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The Geopolitics of it all

  • Thread starter Thread starter QV
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This thought has been niggling at me for a while.

It was a little while ago that I ran across the factoid that Saudi Arabia finally abolished slavery in 1962. That is pretty recent history. It is in my lifetime and it is in the lifetime of King Salman of Saudi Arabia. He was born in 1935. In 1962 he was 27. In 1963 he was named Governor of Riyadh, a role he apparently held for 48 years.

Salman is a son of King Abdulaziz and Hassa bint Ahmed Al Sudairi, making him one of the Sudairi Seven. He was the deputy governor of Riyadh and later the governor of Riyadh for 48 years from 1963 to 2011. He was then appointed minister of defense. He was named crown prince in 2012. Salman became king in 2015 upon the death of his half-brother, King Abdullah. Since July 2023, he is the oldest surviving son of King Abdulaziz.


Think of that for a minute. The current King of Saudi Arabia grew up in a country where slavery was the norm and had been the norm for millenia. Slaves were part of the financial portfolio of the locals.

After World War II, there was growing international pressure from the United Nations to end the slave trade. In 1948, the United Nations declared slavery to be a crime against humanity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, after which the Anti-Slavery Society pointed out that there was about one million slaves in the Arabian Peninsula, which was a crime against the 1926 Slavery Convention, and demanded that the UN form a committee to handle the issue.[2]: 310 

In 1951 the British informed the US State Department that there were at least 50,000 slaves in Saudi Arabia, a number increasing because of oil wealth, and that the US should participate in ending the slavery in Saudi, which at the time were used in Soviet propaganda, who pointed out that slavery was still practiced in reactionary Arab puppet states of the West.[23]

In the 1950s there were diplomatic difficulties due to slaves fleeing across the borders from Saudi Arabia to Kuwait and the Trucial States, since there was uncertainty in how ranaway slaves were to be handled diplomatically without upsetting Saudi, who wished to retrieve them.[24] Saudi Arabia normally denied any involvement in such affairs when they were questioned by the British, but one British report in the Foreign Office noted that twelve Baluchi slaves who had been returned to Ibn Saud had been executed, three of whom where beheaded in front of the Royal Palace.[25] The Red Sea slave trade to Saudi Arabia were still very much active in the 1950s; the contact of the Foreign Office in Dijbuti reported of a shipment of ninenty Africans sold to Mecca in 1952, an investigation of the French Assembly performed by Pastor La Graviere issued a report to that effect in 1955, and the British agent in Jiddah confirmed the report and noted that the prices of humans where high in the Saudi slave market and that a young pregnant woman could be sold for five hundred gold soveregins or twnety thousand riyals.[26]

In the 1960s, the institution of slavery had became an international embarressment for Saudi Arabia. It was used as a platform of Egyptian propaganda, as an issue of complaint from the United Nations, as well as by progressive internal opposition.[27] In June 1962, the king issued a decree prohibiting the sale and purchase of humans.[28] This did not abolish slavery itself however, as was evident when the king's son Prince Talal stated in August 1962 that he had decided to free his 32 slaves and fifty slave concubines.[29] In November 1962, Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who himself personally did not own slaves, finnally prohibited the owning of slaves in Saudi Arabia.[30]

As a Brit of a certain age I was raised on tales of Wilberforce, Newton, Amazing Grace, Somersett, Knight, Kames and Dundas and Napier. The abolition of slavery was the key accomplishment of the Enlightenment and it established the difference between the civilized and the rest.

In 1962, as a British kid, slavery was literally a relic of the history books.
And yet, in Saudi Arabia, slavery continued as it had for millenia. It was the norm. Just as it had been in most of the world prior to Wilberforce, Newton, Kames, Dundas and Napier. And it was the strength of that impetus that drove the West Africa Squadron and the missionaries like David Livingstone. It also drove successive British governments, from the 1850s onwards, to actively intervene in slaving countries, like Benin and The Gambia, like Zanzibar and Kenya, like Oman and India, and like China, to eliminate the slave trade.

But...

When Britain outlawed slavery in its colonies it bought the slaves from the slave-owners out of the treasury. The government was well endowed with tobacco and sugar money as well as from the sales of the new Bolton-Watts steam engines that were putting slaves out of work in any case.
Even Gladstone had his hand out wanting to be paid for his father's slaves in the colonies. Dundas was only following the protocol established in Scotland where Scottish coal slaves (white guys with black faces that were tied to the coal mines) gained their freedom over a generation so that the mine owners wouldn't be out of pocket when they swapped slaves for steam.


Britain wasn't so nice to the rest of the slave owning community. It's moral position was imposed on every other nation by gun boat diplomacy and the occasional punitive expedition into Ashanti territory. It was the right thing to do.... but it destroyed the economies of countries all over the world. Countries that relied on slaves to turn cranks to lift water now had to pay those crankers in cash they didn't have. But which the Bank of England would be happy to loan them in return for a small fee. And, if they wanted to trade up they could buy a steam engine instead. Not sure where the slaves were going to go, where they were going to live and what they were going to eat but .... they would be free.


By 1962 Britain had made a fortune. And it had beggared a good chunk of the world in the process. Including Saudi Arabia.


