- ‘S’ is for Slander (‘P’ is for Palestine) Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
- Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War Fearon & Laitin, APSR
- John Locke and the Hebrew Bible David Conway, Law & Liberty
- Trading with the enemy: An American tradition Murray Rothbard, LRC
Some lessons from Brazil
Jair Bolsonaro has been in government for almost six months now. I believe I can proudly say that I saw this coming before many people: Bolsonaro would be the next president in Brazil. However, he might not be the best person for the job.
In my assessment, Bolsonaro is not the usual politician. As John Mearsheimer brilliantly observed, politicians lie. A lot. It should be a given: dogs bark, cats climb on trees, and politicians lie. Bolsonaro, as far as I can tell, doesn’t. And that might be part of the problem: he always speaks his mind. Nothing is concealed, even when strategy might call for that.
In the past week, Bolsonaro sent an open letter to some of his followers (not written by him) manifesting how hard it is to govern Brazil. The letter sounds like a vent for the president’s frustration: “You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain”. But what Bolsonaro means by all that is not clear. For all sorts of reasons, corruption is a living part of Brazilian politics. Actually, of politics in general, just a little more down there. So why the president sounds surprised by that?
Some people in the press speculated that Bolsonaro plans a coup. Call that it is impossible to govern with the current congress and just close it. To be sure, that is not unthinkable, and Brazil has historical precedents for that. But that doesn’t sound like something that Bolsonaro would do. Sounds more like that he is trying to bypass Congress and govern with direct popular support.
Brazilian congress is fabulously corrupt, and Bolsonaro still enjoys great popularity. Maybe he wants to use that to press Congress for the changes Brazil needs. In any case, it is a good opportunity to remember some lessons: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Or, in other words, if men were angels, we wouldn’t need government. And if we were governed by angels, we wouldn’t need checks and balances. But we are not governed by angels. Therefore, checks and balances are necessary. The downside is that this makes the government slow when important changes are necessary. The temptation is to close democratic institutions and just do things the old fashion way: through a dictatorship. I don’t think that is where Brazil is going right now. But it’s important to remember that we need way more than a president. We need people who really understand and appreciate freedom. An uneducated people on these matters will always grow impatient and vote for an easy solution.
Nightcap
- A girl’s place in the world William Buckner, Quillette
- Why do we teach girls that it’s cute to be scared? Rick Weber, Notes On Liberty
- Reflections on Westeros Livio Di Matteo, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative
- The persistence of racism in Arabic literature Mona Kareem, Africa is a Country
Liberalism & Jewish Emancipation
Crossposted at Liberal Currents
How did religious freedom first emerge? This is the theme of Persecution & Toleration (CUP, 2019). Here I focus on one part of this question: how did Jews obtain civic rights?
Antisemitism has a long history in Europe. Elsewhere, I discussed its institutional foundations in the Middle Ages. But even as pogroms and antisemitic violence waned, disabilities and restrictions on Jews remained in place. It was not until the 19th century that most were removed in Western European countries. In Persecution and Toleration, Noel Johnson and I argue that this discrimination reflected the political economy of fragile states. Religious freedom was impossible in weak states reliant on religious legitimacy. But this doesn’t answer the question: How did this discrimination end? How did we get religious freedom?
The struggle for Jewish emancipation was a long one. When it finally took place it was closely associated with the emergence of modern liberal states. It was only once the institutional basis for political authority had changed that granting Jews full civil rights became feasible or even conceivable.
Here I will focus on the removal of Jewish disabilities in England. And in particular, I’ll focus on one paradigmatic statement of religious liberty that Thomas Babington Macaulay made in Parliament in 1829 in favor of ending all civil disabilities on Jews. As a statement of religious freedom and liberalism more generally, it is sadly neglected.
Jews faced restrictions on their ability to settle, reside, work and practice their religion in all European societies before 1800. These societies were governed by religion-based identity rules, rules that treated individuals differently based on their religious faith. Britain was relatively liberal; when Jews settled in England following their invitation by Oliver Cromwell in 1655, they were free of most of the discriminatory legislation that burdened them across continental Europe. In particular, they were free of the onerous residency or marriage restrictions that burdened many communities. Nevertheless, they were excluded from political power and from occupations such as the law, government service, and the universities. They lacked religious freedom.
