General Qasem Soleimani is Dead

Iran-backed Storming of U.S. Embassy in Baghdad Tests Washington Partisanship

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Turkey’s Mission in Libya

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Lebanese PM Hassan Diab – The Professor Tasked with Saving a Country on the Verge of Collapse

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Editorial

A Weekly Political News Magazine

The year 2019 has been an anxious one for the Middle East.

President Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 JCPOA Nuclear Deal has caused the Iranian regime to become rogue and as a result, many of the US’s allies in the region have suffered from attacks mostly coming from Iran’s proxies. Furthermore, frequent oil tanker seizures in the Gulf of Oman and around the Strait of Hormuz have caused global anguish over economic and energy security. Things came to head in Baghdad by the end of the year, as a missile attack on an Iraqi military base in Kirkuk led to the death of an American contractor, and supporters of an Iran-backed militia stormed the US embassy. The year 2020 is only in its infancy stages, yet the Iranian regime is emboldened now more than ever to directly face off the US after one of its drone strikes assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the General of the Quds Force and a major military commander who was involved in many of Iran’s conflicts in the region. This week’s cover story

by Ali El Shamy centers on this latest escalation as he explains the reasons behind President Trump’s drastic decision, moreover, he highlights the responses from the Democrats, as well as Tehran’s leaders.

Joseph Braude focuses this week on the raid that took place in the American Embassy in Baghdad and the subsequent airstrikes on Kitaib Hezbollah bases which killed 25 Iraqis. He then reports on the difference between Republican and Democrat responses toward the airstrike, naturally, the former party was more supportive than the latter one.

The Gulf region isn’t the only focal point in the Middle East; North Africa is currently facing its own security crisis in the form of the current civil war in Libya. As it stands, the Libyan National Army (LNA), supported by Egypt, the UAE, and France, is on the precipice of defeating the Turkish/Qatari backed Government of National Accord (GNA). In fearing the loss of its interests in the Mediterranean, the Turkish parliament recently approved the deployment of troops in Libya. This move warranted an instant response in Cairo, which hosted an emergency Arab League meeting regarding Ankara’s latest moves. Yasmine ElGeressi writes on the current proxy war taking place in Libya, as well as the wider latent reasons behind Turkey’s escalations which mostly have to do with the discovery of natural gas in the Mediterranean particularly in Egypt.

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

24 New Leader, Same Old Problems

Issue 1781- january- 03/01/2020

28 Ambivalence About Moscow Is a French Tradition

09 Hundreds Arrested at Huge New Year’s Day Rally in Hong Kong

34 The Neoliberal Collapse

40 Netflix Made More Films Than Any

Other Studio

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50 Ever-Further Union

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Paris celebrates the New Year as the Arc de Triomphe is engulfed in fireworks as thousands descended on the Champs Elysees to welcome the New Year on January 1, 2020 in Paris, France. (Getty)

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The afternoon sky glows red from bushfires in the area around the town of Nowra in the Australian state of New South Wales on December ,31 2019. Thousands of holidaymakers and locals were forced to flee to beaches in fire-ravaged southeast Australia on December 31, as blazes ripped through popular tourist areas leaving no escape by land. (Getty) 7

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Baghdad. US troops fired tear gas to disperse a crowd that got into a reception area in the compound, which is in the capital›s heavily fortified Green Zone. A guard post on the street nearby was also set alight. US President Donald Trump blamed Iran for the attack, warning: «They will pay a very big price!». The US defence secretary, Mark Esper, announced that 750 airborne troops would be deployed to the region immediately, with more to follow in the next few days. Up to 3,000 soldiers are reportedly being prepared to move out to the Middle East, adding to the 14,000 sent there since May in an effort to counter Iran.

Iran›s Qassem Soleimani Killed in US Air Strike

was also killed in the attack. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned Friday The United States killed Iran’s top general that the killing of Soleimani was “extremely and the architect of Tehran’s proxy wars in dangerous & a foolish escalation.” “The U.S. the Middle East in an airstrike at Baghdad’s bears responsibility for all consequences of international airport Friday, an attack that its rogue adventurism,” Zarif said on Twitter. threatens to dramatically ratchet up tensions in Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said his death the region. The targeted killing of Gen. Qassem will make Iran “more decisive” in its resistance Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, against the U.S. could draw forceful Iranian retaliation against American interests in the region and spiral Baghdad Embassy Attack Prompts into a far larger conflict between the US and US to Boost Military Presence Iran, endangering US troops in Iraq, Syria and Protesters angered by recent US air strikes beyond. Top Iraqi militia commander Abu targeting an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia have Mahdi al-Muhandis, an adviser to Soleimani, attacked the American embassy compound in

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Turkish Parliament Passes Libya Deployment Bill

Turkey’s parliament on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a bill that allows troops to be deployed in Libya, in a move that paves the way for further military cooperation between Ankara and Tripoli but is unlikely to put boots on the ground immediately. President Tayyip Erdogan said last week Turkey would deploy troops in Libya to support Fayez alSerraj’s internationally-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA). The GNA last month requested Turkish support as it fends off an offensive by General Khalifa Haftar’s forces, which are backed by Russia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Jordan. Turkey’s move comes after Ankara and the GNA signed two separate agreements in November: one on security and military cooperation and another on maritime boundaries in the eastern

Mediterranean, infuriating Greece, Israel, Egypt and Cyprus.

Trump, Erdogan Agree on Need for De-escalation in Idlib, Syria

U.S. President Donald Trump and his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan agreed on the need to de-escalate tensions in Idlib, Syria, the White House said on Thursday, a day after eight people were killed in a Syrian missile strike in the province. “The leaders agreed on the need for de-escalation in Idlib, Syria, in order to protect civilians,” the White House said in a statement.

At least eight people were killed on Wednesday when the Syrian army launched missiles that struck a shelter for displaced families in the country’s northwest, witnesses and residents said. The Russian-led campaign that started in April 2019 had already forced at least 500,000 people to leave for areas closer to the border with Turkey, which Russian jets rarely hit.

Truck bomb at Least 90 in Mogadishu

Over 90 people were killed when a bombladen truck exploded at a busy checkpoint in the Somali capital Mogadishu on Saturday, an international organisation working in the country said, in the deadliest attack in more than two years. The dead included many students and two Turkish nationals, Somalia’s foreign minister said, adding that dozens were injured.

Saturday is a working day in the Muslim country and the explosion occurred during the morning rush hour. Rescuers carried bodies past the twisted wreckage of a vehicle and a minibus taxi smeared with blood. No-one immediately claimed responsibility for the blast but the city’s mayor blamed al Qaeda-linked Islamist group al Shabaab.

Hundreds Arrested at Huge New Year’s Day Rally in Hong Kong

Hong Kong police arrested about 400 people in New Year’s Day protests after what started as a peaceful pro-democracy march of tens of

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thousands spiraled into chaotic scenes with police firing tear gas to disperse the crowds.

The arrests take the total to about 7,000 since protests in the city escalated in June over a now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China, and will highlight the apparent absence of any progress towards ending the unrest. When scuffles broke out, large numbers of black-clad protesters rushed to the scene while other protesters formed human chains to pass them various supplies including bricks, forcing police to bring in their own reinforcements.

Australian Wildfires Threaten to Burn Towns to the Ground

Australian authorities are launching naval and air rescue operations along the country›s southeast coast as deadly wildfires intensify, stranding residents and tourists in towns that may be wiped out by Saturday.

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) sent navy vessels on Friday to the fire-threatened town of Mallacoota, in Victoria state, where thousands of people fled their homes and sought refuge on a beach earlier this week.

Photos from Mallacoota show people wearing face masks and lining up to board the vessels, with the air blanketed in yellow haze and smoke. Similar conditions on Monday and Tuesday led to a devastating 24 hours that destroyed hundreds of homes and killed seven people. In total, 18 people have died across Australia during this fire season.

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General Qasem Soleimani is Dead Why President Trump has Chosen Such a Drastic Measure

by Ali El Shamy

passed in the National Assembly in Ankara. But one mustn’t forget that this is literally a region It was only yesterday when the Arab states were where tensions and conflicts can skyrocket overmired in the prospects of a possible conflict with night. An American drone strike on Baghdad AirTurkey, as the motion to send troops to Libya was port last night has turned the region and the world

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An American drone strike on Baghdad Airport last night has turned the region and the world on its axis, as it caused the death of Qasem Soleimani. entirely new chapter in the tensions and now more than ever both states seem to be on the brink of an armed conflict.

SOLEIMANI’S INFLUENCE ON MIDDLE EASTERN CONFLICTS

The former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard›s Quds Force, General Qassem Soleimani, attends celebrations marking the 37th anniversary of the Islamic revolution on February 2016 ,11, in Tehran. (Getty)

General Soleimani has widely been regarded as the defacto second-in-command in Iran, with only Ayatollah Khomeini having more authority than him. Ever since the Iraq war in 2003, Soleimani has played an instrumental role in the conflicts of Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria and has ensured that the Iranian regime does not lose its interests in those countries. Most recently, he has been advising the military forces of the Assad regime and other militias loyal to the regime, thereby helping him maintain power. Under Soleimani’s command, the Quds force has only been advising and funding other terrorist groups in the region such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Islamic Jihad in Palestine. For the past twenty years, Solieimani has survived several assassination attempts, but Trump’s drone strike order finally put an end to the strongman’s impact on its axis, as it caused the death of Qasem Soleim- and authority in the region. ani, the General of the Iranian Quds Force and one of the major figureheads and military strategists of WHY NOW AND WHY THE RISK ? the regime. And just like that, the attention of the world shifted away from Libya and Turkey, while Tensions between Washington and Tehran were Iran and its allies were once again placed under the reaching new boiling points last year; nevertheless, microscope of scrutiny and speculation. Soleimani Trump has been cautious in his responses to the rewas not the only person to meet his demise as Abu gime’s escalations. President Trump’s preferred Mahdi al-Muhandes, the deputy chairman of the acts of retaliation were economic sanctions, and Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), while that managed to squeeze the Iranian econowas also killed. Ever since Spring of last year, Iran my, the regime remained steadfast and resistant. and the US have been mired in a seemingly endless Moreover, Iran was also careful not to push the US tug of war which consisted of tanker seizures, at- beyond its boiling point, throughout the past year it tacks on allies, sanctions and even hacking of weap- hid behind attacks conducted by its regional allies ons systems, but this latest event has marked an

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and proxy forces. Furthermore, it often attacked US regional allies rather than the US directly. The fact that both states were walking on this cautionary tight rope ensured that neither one of them would be forced to have a direct conflict, something the Trump wanted to avoid, much to the disappointment of neo-con figures in the administration such as former National Security Advisor John Bolton.

