- Richard Rorty’s political turn Alan Malachowski, Aeon
- Empathy in political discourse Zak Woodman, NOL
- Stuck between Berlin and Moscow Iulia-Sabina Joja, American Interest
- Stuck between Berlin and Paris Posaner, Gurzu, and Tamma, Politico EU
Germany
Nightcap
- Gilets Jaunes and the age of commuter democracy Andrew Smith, Age of Revolutions
- Victor Klemperer’s dispatches from interwar Germany Peter Gordon, the Nation
- Harold Demsetz (1930-2019) and UCLA price theory Peter Boettke, Coordination Problem
- The rise and fall of the British nation Richard Davenport-Hines, Times Literary Supplement
Eroding norms and political transformation: A new chance for liberty?
The Hammelsprung
Usually, the debates in Germany’s highest political body – The Bundestag – right before Christmas are not that exciting for the public. Parliamentarians are exhausted from long nights and intense discussions from the past weeks. But on Friday the 14th December, the last scheduled plenary session this year, something remarkable happened in the Bundestag, symbolically standing for the erosion of political norms, which democracies experience for a few years. The topics this day were not too fascinating – they discussed how to make the country more appealing to top-level researchers and if fixed book prices should be abolished. Not trifling, but nothing too crucial either.
But around noon the right-wing party AfD decided to initiate a Hammelsprung. The Hammelsprung is a control mechanism to ensure two crucial things.
First, it can be used to achieve absolute clearness of a voting result. Since the counting of votes mostly takes place via counting hands, a Hammelsprung can help to bring about a final decision in close polls. The process is relatively old-fashioned and quite funny in my opinion: The parliamentarians have to get out of the plenary hall first and then reenter through doors labeled “Yes,” “No,” and “Abstention” while an official counts these votes loudly.
Second, it is a tool to assure that crucial decisions of the parliament are made by a majority of the parliamentarians. If a parliamentary group has doubts that more than half of the parliament’s members are present to an assembly, it can propose a Hammelsprung to determine the exact amount of parliamentarians present. If there are less than half of the parliamentarians present, the parliament does not have a quorum and thus the parliamentary session gets canceled.
How the parliament works
At this point, it is important to mention that the German parliament is a working parliament rather than a debating one (such as the British house of commons). Hence, most of the parliamentary work takes place in exclusive committees. These committees consist of members from each party and are all dedicated to certain political topics such as defense policy, health policy and so on and so forth. Parties look for alliances to back up their policy proposals within these committees. Thus, the majority ratios regarding political proposals are played out not in the big parliamentary debates, but in rather small expert working groups. So one can expect that what gets resolved within a committee, gets resolved in the parliament as well.
These committees meet simultaneously to the parliamentary debates. On top, a parliamentarian has to inform himself, manage his team, be present in his election district and many more things. So it is impossible for him to be present in every parliamentary session. So over the years the norm established, that not every member of parliament need to be physically present during the parliamentary session, but only the experts in the certain relevant subject. During their election campaign, the AfD aggressively attacked this particular norm by labeling parliamentarians of established parties as “lazy” and “self-indulgent”, referring to the many empty seats during parliamentary debates.
A battle against norms and the establishment
The AfD used the Hammelsprung on Friday the 14th December in the second meaning mentioned above: To enforce a cancellation of the parliamentary session regarding the acquisition of top-level researchers. This was not a topic related move to ensure the necessary quota, it was rather yet another milestone in the ongoing battle against existing norms. We can say this for certain because AfD didn’t even re-enter the hall: they purposely stayed outside in order to enforce a cancellation of the session. Alexander Gauland, the party whip of the AfD, explained that they wanted to show that the AfD wants to give the government a “hard time” and added: “He that will not hear must feel.” This can be seen as an act of revenge against the parliament because the AfD’s candidate for the vice presidency of the Bundestag failed to get elected a second time in a row. Contrary to their expectations, enough parliamentarians somehow made their way quickly enough into the parliament to reach the quota necessary to proceed with the debate.
How norms foster social cohesion
But the danger remains: There are several tools populist parties (right or left wing) can use to impede effective governing within a perfectly legal framework. This development is not at all a specifically German one. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt provide an in-depth description of the erosion of norms in the American political system in their book How Democracies Die. According to their theory, functioning democracies do not only rely on a thought-out constitution and functioning political organs but also on shared norms. The most important norms for Ziblatt & Levitsky are mutual tolerance and forbearance.