Attaining full religious liberty was a decades-long struggle. Even after disabilities were removed from dissenting Protestants and from Catholics, there was opposition to allowing Jews to sit in Parliament, to graduate from Oxford or Cambridge, or to serve as judges.
Understanding where this opposition came from one requires appreciating how religion upheld political order, even in a society as apparently modern as 18th-century England. Restrictions on dissenters, Catholics, or Jews did not only reflect simple prejudice. Britain was a Protestant nation. Loyalty to the state was inseparable from loyalty to the Protestant Settlement of 1689. The Church of England was a bulwark of the Constitution. Privileges and economic rents were monopolized by the Anglican elite. Catholics, Methodists, Quakers, and Jews were tolerated — they were largely free as private citizens — but they were kept away from political power.
Overturning this required a new basis for political authority. As discussed in an earlier piece on Catholic emancipation by the early 19th century the threat of militant Catholicism had receded while the Church of England was itself a diminished force. Meanwhile, the narrow oligarchic post-1689 settlement was being challenged. British elites were forced to reimagine the sources of political legitimacy.
One of the first to do so was Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859). As an MP, Macaulay was an establishment figure and no radical. But the view of government he laid out was fundamentally different than what had animated his predecessors. It was a secular and liberal view of the role of the state, in which identity rules based on religion had no place. It was in his view only “because men are not in the habit of considering what the end of government is, that Catholic disabilities and Jewish disabilities have been suffered to exist so long”.
“We hear of essentially Protestant governments and essentially Christian governments, words which mean just as much as essentially Protestant cookery, or essentially Christian horsemanship. Government exists for the purpose of keeping the peace, for the purpose of compelling us to settle our disputes by arbitration instead of settling them by blows, for the purpose of compelling us to supply our wants by industry instead of supplying them by rapine. This is the only operation for which the machinery of government is peculiarly adapted, the only operation which wise governments ever propose to themselves as their chief object.”
Macaulay is outlining a liberal, non-heroic, instrumental, view of government. The state is not a project or painting; it is a mechanism for resolving disputes peacefully and facilitating social cooperation. It is a tool meant to serve specific practical purposes rather than a religion or work of art meant to fulfill a symbolic or spiritual need.
Accept this liberal view of the state and the rest of the case for religious freedom follows. As Macaulay put it:
“The points of difference between Christianity and Judaism have very much to do with a man’s fitness to be a bishop or a rabbi. But they have no more to do with his fitness to be a magistrate, a legislator, or a minister of finance, than with his fitness to be a cobbler. Nobody has ever thought of compelling cobblers to make any declaration on the true faith of a Christian. Any man would rather have his shoes mended by a heretical cobbler than by a person who had subscribed all the thirty-nine articles, but had never handled an awl. Men act thus, not because they are indifferent to religion, but because they do not see what religion has to do with the mending of their shoes. Yet religion has as much to do with the mending of shoes as with the budget and the army estimates. We have surely had several signal proofs within the last twenty years that a very good Christian may be a very bad Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
Why did this argument, which seems natural to us, shock Macaulay’s contemporaries? Israel Finestein observed that in “their view it was precisely the religious difference which unfitted the Jew to be a legislator in a Christian country. To them, Macaulay’s argument was dogmatic, even irrational and certainly question-begging”.
Herbert Butterfield observed that
“Those who are interested in the way in which liberty came to emerge will find themselves safeguarded against certain types of error if they will keep in mind that they are looking at the actions and purposes of men as these appear in retrospect — they are making their observations from the hither side of a great transition” (Butterfield, 1977, 574).
Macaulay’s liberal view of the state made sense only on the other side of this transition. It presupposed a state that had moved from religion-based identity rules to general rules. And this transition, as we discuss in Persecution and Toleration, is the bedrock of modern liberal society.
Of course, once emancipated Jews excelled in numerous fields of endeavor and European society at large reaped huge economic and cultural benefits. Emancipation also had a transformative effect on Jewish communities themselves, giving rise to both the liberal Reform Judaism movement and to various strands of Orthodoxy. But emancipation also provoked a backlash.
Though the transition from identity rules to general rules and the attendant rise of modern liberal societies and of economic growth brought huge net benefits, there were many losers – individuals who lost relative status as industrialization reordered the economic order. Many blamed the Jews, who were seen as the greatest beneficiaries of the new liberal order.