The drone strike followed a series of tit for tat attacks that Iran and the US were participating in during late December/early January. On December 27, Kataib Hizbullah, Iranian-backed militia in Iraq, launched missiles aimed at a US military base in Kirkuk killing an American contractor.

The US responded with airstrikes that killed 25 Kataib Hizbullah militiamen. Things came to head on New Year’s Day when Kataib Hizbullah supporters and soldiers stormed the heavily fortified American embassy in Baghdad, though no one was murdered. The direct murder of an American citizen proved to be the straw the broke the camel’s back since the Trump administration decided to take the bold move of directly attacking an Iranian general, who happens to be the second most powerful man within the regime no less. While the incident has come as a shock to the world, the fact that the Trump administration decided to take such a drastic measure shouldn’t be a surprise. Essentially, Iran has spent the last year playing with fire and it should have expected that sooner or later it would get its fingers burned. In other words, the as-

Calls for vengeance from major Iranian figures have not been taken lightly as the US called on all American civilians in Iraq to exit the country immediately and by any means necessary.

sassination of Soliemani was the result of the culmination of the regime’s retaliatory actions against the US and its allies in the region. Moreover, the US Defense Department noted that Soliemani was planning more attacks on American diplomats and servicemen in Iraq, as such the assassination was a security measure meant to protect them.

There is, of course, another major factor that should not be ignored. Just days ago, the world welcomed 2020; a year that the US will have one of its most anticipated presidential elections in the past 20 years. The phenomenon of “rallying around the flag” is widely recognized in the

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Iraqi anti-government protesters flash the V-sign of victory outside their protest tents in Baghdad›s Tahrir Square following news of the killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guards top commander Qasem Soleimani in a US strike on his convoy at Baghdad international airport on January ,3 2020. (Getty)

American sociopolitical landscape. Essentially, when during times of measure conflicts, war or attacks against the US, the American president gains a surge of popularity from the American public. A recent example of this was George W. Bush’s increase in popularity after the September 11 attacks. It is possible that Trump hopes that this heavy response to Iranian-backed attacks on American servicemen will bolster his popularity into the election campaign and eventually help him gain re-election in November. The fact that shortly after the Pentagon announced Soleimani’s death, Trump only tweeted a large image of an American flag supports this theory.

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DEMOCRATS CRITICIZE TRUMP AND IRAN VOWS TO AVENGE SOLEIMANI Shortly after the Pentagon’s announcement, leading nominees for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voiced their concerns over Trump’s action. Senator Bernie Sanders cited the ghosts of the Iraq war which still haunt the US today and how Soleimani’s assassination could bring the country into another major conflict in the region, a contravention of Trump’s campaign promise to end US involvement in the “endless wars”. Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren cited that Soleimani’s track record of killing thousands of regional civilians and

soldiers, as well as hundreds of American troops. this might be the catalyst that brings the US into diThey nevertheless warned that Trump might have rect conflict with the Islamic Republic. dangerously escalated matters with Iran and that Naturally, major Iranian and Iran-backed figures voiced their anger against the Trump administration and even gone as far as to vow to avenge their fallen comrade. In a statement issued by state media, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei stated that “the cruelest people in the world” killed an “honorable commander. He also said that a “harsh retaliation” is waiting for the US. Iran Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif tweeted that Soleimani’s assassination was an “act of international terrorism” and that the US is responsible for the consequences it would face. Leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah hailed Soleimani as a “master of resistance” and also said that “To continue on General Soleimani’s path, we’ll raise his flag in all battlefields.”

Such calls for vengeance have not been taken lightly since the US called on all American civil-

Just days ago, the world welcomed 2020; a year that the US will have one of its most anticipated presidential elections in the past 20 years. The phenomenon of “rallying around the flag” is widely recognized in the American sociopolitical landscape.

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People gather to stage a protest against the killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guards› Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani by a US air strike in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, after Friday prayer in Tehran, Iran on .2020 ,3 January )Getty(

A handout photo shows Ismail Qaani after he has been appointed as commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards

ians in Iraq to exit the country immediately and by any means necessary.

SOLEIMANI’S SUCCESSOR IS NAMED Less than 12 hours after the US drone strike, Khamenei appointed General Esmail Qaani as Soleimani’s successor. Qaani has served under Soleimani for the past two decades as his second in command of the Quds Force, and now he has taken the helm of the group’s operations. Like most leaders within the Iranian regime, he holds extreme hardline views, furthermore having worked closely with Soleimani he is likely to pick up right where he left off.

The new year usually brings feelings of hope and optimism for the future, however, the escalations in Libya and Iraq have presented the region’s inhabitants with more reasons to be anxious and worried. While it is still unclear

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Qaani has served under Soleimani for the past two decades as his second in command of the Quds Force, and now he has taken the helm of the group’s operations. what consequences this incident will cause, Iran and its allies will surely grow more resistant and hardline. Furthermore, Iran will likely be more emboldened to carry out destabilizing attacks in the region, especially against states that are allied with the US. Thus far, this new year is a continuation and an amplification of the conflicts that mired the Middle East into a state of uncertainty last year.

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Iran-backed Storming of U.S. Embassy in Baghdad Tests Washington Partisanship New Year in Iraq Marked with Chaos as Tehran Poses New Challenges

by Joseph Braude A crisis in Iraq has reached the gates of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and presented a critical test of the administration’s resolve in confronting Iranian-

orchestrated provocations. With Washington still mired in hyper-partisanship amid the ongoing impeachment campaign, congressional reaction has been split between Republican Senators urging the President to show strength and Democratic calls for de-escalation.

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AN EVOLVING CRISIS The crisis now reaching a head outside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad began on December 27 when pro-Iranian militias launched a rocket attack on the Iraqi military’s K1 base near Kirkuk. One American civilian contractor was killed in the barrage, along with two Iraqi police, and several American and Iraqi military personnel were wounded. The markings on the rockets — identical to those used by Lebanese Hezbollah and intercepted by Israel in 2009 — soon drew American officials’ eyes to Kata’ib Hezbollah, known for its close links to Iran.

Supporters and members of the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force try to scale a wall of the US embassy in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on January 2020 ,1.

(Getty)

The crisis now reaching a head outside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad began on December 27 when proIranian militias launched a rocket attack on the Iraqi military’s K1 base near Kirkuk.

that for those Iraqis “who want freedom and who don’t Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Mike want to be dominated and controlled by Iran, this is Pompeo accused Iranian-backed forces of complicity your time!” in a series of attacks on bases in Iraq and warned that future provocations would be «answered with A diverse range of Republicans publicly declared a decisive U.S. response.» Last weekend, the U.S. their support for the President’s course of action and response arrived in the form of a series of airstrikes urged resolve. Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading targeting five Kata’ib Hezbollah bases: three of the voice in foreign policy, announced that he was “very militia›s facilities in Iraq and two in Syria. According proud of President Donald Trump acting decisively in to Jonathan Hoffman, an assistant to the secretary of the face of threats to our embassy in Baghdad. He has defense, the targets struck «included weapon storage put the world on notice — there will be no Benghazis facilities and command and control locations.” on his watch.” For his part, the often Trump-skeptical According to early reports, at least 24 were killed and Senator Romney stated emphatically that the onus 55 wounded. for the crisis lay on Tehran’s shoulders: “The militia attack on our embassy is further evidence that Iran To judge by the swiftness and severity of the response is increasing its provocation & destabilizing actions.

by Iran’s Iraqi allies, this was a painful blow. “Our Iraq must take responsibility to help defend our response will be very tough on the American forces embassy. Iran must feel the condemnation of every in Iraq,” militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, civilized nation & our sanctions on Iran must tighten said on Sunday. And indeed, by Tuesday, protesters further.” waving Kata’ib Hezbollah flags attempted to storm the US embassy in Baghdad. By all accounts, the protesters On the other side of the aisle, the response was failed to breach the heavily fortified compound, more muted. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and were driven back by tear gas. President Trump, tweeted that she was “watching the situation in meanwhile, ordered the deployment of 100 Marines to Baghdad closely,” and that “escalation and violence fortify the embassy against future assaults. must end.” Other Democrats were less circumspect.

Senator Chris Coons announced, “The attack on our REPUBLICANS COUNSEL embassy in Baghdad is horrifying but predictable.

RESOLVE, DEMOCRATS URGE DE- Trump has rendered America impotent in the Middle ESCALATION East. No one fears us, no one listens to us.” Others gave voice to the fears of the anti-war Left. Senator As the militia members gathered outside the American Markey, for one, opined, “This admin‘s failed Iran embassy, Trump offered no concessions, declaring, policy and Trump’s capriciousness have devolved “Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many. to provocation. We cannot allow Trump and his We strongly responded, and always will. Now Iran is hawkish advisers to drag us into a larger conflict. If orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. President Trump wants to use force against Iran or its They will be held fully responsible.” He later added proxies, he needs Congressional authorization.”

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Turkey’s Mission in Libya

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For Erdogan, this was a move to stack the cards against his country, and he felt eager to retaliate, showing he is prepared to act tough to get his way and force new negotiations over their longstanding disputes.

President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, Turkey on December 2019 ,30.

