Author Archives: Alberto

Gambling with our souls: why Brexit and the EU’s deal with Turkey are bad ideas.

In collaboration with Anthony Zacharzewski – Translated and reposted from CheFuturo

European leaders have a deal with the Turkish government. It works like this: Syrian refugees cannot go on from Greece into other EU countries. We are sending them back to Turkey instead. For each one we send back, we pick another from Turkish camps and admit her to Europe. Turkey gets a revamping of its EU accession talks, easier visas for Turks coming into Europe, and money. But what does Europe get in return?

Not much, it seems. Policy experts think the one-for-one scheme is unworkable. The Greek state, understaffed after years of austerity, does not have the capacity to deliver it. Aid agencies think it is “inhumane“. The UNHCR questions the credibility of the safeguards intended to protect vulnerable asylum seekers. European diplomats expect the deal to be brought before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Traffickers will likely see an increase in their grim business.

Chances are the scheme won’t work. And if it did, it might make things worse. Not just for those who crossed desert and sea to get stuck in Greece. For Europeans too. Economists have long done the maths and shown that migrants are net contributors to European welfare states (survey). Migrants are on average younger, more educated and more entrepreneurial than natives. For all their disadvantages, Syrians managed to start 415 companies in Turkey in the first two months of 2016. Without migrants, our aging population would soon be unable to support itself (source). Immigration is good for growth, which is why business leaders want more of it.

So, EU leaders have locked themselves in an unworkable deal and a humanitarian disaster. In so doing, they also crippled their own economies. What’s going on here?

The easy answer is: politics. With twenty years of steady growth suddenly brought to a stop and in many places put into reverse, Europe has spawned populist parties – often ethnic nationalists, always anti-government and anti-EU. They target the disgruntled, those who have lost out from the new high-education, high-skill jobs market. The populists draw on resentment, but offer no real change – just the simple, clear and wrong solution to each country’s problems: stop the migrants!

Economic crisis has brought these parties to prominence, but economic growth tomorrow would not cause them to wither, because they draw their real strength from a deeper problem: we have allowed ourselves to forget what Europe is about.

Europe was never about standards – though they support innovation and growth, and give consumers and business confidence. Standards are just a tool to develop the European single market. And the single market itself is just a machine designed to prevent war.

Europe is about peace. Peace initiatives have happened before, but the European Union is self-reinforcing. Over the decades, EU institutions have enabled, and we the people have built, a dense web of relationships. First it was international trade; then education (Erasmus, anyone?); then business partnerships; then thousands and thousands friendships and marriages. War has become unviable, unthinkable.

This was never meant to stop at our borders. Peace and prosperity through trade is also our foreign policy. Countries at our borders like that, so they want in. And we obliged, letting more and more countries in. We wisely invested in the less developed ones, using European funds to upgrade their infrastructure. They rewarded us by blooming into prosperous countries, with solid middle classes eager to buy German cars, Italian design, British financial services. Ireland, then Spain, then Estonia, then Romania.

The caravan still rolls on, beyond Europe’s present borders. The Balkans were at war only twenty years ago. Now they are at peace, and getting prosperous. They like us there, and we like them back. We are good neighbours. We fund highways, libraries and public buildings at a fraction of what a military presence would cost. We have prestige and influence. We can navigate the region speaking English, German, Italian. We can pay in euro everywhere. All countries are getting in the accession queue.

Everybody aspires to be us, because peace, upholding human rights and free trade work. Gun-toting nationalistic empires don’t. Ask the Ukrainians: they could be part of the last old school empire in Europe, Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union. But they appear not to want to. When their president signed a treaty with Russia in 2014, they staged a revolution, kicked him out of the country and organised citizen militias to fight pro-Russia paramilitaries in the East.

It’s not just Serbians and Ukrainians. It’s Syrians, Tunisians, Eritreans. Whatever their countries do, people aspire to being a part of our project. This is what Europe is all about; this is our legacy. We are the only polity in the world to have renounced violence and uphold mutual understanding as the way forward. Even at these times of crisis, we are a beacon of hope for humanity.

And that brings us to Brexit. Those uncomfortable Europeans, the British, are going to be asked on 23 June whether they want to stay in the EU or not, and the answer is far from certain. As with those trade links, those Erasmus studies, those romances, Brexit reaches into every part of Europe – all the more effectively because it is taking place in Europe’s most-spoken language.

Much of the debate has been awful, from both sides. The supporters of Britain’s place in the EU seem to have no arguments beyond money, jobs and finance – important, but not enough to make the case for Europe’s wider ambitions and possibilities. Reassurances of the Remain campaign today close off any future development of the UK’s relationship with the EU. Their argument is “vote for Europe, because our Europe has no Schengen, lots of opt-outs, and absolutely no Euro”.

On the other side, the Eurosceptic press are dominated by anti-immigrant populism, and a desire to go back to some imagined time of national unity, monoculture and full employment. Mainstream politicians on the Leave side cannot acknowledge that medium sized nation states have no power in the modern world, so they have have had to construct unrealistic futures, where Britain prospers by slashing regulation, or by creating free trade deals with its former empire, or just by getting those Europeans to do what the Brits say.