Modern antisemitism arose in the late 19th century just as the last restrictions on Jews were being removed. In Bavaria, for instance, emancipation was opposed by a petition of citizens from the town of Hilders who did not wish to “humble themselves before the Jews” (Hayes, 2017, 23).
Liberalism has remained resilient in countries like Britain or the United States where its institutional and cultural foundations were strong, but it is not irreversible. To preserve these foundations it is helpful to remember where they made. From that perspective, the case of Jewish emancipation is both instructive and cautionary.
References
Butterfield, Herbert, “Toleration in Early Modern Times,” Journal of the History of Ideas,
1977, 38 (4), 573–584.
Finstein, Israel “A Modern Examination of Macaulay’s Case for the Civil Emancipation of the Jews.” Transactions & Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England), vol. 28, 1981, pp. 39–59.
Hayes, Peter (2017). Why? Explaining the Holocaust. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.
Johnson, Noel D and Mark Koyama. Persecution and Toleration (Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society) ( Cambridge University Press.
Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review, 5th ed. in 3 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848). Vol. 1
Nightcap
- History is more important than ever Regina Munch, Commonweal
- Bad news for Democrats Scott Sumner, MoneyIllusion
- Conversational maps Chris Shaw, Libertarian Ideal
- Democracy and its discontents Adam Tooze, NY Review of Books
Those revenue-raising early central banks
In a piece on a rather different topic, George Selgin, director for the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and editor-in-chief of the monetary blog Alt-M, gave a somewhat offhand comment about the origins of central banks:
For revenue-hungry governments to get central banks to fund their debts is itself nothing new, of course. The first central banks were set up with little else in mind. (emphasis added)
Writing about little else than (central) banks in history, you can imagine my surprise:
Reasoned response: Selgin ought to know better than buying into this simplified argument.
Less reasoned response, paraphrasing one of recent year’s most epic tweets: you come into MY house?!
Alright, let’s make a quick run-through, then. Clearly, some simplification and lack of attention to nuances is permissible under the punchy poetic licenses of the economic blogosphere – especially so when the core of an argument lies elsewhere. But the conviction that early central banks
(a) were created as revenue-raising devices for their governments, or
(b) all central banks provided their governments with direct fiscal benefits,
is a gross simplification of a much broader and much more diverse history of early public banks. Additionally, the misconception entails what Italian banking scholar Curzio Giannini derisively referred to as overly-narrow “fiscal theor[ies] of central banks”. Since too many people believe some version of the argument, let’s showcase the plethora of early central banks and illustrate their diverse experiences.
Initially, the banks-as-fund-raisers argument may seem reasonable; a few proto-central banks definitely were set up with this purpose in mind, with the Bank of England’s series of monopoly charters beginning in 1694 as the prime example. David Kynaston, the great historian of the Bank, eloquently characterized the relation between the government and the Bank as a ‘ritualistic dance’ in light of the periodic renewals of its monopoly charter; the Bank provided the government with funds and in return received some new privilege in addition to lucrative interest payments.
Among the dozen or so other candidates reasonably fitting the description “first central banks”, we see a wide variety of purposes, not all of which were principally – or even at all – concerned with funding their governments.
Banco di San Giorgio (Genoa, 1407), was essentially a precursor of money market funds with investors holding the City state’s debt and receiving taxing rights. Here, as in many of the northern Italian city-state banks of the 14th and 15th century, the banks-as-fund-raisers argument seems applicable (we might mention others here too, like the Catalonian Taula de Canvi, 1401, that is often considered the first public bank). Whether or not these first generation banks may be counted as “central banks” is much less doubtful, but a topic for another day.
Amsterdam Wisselbank (1609), a much-studied institution and a trailblazer in the history of central banking, was primarily set up to facilitate payments, specifically to simplify the chaotic muddle of coins and payment methods that abounded in the Low Countries during the 1500s and 1600s. The Bank’s lending was circumscribed, and the lending that did take place often went to the Dutch East India Company – of course, we might argue that the Dutch East India Company, with its directors appointed by the Dutch provinces, actually constituted an arm of the government and so counting this lending as government financing. Besides, the City only began using the Wisselbank for financing purposes firstly through a loan in the 1650s and then more frequently towards the end of the 17th century. Regardless, those are (decades removed) outcomes – not initial purposes.
