Interesting Atlantic article on this morning's news feed.
Why Europe Needs Ukraine
If you want to know how powerful the European dream still is, don’t go to Paris or Rome, Brussels or Berlin—go to Kyiv. Last October, I visited the city to speak with young and ambitious Ukrainians. They told me of their deepest wish for their country: membership in the European Union.
For these young people, the EU was synonymous with democracy and freedom, progress and prosperity. When I told them that most students in my native country, the Netherlands, find the EU boring and bureaucratic, they reacted with disbelief. In the past few weeks, I have thought a lot about those Ukrainian students. What we take for granted, they and their compatriots have been willing to die for.
We preached human rights while we violated those of asylum seekers at our borders. We rolled out one austerity measure after another at a time when investments were desperately needed. In Northern Europe, leaders lost their sense of solidarity with those in the south, and in the south, democracy was suspended while technocrats took over.
This is what you get when you consider the EU as a purely economic project, instead of a community with shared values. We heard German politicians complain about lazy Greeks, when in reality the Greeks have the longest working week in Europe. We heard Dutch politicians grumble that southerners should collect more taxes, when in fact the Netherlands is one of the largest tax havens in the world. And we heard Brits complain about, well, everything before they finally left.
And yet, in precisely those years following the European debt crisis a decade ago, the zeitgeist began to shift, helping remind those in Europe of its ideals and its potential. Nowhere was that more evident than in the fight against global warming. A 16-year-old schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg, started a lonely protest next to the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, after which a movement was born, helping put climate change at the center of subsequent European elections.
The author argues that while the Europeans are good technocrats, i.e., they are moving ahead on combatting climate change, they lack a culture of European values articulation, e.g., the Green New Deal that the U.S. has while we have the opposite problem, we articulate values without doing anything about them. He wants a European Marshal plan to rebuild Ukraine. Or as an American would say: “Ich bin ein Europäer.”
The ideals of freedom, democracy, and progress which make Ukraine want to join the EU are precisely what Putin hates and fears. Sad, because Russia itself could have been aligning itself more along these values under a different kind of leadership. And Ukraine would have had less reason to consider them an existential threat.
ReplyDeleteHad an interesting conversation this week with a coworker who is from South Sudan. He sees the war in Ukraine rather differently than most other Americans would. He felt that the way we pick our battles has a racist undertone. Which it probably does. He said we don't get too worked up over atrocities in Africa, or the middle east. But we go to bat for white people in the Ukraine because they are more like the majority here. I don't deny the grain of truth in that, but I feel that is not the only or main motivation. We pick the battles which most affect our national interests, and the state of things in Europe impact us more than those in Africa. Which is likely a selfish way of looking at it but we can't be the caped crusaders for the world. He also felt that we were biased in favor of our own style of democracy.
ReplyDeleteHe feels that the big money interests in Russia will ultimately decide who rules, and that Putin is burning too many bridges with them, and he will ultimately be deposed.
Katherine, I have had similar thoughts about our Eurocentricism. A civil war has been going on in Ethiopia, and a proxy war in Yemen (although I think they may actually be enjoying a ceasefire now). I would guess not many Americans know and fewer care. As you say, our perception of self-interest is part of what drives this. I also think we latch onto an event when it feeds a narrative we understand or are familiar with. We have a narrative ready made for Russian aggression. Not so for Syria and the Assads.
DeleteIt also helps that there are Ukrainians in the US. Although our quilt of immigrant communities has more variety than I had appreciated. I learned a couple of years ago that there are over 50,000 Ghanaians in the Chicago area. I had no idea. There may be more Ghanaian immigrants than Ukrainians, but the latter have been here longer and have their own neighborhood.
Just noodling around on Google, I learned that Germany is the largest contributor of aid to South Sudan.
DeleteThe US spends more on foreign aid than any other nation. But the US isn't even in the top 10 of contributors when you look at foreign aid as a percentage of gross national income.
However, we don't take very good care of our own citizens, either. Contempt for low-income people runs deep, and sometimes there is a good deal of resentment about the "free stuff" all the welfare queens are getting. The only time that tune changes is when the feds shuck out a big chunk of change for another country's disaster, and Americans start screaming about how "there are people starving in our own back yard who need that money!" As if we had it cheerfully earmarked for our beloved poor and the bureaucrats snatched it away!
I'm becoming conditioned against war. Does any war ever make anything better? I suppose the rationale is that, if you don't do it, things will be even worse. Hard to imagine anything worse than what we're seeing in the Ukraine. And not seeing in Yemen. And the downside of this war could be a nuclear exchange. People are accusing the West of cowardice for not establishing a no-fly zone. When it comes to nuclear war, I'm a shaking, wet-my-pants poltroon. And the politicization of the whole thing in our polarized environment makes sensible debate and discourse impossible. I'm disturbed by a trend of climate scientists like Michael Mann taking sides in this war debate because Democrats supposedly side with science on global heating. I can't think of anything that contrasts with peer-reviewed science than war propaganda. They're dirtying themselves. However, many if not most climate scientists are keeping their distance.
DeleteJean, thanks for pointing out that we give less than half in foreign assistance for poor countries than do other rich countries when considered as a percentage of GDP.