But then it had lost its fortune in two world wars. And the people she had trampled on the way up..... were waiting on the way back down. And leading the pack were the Americans.

Not far behind were the uncivilized/third world/developing countries - including India, Africa and China, and Saudi Arabia.

Who still remember 1962.

Just as they remember 1956 when Britain was humiliated by the Egyptians and the US, 1960 and Harold MacMillan's Winds of Change speech in Africa and 1966 when Denis Healey withdrew from East of Suez because she was broke.

Whereupon Britain joined the EU in 1973 and the US got what it wanted.

Leaving ....

Britain’s allies were certainly against any drawdown. Australia and New Zealand regarded the Singapore base as their forward defense. The United States, meanwhile, had its own problems in Asia and valued the presence of another external power. During a meeting with Healey in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was recorded as saying that he “would look with the greatest concern at a diminution of the U.K.’s role.” U.S. forces, he continued, “could not be the gendarmes of the universe” because “at heart, the American people are isolationists.” The White House’s view on Britain’s role East of Suez had flipped under President Lyndon Johnson. The Kennedy administration had been disinclined to support Britain over the Confrontation, as it feared a united Western position would drive Indonesia into the arms of China. By 1964 and 1965, however, it was clear that horse had already bolted. It is slightly ironic that Washington’s volte-face on the British Empire came at a time when London was losing its appetite for commitments outside of the Euro-Atlantic area.


And now we are heading back where we started.

One lifetime. Three generations. Long enough for everything to be forgotten.
 
I don't think humanity will last this long regardless.
I am extremely unconcerned about human extinction. We are a very widespread and numerous species. The risks of AI, Nuclear War and Climate Change may be great but it seems doubtful that it will approach anything that dire. Not that it matters if you arent one of the survivors
 
It is bad enough chucking Canadian milk down the drain.

People can't afford to buy their plonk at the price they want to sell it at so they are going to force them to buy it through their governments and chuck that down the drain.

In the name of Bacchus the least they could do is turn it into Remy. :eek:

 
This thought has been niggling at me for a while.

It was a little while ago that I ran across the factoid that Saudi Arabia finally abolished slavery in 1962. That is pretty recent history. It is in my lifetime and it is in the lifetime of King Salman of Saudi Arabia. He was born in 1935. In 1962 he was 27. In 1963 he was named Governor of Riyadh, a role he apparently held for 48 years.




Think of that for a minute. The current King of Saudi Arabia grew up in a country where slavery was the norm and had been the norm for millenia. Slaves were part of the financial portfolio of the locals.



As a Brit of a certain age I was raised on tales of Wilberforce, Newton, Amazing Grace, Somersett, Knight, Kames and Dundas and Napier. The abolition of slavery was the key accomplishment of the Enlightenment and it established the difference between the civilized and the rest.

In 1962, as a British kid, slavery was literally a relic of the history books.
And yet, in Saudi Arabia, slavery continued as it had for millenia. It was the norm. Just as it had been in most of the world prior to Wilberforce, Newton, Kames, Dundas and Napier. And it was the strength of that impetus that drove the West Africa Squadron and the missionaries like David Livingstone. It also drove successive British governments, from the 1850s onwards, to actively intervene in slaving countries, like Benin and The Gambia, like Zanzibar and Kenya, like Oman and India, and like China, to eliminate the slave trade.

But...

When Britain outlawed slavery in its colonies it bought the slaves from the slave-owners out of the treasury. The government was well endowed with tobacco and sugar money as well as from the sales of the new Bolton-Watts steam engines that were putting slaves out of work in any case.
Even Gladstone had his hand out wanting to be paid for his father's slaves in the colonies. Dundas was only following the protocol established in Scotland where Scottish coal slaves (white guys with black faces that were tied to the coal mines) gained their freedom over a generation so that the mine owners wouldn't be out of pocket when they swapped slaves for steam.


Britain wasn't so nice to the rest of the slave owning community. It's moral position was imposed on every other nation by gun boat diplomacy and the occasional punitive expedition into Ashanti territory. It was the right thing to do.... but it destroyed the economies of countries all over the world. Countries that relied on slaves to turn cranks to lift water now had to pay those crankers in cash they didn't have. But which the Bank of England would be happy to loan them in return for a small fee. And, if they wanted to trade up they could buy a steam engine instead. Not sure where the slaves were going to go, where they were going to live and what they were going to eat but .... they would be free.


By 1962 Britain had made a fortune. And it had beggared a good chunk of the world in the process. Including Saudi Arabia.


But then it had lost its fortune in two world wars. And the people she had trampled on the way up..... were waiting on the way back down. And leading the pack were the Americans.

Not far behind were the uncivilized/third world/developing countries - including India, Africa and China, and Saudi Arabia.

Who still remember 1962.

Just as they remember 1956 when Britain was humiliated by the Egyptians and the US, 1960 and Harold MacMillan's Winds of Change speech in Africa and 1966 when Denis Healey withdrew from East of Suez because she was broke.

Whereupon Britain joined the EU in 1973 and the US got what it wanted.

Leaving ....




And now we are heading back where we started.