(Getty)

by Yasmine El-Geressi On January 2, Turkey’s parliament approved by a large majority a controversial bill that allows troops to be deployed to Libya in support of the Tripolibased government in the country’s worsening civil war, putting the North African country’s conflict at the centre of wider regional frictions. The mandate passed with the support of President Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its far-right ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The resolution comes after Libya’s Government of National

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Accord (GNA) requested Turkish military support in December. The Tripoli-based GNA are struggling to confront a months-long offensive by General Khalifa Haftar’s eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA), which has been supported by Egypt, Jordan, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and France. Analysts and officials say Ankara is unlikely to immediately send troops, but rather military advisers and equipment. Nonetheless, the move risks escalating tensions that have already drawn in regional powers.

The fighting has threatened to plunge Libya into the kind of violent chaos to rival the 2011 conflict that ousted and killed the long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Since then, the country has been racked by civil war, with no authority in full control. The latest episode of conflict started in April last year, when Gen Haftar launched an attack on Tripoli in an attempt to oust the GNA. But eight months on, the battle continues with the GNA keeping Gen Haftar›s forces at bay on Tripoli›s southern outskirts. In recent weeks, the fighting escalated after Gen Haftar announced a new offensive aimed at taking control of Tripoli and ousting Fayez al-Sarraj’s GNA. The LNA had tried and failed to do the same in April.

Ankara, with NATO’s second-largest army, has hinted for weeks that it would flex its military muscle in Libya to defend the embattled GNA government, which is also supported by Qatar. Erdogan has already been sending weapons and drones to the GNA and allied Islamist militias despite a UN arms embargo. Turkey has also in the past couple of weeks reportedly recruited Syrian rebel fighters it backs and sending them to Libya. That has elicited protests from Haftar’s backers, including the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, the latter of which organised an emergency summit of the Arab League this week to discuss Libya.

Meanwhile, Turkey recently signed two controversial

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agreements with Tripoli: a memorandum of understanding on providing the GNA with arms, training, and military personnel; and a November 28 maritime agreement delineating exclusive economic zones in the Mediterranean waters separating the two countries.

The latter move drew protests from Greece and Egypt and was condemned “unequivocally” by the European Council but in Erdogan’s view, drawing this line will allow him to cut into the emerging Cypriot-EgyptianGreek-Israeli maritime bloc, while simultaneously pushing back against Egypt and the UAE’s pressure on the GNA. Over the last five years, the Eastern Mediterranean has witnessed major discoveries of gas fields in Greece, Cyprus and Israel. But it was the discovery of the Egyptian Zohr field, the biggest gas field in the Mediterranean, that was seen as a game changer, paving the way for Egypt to be the region’s energy hub. The Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, a Cairo-based body that aims to create a regional gas market to benefit member states, was established. While it includes most of the region’s states in its membership, Turkey was notably not invited. For Erdogan, this was a move to stack the cards against his country, and he felt eager to retaliate, showing he is prepared to act tough to get his way and force new negotiations over their longstanding disputes.

Turkey has said the military pledge is in support of an internationally government in Libya and to safeguard its interests in the country and in the eastern Mediterranean.

Other analysis, however, have interpreted the Turkish moves as primarily motivated by its vital need to shape

Turkey’s Libyan gambit threatens to complicate its relationship with Moscow, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, which has expressed concern about the prospect of Turkish troops being deployed to Libya.

the region’s future in its own favour and an indication of Libya’s emerging status as focal point of Ankara’s foreign policy, which seemingly regards the country as an arena for Turkish proxy competition with rivals old (Greece) and new (Egypt and the UAE).

Turkey’s Libyan gambit threatens to complicate its relationship with Moscow, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad, which has expressed concern about the prospect of Turkish troops being deployed to Libya. Libya’s GNA has become increasingly dependent on Ankara for military reasons—namely, a lack of other allies willing to provide arms capable of countering the LNA’s Emirati-supplied drones, and the introduction of Russian mercenaries from the private Wagner group in September upended the balance of power and allowed LNA troops to seize control of key towns south of Tripoli.

Erdogan has voiced opposition to the Wagner group supporting Haftar›s forces. «Russia is there with 2,000 Wagner [fighters],» the Turkish leader said last month,

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General Khalifa Haftar›s Libyan National Army is the main opponent of the Tripoli government.

(Reuters)

also pointing out that some 5,000 Sudanese fighters were in Libya. «Is the official government inviting them? No.» The US believes that Russian air defences may also have been provided to Gen Haftar›s forces Washington insists that last November one of their UAVs was brought down by Russian missiles. The US operates over Libya against remnants of ISIS – a further illustration of the multifaceted and fractured situation on the ground.

Russia denies any active involvement in the fighting.

Attention is now on a planned January 8 visit by President Vladimir Putin to Turkey, where he will attend the opening of the TurkStream natural gas pipeline. The trip is likely to be dominated by discussions on Syria and the Turkish parliament›s vote to send troops to Libya.

The move is also likely to increase divisions between Washington and Ankara. President Trump faced a fierce backlash in October after effectively giving the green light to a Turkish military operation in Syria. He is under

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pressure from Republican members of Congress — who are threatening to impose sanctions on Ankara — to take a tougher stance towards Erdogan on a range of issues, including a regional dispute over gas in the eastern Mediterranean.

It also raises the stakes with Egypt, which has been at odds with Turkey since the Egyptian military removed Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in 2013 from power. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have also become increasingly angered by what they view as Turkey’s meddling in the Arab world, from its support for Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood to its intervention in north-east Syria and its backing of Qatar in a more than two-year dispute between rival Gulf states. Cairo condemned the parliamentary vote in the “strongest terms” and warned that any Turkish military intervention in Libya would have a “negative impact” on stability in the Mediterranean and accused Ankara of supporting terrorist organisations in the country.

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New Leader, Same Old Problems Baghdadi’s Legacy Looms Large Over the New ISIS Leader

by Asaad Almohammad ISIS is down but not out. In March 2019, U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab forces captured the group’s last territorial stronghold in the Middle East, the town

of Baghuz in eastern Syria. Seven months later, the organization’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, killed himself after U.S. special operations forces trapped him in a dead-end tunnel.

But ISIS didn’t die with him. In November, Russell

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The doctrinal debate over takfir had real-world repercussions. Rancorous infighting over the issue weakened ISIS during a crucial period of its decline in 2018 and 2019, causing friction at all layers of the organization. bedeviled his predecessor: an ideological dispute that threatens to tear ISIS apart from within and a rapidly expanding network of global branches and affiliates that presents a raft of challenges to centralized control.

DOCTRINE AND DEBATE

A picture taken on October 2019 ,27 shows Mosul›s AlNuri Mosque and the remains of the destroyed «Al-Hadba» leaning minaret (R) next to it in the former base of the Islamic State (IS) group in northern Iraq, where Jihadist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi used to address followers before the group was chased out of the area in 2017. (Getty)

Travers, the acting director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, testified to Congress that over the last year ISIS carried out a number of centrally coordinated transnational attacks and propaganda campaigns, indicating a degree “of enhanced connectivity.” Even after Baghdadi’s death, Travers said, the group “remains robust and—in some areas—is expanding.”

The man who has taken the helm of ISIS’s command is Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi alQurashi. Little is known about Baghdadi’s successor, whose real identity remains a mystery. (Qurashi is a nom de guerre.) U.S. State Department officials have both described him as a “nobody” and conceded that “nobody knows his background.” But to reunite what remains of the militant organization and build on the momentum of the last year, Qurashi will have to resolve two festering problems that

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The new leader didn’t inherit a unified or ideologically coherent organization from Baghdadi. He inherited one that is deeply divided over the doctrinal issue of takfir, or excommunication. The dispute is wide-ranging, but it centers on a single question: whether Muslims who excuse coreligionists who commit “polytheistic” acts—such as voting in elections, which is considered an expression of loyalty to a sovereign other than God—can be declared unbelievers.

One faction within ISIS—the Hazimis, or “extremists”—contends that excusing such acts is itself heretical, making it permissible to kill the excuser. Another faction, the so-called moderates, opposes this interpretation. Its members warn that the extremists’ approach is untenable, since it would cast masses of Muslims outside the faith, including a great many jihadis who differ over how to interpret takfir and when to use it. Internal ISIS documents leaked by dissenters on both sides of the takfir debate show that Baghdadi struggled to resolve this tension in his final years.

In late 2015, ISIS’s Department of General Security—a body charged with managing a broad range of internal and external security issues—proclaimed that it planned to rid the organization of extremists. But in early 2016,

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one of ISIS’s most important scholars, Turki al-Binali, claimed that the issue of “extremism” within the organization remained unresolved. In an effort to mediate between the factions, ISIS issued two reports in mid2016-. In one, the group prohibited discussing the nature of takfir, and in the other, it asserted that the organization’s most pressing problem was not the overuse of takfir but rather excessive moderation.

By May 2017, ISIS’s top leadership had denounced the extremists within their ranks in an official ruling that simultaneously brought the organization closer to the extremist interpretation of takfir. This awkward compromise angered the more moderate ISIS scholars, who publicly voiced their disagreement with the ruling. In September 2017, ISIS leadership backtracked, withdrawing the May ruling on takfir. But this concession to the moderate camp didn’t silence the growing chorus of dissent. After Baghdadi’s death, for instance, moderates went as far as questioning the legitimacy of Qurashi, whose stance on takfir remains unknown, in two essays published through the dissident Al Wafa Media Agency.

The doctrinal debate over takfir had real-world repercussions. Rancorous infighting over the issue weakened ISIS during a crucial period of its decline in 2018 and 2019, causing friction at all layers of the organization, from scholars to foot soldiers, and even defections. As a result, some of ISIS’s rank and file came to see the organization’s religious scholars as “the foundation of the problem,” as the ISIS dissident Abu Abd al-Malek al-Shami put it, prompting ISIS’s Delegated Committee—the group’s top governing body—to imprison many of the scholars involved in the takfir debate.

The man who has taken the helm of ISIS’s command is Abu Ibrahim alHashimi al-Qurashi.