Mutual tolerance describes the recognition of the political enemy as an opposed actor instead as an existential threat to the country. Contrary, forbearance means to restrain the urge of using every legal means to achieve a political end.
It is certainly not too difficult to quantify the erosion of these two norms in America, specifically when one pays closer attention to the skyrocketing amount of “filibustering” in the Congress or, as seen recently, to the increasing times of governmental shutdowns caused by a lack of agreement between Republicans and Democrats over the federal budget. We can see the effects of this abandonment of norms on a daily basis: The more hostile political environment, the lack of respect for other political opinions, the increasing difficulties for finding a compromise between parties. The political opposition is on the verge of drifting away from constructive criticism towards impeding the government in every possible way.
A liberal response?
In my opinion, there are two ways to react to this threat.
First, we could change the rules of the game and narrow the legal framework for processes which can be used to impede effective governing such as filibustering and the Hammelsprung. I do not think that this is the right way to counteract populist parties (or tendencies more generally). These processes exist for a good reason. But they hinge on the observance of forbearance. There was no extensive problem of filibustering in the Roosevelt, Truman, or Wilson administrations, although their policies were also quite controversial. The problem is not the rules themselves, but the lack of shared norms for a solid foundation to put them to good use. Furthermore, changing the rules would only foster the thought that a perfect constitution is somehow reachable. And here I see the danger, that we might jeopardize the status of the law as a neutral guardrail for society and it instead becomes an arbitrary mean to achieve political ends, as Frederic Bastiat describes in his work The Law.
The second option is to adjust our own behavior to the changing circumstances brought by the new populist players one the pitch. Therefore the established political actors need to carefully reevaluate the importance of certain norms and if necessary transform them. Of course, this is not as easy as said: It presupposes a willingness to cooperate among established actors (which is nothing to take for granted in today’s times) as well as a vigilant public, which backs up those norms. Additionally, norms do not emerge from scratch. They are rather the result of a slow change in the mutual understanding of social human interaction.
What the future will bring
The AfD already has announced that they want to continue to use every legal (and in some cases illegal) way to make it harder to govern the country, which is their way to battle the establishment. Whereas the established parties tried various strategies to cope with this right-wing populist party ranging from ignoring to direct confrontation. Still, nobody knows exactly how to deal with these new political circumstances. But what is for certain is the political landscape is further going to change; and thus also politicians and parties will need new strategies, structures, and norms.
Although this development is mostly seen as the road to a gloomy and authoritarian future, I believe (or at least I hope) that democratic parties will find new ways to counter right and left wing populist proposals. Instead of trying to engineer our legal framework to preclude populist from polls, politicians should focus on giving scope for spontaneous order and new alliances. This process is incredibly exciting to me. As Steve Davies describes it, we are currently witnessing a “great realignment” of party structures in Europe. And where old structures break up, there is room for new ones. European liberal party leaders (carried by the Axis of Linder – Rutte – Macron) are still looking for their place in this new power vacuum. Nobody can predict where this development will lead us. That is why we must proceed to fight for our liberty: inside and outside of political party structures.
RCH: the Christmas Battles in Latvia
That’s the subject of this weekend’s column over at RealClearHistory. An excerpt:
9. The battles didn’t actually take place on Christmas Day. They actually occurred in early January. However, under the old czarist Julian calendar, the battles occurred over the Christmas season, from Dec. 23-29. The Germans were caught by surprise because even though it was January in the West, it was Christmas season in Russia and the Germans believed the Russians would be celebrating their Christmas rather launching a major counter-offensive.
And
3. The Siberians were eventually slaughtered. The Siberians who refused to fight were not necessarily betraying their Latvian brothers-in-imperium. They knew they were cannon fodder. And, indeed, when the Siberians finally went to reinforce the Russian gains made, they were greeted with a massive German counter-offensive. The Siberians (and others) were left for dead. They received no food, no weapons, and no good tidings of comfort and joy.
Please, read the rest (and tell your friends about it). It’s my last post at RCH for the year, so there’s lots of links to other World War I-themed articles I wrote throughout 2018.
Nightcap
- Hayek and liberal dictatorship Matthew McManus, Areo
- Rule of Law: the case of open texture of language and complexity Federico Sosa Valle, NOL
- How the Germans finally caught up with the West Wolfgang Streeck, London Review of Books
- Rebuilding Europe after World War II Barry Stocker, NOL
RCH: Antarctic history
Longtime readers of NOL know I have a strange obsession with Antarctica, and the murder that happened on the continent earlier this week gave me the perfect opportunity to write about the southernmost continent for this weekend’s column at RealClearHistory. Behold, an excerpt:
6. The Gauss Expedition (1901-03). The Germans got in on the Antarctic act, too, even though Germany only formed as a country in 1871. The Gauss Expedition got trapped by ice for 14 months, but the gas balloon that the Germans brought along was put to good use while they were trapped. The photo above was taken in a balloon the Germans floated above their trapped ship. Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, by the way, is one of history’s most important mathematicians, and many rank Gauss second only to Newton in mathematical importance.