One lifetime. Three generations. Long enough for everything to be forgotten.
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea
 
 
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea

Coincidentally, it seems that a sizeable contingent of retirees from my old regiment are running bars in Thailand ;)
 
Article in today's "Torygraph" explaining The Troubles, Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol.
This is the standard of care that the Protestants of Northern Ireland and their brethren across the water feared.
The Protestant institutions were miserable but they could be changed with the politicians.


Women who were kept in the religious institutions reveal the terrible truths behind Ruth Wilson’s new BBC One drama The Woman in the Wall​


ByChris Harvey26 August 2023 • 10:00am


Ruth Wilson stars in new BBC drama The Woman in the Wall CREDIT: Chris Barr/BBC

“It’s a nightmare that you could never come out of,” says Elizabeth Coppin. “I look back in horror, sometimes in panic, and I think, ‘I can’t believe this actually happened to me, in my time.’”
The 74-year-old is describing her experiences as a girl in Ireland’s religious “care” system in the 1960s, where she was abused and “trafficked”, as she describes it, into one of the infamous Magdalene laundries at the age of 14. There, she was held prisoner, sleeping in a cell that was locked every night, and forced to work six days a week without pay in the commercial laundry business run by the Catholic order the Religious Sisters of Charity. “They didn’t have an ounce of charity in them,” Coppin says, anger still gripping her more than 50 years later.
The grandmother and former teacher, who spent her teenage years in three separate laundries, has pursued the Irish authorities all the way to the UN in her quest for justice, and is one of the survivors who was consulted by screenwriter Joe Murtagh during the writing of BBC One’s new six-part drama The Woman in the Wall. It stars Ruth Wilson as a woman suffering from extreme trauma caused by her time in a “mother and baby home” and Magdalene laundry in the west of Ireland. She’s experiencing flashbacks and hallucinations, acting out her pain in rage-filled attacks on symbols of Catholic authority, including a kitchen knife through the eye of a portrait of Jesus.

In real life, many of the estimated 30,000 women who were held in Magdalene laundries suffered abuse at the hands of the Church. And the terrifying reach of the nightmare that Coppin is describing becomes plain when she describes what happened after she escaped from the Peacock Lane laundry in Cork in 1966, when she and another girl jumped from a first-floor window and ran.
Coppin spent three months in the outside world working in a local hospital, when inspectors from the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children showed up. She was instructed to get into their car. “He was driving,” she recalls. “And he turned around and said, ‘Now, this place we’re taking you to… you try to run away from it, we will put you in a place you will never get out of.’” Her voice breaks into a sob. “There was nobody to turn to.” Every instrument of the state was used to keep women and girls trapped in the laundries, from government agencies to the garda police force, all working in concert. The inspectors took her to a laundry run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd at Sundays Well, also in Cork.
Coppin knew the threats were real. At Peacock Lane there was an older woman two cells from hers, with grey hair. “I’d hear her at night, Bridie was her name. She used to call out, ‘My baby, my baby. They took my baby from me.’ This poor woman. She was just so damaged.”
Bridie was likely one of the women who had given birth in a convent-run mother and baby home, before being confined in a Magdalene laundry. This was what happened to Philomena Lee, whom Judi Dench portrayed in the 2013 film Philomena – the first time that many in the UK had heard of the Magdalene laundries. As in Lee’s case, many of the children were taken from their mothers and put up for adoption. (Some met a worse fate. Next year, exhumation will begin on a mass grave at a former mother and baby home in Tuam, Galway, where the bodies of 796 babies and children were discovered in disused sewage tanks.)
The mother and baby homes were just one element of what has been described as Ireland’s “architecture of containment” – which also included the “industrial schools” that housed orphans and “abandoned” children. Through a succession of convent-run institutions, Ireland could keep a woman prisoner from birth to death. As Katherine O’Donnell, professor of philosophy at University College Dublin and member of the education and advocacy group Justice for Magdalenes Research, explains, “Over half of the women – at least – who were put in [the laundries] from the 1950s on, never got out.”

O’Donnell was a consultant on The Woman in the Wall, putting Wilson in touch with laundry survivors. She has been collecting their oral histories for more than a decade. Some of the accounts are so harrowing that O’Donnell developed trauma symptoms herself. “There were nuns who were maniacally cruel,” she says. “In 200 years, Irish nuns have done the most remarkable things, but also, at times, they were forces of evil.”
In Catholic Europe, Magdalene laundries had traditionally been a refuge for prostitutes,
where they could spend time off the streets and work for their board. When they began to appear in Ireland in the 1820s, however, women were locked up in cells from the start. For a brief period later in the 19th century, they became associated with a Protestant movement aimed at rescuing and rehabilitating “fallen women”, but by the revolutionary period that began in 1912, O’Donnell says, the laundries had entirely become places of incarceration. Poor women, unwed mothers and any child or woman who passed through the religious homes could be taken to one of the laundries and kept there for life.
This was the fear that haunted Gabrielle O’Gorman, who was born in St Patrick’s mother and baby home in Dublin in 1945, the daughter of an unmarried mother who “stayed there with me until I was four”, she tells me. Until the age of 16, O’Gorman was raised in two industrial schools in Dublin, before being sent to work at a convent in London. Her mother, whom she had known only as someone who would sometimes “come to visit me and bring me biscuits”, was now married and living there in a one-bedroomed flat.