Even now, those on both sides of the dispute remain convinced that the other side has corrupted the organization. Which of the two factions is stronger, and how Qurashi will approach the debate, remains to be seen. But left unresolved, the issue is likely to undermine his authority as well as his ability to coordinate the group’s dozens of global branches and affiliates.

THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD Qurashi inherited control of a transnational entity that extends from West Africa to Southeast Asia.

At the beginning of 2014, the group was known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and had a formal presence in just two countries. Today, ISIS has branches as far north as Azerbaijan and as far south as Mozambique and Mindanao in the Philippines. In May 2019, the organization added a branch in Pakistan to its already expansive

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A soldier stands at a destroyed school, which was heavily damaged in the main battle, in Marawi, Lanao del Sur in the Southern Philippines on October 2017 ,25.

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As the new ISIS leader, Qurashi has the power to shape the future of his organization. But Baghdadi’s legacy and the challenges he faced during his tenure still loom large.

roster of subsidiaries and affiliates. ISIS’s rapid global advance was one of Baghdadi’s accomplishments but it also introduced a number of political, cultural, and linguistic challenges to centralized control.

A deluge of recent videos of militants around the world pledging allegiance to Qurashi and ISIS reveals the depth of loyalty that the organization’s branches and affiliates still feel toward their central command. And according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, ISIS leadership likely still orchestrates the transnational attacks and propaganda campaigns carried out by its branches and subsidiaries.

But with new branches and affiliates have come new problems of coordination. When the organization first expanded into West Africa in 2015, ISIS sought to partner with the Nigerian militant group Boko Haram. But despite swearing loyalty to Baghdadi, Boko Haram

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leader Abubakar Shekau refused to abide by ISIS’s norms, producing deep strife within the West African organization. In 2016, Baghdadi was forced to replace Shekau with Shekau’s spokesperson Abu Musab al-Barnawi. Barnawi’s selection is believed to have cemented ISIS’s relationship with its West African affiliate. But it also split the group in two, as Shekau absconded with soldiers who remained loyal to him. Similar coordination issues are likely to arise in Africa and elsewhere as ISIS’s central leadership moves to reconsolidate after Baghdadi’s death.

To manage this ever-growing network, the new leader will likely seek to empower the Department of General Security. According to Benjamin Bahney and Patrick B. Johnston, two political scientists at the RAND Corporation, this entity is “the glue of the ISIS organization from top to bottom.” It is the crucial link between the organization’s leadership and its specialized departments, which coordinate everything from propaganda production to the creation of sleeper cells. During Baghdadi’s tenure, it maintained cohesion between the organization’s senior leaders and helped keep the center in sync with a rapidly expanding list of affiliates in geographically dispersed territories.

As the new ISIS leader, Qurashi has the power to shape the future of his organization. But Baghdadi’s legacy and the challenges he faced during his tenure still loom large. To rebuild ISIS into a potent organization with global reach, Qurashi will need to both mend the internal ideological rift and command ISIS’s branches and affiliates—all while avoiding the fate of his predecessor.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Ambivalence About Moscow Is a French Tradition But Macron Has Bet on Holding Russia Close 28

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The Enlightenment revolutionized Western conceptions of both time and space: its thinkers created the idea of the Middle Ages as a foil to their own age and “Eastern Europe” as a mirror for their native “Western Europe.”

Macron’s declaration was not improvised. Not only did it throw important light on recent French diplomatic activity but it also reflected an older source of light—namely, le siècle des Lumières, or the Enlightenment. It was fitting that a président philosophe—pace the title of a recent Macron biography—reaffirmed Russia’s ties to Europe. Who could be better qualified? After all, the eighteenthcentury French philosophes were the ones to both inspire and thwart Russia’s long effort to be counted as a European nation.

Say what one will about the Enlightenment—and much can be said in light of the furious debate over the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s recent work, Enlightenment Now—one cannot gainsay its impact. The Enlightenment revolutionized Western conceptions of both time and space: its thinkers created the idea of the Middle Ages as a foil to their own age and “Eastern Europe” as a mirror for their native “Western Europe.” Tell us how far in the past and far to the east you live, declared the philosophes, and we will tell you how far from civilization—a word they also reinvented—you happen to be.

French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Russian President, Vladimir Putin as he arrives at the Elysee Presidential Palace to attend a summit on Ukraine on December 2019 ,09 in Paris, France. (Getty)

by Robert Zaretsky Last August, while preparing for the G7- summit in Biarritz, French President Emmanuel Macron opened the doors of his summer residence at Fort Brégançon to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Armed with a bouquet of flowers, the Russian ruler praised the residence’s superb view of the Mediterranean and his host’s equally superb tan. In return, the French leader praised the cultural role in France of Russian artists such as Ivan Turgenev and Igor Stravinsky. These artists served as a reminder, Macron announced, that Russia is très profondément European.

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Having reshuffled this geographic deck of cards, the Enlightenment dealt the joker to Russia. The French philosophes were not certain how to classify this distant land that, ever since Peter the Great, sought to join the European club. As the historian Larry Wolff has observed, the French imagination located tsarist Russia somewhere “between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism.”

From Montesquieu through Voltaire to Diderot, les philosophes debated Russia’s geographic, and thus civilizational, status. The results were mixed. The first dismissed it as “Asiatic,” the second argued it was European, while the third concluded it was, well, betwixt and between.

In the mid–twentieth century, French President

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Charles de Gaulle expressed an ambivalence not far from Diderot’s about Russia’s place in Europe.

The founder of the Fifth Republic embraced what he called a “European Europe,” but he never clearly defined what he meant by this notion—apart, that is, from the leading role he gave in it to France. In 1959, de Gaulle described Europe as stretching “from the Atlantic to the Urals” and in doing so maintained the geopolitical flou first conjured by the philosophes.

The political scientist Marc Trachtenberg recently suggested that de Gaulle was “laying out not so much a political program as a vision of how things might develop in the fairly distant future—a vision of a Europe freed from the ‘two hegemonies,’ free to settle its own affairs.”

Sixty years later, only half of de Gaulle’s vision has materialized. The Russian hegemon, from its invasion of Crimea to its cyberattacks on elections, has not left Europe free to settle its own affairs.

As for the American hegemon, it has been in full retreat from Europe ever since the election of Donald Trump. Despite his efforts to educate his American counterpart on the mission of the Atlantic alliance, Macron succeeded only in entertaining him with military parades. The French president has not been shy in assessing the consequences of this fact. Last month, he bluntly declared that not only had the United States “turned its back on Europe” but it had left behind a “brain-dead” North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The diagnosis sent shock waves from the Atlantic, where it spawned panic, to the Urals, where it spurred cheers. In Moscow—admittedly some 2,000 miles west of the Urals—a Foreign

And so, with the United Kingdom distracted by the question of Brexit and Germany divided over the question of immigration, the French president has taken it on himself to hit the reset button with Russia.

Ministry spokesperson described Macron’s “words of gold” as “sincere and accurate.”

The hearty Russian response underscored a dramatic change in diplomatic atmospherics between the two countries. In the first round of the French presidential election in 2017, Putin rooted for the right-wing François Fillon, then for the extreme right-wing Marine Le Pen in the second round. Upon becoming president, Macron expressed anger toward Russian news outlets such as Russia Today for peddling fake news in France, and he voiced his opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. “France remains attached,” he affirmed at a joint press conference with then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, “to the sovereignty of Ukraine within its recognized borders.”

Putin was displeased. He met Macron in St. Petersburg to discuss the war in Syria in May 2018, and though Macron repeatedly glanced at the Russian president during the press conference, Putin neglected to return the favor. Moreover, while Macron sought to emphasize important geopolitical “convergences” with Russia—he even echoed de Gaulle’s “Atlantic to the Urals” declaration—Putin limited himself to

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French President Emmanuel Macron (R) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) during their meeting on May, 2017 ,29 in Versailles, France. (Getty)

In the first round of the French presidential election in 2017, Putin rooted for the right-wing François Fillon, then for the extreme right-wing Marine Le Pen in the second round. the question of Brexit and Germany divided over the question of immigration, the French president has taken it on himself to hit the reset button with Russia. Some of Macron’s European allies have seen his extended hand to Moscow as a back of the hand to them. As one EU ambassador complained to Le Monde, “Macron is not wrong. . . . But why must he always express himself in so French a fashion?” Even within France, the Franco-Russian specialist Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean warned against being too fast or too eager in pulling Russia closer, lest Putin see Macron not as “a new de Gaulle, but instead interpret the French overtures as an avowal of weakness and inconsistency.”

wanly acknowledging that “dialogue is always better than confrontation.”

But Macron has judged Russia’s options more starkly. Russia’s “anti-European project,” the French president observed in a July 2019 interview with The Economist, is confrontational, overmilitarized, and unsustainable. The country’s economy is contracting and its birthrate declining. Moscow will soon enough find itself beholden to a larger power, and Macron is certain that Russia does not want to become the “vassal of China.” A partnership with Europe may be its only alternative.

C’est maintenant, Macron believes, to make the European case to Putin—not only for Russia’s sake but for Europe’s. To push Russia away, he said in his annual address to his diplomatic corps in August, would be to sacrifice control over a crucial relationship and perhaps tip a precarious balance.

“We know that civilizations disappear,” he told his audience. “Europe will disappear. And the world will be structured around two big poles: the United States of America and China, and we will have to choose between dominations.”

And so, with the United Kingdom distracted by

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Given the brutal nature of Putin’s rule, much rides for the West on the danger of such an interpretation.

In May 2018, an inquiry led by officials from five countries released a report confirming that a Russian missile, fired by a Russian crew on Russian soil, had indeed brought down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014. During a press conference in St. Petersburg, a French journalist asked the Russian leader for his reaction. With the impassive look of a poker player, Putin replied that he did not know about the report because he had been working all day. Standing next to him, Macron did not flinch or respond, except to express his grief for the families of the nearly 300 murdered passengers.