Hamburger Bank (1619) was similarly set up with monetary stabilization in mind and adopted many of the features of the Wisselbank. Contrary to the Wisselbank, it had a credit department that right away engaged in lending to private parties on collateral. However, it seems that most of its funds were lent to the Kämmerei (municipality treasury). In economists William Roberds and Francois Velde’s account, the
problems with circulating coinage in early seventeenth-century Hamburg were, if anything, worse than in Amsterdam.
A partial vindication, at best, for the banks-as-fund-raisers argument since the Hamburger Bank was clearly set up with monetary stabilization in mind rather than government financing. In practice, however, it did finance the city.
The Riksbank: (Stockholm, 1668). Picking up from its failed predecessor ‘Stockholms Banco’, what later became known as Sveriges Riksbank (frequently credited with being the first – surviving – central bank) was tasked with facilitating trade and upholding the value of the domestic currency. In practice, this meant influencing the foreign exchanges as they stood in Hamburg or Amsterdam. Initially, the bank was explicitly prohibited from extending funds to the crown (in early 2019 there has emerged a dispute over this point among some Swedish financial historians). What is clear is that for the first fifty years or so of the bank’s existence, the rule seems to have mostly held up; not until the Great Northern Wars in the early 1700s did the Riksbank to any meaningful extent advance funds to the government.
Bank of Scotland (1695) and the Royal Bank of Scotland (1727), were both – a bit like the Riksbank – chartered to advance and improve the functioning of the domestic economy, and they were prohibited from lending to the crown. Despite the well-known political conflicts leading to the chartering of the Royal Bank, the Scottish case of rivaling banks were clearly created to advance the North Sea trade, not to finance the government or manage its debt. The third chartered Scottish bank, the British Linen Company (1745) was formed in order “to carry on the linen manufactory”. As is often the case in banking history, the Scottish case might thus be the clearest counterpoint to an argument. Further, the Scottish banking historian Sydney Checkland pointed out that the Bank of Scotland was “solely dependent on private capital, and […] wholly unconnected with the state.”. Again, the No True Central Bank objection might be raised, but it would send us tumbling into a dark definitional hole that has to wait for another time.
Banco del Giro/Wiener Stadtbank (Vienna, 1703 and 1705) were both established as a result of “the poor state of Austrian public finance” Like in Venice and Genoa, the banks were meant to enhance the liquidity of the government’s debt, actively contributing to reducing the State’s and the City’s interest rates respectively – and then gradually pay back their debt. While both banks did accept private deposits, and like its Hamburg and Dutch predecessors facilitated payments through their ledgers, these operations were clearly not their prime purposes. Money-raising argument vindicated.
This brief overview of some early central banks illustrate the point: banking history contains much wider experiences than a simplified money-raising argument implies. Indeed, even the First Bank of the United States – clearly an aspiring candidate to the title of ‘first’ central banks’ – seems to primarily have had trade-enhancing and economic development purposes in mind. This I say much hesitantly, since early American banking is definitely not my forte and I fully expect Selgin (and others) to correct me here.
Regardless, to claim that early (central) banks were set up with government finance in mind, is clearly an overstatement.
___
The title is a play on my favorite of George Selgin’s many brilliant articles, ‘Those dishonest goldsmiths’.
For the record, George Selgin is well-versed in this literature, and I’m merely using his quote as a stand-in for a common conviction among the not-so-well informed academic crowd.