You’ll have to read the whole thing if you want to see the photo (it really is a thing of beauty).
Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy
Understanding how political parties function is an area where recent research in political science has contributed major insights. Political parties are a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to the 19th century, there were factions and loose groupings – the Optimates and Populares in Republican Rome, Tories and Whigs in late 17th century England, and Girondins and Jacobins in the French Revolution – but not organized parties. They were looser groupings that centered around dominant individuals – a Marius or Sulla, a Lord Shaftsbury, or a Brissot or Robespierre; but not parties with structured platforms and a deep well of local support.
I recently reviewed Daniel Ziblatt‘s recent book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy for the Journal of Economic History (gated and ungated). Ziblatt provides new insights into the key role played by conservative parties in the formation and stabilization of democracy in Western Europe. Ziblatt’s thesis is that where conservative parties were able to become entrenched and organized political forces, the prospects for liberal democracy were fairly good. But where conservative parties remained weak, democracy was likely to remain poorly institutionalized. Under these circumstances, elites simply had too much to lose from acquiescing in universal suffrage.
Ziblatt contrasts the fate of England where a popular conservative party did take on solid roots in the late 19th century with that of Germany. As I write in my review:
“The central insight Ziblatt emphasizes throughout is game theoretic: the absence of a party to organize around meant that economic elites lacked the ability to strategically defend their interests and hence became willing to ally with any forces that might help them protect their property. While in Britain, the well-institutionalized Parliamentary Conservative party moderated and sidelined the more reactionary and xenophobic elements in British life, the absence of such a strong party meant that in Germany, the right tended towards antisemitism and other forms of extremism . . . “
“. . . Stable and lasting democratization required “buy-in” from old regime elites and this buy-in can only occur if there are institutional mechanisms in place that are capable of assuaging their fears and moderating the influence of extremists. In late 19th and early 20th century Europe, strong professional conservative parties served this purpose. In the absence of such a party the transition to democracy will likely be temporary and unstable.”
Do read the full review.
Nightcap
- Would the British Raj simply be replaced by a Hindu Raj? Brent Otto, JHIBlog
- Signal, noise, and statelessness in India Ameya Naik, Pragati
- Our insular British culture Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
- Toward a new “Ostpolitik”? Ulrich Speck, Berlin Policy Journal
Nightcap
- The dark side of German reunification Marcel Fürstenau, Deutsche Welle
- Kurdish rebels join anti-Iran lobbying fray Jack Detsch, Al-Monitor
- God, Man, and the Law according to Judge Kavanaugh Mark Movsesian, Law & Liberty
- The obligation to smile Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
Latest thoughts on Brexit: Its Decay, Italy (and Ireland), Cars, and Giving up British Citizenship
The slow decay of Brexit: a Rule-Taking Country
I don’t mean that the UK will stay in the EU. I fully expect it to formally depart next year. If the poor performance of the UK economy compared with the Eurozone continues, I also expect the UK to rejoin in a few decades, when the growth divergence is not just in figures, but felt in everyday life, such as when people find it too expensive to travel in Europe or buy goods from Europe; if they do travel they notice that everything seems expensive and there are more nice things abroad than at home, while European tourists will seem to have huge amounts of money to throw around.
It might or might not work out like that, but the point here is that the UK, behind headlines about soft versus hard Brexit, is moving towards an ‘alignment’ with the single market and the customs union: not formal membership but keeping nearly all the rules. The short term losses in trade from leaving both the single market and the customs union, along with the Republic of Ireland/Northern Ireland border question, have combined to make de facto membership of the single market and the customs union inevitable. Hardening the border at all between the two parts of the island of Ireland is economically disruptive and very threatening to a Northern Ireland peace settlement, in which the Irish nationalist-republican side in NI can live with being part of the UK as long as the North and the Republic are unified via the EU and associated commercial agreements.
This is what I get from following Eurosceptic sources when they get round to proper conversation and analysis, rather than fighting the remain-leave battle. Brexit outbursts of premature triumphalism over Italy, or demands to abolish the upper House of Parliament because the Lords uses its constitutional rights to pass amendments they don’t agree with back to the Commons for the final decision, are a distraction from the collapse of full Brexit.