Diderot might have sympathized. In 1773, he visited St. Petersburg at the invitation of Catherine the Great, whom he’d hoped in vain to turn into an enlightened ruler. Upon his return, a friend asked him for his impression of the empress whose rule was founded on the murdered body of her husband, the deposed Peter III. The philosopher paused, then whispered: “There is a world of difference between gazing at tigers in paintings and tigers in real life.”

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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The Neoliberal Collapse Markets Are Not the Answer

by Miatta Fahnbulleh

brought into sharp focus in the aftermath of the global financial meltdown of 8–2007 and the global Capitalism is in crisis. Until recently, that conviction recession that followed it. In the developed countries was confined to the left. Today, however, it has of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and gained traction across the political spectrum in Development, economic growth over the last decade advanced economies. Economists, policymakers, and ceased to benefit most people. At the end of 2017, ordinary people have increasingly come to see that nominal wage growth among OECD members was neoliberalism—a creed built on faith in free markets, only half what it was a decade earlier. More than one deregulation, and small government, and that has in three people in the OECD countries are estimated dominated societies for the last 40 years—has reached to be economically vulnerable, meaning they lack the means to maintain a living standard at or above the its limit. poverty level for at least three months. Meanwhile, This crisis has been long in the making but was in those countries, income inequality is higher than

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at any time in the past half century: the richest ten percent hold almost half of total wealth, and the bottom 40 percent hold just three percent.

Defenders of neoliberalism frequently point out that although decades of wage stagnation and wealth concentration have led to ballooning inequality in developed countries, the same time period has seen a dramatic increase in prosperity on a global scale.

Over a billion people, they argue, have been lifted out of extreme poverty owing to technological advances, investments, and prosperity that were made possible by the spread of free markets. However, this argument fails to account for the critical role that governments have played in that change through the provision of education, health care, and employment. Such state interventions have arguably been as decisive as the invisible hand of the market in lifting living standards.

This defense also ignores the fact that despite many gains in prosperity, massive wealth concentration and staggering inequality continue to shape the global economy: less than one percent of the world’s population owns 46 percent of the world’s wealth, and the poorest 70 percent own less than three percent.

US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders greets supporters during a rally in the Venice Beach neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, December 2019 ,21 (Getty)

Inequality has always been a feature of capitalist societies, and people have been willing to tolerate it as long as they felt that their quality of life was improving, their opportunities were expanding, and their children could expect to do even better than them—that is, as long as all the proverbial boats were rising. When that stopped happening in recent decades, it fed a growing perception that the system is unfair and is not working in the interest of the majority of people.

Pent-up frustration has led to a clamor for change— including a new receptivity to socialist ideals that have long been sidelined or even considered taboo. In the United Kingdom, for example, 53 percent of people recently polled said they believed that the economy has become more unfair over the last decade. Eightythree percent said they felt that the economy worked well for the wealthy, but only ten percent said that it worked for people born into poor families. And ideas such as restoring public ownership of the essential utilities that were privatized in recent decades, such as railways, electrical services, and water companies, are gaining traction, with over 75 percent of people polled supporting such a step. Meanwhile, in the United States, a 2018 Gallup poll found that among Americans aged 18 to 29, socialism had a higher

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At the end of 2017, nominal wage growth among OECD members was only half what it was a decade earlier. approval rating (51 percent) than capitalism (45 percent). “This represents a -12point decline in young adults’ positive views of capitalism in just the past two years,” Gallup noted, “and a marked shift since 2010, when 68 percent viewed it positively.”

A mere revival of the social democratic agenda of the post-war era, however, would not be sufficient.

For one thing, that period’s emphasis on central authority and state ownership runs counter to the widespread demand in developed economies for more local and collective control of resources. Perhaps more important, however, is the need to confront a challenge that post-war social democratic models did not have to take into account: the threat posed by climate change and catastrophic environmental degradation. After all, neoliberalism is not just failing people: it’s failing the earth. Owing in no small part to the massive levels of consumption and fossil fuel use required by an economic model that prioritizes growth above all else, climate change now imperils the future of human existence. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that the world has barely over a decade to halve carbon emissions if humanity is to have any chance of limiting the increase in average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—a point past which the damage to human and natural systems would be devastating and largely irreversible.

Just like the economic breakdown that has chipped away at people’s quality of life, environmental decline is rooted in the crisis of capitalism. And both challenges can be addressed by embracing an alternative economic model, one that responds to a hunger for genuine reform by adapting socialist ideals to the contemporary era. A new economic model must prioritize a thriving and healthy natural environment.

It must deliver improvements in well-being and guarantee all citizens a decent quality of life. It must

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be built by businesses that plan for the long term, seek to serve a social purpose beyond just increasing profits and shareholder value, and commit to giving their workers a voice. The new model would empower people and give them a larger stake in the economy by establishing common ownership of public goods and essential infrastructure and by encouraging the cooperative and joint ownership of private, locally administered enterprises. This calls for an active but decentralized state that would devolve power to the level of local communities and enable people to act collectively to improve their lives.

A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT The United Kingdom provides an interesting case study of how the crisis of capitalism is playing out.

There, as in the United States, center-right and centerleft governments alike have spent decades following a neoliberal recipe of tax cuts, reduced social welfare benefits, and deregulation—far more enthusiastically than most other European countries, which have stronger social democratic traditions and institutions.

As a result, the neoliberal breakdown has been particularly painful in the United Kingdom, where people are on average poorer today than they were in 2008, adjusting for inflation. British household debt is higher than it was before the financial crisis, as more people borrow just to get by, and a staggering 14.3 million people live in poverty.

For those experiments to flourish, influential political figures who identify with the socialist tradition should use their platforms to draw attention to local-level activists and organizations that are working to create a more democratic economy.

For many British people, the 2016 referendum on whether to leave the European Union served as an outlet for their discontent and anger at a failing system.

The vote in favor of Brexit was a clear message from communities under pressure that the status quo needed to change. More than three years on, this disquiet continues to grow, opening up space for more radical changes in domestic policy—as witnessed by the Labour Party’s recent embrace of ideas that would once have been considered too risky, such as the renationalization of utilities and the establishment of a state-run pharmaceutical company.

But even in the United Kingdom, political platforms have lagged behind public demands for significant change. What’s needed in developed economies across the world is not tinkering around the edges but a full-scale reformation of the relationship among the state, the economy, and local communities.

The first step would be a global Green New Deal: a massive mobilization of resources to decarbonize and at the same time create millions of jobs and lift

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A general view of the company branding on the Oxford Street branch of the department store John Lewis and Partners on September 2018 ,13 in London, England.

(Getty)

In the United States, a 2018 Gallup poll found that among Americans aged 18 to 29, socialism had a higher approval rating (51 percent) than capitalism (45 percent). activities and setting quotas for the amount of finance that should flow to low-carbon investment.

living standards. The goal should be net-zero carbon emissions within ten to 15 years, which will require governments to make significant investments in green infrastructure, such as onshore and offshore wind farms and smart energy grids; in new technologies such as carbon capture and storage; and in training workers to develop the skills they will need for the jobs a green economy will create, such as installing insulation, maintaining renewable energy systems, and reconditioning and refurbishing used goods.

To boost sluggish wages, governments should use all the levers of the state—corporate taxes, wage regulations, and subsidies—to incentivize or force businesses to pay their workers fairly. A just share of the rewards from their labor should come not only in the form of higher wages but also in reductions in working time, with a move to an average fourday workweek, which governments can achieve by increasing statutory holidays. At the same time, the power of workers to protect their interests should be strengthened by requiring all companies to automatically recognize labor unions and by giving workers stronger legal rights to organize, bargain collectively, and strike. Workers must also gain greater ownership of the organizations that employ them. Governments ought to mandate employee ownership funds, which transfer a share of a firm’s profits, in the form of equity, into a trust that is owned by workers collectively. Through the trust, workers would receive shares in the company, just like any shareholder. Those shares would come with voting rights, enabling employees to become the dominant shareholders in every enterprise over time, with the power to shape the direction of the businesses where they work. In the United Kingdom, a growing number of companies, including the department store chain John Lewis, the home-entertainment retailer Richer Sounds, and the consulting firm Mott MacDonald, are already reaping the benefits of putting ownership in the hands of workers: higher productivity, better worker retention and engagement, and stronger profits.

Policymakers will also need to create incentives for companies to reduce their carbon use by replacing subsidies for fossil fuels with tax breaks for the use of renewables. New regulations, such as zero-carbon building standards or quotas for the use of fossil fuel energy, would help bend markets that have been slow to act in response to the climate crisis. And central banks will need to encourage financial markets to divest from fossil fuels through tougher credit guidance A new social contract with citizens should extend policies, including capping the amount of credit that beyond the workplace, however, with the ultimate goal can be used to support investment in carbon-intensive being the establishment of a “well-being state” that

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would provide everyone with the basics necessary to maintain a decent quality of life. This would require increased investment in the staples of the welfare state, which have been weakened under neoliberal governments, such as guaranteed universal access to high-quality health care and education. But the new approach would go beyond those familiar elements by offering universal access to childcare, public transportation, and minimum income protection— that is, a floor below which no one’s income can fall irrespective of whether a person is employed. These expansions of the welfare state should be funded through progressive taxation that would raise the tax burden on those who can most afford it, by increasing the top rates for income and corporate taxes and by taxing wealth, such as capital gains, at the same level as income.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE Top-down policies, however, will not be sufficient to spur the kind of transformation that must take place in developed countries in order to truly shake off neoliberal stagnation and decline. Those societies also must become more democratic, with power and resources distributed to regional and local governments, closer to the people in the communities they serve. This is one critical way in which such a new economic agenda would differ from more traditional socialism, which tends to favor centralized authority public transportation, municipalities should establish and state ownership. For example, rather than relying corporations owned by and accountable to residents on federal or provincial governments for everyday to provide these services. essentials, such as energy, affordable housing, and The Basque Country, in Spain, offers one example of what a more democratic economy might look like. There, the Mondragon Corporation, set up in 1956 by graduates of a technical college to provide employment through worker cooperatives, has grown to become one of the ten largest business groups and the fourth-largest employer in Spain, with hundreds of different companies and subsidiaries and over 75,000 workers. The cooperatives operate in a variety of sectors, including banking, consumer goods, and engineering. They are set up not merely to turn a profit but also to achieve a specific social or environmental goal. They are owned and run by the people who work for them rather than by external investors, and their governance structures ensure

What’s needed in developed economies across the world is not tinkering around the edges but a full-scale reformation of the relationship among the state, the economy, and local communities.