Nightcap
- Why are economists wrong so often? Peter Coclanis, Aeon
- Civilization and urbanization Nick Nielsen, Grand Strategy Annex
- Rethinking how imperialism works Joseph Stieb, War on the Rocks
- Social warfare Mary Lucia Darst, NOL
Nightcap
- How inequality makes us poorer Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
- The ancient Persians had epics, too Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books
- Showdown in Berkeley Rick Brownell, Medium
- Three suicides and a funeral (the Soviets) Jarrod Hayes, Duck of Minerva
Nightcap
- Populism and American political institutions Michael Zuckert, National Affairs
- The Fed’s shifting goalposts George Selgin, Alt-M
- Tariffs can be deflationary Scott Sumner, MoneyIllusion
- Rashida Tlaib and the allure of shiny objects Michael Koplow, Ottomans & Zionists
Bourgeois III: Values in real-life
Today, there is a rising commercialization, a commodification of the character traits of the bourgeois. This in turn is leading toward a worldview in which bourgeois behavior is a “privilege,” instead of simply being an expectation of a civilized society. As part of such a change, the bourgeois, the real middle-class as exemplified by a set of genuine values and behaviors, not just income or the terrible Marxist clichés from authors such as Christina Stead (The Man Who Loved Children), have moved from being the group of idealized role-models to being portrayed as a slightly deviant clique. Now, words such as “censorious,” “sanctimonious,” “privileged [again],” “hectoring,” and “judgmental” are routinely thrown around concerning those of bourgeois persuasion by pundits and the commentariat on both sides of the political aisle.
In 1960, psychologist Dr. Walter Mischel led the famous (or infamous depending on social leanings) marshmallow experiment. A young child, observed by researchers and parent(s), was left alone in a room deliberately devoid of stimulation outside of a candy marshmallow. The researcher who took the child into the room would tell the child he/she could eat the marshmallow but would promise a gift of two marshmallows if upon the adult’s return two minutes later, the original piece of candy was uneaten. Needless to say, once the researcher left the room, the majority of children promptly ate the thing.
Mischel checked on them when they were teenagers and then located a smaller segment when they were almost 50 – those who had displayed deferred gratification had more successful lives than those who had gobbled the first marshmallow. Starting in 1990, when Mischel published the results of both the original test and the teenage checkup and revealed that those with self-control had achieved higher SAT scores and therefore received admission into the best universities, his work came under fire from the social justice coterie. The reason was that the results were an indictment of the difference in the parenting style of the majority, i.e. the single marshmallow gobblers, and the disciplined minority. In a logical world, the results should be cause for celebration because the two-marshmallow children came neither from a racially homogenous group nor from elite backgrounds, though the fact that the majority had one professional parent has formed a large part of “but the experiment is socially discriminatory” argument.
The crux of the rejection is the evidence that the two-marshmallow children entered the experiment room having already learned self-control from their parents, while the candy wolfers had not. In an attempt to debunk Mischel’s study, a group of psychological researchers redid the experiment, publishing the results in 2018, with a larger sample and a thorough study of the home environments of the subjects. Instead discrediting Mischel, the second study upheld the macro principles of his work; those who did best on the “new and improved” version were children who came from homes with large numbers of books and had very attentive, responsive parents. In other words, two-marshmallow children came from a different type of family than was, or is, standard. Crucially, the study found that the culturally impoverished, those with money and possibly advanced degrees but no books, did not do significantly better than those from financial poverty, with both groups producing marshmallow snatchers. On an interesting side note on the book divide, parental attention did not seem to make much of a difference, though it is possible that this is because the book-readers were also the better parents – the language is a little ambiguous on this point.
The Atlantic, for example, more or less gloated that Mischel and co.’s unconscious snobbishness had finally been unmasked to the world:
There’s plenty of other research that sheds further light on the class dimension of the marshmallow test. The Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the Princeton behavioral scientist Eldar Shafir wrote a book in 2013, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, that detailed how poverty can lead people to opt for short-term rather than long-term rewards; the state of not having enough can change the way people think about what’s available now. In other words, a second marshmallow seems irrelevant when a child has reason to believe that the first one might vanish. [….]
These findings point to the idea that poorer parents try to indulge their kids when they can, while more-affluent parents tend to make their kids wait for bigger rewards. Hair dye and sweet treats might seem frivolous, but purchases like these are often the only indulgences poor families can afford. And for poor children, indulging in a small bit of joy today can make life feel more bearable, especially when there’s no guarantee of more joy tomorrow.
It is important to note that Mischel’s critics completely distorted his findings. At no point did he claim one group was superior to the other in any sense. Nor, did he claim, as is often misrepresented, that “character was everything.” These were all things impugned to him by opponents. All he did was prove that patience and self-restraint at age five (the approximate age of his subjects) tended to translate into disciplined, high-achieving high school students.[1]
The real rub of the marshmallow test is that it forced recognition of the fact that different child-rearing methods convey value sets, and that these values can be a determining factor in success or failure. They have the potential to translate into material, cultural, and social capital, or to reveal the lack of these things to the world. To make things worse, from a social justice standpoint, the experiments appear to demonstrate that values of the upper echelons are better because they have consistently produced the same results.