For O’Gorman, now an exuberant, Elvis-mad 78-year-old, London was very different from the repressive environment she had known. “I was very gregarious,” she says. “I love life.” After a year, though, her mother took her back to Dublin to work in the convent where she had lived from four to 12; she was 17. “I wanted to get back to London because I had a lovely boyfriend,” she says. “I was quite cheeky with the nuns. I said, ‘I want you to have my case ready. I’m going to England.’” Instead, after staying out past the convent’s 10pm curfew one night, she found a garda waiting for her in the parlour next morning. She was taken to the notorious Magdalene laundry in Sean McDermott Street, Dublin (the last of Ireland’s 10 laundries to close, in 1996). “All I could smell was carbolic soap, Jeyes fluid, bleach.”
“They tried to take my clothes off,” she continues, “and I wouldn’t let them because they wanted you to put on the uniform – that way you cannot escape, you get brought back. Some of the women were in there for 20, 30, 40 years. And they weren’t allowed to speak. Even at lunch, you’d have this nun watching you. A lot of the people in there, they didn’t even know each other’s real names” – the women were stripped of their identities on entering and given a religious name – “and it was work from early morning. Or it was praying in the church – Mass after Mass. It was awful. I refused to do anything, I refused to work, I refused to go to bed. I would sleep in my clothes.”
Like Coppin, O’Gorman made a break for freedom, but was brought back by the garda and taken to another laundry in Limerick. The nun in charge there, she says, was “wicked, spiteful, she hated me”. She remembers one occasion when the woman grabbed her by the hair, forcing her to the ground. “She said, ‘Get down on your knees’ and she was pulling my hair, and she said, ‘You are here because nobody wants you.’ And that hurt me more than her pulling my hair. It really had a big effect on me, I think, because I’d been brought up in an institution.”
They finally let her go, two and a half years later, aged 19 (Edit:1964?). She and Coppin both moved to England, where they built successful lives; Coppin married, had two children and lives in Dorset; O’Gorman has seven grandchildren and lives in Hampshire. She looks back on her experience as “like being kidnapped”.
Has there been a serious attempt by the Catholic Church to apologise for its crimes? “Absolutely none,” says O’Donnell. “Even when Pope Francis came to Ireland in 2018, he said he’d never heard of these institutions.” In 2013, Ireland’s then taoiseach Enda Kenny made an “unreserved” apology for the state’s role in the trauma and vowed to make amends. Yet, as O’Donnell says, as long as it fails to force the orders who ran the laundries to release the records of the women held in them, “the state itself is still colluding”.
The Woman in the Wall starts on Sunday, BBC One at 9.05pm

The Magdalenes were a pan-European institution that operated in Canada as well.

That is the hurdle of trust that the Europeans have to overcome.
 
Coming soon to the CPC convention - Daniel Hannan

BLUF

Some Russian democracy activists, now based in Lithuania, carried out a series of opinion polls earlier this month. To their horror, they found that, while Putin is seen as a murderer in the former Soviet satellite states, he is admired in France and Germany as a strong leader.
Asked who was responsible for the war, 36 per cent of Germans blamed the US, 15 per cent Nato and 9 per cent Ukraine; only 29 per cent blamed Putin or Russia. In France, 46 per cent blamed the Americans, 36 per cent Nato, 19 per cent Ukraine, and 40 per cent Putin.


Anti-Westernism is rampant in Europe and beyond. Love of Putin is its worst abomination​

Tragically, the killing of Prigozhin will be admired and only boost the Russian dictator’s standing in much of the world
DANIEL HANNAN26 August 2023 • 3:52pm