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Ayse Tokbay, right, walks Cydney Franklin through her Medicare options at the Howard County Office on Aging and Independence on Medicare in Columbia, Maryland on November 2019 ,25. (Getty)

that members have a stake in the organizations and share in the wealth they create.

Community land trusts in the United Kingdom provide another example. Granby Four Streets, in Liverpool, and the London Community Land Trust, in the Mile End district, provide affordable housing to their local communities by buying land from the private sector and taking it into community ownership. The trust builds affordable homes that it sells or rents to local residents at discounted rates. An asset lock prevents the land from being resold, which guarantees that the homes will remain affordable.

Bottom-up experiments such as these will be critical to the success of a new economic model. For those experiments to flourish, influential political figures who identify with the socialist tradition should use

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their platforms to draw attention to local-level activists and organizations that are working to create a more democratic economy. Meanwhile, some degree of patience will be in order: it will take time for such new thinking to produce the large-scale changes necessary. But such patience must also have a limit: when it comes to fixing the damage that neoliberalism has done, time is running out.

MIATTA FAHNBULLEH is Chief Executive of the New Economics Foundation. This essay expands on an article that appeared in The New Economics Zine, which is published by the foundation.

This article was originally published in the January/ February 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine and on ForeignAffairs.com.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1781- january- 03/01/2020

Lebanese PM Hassan Diab – The Professor Tasked with Saving a Country on the Verge of Collapse

www.majalla.com

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Netflix Made More Films Than Any Other Studio Now it Wants an Oscar Netflix Inc. has been making its own movies for years, but 2019 may be remembered as the year it truly became a film studio.

The company began the year by joining the Motion Picture Association of America, the Hollywood trade group that represents movie studios. It went on to release nearly 60 Englishlanguage feature films over the course of 2019, including Oscar contenders “The Irishman” and “Marriage Story.”

With a slate that includes its first animated feature “Klaus,” a Michael Bay action thriller and comedies like Eddie Murphy’s “Dolemite Is My Name,” Netflix has doubled or even tripled the output of Hollywood’s biggest studios. And for the first time, the company’s top executives are saying that movies will determine whether Netflix hits its financial targets in 2019.

“This fall was a nice culmination,” Scott Stuber, Netflix’s film chief, said in an interview. “I’m very proud of this slate. I can look you in the eye and say we’ve made as good movies this fall as anybody.”

Stuber, 51, joined Netflix in 2017 after more than two decades working in the film business

— first as an executive and then a producer.

Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos asked Stuber to build a movie studio from scratch, one that would rival any in Hollywood.

At the time, Netflix had only released a couple dozen original movies, most of them forgettable — like the sequel to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and Adam Sandler’s comedy western “The Ridiculous 6.” The company had to fill its slate with projects that had been cast aside by other studios.

Netflix’s one movie that delighted critics, “Beasts of No Nation,” earned no nominations at the 2016 Academy Awards — an outcome that many experts interpreted as a rebuke of the streaming company. It had resisted demands to release its movies in theaters before they appear on its service, angering cinephiles and movietheater owners.

“It was a company built on television — that was first and foremost,” said Stuber, a -6foot4executive who brought a fat Rolodex to Netflix from producing movies such as “Ted,” “The Break-Up” and “Central Intelligence.” Many of his past collaborators, including Dwayne “The

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The buttons of Netflix, Spotify, Podcasts, WhatsApp and Music on the screen of an iPhone. (Getty)

Rock” Johnson and director Peter Berg, have since signed on to make movies for Netflix.

FILM FLOOD In the 2/1 2 years since Stuber took the job, Netflix has morphed into the largest movie studio in Hollywood, at least in terms of volume. The company plans to release 50 to 60 films a year, and that doesn’t include projects born out of other divisions, such as “El Camino,” a spinoff movie from the TV show “Breaking Bad.” The company has scored both critical and commercial hits. “Bird Box” and “Murder Mystery” were viewed by more than 70 million people apiece in their first month on the service, according to the company, while “Triple Frontier” and “The Highwaymen” both eclipsed 40 million viewers. Six of the 10 most-watched new titles on the service in the U.S. in 2019 were original films.

Still, it’s hard to measure Netflix’s success. The company is selective in what viewer information it releases and there’s no reliable third-party data source. So it’s all but impossible to verify

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Netflix found a sweet spot making the kinds of movies other studios have abandoned: adult dramas, romantic comedies and action movies without superheroes. how any one Netflix project fared. The company points to its continued subscriber growth as evidence of success, but critics note that Netflix still borrows money to fund its productions.

Two facts seem clear, though. First, Netflix found a sweet spot making the kinds of movies other studios have abandoned: adult dramas, romantic comedies and action movies without superheroes. Rom-coms like “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “Always Be My Maybe” don’t have the global appeal of “The Avengers,” but they are infinitely rewatchable at home.

The sequel to “All the Boys” is on the slate in 2020, along with movies from George Clooney, Spike Lee and Ryan Murphy, creator of “American Horror Story.”

Second, the industry no longer views Netflix as an outsider. Filmmakers Alfonso Cuaron, Martin Scorsese and Noah Baumbach — all staunch defenders of classic cinema — have turned to

Netflix Inc. has been making its own movies for years, but 2019 may be remembered as the year it truly became a film studio... It went on to release nearly 60 Englishlanguage feature films over the course of 2019, including Oscar contenders “The Irishman” and “Marriage Story.”

Netflix to get their movies made.

And the voters for the Academy Awards have come around, nominating Netflix for 15 Oscars last year, including its first for best picture, best director, best actress and best screenplay. The company didn’t win the best-picture statuette, but took home its first prizes for something other than a documentary.

‘You did it’ “When I saw Ted Sarandos after the Oscars, I said, ‘You did it, you got over the hump,’” said John Sloss, who produced “Green Book,” last year’s winner for best picture. In other words, the Academy is ready — when the film is right — to give Netflix its top prize.

That could be as soon as 2020. Netflix has two of the five movies with the best odds, according to Gold Derby, a site devoted to predicting entertainment awards. They include the current front-runner, Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman.”

The nominations will be announced Jan. 13.

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Scarlett Johansson (L) and Adam Driver attend the «Marriage Story» premiere at 57th New York Film Festival on October 2019 ,04 in New York City. (Getty)

David O. Russell, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro attend ‹The Irishman› LA AMPAS Hosted Tastemaker at The London Hotel on October 2019 ,27 in West Hollywood, California. (Getty)

The New York film critics named that movie the year’s best, and Netflix earned the most Golden Globe nominations of any studio in both film and television.

Though Netflix has relaxed its policy on theaters — allowing movies to appear on the big screen for as long as a month before they migrate to the streaming service — that hasn’t appeased the world’s largest cinema chains.

But this year has been a particularly strong one for movies, and there is no one leader.

Los Angeles film critics named Bong JoonHo’s “Parasite” the year’s best, while Sam Mendes’s “1917” has earned ecstatic reviews.

Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” could finally earn the filmmaker his first Oscar for best director.

The only group that hasn’t embraced Netflix yet is theater owners. Though Netflix has relaxed its policy on theaters — allowing movies to appear on the big screen for as long as a month before they migrate to the streaming service — that hasn’t appeased the world’s largest cinema chains. They still refuse to show the service’s movies.

and Universal Pictures, want to get their movies online sooner, too. And many companies, including Walt Disney Co., are making movies that won’t appear in theaters at all.

“It’s not a Netflix-versus-theater thing,” Stuber said. “The entire film business has to figure out the right distribution model that helps everyone.”

But many movie studios, including Warner Bros.

Originally published in Bloomberg News

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Lebanese PM Hassan Diab – The Professor Tasked with Saving a Country on the Verge of Collapse Majalla - London Hassan Diab was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1959. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in communications engineering, which he received from Leeds Metropolitan University in 1981. He also holds an M.Sc with Distinction in Systems Engineering from the University of Surrey, and a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Bath, UK. He is a chartered engineer in the UK Engineering Council and a registered Chartered Professional Engineer in the National Professional Engineers Register of Australia.

Prior to entering politics, Diab pursued a career in academia, eventually becoming Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. In 2004, he was appointed as Founding President and Dean of the College of Engineering of Dhofar University in Oman. In 2006, he was appointed AUB›s vicepresident of Regional External Programs (REP), the university›s consulting and professional development arm.

Diab has over 30 years of experience in the academic field. He has over 130 publications for national and international journals, and has led over to 30 research projects sponsored through local and

international grants. He has also served as a member of over 50 organizing committees of international conferences, and is an honorary member of the Advisory Board in several international biographical organizations.

Diab has received 13 international and regional awards, including the Fulbright Research Award in 1988, and the Young Arab Scientists Shuman Prize in Engineering in 1992. Diab is also a Founding Member of the first Arab Computer Society established in 2001, as well as the Founding Member of the IEEE Student Branch at AUB in 2001. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineers, UK and the Institute of Engineers, Australia as well as a Senior Member in the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers, USA. In 2011, he was appointed the Minister of Education and High Education of Lebanon under then Prime Minister Najib Mikati, a position he held until February 2011. According to a 2018 biography, Mr Diab is one of only a few non-party affiliated technocrats to have been a minister in Lebanon. He was also the first Lebanese education minister to have a professional background in higher education.