The excuse-seeking used by The Atlantic author, such as hair dye and sweets, is recognizable to anyone who has read George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier because the logic’s template is his chapter on the dietary habits of the northern English working-class in the 1930s. What isn’t shown is Orwell’s own honesty. While he gave his subjects a pass on spending eight pounds[2] on sugar, as the only affordable indulgence, he excoriated them for spending on tinned corn beef and dried milk when fresh meat and dairy was both readily available and were much, much cheaper. For him, it was one of the little ironies in the social fabric that the middle-class, who preferred fresh products, lived cheaper and better than the working-class, whom he suspected bought canned meat and desiccated milk out of some misplaced notion that this was what the middle-class ate exactly because cans and boxes were more expensive.
In his book The Wealth of Humans: Work and Its Absence in the Twenty-First Century, journalist-economist Ryan Avent wrote on the subject of social capital:
Wealth has always been sociable. The long process of cultural development that eventually yielded the industrial revolution was in many ways the process by which humanity learned ever better ways of structuring society in order to foster the emergence of complex economic activity. Wealth creation in rich economies is nurtured by a complex system of legal institutions (such as property rights and the courts that uphold them), economic networks (such as fast and efficient transportation and access to scientific communities and capital markets) and culture (such as conceptions of the ‘good life’, respect for the law, and the status accorded to those who work hard and become rich). No individual can take credit for this system; it was built and is maintained by society.
Avent is absolutely correct, especially in terms of this as the essence of a capitalist society. To return to the marshmallow test and its subjects, if one divides society into snatchers and waiters and then looks at Avent’s behavioral traits, such as “respect for the law,” or values – “property rights” – one immediately sees that one of the two groups is going to fare much better than the other. This is not because one group is inherently superior to the other; no, the difference is that one group received the value system, and therefore social capital, necessary to function acceptably in a capitalist system. The other did not.
Training the values to be functional in a capitalist system has nothing to do with society at large, and everything to do with the family. That said, society does play a role in terms of upholding bourgeois values, but modern American society has, as previously indicated, not only disincentivized such values but has come to stigmatize them as unacceptable. Up next: examples of the bourgeois family!
[1]Officially, he has not directly published the results of his check up with the available subjects at age 49; however, the APA report, hyperlinked above, indicates that the two-marshmallow children honored their potential and became successful, fulfilled adults.
[2]He either observed that they spent eight pounds money, or that they bought eight pounds in weight; he was not clear in his wording.
Nightcap
- Plato and teaching foreign policy Luke Perez, Duck of Minerva
- Suicidal elites Joel Kotkin, Quillette
- Debating the far right Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
- Buddhist Hell park Laetitia Barbier, Atlas Obscura
How US foreign policy hurts Christians worldwide
Christians are the most persecuted religious group worldwide. The 20th century produced more Christian martyrs than any other period in history. During a great part of that century, Christians were mostly persecuted by totalitarian regimes in communist countries like the USSR and China. Today persecution still comes from communist governments, such as the ones in China, Cuba and North Korea, but mostly Christians are persecuted in countries where Muslims control the government. With that in mind, I would like to answer two questions: Why is that and can Christians in the West do something about it?
Typically, Christians (and other religious groups) are persecuted by totalitarian governments. The definition of a totalitarian regime is that it can comport no opposition or dissidence. A totalitarian regime is characterized by the attempt to control your whole life, including your religious life. Totalitarian regimes fear losing control over their population. Christians gathering for worship are mistaken for a seditious group. This is the reason why these governments persecute Christians.
Until World War I, US foreign policy was mostly characterized by what is typically defined as isolationism. US presidents since the Founding Fathers understood that Europe was a mess and that the US would do well to keep away from political entanglements with it. This changed with Woodrow Wilson. Wilson understood that it was the US’ mission to rebuild the World after its own image. With that in mind, he struggled, against the US population, to get the country into World War I.