The idea of a ‘no deal’ walk-away from the EU has been abandoned and inevitably the UK will accept single market/customs union rules while the government makes a show of leaving everything. Because the UK very probably will not be a formal member of the single market (though there is a possibility of joining the EEA which would mean formally staying in the single market), it will be able to reduce migration from the EU (not a great thing to my mind), which will bring joy to a large part of the population (particularly the Brexit-voting part). No doubt the reality of moving to what Jacob Rees-Mogg (a well known, hard-Brexit Conservative MP) calls ‘vassal state’ status will be covered over with that issue, but the reality is the UK will accept rules for customs and economic regulation made by the EU indefinitely.
‘Indefinitely’ means ‘permanent’ though this is being covered up by talk of ‘transitional periods’. Alternatives to this have collapsed with the failure of ‘no deal’. The New Hard Brexit is to accept aligned rules on goods, but not on services, with the UK’s exceptional role in financial services in mind. However, there is no indication that the EU will give this kind of deal, despite the Brexiteer posturing about the UK being too powerful to push around, which has clearly been shown as empty by negotiations so far.
Over-excited Brexiteers getting Italy wrong (and Ireland)
So a new government formed without anti-Euro currency finance minister. 5 Star and the League (the coalition partners) are not impeaching President Sergio Mattarella. The idea they would is a bit of a joke anyway, as it would require the agreement of the Supreme Court and a vote of both chambers of the Italian parliament to achieve an impeachment. The issue behind the non-impeachment was that Mattarella had vetoed an anti-Euro candidate for finance minister: Paolo Savona (who now has another post in the government).
Some relevant facts here. 1. Italian presidents have the constitutional right to veto ministerial nominations and have frequently done so before 2. Recent Italian opinion polls show support for the Euro at over 60% 3. Neither coalition party ran on an anti-Euro manifesto.
Claims that Mattarella is some pathetic weak instrument of the European institutions who ordered him to keep Savona out are themselves absurd. 1. There is a shared preference of Mattarella, the Italian public, and European institutions for staying in the Euro 2. Mattarella is from a political family in Sicily, which went anti-mafia and Sergio Materall’s brother, Piersanti, who was head of the regional government, was assassinated by the mafia as a result. I think we can say Sergio is a character of substance to stay in politics after that.
Regarding constitutions and democracy, constitutions establish limits on the power of temporary majorities through rules and institutions designed to embed basic rules about rights and the use of power. This is why democracy of a kind worth having is referred to as ‘constitutional liberal democracy’. You cannot both be in favour of constitutional democracy and complain when constitutional constraints express themselves in the action that Mattarella took, which is well within his formal powers and previous precedent.
Many of the triumphalist Brexiteers in the UK, who were shouting about Mattarella as an enemy of democracy who was about to be punished, are admirers of the US ‘constitutional conservatism’ which, on the face of it, advocates very strict restraints on the actions of elected bodies according to the supposed original meaning of the constitution. You can’t have it both ways. And even if you think democracy means the unrestrained right of a majority, there is no majority support for leaving the Euro in Italy and no manifesto mandate for the coalition to leave the Euro.
You could argue that Mattarella made a mistake about perceptions and had been outplayed, that had some plausibility for a few days but does not look so correct now. Mattarella has got what he wanted and will not be impeached. It’s true that the League has strongly increased its support since the election in opinion polls, but that mostly precedes the ministerial crisis. Brexiteers are still clinging to an attempted triumphalism over Italy. The Italians are standing up to Brussels, which supposedly is a lesson to Britain to be tougher in Brexit negotiations. Well it is a bit soon to say whether the Coalition in Italy represents Eurosceptic triumph and hard to see what this has to do with Brexit negotiations.
What loud mouthed Brexiteers in the UK say about Italy is in some ways not very important, but what is important is the presumption to know more than they do and circulate false assumptions about European politics in the UK, which in turn distorts our debates and assumptions, and which can then pop up amongst Proper centre-right journalists and commentators Who Should Know Better.