Imagine looking at Russia and seeing not a blood-soaked tyranny, but an ally. Imagine thinking of Vladimir Putin not as a villain, but as a role model. Imagine being so marinated in anti-Western sentiment that, when Russia breaks a treaty to invade a nation it had promised to defend, you convince yourself that Nato started it.
Who has such a twisted view of the world? Many people, it turns out.
Even as Russia was carrying out what looks like the latest in a long series of extra-judicial killings, this time of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Brics countries were meeting in South Africa to decide which delinquents to admit to their club.
It’s a strange creature, the Brics. It has no geographical or cultural cohesion, no obvious purpose. It began life as an acronym in Goldman Sachs, a way of referring to the world’s chief developing economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China. In 2009, the leaders of these states began holding annual summits, with South Africa joining the following year and adding the “S”.
It soon became clear that the bloc was seen by Russia and China as a counterweight to Western international structures, such as Nato, the IMF and the G7. At that stage, lots of anti-colonial autocracies expressed an interest in joining. Last week, the first six were invited to join: Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia – all, except Peronist Argentina, repressive dictatorships. How long, one wonders, can India, which has traditionally prided itself on being a law-based democracy, remain involved?
A delighted Vladimir Putin, who could not attend in person because of a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (which he doubtless sees as yet another instrument of American hegemony, despite the US having repudiated it), addressed the meeting remotely. He blamed the Ukraine war on “a policy of continued neo-colonialism” through which Western countries sought to “preserve their global hegemony”.
To accuse others of colonialism while you are literally annexing territory from a neighbour who offered you no threat takes some chutzpah. But Putin has for years presented himself as the champion of all those who resent Western cultural supremacy – including many Westerners. He appeals to authoritarians on the Right and the Left, portraying bourgeois democracy as soulless, effete and degenerate.
It is an old song, a song once sung by the Nazis and the Soviets. And it finds an appreciative audience in parts of the world that were primed during the long decades of the Cold War to appreciate its cadences.
More than a hundred years have passed since Lenin wrote Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, one of the most influential pamphlets of the 20th century. Karl Marx, to the disappointment of his modern fans, was a supporter of colonialism, seeing it as a way to spread education, medicine and class consciousness.
But, by the beginning of the 20th century, Marxists were beginning to wonder why the promised revolutions had not happened. In 1916, Lenin offered an explanation. The bourgeois had bought themselves time, he argued, by looting the wealth of their subject peoples, so that “capitalism has been transformed into imperialism”.
The idea that the West became rich through plunder, rather than through independent courts, free contract, private property and limited government, was sedulously spread across Asia, Africa and Latin America by Soviet propagandists. It found its way into the school textbooks published by newly independent states – the textbooks that educated many of today’s leaders in the Global South.
At the same time, anti-imperialist writers became popular in Western universities, preparing the ground for what we now call identity politics.
“Fortified in aggressive spirit by an arrogant, messianic Christianity, and motivated by the lure of enriching plunder, white hordes have sallied forth from their western European homelands to assault, loot, occupy, rule and exploit the world,” wrote the Nigerian author Chinweizu in a story that inspires the statue-smashers and reparations activists of our own time.
Here, in 1961, is Frantz Fanon, a revolutionary from Martinique who inspired anti-colonial movements across Asia and Africa: “The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Blacks, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races.”
How many of today’s woke activists are, without realising it, channelling a 60-year-old tract which was in turn directly inspired by Lenin?
Yet the premise is false. Colonialism was a net drain on the treasury of European states. Many British possessions were acquired in the teeth of government resistance following pressure from abolitionists who, having halted the Atlantic slave trade, wanted to stamp out the institution inland, too.
Unlike previous imperial powers, Britain brought most of its former colonies to independence peacefully. Indeed, it is striking that anti-colonialist sentiment has grown as memories of British rule fade, leaving those who never experienced it to rage against an imagined version.
The success of former colonies, like the success of all countries, was determined by the policies they then chose. Singapore, for example, opted for low taxes, light regulations and free trade, and so overtook many resource-rich states that became independent around the same time.
How twisted do you have to be to see Western civilisation, not simply as flawed (which all civilisations are) but as inferior to that of Russia?
The death of Prigozhin follows a series of state-sanctioned murders, sometimes of magnates who stray too close to windows (Pavel Antov, Ravil Maganov), sometimes of opposition politicians (Boris Nemtsov), sometimes of investigative journalists (Anna Politkovskaya, Natalia Estemirova), sometimes of Russians living under the protection of another state (Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky), sometimes of ordinary people in the wrong places (Dawn Sturgess).
Was it a mafia regime from the start? Many analysts believe the 1999 Russian apartment bombings, blamed on Chechen separatists, were a false flag operation designed by the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, to bring Putin to power. Russia’s authorities have blocked all attempts at an independent investigation, and we shall probably need to wait until Putin’s overthrow to learn the truth.
The 2002 Moscow theatre siege advertised Putinism’s values. Russian special forces pumped in a chemical agent which killed 130 innocent theatre-goers, before going in and shooting the hostage takers. And the population cheered.
This is the regime that the other Brics (and wannabe Brics) admire. A notionally Christian state that places no value on human life. A kleptocracy that anaesthetises its people with promises of military glory even as it immiserates and brutalises them.
And not just the Brics. Some Russian democracy activists, now based in Lithuania, carried out a series of opinion polls earlier this month. To their horror, they found that, while Putin is seen as a murderer in the former Soviet satellite states, he is admired in France and Germany as a strong leader.
Asked who was responsible for the war, 36 per cent of Germans blamed the US, 15 per cent Nato and 9 per cent Ukraine; only 29 per cent blamed Putin or Russia. In France, 46 per cent blamed the Americans, 36 per cent Nato, 19 per cent Ukraine, and 40 per cent Putin.
The trouble with performative wokery is that other countries are listening. Blaming Britain and America for all the world’s ills might be intended as a way to signal high-status views, but it has consequences.
If the Anglosphere is systematically portrayed as wicked, rather than as the last-ditch defender of the rule of law, personal freedom and representative government, then some people will be drawn to other systems. Sure, they’ll miss the ascendancy of Western liberalism when it has gone; but that will be scant consolation.
 
This thought has been niggling at me for a while.

It was a little while ago that I ran across the factoid that Saudi Arabia finally abolished slavery in 1962. That is pretty recent history. It is in my lifetime and it is in the lifetime of King Salman of Saudi Arabia. He was born in 1935. In 1962 he was 27. In 1963 he was named Governor of Riyadh, a role he apparently held for 48 years.