US involvement in World War I proved to be essential for that war and for all US foreign policy since then. The tendency in Europe, since the 17th century, was for major wars to end with a new power equilibrium. This is not hard science, but pretty much every hundred years Europeans would fight a major war and then rest for another hundred. That was so with the 30 Years War, the War of Spanish Succession, and the Napoleonic Wars. All these conflicts had one thing in common: the emergence of a new great power in Europe moved other countries to balance that power. The tendency, in the end, was equilibrium. That was the case with World War I: the European system was balanced after the Napoleonic Wars. However, towards the end of the 19th century, Germany emerged as a new great power. Other countries allied against it. This scenario was delayed by Otto von Bismarck’s brilliant foreign policy but proved ultimately inevitable.
World War I should end like any other European War since the 17th century: that generation realizes that it is impossible for a single country to dominate the entire continent, diplomats accept the status quo and anyway, everybody becomes war-weary and more inclined to peace. But US intervention prevented that from happening. My hypothesis (that I have no idea how to test) is this: without US intervention, World War I would finish with peace without winners. It would be considered a draw. With US intervention, however, France managed to punish Germany for the War. Germany, on its part, became vengeful against France. England understood that it was better to stay on the other side of the channel. World War I became only the first half of a major conflict that continued some twenty years later with World War II. If in World War I US involvement was optional, in World War II it became inevitable. And after World War II came the Cold War, and the US hasn’t stop ever since.
US involvement in World War I had a number of consequences. German revanchism against France gave way to the rise of Nazism. In Russia, the Bolsheviks rose to power as well. Another effect of World War I was the end of the Turco-Ottoman Empire. Following Woodrow Wilson’s vision, that empire was to be divided into several countries, according to several ethnic groups identified by westerners. In actuality, England and France took the chance to divide the Middle East into several colonies. Christians were persecuted in Nazi-Germany and the USSR. The Middle East is a mess to this day. Before World War I, American missionaries were welcomed in the Turco-Ottoman Empire.
British ones were not, because that empire understood (I suppose correctly) that they would be hard to separate from the imperialist interests of Great Britain. The US mostly took England’s place in this regard. To make matters worse, oil was the fuel of the second industrial revolution that began at the end of the 19th century. Soon after, it was discovered that the Middle East had some of the greatest deposits on the planet. The US became the first world superpower, and to maintain that it needed oil. Lots of oil. It is a vicious cycle.
In sum, I am blaming Woodrow Wilson and his foreign policy for everything bad that happened ever since. The Founding Fathers had a very good foreign policy, that made the US and US citizens welcomed worldwide. Woodrow Wilson broke that pattern, much because he was a liberal Christian who thought that the US role was to make the world democratic by force.
I don’t think it’s too late to change. It might be unthinkable to just withdraw from every international commitment the US has today, but it is definitely time for a gradual change. A world without major US military intervention may be – counterintuitively – a world safer for Christians.
Paris Islamophobia, 2019
Here is a little story that may confuse you for a short while. At least, I hope it does.
The story takes place in the eastern Paris neighborhood where I grew up. It used to be frankly working class. I guess that it may have become a little gentrified but, I guess, not much. It’s at a bus stop next to a large park built over a former 1900 mushroom farm that used the abundant horse manure then available in Paris. (That’s another story told in my book of memoirs, I Used to be French…. Ask me.)
Anyway, two youngish women are waiting for a bus in broad daylight. When one shows up, they signal for it to stop. The bus slows down and then speeds away. It’s stopped shortly at a red light. One of the women runs to it, pounds on the door, and demands to know why the driver did not stop to pick her and her girlfriend up. “You should dress better,” responds the driver motioning at her short skirt.
The next day, a man tried to place a formal complaint with the Paris Transport Authority (“RATP”). His name is Kamel Bencheikh; he is one of the young women’s father. He is a well-known Algerian poet who writes in French. I don’t know if he is a French citizen but he seems to live in France. He demands exemplary punishment for the driver.
The Transport Authority announced publicly that it would investigate the alleged incident as a violation of driver’s rules. It added that its hands were mostly tied in the absence of contact with the two young women – including Bencheikh’s daughter – who were the victims in the reported incident. The daughter is 29.
Bencheikh took the opportunity to announce to the media that he claims forcefully his Islamophobia.
