceed the political appetites of European leaders.”

These solutions will not work because what historian Walter Russell Mead calls “national egoism” has not disappeared among the peoples of Europe: “Europeans are debating in European forums today with the same nationalist selfishness that their predecessors did 150 years ago.” Different customs, different values, and different attitudes towards work, leisure, and the good life all derive from the particular histories, geographies, and cultures that define a people and a nation. These differences will not disappear because states share a currency.

Just as dirigiste economics, extravagant state-funded social welfare subsidies, and idealistic internationalism are ideas that were bound to fail, so too is the E.U.—it cannot be fixed. Rather, it is an idea whose time has gone.

Culture, Pop Culture and Recreation

Signs in English around the world

In a Bangkok Temple :

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ENTER A WOMAN, EVEN A FOREIGNER, IF DRESSED AS A MAN.

Cocktail lounge, Norway:
LADIES ARE REQUESTED NOT TO HAVE CHILDREN IN THE BAR.

Doctor's office, Rome :
SPECIALIST IN WOMEN AND OTHER DISEASES.

Dry cleaners, Bangkok :
DROP YOUR TROUSERS HERE FOR THE BEST RESULTS.

In a Nairobi restaurant:
CUSTOMERS WHO FIND OUR WAITRESSES RUDE, OUGHT TO SEE THE MANAGER.

On the main road to Mombasa , leaving Nairobi :
TAKE NOTICE: WHEN THIS SIGN IS UNDER WATER, THIS ROAD IS IMPASSABLE.

On a poster at Kencom:
ARE YOU AN ADULT THAT CANNOT READ? IF SO WE CAN HELP.

In a City restaurant:
OPEN SEVEN DAYS A WEEK AND WEEKENDS.

In a Cemetery:
PERSONS ARE PROHIBITED FROM PICKING FLOWERS, FROM ANY BUT THEIR OWN GRAVES .

Tokyo hotel's rules and regulations:
GUESTS ARE REQUESTED NOT TO SMOKE, OR DO OTHER DISGUSTING BEHAVIOURS IN BED.

On the menu of a Swiss Restaurant:
OUR WINES LEAVE YOU NOTHING TO HOPE FOR.

In a Tokyo Bar:
SPECIAL COCKTAILS FOR THE LADIES WITH NUTS.

Hotel, Yugoslavia:
THE FLATTENING OF UNDERWEAR WITH PLEASURE, IS THE JOB OF THE CHAMBERMAID.

Hotel, Japan:
YOU ARE INVITED TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE CHAMBERMAID. 

In the lobby of a Moscow Hotel, across from a Russian Orthodox Monastery:
YOU ARE WELCOME TO VISIT THE CEMETERY, WHERE FAMOUS RUSSIAN AND SOVIET COMPOSERS, ARTISTS AND WRITERS ARE BURIED DAILY, EXCEPT THURSDAY.

A sign posted in Germany 's Black Forest :
IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN ON OUR BLACK FOREST CAMPING SITE, THAT PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT SEX, FOR INSTANCE, MEN AND WOMEN, LIVE TOGETHER IN ONE TENT, UNLESS THEY ARE MARRIED WITH EACH OTHER FOR THIS PURPOSE.

Hotel, Zurich :
BECAUSE OF THE IMPROPRIETY OF ENTERTAINING GUESTS OF THE OPPOSITE SEX IN THE BEDROOM, IT IS SUGGESTED THAT THE LOBBY BE USED FOR THIS PURPOSE.

Advertisement for donkey rides, Thailand :
WOULD YOU LIKE TO RIDE ON YOUR OWN ASS?

Airline ticket office, Copenhagen :
WE TAKE YOUR BAGS AND SEND THEM IN ALL DIRECTIONS.

A Laundry in Rome :
LADIES, LEAVE YOUR CLOTHES HERE AND THEN SPEND THE AFTERNOON HAVING A GOOD TIME.

And finally the all time classic: Seen in an Abu Dhabi Souk shop window:

IF THE FRONT IS CLOSED PLEASE ENTER THROUGH MY BACKSIDE…

Quote of the Month

Green and Red

[G]reen thinking represents a challenge to the status quo? That's a laughable idea. From schools and universities to every corner of the Western political sphere, the climate-change outlook is the status quo. It's the new conservatism, its aim being to conserve nature at the expense of further developing and transforming society. 

by Brendan O'Neill