Something similar has emerged with Brexiteer attitudes towards Ireland’s attempts to keep an open border with Northern Ireland. Manipulated by the EU institutions with naive and incompetent leaders (rather reminiscent of old prejudices about the Irish being stupid) has been standard opinion, and then there was the claim by a senior Conservative politician, Iain Duncan-Smith, that the Irish position is to do with a forthcoming presidential election. 1. The Irish president has no political powers whatsoever 2. There may not be an election, since no one has announced a wish to run against the incumbent so far and it may suit the major parties in Ireland to leave it like that. Funnily enough all those stupid naive Irish leaders manipulated by the EU have given Ireland much greater economic growth than the UK. What an economic miracle there would be in Ireland if they were as clever as Brexiteers!
It’s difficult to stop Brexiteers from 1. using simplistic rhetoric about majorities and Will of the People to suit their immediate anti-EU goals without concern for consistency and the values of liberal democracy 2. Living in an imagined world where European politicians they disagree with are stupid and/or slaves of the European Commission, conspiring against democracy. These views should be challenged and left with the true believers, away from informed debate.
Brexiteers and German car companies
UK enthusiasts for leaving the EU have a strange obsession with German car makers. They export so many cars to the UK, they will MAKE the German government which will MAKE the European Commission give us the exit deal we want. This has been going on from all kinds of people ever since the Leave Referendum (maybe during the campaign as well, but I missed that). It is an expectation that has obviously been falsified by the course of negotiations in which the EU has got 10s of billions of Euros from the UK to even start negotiations (though the UK tries to pretend otherwise) and has refused the kind of market access the Brexiteer enthusiasts assumed they would get automatically thanks to Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes (!).
Even today, listening to the Telegraph Brexit podcast, I heard Christopher Hope (the highly affable and mostly reasonable chair) keep on about how German carmakers were going to make Brussels gives the UK what it wants. The guests, pro-Brexit people from the Telegraph, were clearly bemused as they had been explaining how the UK was going to remain ‘aligned’ with the single market. Clearly if the UK is already de facto accepting the ‘indefinite’ (i.e. permanent) application of single market rules, German car makers have no incentive to MAKE Merkel give the UK another deal preferable to hardcore Brexiteers.
Of course the saddest expression of this muddled thinking came from Boris Johnson (the notoriously attention seeking and inconsistent foreign minister) when he claimed Italian prosecco wine manufacturers would make Rome/Brussels give the UK a Brexiteer-friendly trade deal. It turns out demand for prosecco in Italy is greater than supply and the makers can easily live with reduced demand in the UK.
The German car industry is of course much larger and not dependent on the supply of a particular kind of grape. Still, just one seventh of German cars are sold in the UK. Now obviously it would be very bad news to lose one seventh of the market, but there are no circumstances in which German manufacturers would sell no cars in the UK, the drop would never be as great as one seventh. Sales of German cars are already declining in the UK and given weak UK economic performance compared with Germany, the decline is likely to continue. Anyway, it should now just be really bloody obvious that German car manufacturers have not united to force Berlin/Brussels to accept a hardcore Brexit agenda! There is clearly a very big stream of reality distorting national self-obsession amongst Brexiteers who believe this kind of thing. Well it has now been shown to be thoroughly incorrect, let go now!
Brexit Bureaucracy and Renouncing UK Citizenship
UK nationals living outside the UK in the EU are applying for citizenship abroad to retain rights they lose after Brexit. Some of these countries forbid dual citizenship so UK citizens are renouncing UK citizenship. The Home Office takes the opportunity to raise fees for renouncing citizenship, though evidently its revenue is already increasing because of charges for renouncing citizenship. Didn’t Brexiteers tell us Brexit would reduce state bureaucracy?
“10 things you didn’t know about World War I”
That’s the title of my weekend piece over at RealClearHistory. The structure of the pieces, if you’ll remember, is Top 10 style, but I try to throw some more in-depth stuff into the mix, too. An excerpt:
3. World War I showed the world what a united Germany could do. Germany was formed in 1871, making it almost 100 years younger than the United States and much younger than France and the United Kingdom. Prior to the formation of Germany, which came about due to Prussian diplomat Otto von Bismarck’s genius machinations, observers and thinkers throughout the world penned works speculating on what a unified German-speaking world would do, politically, economically, culturally, and militarily. Rome’s decentralized barbarian enemies were from Germania, the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire), the Hanseatic League, and the German Confederation which all tried, in vain, to do what Bismarck did. Many of the attempts to unite Germany were foiled by French, British, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian statesmen because of fears that a united Germany would come to dominate Europe and upset the balance of power that European elites had come to rely on as their foreign affairs blueprint. They weren’t wrong.
Please, read the whole thing.