This is an attempt – who knows how successful? – to rationalise around an emotional reaction – a love for Parliament, for British democracy, the ‘thousand years of British history’ which a former Labour leader thought the EEC would put to an end. Sovereignty, democracy and national power are slippery concepts. The dry world of European summits and compromises might be more effective power but it is not more romantic power.

The default of the Brussels bubble is to believe that Europe will get there in the end. In mid-euro-crisis, a European politician said “we all know what we have to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected once we’ve done it”. As time has passed, that politician is President of the Commission, governments around the continent have changed – but the Euro remains. Maybe in five years the migration crisis and Brexit will be in the same place – not solved but not quite so present, a memory of a panic.

Maybe not. There is a saying that companies go bankrupt at first slowly, then all at once. Look around Europe and the signs are there that the structures are weakening, the institutions becoming hollowed out, as they are with national politics.

But in that romantic love of the Brexiters, there is an answer to the problem of European politics, and not just in Britain. We have to make Europe something that can be believed in again – not with an emotional allegiance, but as a shared project of construction, based on those principles of freedom, openness and democracy.

You can’t do that by decreeing a European nationalism, commanding a tear in the eye as Ode to Joy plays. Some people feel that now, more may feel it in the future, but it can’t be invented. Instead the connections and the networks of Europe should be celebrated as success not denigrated as failure.

If we fail to do that, what else can we Europeans do? Well, we could follow the lead of the Brexit camp, and focus on being just 28 more nation states. Doable, maybe. But we would be second-rate nation states. Too small. Too old. Too petty. Plagued by low growth, high debt, an ever more aging population, and populist, rancorous politics. A backwater in the coming Asian century.

A peaceful continent for us all to roam freely is our gift the world, what makes us unique. Politicians in the UK and elsewhere, when they talk of breaking this down, or restricting its scope, might gain some short-term consensus and media visibility. But they are gambling with our souls.

Photo: Malachy Browne: murales at The Jungle, a semi-official refugee camp in Calais (France)

[Readings] The Authoritarians: a known issue for democracy

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As per the suggestion of Giovanni, I decided to start a series of short blog posts on books I read. Nothing fancy, just keeping track of interesting material and sharing the references.

Bob Altemeyer, 2006, The Authoritarians. Published online here.

Bob Altemeyer is an academic psychologist, now retired. He dedicated all his life as a researcher to one single issue: authoritarianism. Most of his work is empirical: it consisted in designing and executing laboratory experiments, and in parsing their results. The Authoritarians recaps his intellectual journey in a way accessible (and enjoyable), to non-specialists like myself.

Altemeyer’s research really took off in 1981 when he came up with a psychological test that reliably measures what he calls Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). RWA is a cocktail of three personality traits: authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. Most of Altemeyer’s research consists of administering a test to a random group of subjects, and then checking their behaviour in the test against their score on the RWA scale. It turns out that people who score high on the RWA scale tend to do things like still endorse Nixon after Watergate (submission), recommend harsher-than-average punishments for just about any offense (“from spitting on the sidewalk to rape” – aggression), be anti-gay or anti-minority or anti-anything that does not resemble their canon (conventionalism). They also tend to hang out with people very similar to them, and have a strong tendence to dogmatism – it is practically impossible to get them to change their mind by rational argument.

Now, all of this would be just a nice bit of fairly inconsequential academic work if it were not for one Kevin Phillips, a young political analyst in the Nixon administration. In 1969 he published a report in which he foresaw a “New Republican Party coalition”. This would include far greater numbers of Protestant and Catholic conservatives”. Until that moment American Christians had stayed out of politics. But then it was fast forward to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the 1980s. That led to Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition in the 1990s. And that led to George W. Bush’s nomination for the presidency, which he obtained after the infamous Supreme Court ruling in 2000.

According to Altemeyer, many high-RWA Americans cluster around various Christian denominations. They work hard and yearn for mighty leaders who uphold conventional values. They are the perfect foot soldiers for would-be strongmen. The latter, therefore, pick the religious right as the best environment for their career to take off. The result of this dynamic is today’s Republican Party: a cocktail of highly organised authoritarian followers and ruthless, power-hungry leaders. Altemeyer thinks it is a threat for democracy. So does Phillips: in 2005 he sounded the alarm on a Republican party gone feral in a book called American Theocracy.

I recommend this book for three reasons. One is the “perfect storm” on democracy that happens when (1) high-RWA people meet (2) dominant individuals (3) over the unifying language of the Christian Evangelical movement (4) in the context of America’s political bipolarism. If complexity scientists wrote history, this is what they would look like, full of nonlinearities and emergent effects.

The second reason why I like this book is this. As Altemeyer himself admits, the danger posed by authoritarians in North America to their democracy does not happen through a failure of democracy, but through its success. High-RWA people assembled in their churches have a right to vote, and to proselytise. They work very hard for the values they believe in; they are highly organised and well funded. They are doing what every citizen should do. And yet, look at the results of these efforts: corruption, war, pervasive surveillance, racial discrimination. When you read the documentation for software, sometimes you find a “known issue”. This is shorthand for a bug that the programmers are aware of, but was judged too hard or too expensive to fix. The existence of authoritarian followers is a known issue for democracy. We know it’s there. It potentially calls into question everything, all the way to “one (wo)man one vote”. But we can’t fix it without breaking the whole democratic architecture.