Nightcap
- Who lost Czechoslovakia? Benn Steil, History Today
- How the Black Death changed Europe’s cities Jedwab, Johnson, and Koyama, Voxeu
- Victorian England and the Japanese Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books
- Solzhenitsyn and the human spirit Daniel Mahoney, Modern Age
Ok, Americans – here is your Eurovision Guide
“Euro-what?” I hear you ask. Great! Set your coffee aside for a few minutes and indulge in a much-required and long-overdue cultural enlightenment.
Eurovision Mania is on, so you better get with it!
Eurovision Song Contest, or “Eurovision”, is an annual music competition that’s been running since 1956 and every year sees some 40 countries participating. And it’s massive. Every participating country selects an original song – usually through some kind of nationally televised show – with an associated live performance and all those entries get to perform in front of tens of thousands of ecstatic Eurovision fans from across the globe.
In short, it’s basically American’s Got Talent merged with The Voice – but structured a bit like Miss U.S.A – with tons more glitter, spex, showtime and glamour and with twice(!) the audience of SuperBowl. Beat that, ‘Murica.
Yes, that’s some 200 million people lining up their Saturday nights (and the preceeding Tuesday and Thursday too, for semi-finals) for this:
The winner is lavished in eternal fame and glory, and their country’s broadcasting company gets the honor of splashing out on next year’s event. As Israel’s Netta and her song ‘Toy’ won last year’s competition in Libson, Portugal, the 64th version of Eurovision is held in Tel Aviv, Israel, beginning today!
Is Israel European?
Perhaps not, but that’s never stopped Eurovision before. Actually, the event is organized by European Broadcasting Union (EBU), an alliance of public service media companies – and includes associate members such as Australian, Algerian, Jordanian and Lebanon organizations. Thus, the geographical boundaries for entries into Eurovision is somewhat flexible – which is why Australia has competed in the competition since 2015!
That’s also the reason Brexit won’t affect the UK’s participation in Eurovision, thank god!
So, what is this thing – and why have I never heard of it?
Depending on who you ask, Eurovision could be anything between a fabulous celebration of European unity through culture and music, or a dull, wasteful affair of pretty freaky performances. No doubt among the competition’s 1500 entries, it has seen its fair share of strange, quirky, silly and outrageous performances (just google some of them). But it also contains the fanciest, most extravagant dresses and costumes imaginable, friendly rivalry, great music and an outburst of colors. Indeed, a bit like the SuperBowl, the half-time entertainment has been at least as interesting as most of the performances. This year it is even rumored that Madonna is making an appearance!
In other words, across the Atlantic, Eurovision mania has descended and will be this week’s Big Thing. Indeed, at 10 pm local time (3 p.m ET), the first semi-final begins, and the winner usually emerges after a rather complicated voting procedure sometime Saturday night (6 p.m ET).
As for American’s (un)surprising ignorance of the event, it’s even become somewhat of a Youtube phenomena of introducing this long-standing pan-European institution to shockingly unaware Americans and recording their reactions. Some of them are pretty spot-on (“this is the cheesiest of music shows!”). Without passing judgment on the worldy outlooks of Americans, y’all aren’t exactly – erm let’s say – well-versed in the going-ons of places beyond your coasts.
In the Eurovision case, not for lack of trying: in the last few years, Logo actually broadcasted the event, but couldn’t muster more than 50,000-75,000 viewers and so the greatest of European non-sports events won’t be on American TV this year. Hardcore fans (list of international broadcasters) are probably best served by a youtube live-stream.
Of course, the skimpy American coverage by outlets like the New York Times isn’t exactly helping either; their angle of the “Israel-Palestine dispute” compleeeeetely miss the point of Eurovision. The event’s apolitical nature is another thing that makes Eurovision so great: politics is strictly, explicitly, unavoidably relegated to the sidelines. As in political messages and even song lyrics with too definitive political flavors are censured or expelled. For instance, Iceland’s participants this year, the controversial band Hatari, is already challenging this sacred line of No Politics Beyond This Point by their frequent pro-Palestine stunts. Allegedly, they have already been issued a final warning by the organizers; one more political stunt and they’re disqualified.
In sum: Eurovision is the biggest, fanciest, most extravagant and entertaining music event you’ve never heard of. Get on the train. A great start is by watching the recap of this year’s 41 entries.
Notes On Liberty 