Think of that for a minute. The current King of Saudi Arabia grew up in a country where slavery was the norm and had been the norm for millenia. Slaves were part of the financial portfolio of the locals.



As a Brit of a certain age I was raised on tales of Wilberforce, Newton, Amazing Grace, Somersett, Knight, Kames and Dundas and Napier. The abolition of slavery was the key accomplishment of the Enlightenment and it established the difference between the civilized and the rest.

In 1962, as a British kid, slavery was literally a relic of the history books.
And yet, in Saudi Arabia, slavery continued as it had for millenia. It was the norm. Just as it had been in most of the world prior to Wilberforce, Newton, Kames, Dundas and Napier. And it was the strength of that impetus that drove the West Africa Squadron and the missionaries like David Livingstone. It also drove successive British governments, from the 1850s onwards, to actively intervene in slaving countries, like Benin and The Gambia, like Zanzibar and Kenya, like Oman and India, and like China, to eliminate the slave trade.

But...

When Britain outlawed slavery in its colonies it bought the slaves from the slave-owners out of the treasury. The government was well endowed with tobacco and sugar money as well as from the sales of the new Bolton-Watts steam engines that were putting slaves out of work in any case.
Even Gladstone had his hand out wanting to be paid for his father's slaves in the colonies. Dundas was only following the protocol established in Scotland where Scottish coal slaves (white guys with black faces that were tied to the coal mines) gained their freedom over a generation so that the mine owners wouldn't be out of pocket when they swapped slaves for steam.


Britain wasn't so nice to the rest of the slave owning community. It's moral position was imposed on every other nation by gun boat diplomacy and the occasional punitive expedition into Ashanti territory. It was the right thing to do.... but it destroyed the economies of countries all over the world. Countries that relied on slaves to turn cranks to lift water now had to pay those crankers in cash they didn't have. But which the Bank of England would be happy to loan them in return for a small fee. And, if they wanted to trade up they could buy a steam engine instead. Not sure where the slaves were going to go, where they were going to live and what they were going to eat but .... they would be free.


By 1962 Britain had made a fortune. And it had beggared a good chunk of the world in the process. Including Saudi Arabia.


But then it had lost its fortune in two world wars. And the people she had trampled on the way up..... were waiting on the way back down. And leading the pack were the Americans.

Not far behind were the uncivilized/third world/developing countries - including India, Africa and China, and Saudi Arabia.

Who still remember 1962.

Just as they remember 1956 when Britain was humiliated by the Egyptians and the US, 1960 and Harold MacMillan's Winds of Change speech in Africa and 1966 when Denis Healey withdrew from East of Suez because she was broke.

Whereupon Britain joined the EU in 1973 and the US got what it wanted.

Leaving ....




And now we are heading back where we started.

One lifetime. Three generations. Long enough for everything to be forgotten.

Bad form to quote yourself but I am going to do it anyway.

If Britain made enemies out of the slavers by disrupting their economies, did it pick up any friends along the way?

How about?

The women that weren't burnt on their husbands' funeral pyres.
The Dahlits that got jobs in the Civil Service.
The Sikhs and Gurkhas that served in John Company's army.
The people that built and ran the railroads.
The Hindus that didn't have to bow to the Moghuls.
The African tribes that weren't enslaved.
The slaves that were allowed to earn cash wages and spend them as they saw fit.
The people that could migrate around the Empire, making their living, meeting new people, learning.
Cricketers, Rugby and Football players.
Chinese coolies.
Laskars.

It is just unfortunate that the people most impacted by the loss of the slave trade were the Arab and Moghul traders, the Chinese ruling classes and the Russians (who lost their serfs) as well as the Ashanti and similar African tribes.
 
Some light reading for a Sunday evening.

Two Foucaults.

Great Crisis of Our Time​

By John Waters
August 26, 2023
AP
Nearly 100 years ago, Winston Churchill wrote an essay called the “Mass Effects in Modern Life.” In it he wondered whether the best of human potential had been handed over to assembly lines and machine processes, what he referred to as the “magic” of mass production. “Science in all its forms surpasses itself every year,” Churchill observed. The year was 1925. Churchill had seen a great deal of change in his life. He had lived through the mass sacrifice and suffering of the Great War, the rise of a collectivist ideology in Soviet Russia, and a second wave of industrialization that stretched from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth century. Though science had delivered “material blessings” in “measureless abundance,” the face of society was changing.
Gone were the master craftsmen and creators. Gone were the pioneers and adventurers, whose bold choices spurred the enterprise that followed their discoveries. In the place of “eminent men” was industrial repetitiveness, powerful and productive but lacking in whatever elusive qualities that once imbued the lonely individual with a sense of honor, and an ambition to leave his mark on the world. Modern civilization proved "hostile to the development of outstanding personalities and to their influence upon events." More artist than politician, Churchill saw through the mysteries of the times and concluded that as man becomes more dominant over science and technology, “the individual [himself] becomes a function." This tiny speck that is a person no longer thinks of "himself as an immortal spirit, clothed in the flesh, but sovereign, unique, indestructible.” He loses his faith; he loses himself.
Modern life seems depleted of meaning and purpose, writes political philosopher Glenn Ellmers. In his new book The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy (Encounter, 2023), Ellmers explores what went wrong in the American political community over the last 100-plus years, tracing a line from Machiavelli to Nietzsche on to Hegel and then Foucault in search of that rogue strain of thought that produced this modern condition. At less than 100 pages, the book offers no solutions. Instead, like Churchill, Ellmers illuminates the problem: how the individual became part of an aggregate; why “our dignity has no quantitative value.” I spoke with Ellmers about his book and ideas. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