My third reason for recommending this book is that it contains a simple formulation of the Great Discovery of social psychology, and an argument for it:

Experiment after experiment demonstrates that we are powerfully affected by the social circumstances encasing us. And very few of us realize how much. So if we are tempted by all the earlier findings in this book to think that right-wing authoritarians and social dominators are the guys in the black hats while we fight on the side of the angels, we are not only falling into the ethnocentric trap, we are not only buttering ourselves up one side and down the other with self-righteousness, we are probably deluding ourselves as well. Milgram has shown us how hard it is to say no to malevolent authority, how easy it is to follow the crowd, and how very difficult it is to resist when the crowd is doing the biding of malevolent authority.

Amen to that.

Photo credit: Beverly on flickr.com

The invisible city: chronicles of love and defiance in Brussels

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(written on March 22nd 2016, day of the Brussels attacks – translated from CheFuturo)

Here we go again. This morning’s explosions have plunged Brussels back into the lockdown we already went through in November 2015, after the Bataclan attacks in Paris. The airport is closed. Railway stations have been evacuated. The public transport network is down. Cinemas and museums are closed. The Université Libre de Bruxelles has been evacuated. No one is allowed in or out of schools. The government has declared a state of maximal alertness and asked everyone to stay put.

Since November, we have a name for this state of things: #BrusselsLockdown. It’s not an easy situation to be in. But neither is it desperate. As in November, as always, the images you see on TV are not representative of life in the city. In my neighborhood – between Saint-Gilles and Forest – shops are open. The weather is sunny, so outdoor tables of cafés are popular with my fellow Bruxellese (the photo above is fairly representative of a normal day); they shake their heads and exchange small tales of their life in the times of this new Lockdown.

In November, the city had demonstrated its level-headness and a very Belgian surrealist sense of humour. The police had asked not to share anything about its movements as it raided the city for suspects; as a response to that, we inundated Twitter of cat photos. I was delighted: this was a funny, deeply human way to collaborate without keeping your head down and staying put. I am sure that the same spirit will show up this time around. Already funny-defiant images are showing up on social media, and the Bruxellese use Twitter to offer hospitality to people who have come for work and got stranded in the city.

The truth is, this city can not yield to fear of terrorism. Not in the sense that we do not want to (though we don’t); not even in the sense that we have a moral duty not to (though we do). We are actually unable to do so, in a very practical way. I am not aware of any other city that, though it is relatively small (1.1 million inhabitants), is so diverse. Walking the streets of Saint-Gilles you meet people from all over the world, and hear the sound of many languages: French, Dutch, English, Arabic, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Spanish. You can attend Catholic Mass in Portuguese, and driving school in Polish.

According to Statistics Belgium, on January 1st 2015 Brussels had 771,000 residents of Belgian nationality, and 398,000 non-Belgian residents. With over one third of the population not holding Belgian citizenship, that’s as diverse as it gets outside of Dubai (which is uncomparable on many levels with any European city). The ten most common nationalities among non-Belgian Bruxellese are: French, Moroccan, Romanian, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Bulgarian and Turkish.

These figures underestimate the foreign presence in Brussels, because individuals holding double citizenship are counted as Belgians. It turns out that only 44% of residents was holding Belgian citizenship at birth (source 1, source 2). This means that a mind-boggling 22% of residents are naturalised Belgians. Most naturalised citizens come from Morocco, Turkey, Congo and Guinea. European Union citizens normally don’t bother acquiring Belgian citizenship, as EU magic allows us to enjoy most rights granted to citizens anyway. It is estimated that 25% of residents are muslim.

This is the Brussels I live in. If you only ever hear about it because of EU politics or the recent security problems, it is invisible to you. But that does not make it any less real. Here, yielding to terror and xenophobia means not waving hello to your Romanian or German neighbour; change your favourite grocer (Moroccan) and that café with tables in the sun (Italian). In the home where I live, we would have to discriminate each other: we are two Frenchmen, a Pole, a Swede and me, an Italian. It’s unthinkable. Brussels cannot go xenophobic: it’s already over the tipping point. It is Europe as Europe could be, and will be if we do not lose sight of our common journey.

So, it’s no surrender for us. Tonight we will hold an open house. We’ll have friends from Egypt, America, Italy, Belgium – every one of them a Bruxellese. We will raise our glasses in love and defiance, and drink to the city that makes us brothers and sisters without requiring us to be the same. In time, the Lockdown will be lifted and we’ll take Brussels back, just as we did in November. The people responsible for this tragedy will be arrested and punished, as happened with those responsible for the Bataclan attacks in Paris. This is Brussels, sweetheart. We are not going down. Wherever you are, raise your glass with us.

Photo: sam.romilly on Flickr.com