After leaving office, he returned to his teaching and administrative roles at AUB. Diab was designed the next Prime Minister of Lebanon succeeding Saad Hariri on December

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2019 ,19, against the backdrop of nationwide protests against the country’s ruling elite that caused the resignation of Hariri. Diab’s candidacy won the support of 69 members of the Lebanese parliament, a simple majority; his support came from parties that co-form the March 8 alliance. Diab vowed to swiftly form a new government to “focus on stopping the collapse and restoring confidence.” But the new premier faces an uphill battle. He has the onerous task of steering Lebanon out of longbuilding financial crisis which has made it one of the world’s most indebted countries. His task is further complicated by the opposition from Sunni, Christian and Druze parties who view him as a political appointee of Iran-backed Hezbollah. In Lebanon’s sect-based political system, the prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, and Diab’s appointment was unique in that his backing came not from fellow Sunnis but from Christian and Shiite parties. The latter includes Hezbollah, the militant group that the United States and other countries have designated a terrorist organization. Some analysts doubt Diab’s appointment would be enough to address the country’s simultaneous crises, questioning the qualifications he brought to the difficult job.

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ealth

Hidden Dental Dangers that May Threaten Your Whole Body

Tooth Decay and Gum Disease can Lead to Serious Health Problems, Including Brain or heart infections.

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One in five adults ages 65 or older has untreated tooth decay (a cavity). tooth decay (a cavity). This develops when food and bacteria form plaque that sticks to teeth and produces toxins that break down a tooth›s outer layer (enamel).

Bacteria also can infect the root of the tooth and form a small pocket of pus (an abscess). «If the infection doesn›t find a way out, it may travel to another space in the head. It wants the path of least resistance, so it may infect the jaw. But it can also travel to the brain and cause death, although this is fortunately rare,» warns Dr. Lisa Thompson, a geriatric dentistry specialist at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

GUM DISEASE Two out of three adults ages 65 or older have gum disease (also called periodontal disease).

This is inflammation of the gums that can lead to tooth loss and many other problems. The disease starts with plaque buildup that irritates the gums.

This early stage (gingivitis) causes swollen gums that bleed easily.

by Harvard Health Letter A growing number of older adults have something to smile about: research shows they›re keeping their teeth longer. While that makes chewing and talking easier and staves off malnutrition and the discomfort of dentures or missing teeth, it also means you need to be more vigilant than ever about preventing dental problems -including some that can have life-threatening complications.

TOOTH DECAY One in five adults ages 65 or older has untreated

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If untreated, gingivitis can extend below the gum line. The body›s own immune system is thought to fuel the condition, as white blood cells -- called to attack the bacteria -- eventually damage gum tissue as well. «It can infect the gums all the way down to the ligament that holds the teeth in the bone, penetrate the ligament, destroy bone, and cause tooth loss and abscesses,» Dr. Thompson says. At worst, bacteria from gum disease may get into the bloodstream and infect the heart valves, a potentially deadly complication.

People with gum disease are more likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer›s disease, and pneumonia -- although it is not proven that the gum disease actually causes these conditions.

OLDER ADULTS FACE INCREASED RISKS Maintaining good oral health gets harder as we age. Sometimes that happens because we›ve suffered declines in other abilities. «You might have arthritis and decreased manual dexterity.

That can make it difficult to brush or floss your teeth or properly care for dentures if you have them,» says Dr. Thompson.

Another challenge: age-related physical changes in the mouth. The gums start to recede, exposing more of your teeth and creating new spaces that floss doesn›t always reach. The teeth become less sensitive as the nerves inside them shrink and a secondary layer of dentin (porous material beneath the enamel) develops.

«You may not feel the same amount of pain in

the tooth if there›s a problem, and it can progress before you realize it,» Dr. Thompson points out.

And years of wear and tear can leave your teeth weakened or cracked and vulnerable to dental problems.

Chronic conditions also play a role in oral health.

Uncontrolled diabetes can make gum disease worse. And many medications cause dry mouth.

«You need saliva -- which contains fluoride and electrolytes [like sodium and calcium] and moistens the mouth -- to help clean and protect the teeth,» Dr. Thompson says. A lack of saliva can lead to tooth decay in as little as three months after dry mouth begins.

WHAT YOU CAN DO By staying on top of oral hygiene, you can ward off cavities and even reverse gingivitis. But it›s

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going to take extra effort now. These steps can help keep your mouth -- and the rest of you -healthy: • Brush your teeth at least twice a day and floss at least once. If you›re still not removing enough debris, Dr. Thompson recommends adding an interdental brush to your routine.

«It has a little cone-shaped bristle that fits between the teeth,» she explains. «You can find it in the toothbrush aisle of any pharmacy.»

• If you have dry mouth, ask your dentist about a prescription toothpaste or mouth rinse with fluoride to help protect against cavities.

Chewing gum with xylitol may also stimulate saliva production, which can help protect against cavities.

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Brush your teeth at least twice a day and floss at least once.

• If you find brushing difficult because of arthritis, try an electric toothbrush or a toothbrush with an ergonomic handle.

• Avoid smoking, which is a risk factor for gum disease.

• If you have dentures, be sure to brush them daily and soak them overnight in a denture cleaner.

• Don›t skip check-ups and cleanings at your dentist›s office (at least two to four times per year, depending on your gum health).

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Ever-Further Union What Happened to the European Idea?

by Andrew Moravcsik The Capital. Robert Menasse. Translated by Jamie Bulloch..

Liveright, 416 .2019pp.The European Union may well be the most ambitious and successful experiment in voluntary international cooperation in history. It has lasted longer than most national democracies in the world today. But it is deadly

dull. So it is no surprise that novelists shun EU politics.

How could a writer possibly find inspiration among the soulless steel and glass buildings of Brussels, where pedantic bureaucrats, politically correct diplomats, and remorseless lobbyists hammer out market regulations?

Robert Menasse, a popular Austrian author and essayist, accepted the challenge. Ten years ago, he moved to Brussels

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If The Capital does not qualify as great literature, it is worth reading for another reason: to gain fresh insights into the way Europeans perceive the EU’s future. diplomats, and, in a deliciously Machiavellian scene, a suave official sitting atop the European Commission.

Menasse gets many details of the EU just right. His cruel caricature of the technocratic, self-important, and sometimes petty bureaucratic culture of the commission is largely accurate. He skillfully renders the bland life of the expatriate in Brussels—not surprising, since his book research required him to become one. More profoundly, he captures how in modern Europe, where historical memories tied to a specific time and place have grown less vivid, people invoke the Holocaust and other epochal events without any real sense of their cultural and historical context. And Menasse has a way with metaphors—especially those involving pigs, which he invokes to symbolize a vast range of things, including pork-barrel politics, anti-Semitic rhetoric, and the wildness of human nature, from which modern bureaucrats are alienated.

European Union (EU) flags are seen waving outside the EU Commission Building at night in Brussels, Belgium on December 2019 ,20. (Getty)

with the quixotic aim of writing the first great EU novel. The resulting work, Die Hauptstadt, was published in 2017 and won the most prestigious book prize in the German-speaking world, the German Book Prize. It now appears in English as The Capital.

Menasse’s novel is a satirical send-up of contemporary Brussels. Alongside subplots involving terrorists, contract killers, police officers, farmers, fathers, sons, and a (perhaps imaginary) wild pig, the main narrative follows the rise and fall of two absurd plans to re-invigorate the EU: an official proposes that the European Commission’s 60th anniversary be celebrated at Auschwitz, and a retired Austrian economics professor—apparently the last true believer in federalism— seeks to renew European idealism by transferring the EU’s capital to the same spot. Of course, neither plan stands the slightest chance of success. They are easily shot down by venal lobbyists, conformist consultants, cynical national

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Menasse’s literary ambitions are far from modest. He explicitly models his book on one of the great modernist novels of the twentieth century: The Man Without Qualities, by his compatriot Robert Musil, who published three volumes of the novel between 1930 and 1943 but never completed it. Both works are political satires set during what Menasse called in a 2016 essay “the eve of an epochal rupture”—for Musil, it is World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and for Menasse, it is a possible collapse of the EU. Both peel back everyday routines to reveal a world in which historical memory and religious belief are eroding and individual actions seem to lack any sense of higher purpose. And both weave rich tapestries out of seemingly disconnected actions through a panoramic collection of archetypes: the criminal outsider, the lonely lady, the political expert, the self-important political climber, the master manipulator. As if to dispel any doubt, The Capital coyly mentions that Musil’s novel is the favorite book of the fictional European Commission president—who, of course, has not actually read it.

Yet Menasse is no Musil. He cannot match his predecessor’s

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edgy prose, and his comfortable and small-minded characters do not, as Musil’s do, peer over the edge of an abyss, questioning whether basic moral principles, or even life itself, have any deeper meaning. And the dangers facing Menasse’s Europe hardly compare with the existential threat World War I posed to Musil’s Austro-Hungarian Empire.

If The Capital does not qualify as great literature, it is worth reading for another reason: to gain fresh insights into the way Europeans perceive the EU’s future. Many argue that the central challenge facing Europe today is the lack of a common political narrative with sufficient public resonance. Menasse explores a critical question that this concern raises: In an era in which historical memories, religious beliefs, and national identities are eroding, what ideals could revive public support for European integration?

TOUGH CROWD The EU does not lack for critics. They divide into two camps: those who believe Brussels should do less and those who believe it should do more. Both assert that the EU aims to replace nation-states, but the first group resists this goal, while the second applauds it. Resisters include the Euroskeptics behind Brexit and their right-wing populist and nationalist allies in France, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. These critics see themselves as defending the nation-state in the face of a tyrannous EU “superstate” bent on imposing socialism. The Capital, completed before Brexit and concerns of Russian meddling in European democracy, largely ignores these views.

Instead, Menasse focuses on (and casts his lot with) the second group of critics—those who complain that the EU does not go far enough. Members of this group are generally

Left-wing critics of the EU receive less media attention than their right-wing counterparts, but they are probably more numerous across Europe, and especially in Brussels. Menasse’s most sympathetic and thoughtful characters belong to this group.

left-wing in political orientation and view the EU as a dangerously neoliberal construction that fosters inequality, coddles corporations, and dampens progressive government policies. (That view may be reductive, but it is surely a more accurate critique of what the EU does than the one offered by the Euroskeptics.) These critics believe that Europe should move toward “ever-closer union” by enacting more generous pan-European fiscal and social policies, cushioning the harsh effects of globalization and liberalization, limiting environmental pollution and corporate prerogatives, defending human rights, and combating nationalism and right-wing populism.