What is the “great crisis” of our time?
Most educated people in the West do not know what they live for or what their society stands for. There are still many people who believe in God, but there is a question of whether the churches are just another manifestation of modern liberalism. [Political philosopher] Leo Strauss pointed out years ago that the West no longer believes in anything, and, in a way, we are living with the consequences of what Nietzsche pointed out—that “God is dead,” by which he meant that most modern, educated people no longer believe in God. Nietzsche described this as nihilism, and this loss of faith—that life doesn’t have any meaning—is the great crisis of our time.

But a “great crisis” typically entails war, famine, or depression. If you believe there is a crisis of belief, then what can you point to that reveals the crisis?
The intensity of our politics reveals how desperate we have become. Nietzsche was way ahead of his time, and he saw long before other Western minds that the belief in progress was empty. Karl Marx and Hegel believed in utopia on earth, but they were selling a false promise, and it took the catastrophes of World War One, World War Two, and the atomic bomb—you might say all the tech progress of our times, too—to reveal the sense of emptiness, this feeling that as people we have no purpose.

You note the allegory of Plato’s Cave—that we live inside the cave and the true legislators are those who create the flickering images on the cave’s wall. If we are experiencing a crisis of belief, then who is creating the images?
Many people. Every society lives in its cave in the sense that a society must have traditions and that those traditions are communicated through narratives containing heroes and villains, the things society admires and disparages. I write in the book about pop idols and musicians, but truly they are second- and third-rate purveyors of the narrative. The true shapers are the philosophers, but no one reads the great philosophers and so their work becomes watered down and distorted. I refer to popular culture figures as the poets of our times because they transmit the ideas that reinforce larger narratives. Once, the West had agreed-upon heroes and mythologies, but the images are being altered and so is the underlying narrative.
Take, for example, Silicon Valley. I think tech lords in Silicon Valley do not have original thoughts whatsoever, but the conflict I see on the Left is that the people in Silicon Valley represent the role of the expert class. This goes with the prestige accorded to elite universities and the deference claimed by scientists and educated officials who make up the administrative state. Anthony Fauci said we had to defer to the expertise of the scientists, even for questions predicated on moral or ethical issues.
Post-modernism tells us that truth is merely a function of power, that mathematics is a function of white hegemony. There is an inherent flaw in this ideology because you cannot claim to rule based on superior scientific knowledge, then go on to claim that all knowledge is “just a narrative” or a product of the patriarchy. I don’t claim any originality in these ideas, which come from Leo Strauss, Harry Neumann, and Harry Jaffa. Strauss argued that nihilism will ultimately win out because the scientists do not have a philosophical basis. Technology is method without meaning, process without purpose. The technologist will ultimately lose to the ideologues, the anarchists. I think you see this most clearly in the elite universities. Look at any liberal arts program and ask what is the basis for objective truth—the professor will laugh in your face. Talk to them about natural right. Talk to them about an objective basis of justice or human nature. These questions are absurd to the intellectual class. Our Silicon Valley experts do not know this intellectually but they have absorbed it through the university, media and culture. Everything is sardonic. Everything is subjective. I actually enjoy the show “Seinfeld” but it was self-consciously playing on the idea of upper middle-class people in Manhattan who live frivolous lives, it was the “show about nothing.”

“Americans are lied to on a daily basis,” you write. “This has become normal, even expected.” Are you talking about false advertising, puffery in business transactions or something else? What do you mean when you say that Americans are being “lied to” on a daily basis?
Among the elite class, truth has been rejected as not having any objective basis.
Among the working class, it has become confused. I don’t want to be too down on the churches, but many mainstream churches are just repeating the dogmas of modern liberalism—politically correct symbols, causes, and sermons. You see them everywhere. People are fed a steady diet of politically correct propaganda. Professor Charles Kesler wrote an essay called the “three waves of liberalism,” in which he drew on an essay from Leo Strauss called the “three waves of modernity.” Strauss explains how the early modern thinkers like Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Descartes had put their faith in science and reason to create the rational state, but those ideas became more and more radical until culminating in the nihilism of Nietzsche and Hegel.
Kesler adapted this to modern America. The first wave is the intellectual rejection of the Constitution and the underlying principles of natural right contained in the Declaration of Independence. The progressives were students of German philosophy and they rejected natural right in the decades leading up to the Civil War. By the turn of the twentieth century, German thought was coming into America in an explicit way as graduate programs in this country were heavily shaped by German philosophers. You notice this shift personified in the rise of Woodrow Wilson; he was the only professor of political science to become president, and his academic work explicitly repudiated the principles of constitutionalism. The second wave was economic. That came with FDR and the vast expansion of the federal government to claim a host of new responsibilities and the birth of the regulatory state. The third wave is in the sixties and that’s the cultural wave. Sexual revolution. Feminism and the attack on the traditional family. These have been harmful to the health of the Republic. Along the way somewhere, truth fell by the wayside.