Nightcap
- Germany is struggling with its place in the world Ulrike Franke, War on the Rocks
- German parents are more laid back than American ones Lenore Skenazy, Hit & Run (Reason)
- How to walk through a Berlin park Elnathan John, 1843
- How is the world ruled? Branko Milanovic, globalinequality
Nightcap
- In 1948, Israel lost 1% of its population Marcel Surr, War is Boring
- How Nazis Celebrated Murdering Jews Edward Westermann, Aeon
- Croatia: the Fragile Heart of the Balkans Matthew Engel, New Statesman
- How Marvel Comics’ Wakanda Got Its Name Thomas McDow, Origins
Nightcap
- The new age of great power politics John Bew, New Statesman
- Before We Cure Others of Their False Beliefs, We Must First Cure Our Own Christopher Preble, Cato Unbound
- Libertarians (FDP) ruin coalition talks in Germany Christian Hacke, Deutsche Welle
- The Rich You Will Always Have With You Brandon Turner, Law & Liberty
Towards a genuinely Inclusive, Liberal, and Open Global Agenda
The recent past has been witness to the increasing rise of ‘economic-nationalism’, anti-immigration policies, and increasing xenophobia. Countries which in the past have welcomed immigrants, and have been protagonists of Free Trade and open borders, while immensely benefiting from the same, are becoming more and more insular. While this point got strongly reiterated by the election of Donald Trump. Apart from the US and UK, many of the EU member states and Australia are also becoming more and more inward looking.
Germany and Canada have tried to develop an alternative narrative while being open to immigrants, and opening their doors to refugees. Justin Trudeau in Canada, like Angela Merkel, deserves immense credit for exhibiting courage and conviction and not capitulating before populist and ultra nationalist sentiments.
Both Trudeau and Merkel have opened their doors to refugees, with Trudeau opening his country’s doors to nearly 40,000 Syrian refugees. After the US imposed a ban on immigrants from certain Muslim countries, he tweeted:
“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.”
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, in spite of scathing criticism for her decision to admit over 1 Million refugees, since 2015, from Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan, has stuck to her guns. In an interview, the German Chancellor stated:
“It was an extraordinary situation and I made my decision based on what I thought was right from a political and humanitarian standpoint.”
The rise of the extreme right AfD, which emerged as the third largest political outfit, and which Merkel managed to beat by a lesser margin than usual, has been attributed to Merkel’s open door policy.
Along with Macron and Trudeau, one more leader who is trying to offer an alternative narrative is the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who has started a campaign, ‘London is Open’. Said Khan in his message:
…Many people from all over the globe live and work here, contributing to every aspect of life in our city. We now need to make sure that people across London, and the globe, hear that #LondonIsOpen…
Not restricted to any ideology or country
It would be pertinent to point out that while the rise of right-wing leaders like Trump and AFD in Germany is cited as one of the reasons for this growing insularity, even left leaning leaders have been equally inward looking, when it comes to economic and trade policies. One thing which was common between Trump and Bernie Sanders was their economic policies, which found resonance with the working class.
Not just Trump
While Trump has emerged as the mascot of ‘insularity’ and economic nationalism, it must be pointed out that not just the US, but other countries which have benefited from immigration, to have tended to look inwards on important issues.
Australia, which has opposed Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership TPP and has repeatedly spoken in favour of an ‘open’ Indo-Pacific, has brought in some tough laws to oppose immigration. This includes the abolition of the 457 Visa (for skilled migrants), replacing it with a new visa program which is far more stringent, and will make it tougher for workers from other countries.
Commenting on the abolition of the Visa, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull stated:
“The migration program should only operate in our national interest. This is all about Australia’s interest.”
The second point to bear in mind is that some countries have spoken vociferously in favour of trade agreements, and open borders, but have played it safe on important human rights issues and immigration. This includes not just Syrian refugees, but more recently the Rohingya Issue. If one were to take the case of ASEAN for instance, a number of member states including the Chair for 2018, Singapore, have argued in favour of economic openness, and were critical of the US approach towards TPP. Yet, they have been cautious on the Rohingya Issue, not wanting to rub Aung San Suu Kyi the wrong way.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there can not be a selective approach, countries which seek to benefit from globalization, need to be open to immigrants and at times shoulder onerous responsibilities. After all, it is not just immigrants who benefit economically, but countries which they have migrated too also benefit from their skills and productivity.
Secondly, an enlightened, liberal agenda cannot just be restricted to economic issues, important human rights issues, can not be obliterated and must get the attention they deserve.
Third, it is pointless, to blame any one country or ideology for insularity, everyone shares collective responsibility for the same.
Notes On Liberty 