Left-wing critics of the EU receive less media attention than their right-wing counterparts, at least in the English-language press, but they are probably more numerous across Europe, and especially in Brussels. Menasse’s most sympathetic and thoughtful characters belong to this group. The EU, they maintain, was an idealistic project from the start, and its fortunes have risen and fallen with the idealism of its supporters. In the 1950s, those who launched European integration were largely political moderates, mostly Christian democrats, who viewed federalism as an instrument to vanquish the nationalism and political extremism that had caused two centuries of strife in Europe, culminating in World War II. The EU’s raison d’être, the idealists in Menasse’s book argue, was to prevent another war in Europe and another Auschwitz by stripping nationstates of their power and prerogatives in favor of a system of supranational governance.

The Capital espouses a radical variant of this critique in the form of a rant delivered by the retired Austrian professor, Alois Erhart. Nation-states, he says, no longer stand for any common beliefs or practices, let alone for worthy ethical ideals. Farmers, multinational firms, and other venal special interests have captured policymaking. And when these narrow interests conflict, EU policy gridlocks, as exemplified by the perennial quibbles over the EU budget and by the failure of Germany to be more generous toward the eurozone debtor states, such as Greece. Even worse, Erhart charges, politicians peddle nationalism, which persuades citizens that their parochial claims are ethically justified and blinds them to their true identity as Europeans or as human beings. Even EU policy intellectuals lack a vision of the future. Instead, Erhart fumes, they are no better than the “pragmatists” who defended slavery in ancient Greece, low wages during the Industrial Revolution, or the following of Hitler’s orders.

For all these reasons, Erhart (and Menasse) concludes that nation-states will disintegrate of their own accord, as will the EU’s most powerful institutions, the European Council and the Council of Ministers, both of which represent member

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Ten years ago, Robert Menasse moved to Brussels with the quixotic aim of writing the first great EU novel. The resulting work, Die Hauptstadt, was published in 2017 and won the most prestigious book prize in the German-speaking world, the German Book Prize. It now appears in English as The Capital. war and genocide. Beyond this, Menasse’s writings reveal little about what the new institutions would look like or how they could manage the ambitious European fiscal, social, and regulatory policies he advocates.

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS

governments. The destruction of nation-states would also imply the collapse of national democracy as a mode of legitimation. The only remaining question is what to put in their place. Menasse argues that the EU must be transformed into a modern, postnational welfare state, with its own social, tax, fiscal, and human rights policies. Yet he does not, in The Capital or elsewhere, dwell much on policy details. His focus is on the radical new institutions and ideas required to legitimate such changes democratically—which would result in an “entirely new, globally innovative, bold European avantgarde” political system, as he described it in a 2012 essay.

Breathless adjectives cannot disguise the fact that the details of Menasse’s postnational system remain frustratingly scarce. In his essays, Menasse rejects the idea of endowing a European superstate with a large budget, overarching regulatory power, or an army. Instead, the European Commission’s bureaucrats would somehow govern through persuasion, compelling symbolism, and stronger cultural policies—an approach modeled on the Erasmus program, which allows European college students to study in other EU member states. In place of the current state-centric system, Menasse suggests that subnational regions, such as Catalonia, Piedmont, and Scotland, should deal directly with Brussels through the European Parliament. In the novel, Erhart proposes a new EU passport, with no national identification, and a new European capital in Auschwitz to underscore Europe’s opposition to

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Despite its paucity of detail, Menasse’s work has garnered praise and prizes from progressive European intellectuals, not least in German-speaking countries, where his premises are widely shared. Yet there is little reason to put much stock in his vision of Europe’s past, present, or future.

What is most glaring, Menasse gets the EU’s history wrong.

A quarter century ago, historians debunked the belief— still found today in textbooks, political speeches, and The Capital—that preventing war or another Auschwitz was the primary motivation behind the founding of the EU. Such idealism may have provided the impetus for national leaders in the late 1940s to create Europe’s human rights body—the Council of Europe—and perhaps the European Coal and Steel Community. Jean Monnet, the idealistic father of the EU, did envision locking in peace and democracy by incrementally replacing nation-states with a European superstate that would wield its technocratic authority over atomic energy, coal, steel, and other war materiel. But when European leaders created the European Economic Community, in 1957, taking the first step toward the EU that exists today, they overrode the objections of Monnet, who viewed a common market as an apolitical betrayal of his vision. They focused instead on trade and investment in civilian goods, not to save Europe from violence but because industrialists and farmers on the world’s most interdependent continent, especially those in Germany, insisted that this was the best way to assure national prosperity and bolster the effectiveness of national policies. And they constructed more intergovernmental and

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decentralized institutions not to abolish nation-states but, in the words of the historian Alan Milward, to “rescue” them.

In the decade that followed, the politician who did the most to promote Europe’s first supranational institutions—those governing the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy—was no idealist. He was an outspokenly nationalist French president named Charles de Gaulle.

Over the past 50 years, the EU’s member states have slowly reformed the union in order to serve national interests, and Menasse is correct that national governments and institutions such as the European Council and the Council of Ministers dominate EU decision-making today. Yet he is wrong to assume that this intergovernmental structure has led to gridlock or impotence in the face of recent crises. To the contrary, the EU has compiled an extraordinary record of successful action.

It has maintained the single market, enforced the world’s highest regulatory standards, policed market competition, and protected the euro in the face of the Great Recession. It has all but eliminated Mediterranean migration yet retained nearly borderless travel. It has managed numerous military missions and, more important, used trade, sanctions, aid, and diplomacy to bolster Ukraine and face down a resurgent Russia. EU leaders are now constructing a common investment-screening policy directed at China, as well as a response to democratic backsliding in Europe itself. If some of these policies are less redistributive or humanitarian than perhaps they should be, the cause is not bureaucratic obstructionism or institutional paralysis but the absence of left-wing majorities in European capitals. Far from teetering on the brink of collapse, the EU’s nation-state-based system remains effective and legitimate.

Of all the views that Menasse’s novel implicitly backs, the most dubious is his conception of Europe’s future.

Even if one overlooks the vagueness of his vision, a more troubling question lurks underneath: Would Europeans view the demolition of nation-states or the construction of a postnational European state as legitimate? Here, Menasse displays another conviction typical of the European left: a blind trust in mass democracy. The new system would be legitimate, Menasse believes, because a process of genuinely democratic transnational deliberation would surely lead the European public to adopt more cosmopolitan and solidaristic ideals. If only the European masses could be edified through such a process, they would firmly oppose nationalism and racism, support stronger European integration in areas such as fiscal and social policy, and become open to immigration—all at the expense of national governments.

This belief is far-fetched, even utopian, as the EU’s own recent history has shown. Something akin to Menasse’s vision, minus the insistence on regional representation, motivated the effort

in the late 1990s to redress the EU’s so-called democratic deficit by promulgating a European constitution. Advocates claimed that vibrant deliberation and more competitive elections for the European Parliament would encourage mass participation, voter education, deep reflection, and, ultimately, greater trust and support for the EU. The opposite occurred.

In referendums and elections, Europeans voted erratically, ignoring basic facts and choosing hazy nationalist ideals over pragmatic problem solving. Far from serving as a font of cosmopolitanism, the European Parliament has become a source of legitimacy and funds for Euroskeptics such as Nigel Farage, one of the British politicians behind the proBrexit campaign in 2016. And in national elections, populists and nationalists have surged, largely at the expense of social democrats.

One senses that Menasse the satirical novelist, as opposed to Menasse the essayist, understands that his schemes to rekindle European idealism are bound to fail. In The Capital, all the genuine idealists in the novel are old, lonely, demented, or dead—with no connection to the modern world. Whatever commitment European leaders may have had to preventing war and genocide immediately after World War II, today no EU citizen under the age of 75 (immigrants and some residents of Croatia excepted) has ever experienced either one.

Nor does anyone today view war or genocide as a realistic threat on a continent of democratic, nationally satisfied, and economically interdependent nations.

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Yet Menasse’s idealism is hardly idiosyncratic: it is shared by most European left-wing party leaders, as well as prominent left-wing social philosophers, such as Jürgen Habermas. If faith in postnational democracy is misplaced, why does the European left cling to this vision? One reason is that this ideal serves as a comfortable fiction among European social democrats faced with an insurmountable contradiction. On the one hand, they are principled European federalists. On the other, they dislike many neoliberal EU policies. To square the circle, they tell themselves that if only Europe replaced existing states with postnational democracy and cosmopolitan ideals, everyone would surely do the right thing. The result is that these friends of Europe judge the EU even more harshly than do the Euroskeptics, further undermining European integration.

Postnational utopianism constitutes a missed opportunity, because it undermines the left’s ability to combat Brexiteers and conservative nationalists. Fearing an electoral rebuff similar to those suffered in 2017 by the Brexiteers and by the far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, almost all right-wing political parties have moderated their criticism of the EU. Hardly any right-wing party leaders still advocate holding a referendum on exiting the EU or abandoning the euro, claiming instead that they will work within the EU system in order to weaken the union—a strategy with little chance of success. If these Euroskeptics remain in power, it is in large part because the left has not proposed a coherent, workable, or legitimate conception of Europe’s future. Instead

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Hardly any right-wing party leaders still advocate holding a referendum on exiting the EU or abandoning the euro, claiming instead that they will work within the EU system in order to weaken the union—a strategy with little chance of success. of radical schemes, Europeans need a vision that appreciates the virtues of sound, realistic policies. In this context, the satirical condemnations of pragmatism in The Capital are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

ANDREW MORAVCSIK is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs and Director of the European Union Program at Princeton University.

This article was originally published in the January/ February 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine and on ForeignAffairs.com.