DeleteOur foreign aid program is complex, and also includes a lot of funding that few Americans are fully aware of. Way back when I was in grad school in economics, I focused on international Econ, including coursework on economic development in third world countries. I learned then that the impetus for PL 480 (Public Law 480, aka, Food for Peace) was not simply to help the war-devastated European countries feed their people until they recovered, and, now, for poor countries to feed theirs, it was to provide what is effectively a subsidy for American farmers. We grow more food than we consume, including grains, which are exported - bought by the federal government to give away as foreign aid. We provide direct subsidies for some agricultural products - for example. to provide a price floor for dairy for (allowing the free market/ capitalism to work unhindered is great for GOP and libertarian pols until it hurts their farming constituents and then suddenly socialist policies look real good). So PL 480 helps American farmers, by the US providing foreign aid as food (instead of $$) it also helps feed the world’s hungry. And, on the plus side, it keeps cash out of the hands of corrupt rulers in some countries. But I doubt the conservative politicians would have supported the program for decades if it was for a purely humanitarian purpose.
We also provide “foreign aid” for countries to buy military weapons (usually made in America planes, missiles etc) . Israel has been the main recipient of this type of aid. When countries like Norway or New Zealand give two or three times as much foreign aid (as % of GDP) as the US it is not often to beef up Israel’s military. This aid might be justified on national security grounds (or maybe not!) but when some Americans complain that we give too much aid to foreigners, they don’t realize that most of the aid is also subsidizing American jobs and profits. And war. It all goes by the same description- “foreign aid”.
Background and U.S. Relations in Brief, by Jim Zanotti.
Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $142.3 billion (current, or noninflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance, although from 1971 to 2007 Israel also received significant economic assistance.
In 2016, the U.S. and Israeli governments signed a new 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on military aid, covering FY2019 to FY2028. Under the terms of the MOU, the United States pledges to provide $38 billion in military aid ($33 billion in Foreign Military Financing grants plus $5 billion in missile defense appropriations) to Israel. This MOU replaced a previous $30 billion 10-year agreement, which ran through FY2018.
Stanley, would be interested to know what you're seeing re climate scientists and Ukraine.
DeleteThe potential for nuclear weapons use scares the crap out of me, too. Two potentials that I can see: Vlad uses nukes directly in Ukraine (dumb move since he's downwind of anything he drops over there), or he goes to the Saudis or similar and starts offering them nukes in exchange for cash. Then they start threatening Israel.
Maybe those frightening duck-and-cover drills we did in elementary school helped keep us sensitized to the threat of annihilation. Now kids worry more about whether some deeply disturbed classmate is going to shoot them up.
As a 50's kid, I was always aware that there was a nuke with my name on it. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, I walked home from high school with my eyes downward so the nuclear pulse of light didn't blind me. Thirty years after the Soviet collapse and now some hot shots think we should go for regime change with another nuclear power.
DeleteAs for the climate scientists, some like Mann seem to be siding with Democrats as a hope for climate change mitigation but then they get sucked into that party's political theatrics. Other scientists seem to think, as I do, the solution is outside the Republican vs. Democrat box.
There were scientists throughout the world who chained themselves to banks, protesting their funding of fossil fuel development. I knew of it but was it even covered in the MSM.
Stanley, I agree with you about the sheer futility of war. Not to mention the pure horror. But when I grapple with the idea of pure pacifism, and think about Hitler and Nazi- ism, I can never come up with a possible solution for how that kind of evil ruthlessness can be stopped without going to war.
ReplyDeleteYou have Polish heritage and you know that millions of Polish Jews were murdered. You know that millions of christian Poles were also arrested, and executed, and worked to death - literally- in German labor camps. My d-il’s Polish grandfather spent months in Auschwitz before being sent to do hard labor in Germany. Both of his brothers died. One was shot immediately after arrest, with tens of thousands of Jews and a few thousand people thought to be in the Polish resistance (including the eldest brother) when the Nazis rounded up hundreds of thousands after first invading the country. Her grandfather was a teenager then, and one of only two males between teens to about 50 in the town of 6000 to survive the war. Not a single Jewish person from the town, of any age from infants to old people, survived. At that time about half the town’s population was Jewish.
How is this kind of evil stopped without violence?
Ghandism eventually triumphed in India with peaceful resistance. But as bad as the Brits were as a colonial power, they never reached that level of evil ruthlessness.
Anne, I'm not a pacifist though I'm not convinced pacifism is ultimately wrong. I've always thought of just war, if there is such a thing, as being like emergency lung surgery after a lifetime of smoking. Peace is built by continuous long term action for justice and human wellbeing. War comes when continuous exploitative and ambitious behavior results in crisis. I don't think my country did anything to promote peace and has been more interested in power, money and winning.
DeleteI worked my whole career for the U.S. Army. In the 80's, I participated in programs to protect the soldier's eyes against laser hazards, intentional and unintentional. It became real to me how vulnerable and weak human beings are in the face of these new technologies. A delicate human retina versus a one joule pulsed laser made me realize where things were going. Now robotics and AI. What chance does a fragile human body have?
I am just so skeptical of war now after the last 30 years of drum beating and poor results, I am extremely reluctant to believe anything the CIA or governments say. When I hear "freedom isn't free", my mental antibodies kick in. It's free enough for a lot of people who don't have to do the dying. I still think this war might have been avoided but we didn't do a damn thing to avoid it and did many things to promote it.
As for Hitler, the Versailles Treaty helped him. And the Great Depression.
So I'm not a pacifist but I am not convinced war solves anything.
This talk would get me labeled pro-Putin in the present atmosphere. But if I could press a button and only Putin vaporized, I'd press it in a second.