What was the role of the Second World War in transforming values? In the Studs Terkel book, The Good War, one veteran comments that returning to society was like being “pinched back into the meanness of the soul.” There’s a theme in the Terkel book that war was hell but veterans were surprised by what they discovered about their country, too—that America had become competitive in a Machiavellian sense, that everyone lived by fear and “phony standards,” that people didn’t bother to help one another.

Well, war has always produced a sense of camaraderie, and warriors have always fought for each other, in addition to whatever cause the generals and strategists have. But the cultural revolution started in the 1950’s. There is an idea that the hollow society, the consumer society, the increasing de-spiritualization, demoralization of modern life began in the 1950’s. John Marini, another teacher of mine, says that it was really after WWII that the ruling class stopped being interested in America and the common good and began being interested in itself primarily. Strauss says we defeated a nation on the battlefield and yet that defeated nation may prove victorious through the power of its ideas, what came from Nietzsche, Marx, and Hegel. Strauss means that we obliterated the Nazis and defeated the Wehrmacht, but the German philosophers permeated our culture and intellectual class. It remains an open question. There is no determinism in human history.

You cite French philosopher Michel Foucault as the most incisive intellectual for explaining the current state of social science, particularly as it pertains to the relationship between power, knowledge, and truth. Why Foucault?
If you’re my age and you lived through the 1980’s and 1990’s, we all made fun of Jacques Derrida and Foucault. We thought they were ridiculous but now people are coming back to them. Foucault was one of the French post-modernists who tried to describe what social science looks like in a Nietzschean world. What happens when we abandon the ideal that there is an objective ground to the universe? Foucault says, well that doesn’t mean life just stops, but, without any objective ground for making moral judgments, government becomes a system for making judgments based on power. People are still expected to believe in truth, but how does that work—how does the narrative dictate truth? Every cave shapes opinion by deciding what’s important, what gives status, and what we look up to. For example, if you went to Yale, then your status or degree is tied to the regime, and so you’ll never really want to reject it. Even the people who are ruling have been coopted into the anonymous power structure.
Foucault knew that modern power structures operate in an impersonalized, institutional way, and that the structures coopt people to influence their thoughts and behavior. Now that the Left is the establishment, people on the Right need to get their minds around the fact that they are not the establishment any longer. Our government is politicized, our law enforcement is politicized. People have to get their heads around the fact that the Right is the counter-establishment, and so thinkers like Foucault are very helpful to those of us battling oppressive power structures.

When you talk about “coopting people,” my thoughts turn to electronic surveillance and collection of biometric data. We did this in Afghanistan to synthesize from the data a “pattern of life” for enemy combatants. Now, a similar kind of collection is pervasive in society—against Americans. What does it mean?
Well, another way the structures control you is by coopting your identity. Foucault liked this term ‘the panopticon’. It was Jeremy Bentham’s idea about how prison cells should work, which allowed the guard tower to look out into all the prison cells. It’s become an apt description for the modern surveillance state, that we are at all times under the watchful eyes of someone. I think even Foucault would be shocked at how pervasively this technology has been deployed.

I know you say the “great crisis” of our times is spiritual, but what do you say about technology?
Technology cannot explain itself or justify itself, but in a way it is seemingly perpetuating itself. We want faster phones and more titillating entertainment. No one stops to deliberate whether it’s good for us. Heidegger said that once we see the world as a commodity to be mastered, once nature becomes raw material to be manipulated, then technology will have taken on a life of its own. It’s an end without any purpose but it is self-perpetuating. We want to master nature to fulfill our desire but there is no interest in the common good. Aristotle warns about seeing technology as a good in itself, advising that it must be kept under political supervision, that it must serve the common good and the virtue of the citizens.
I’ll add that Strauss took very seriously the theory of Martin Heidegger, who was Nietzsche’s greatest student. He was the most intellectual of the Nazis, a strange man but a profound thinker. Heidegger thought science and technology had massively distorted human life, that the hubristic attempt to make the world and nature conform to our desires was backfiring. Science and technology turned nature into a commodity. And, science and technology turns human beings into commodities, too, mere objects to be manipulated.

John Waters is a writer in Nebraska. His novel River City One publishes this fall.

The pendulum swings.
 
My country right or wrong, or else....


How paranoid nationalism corrupts​

Cynical leaders are scaremongering to win and abuse power​


People seek strength and solace in their tribe, their faith or their nation. And you can see why. If they feel empathy for their fellow citizens, they are more likely to pull together for the common good. In the 19th and 20th centuries love of country spurred people to seek their freedom from imperial capitals in distant countries. Today Ukrainians are making heroic sacrifices to defend their homeland against Russian invaders.
Unfortunately, the love of “us” has an ugly cousin: the fear and suspicion of “them”, a paranoid nationalism that works against tolerant values such as an openness to unfamiliar people and new ideas. What is more, cynical politicians have come to understand that they can exploit this sort of nationalism, by whipping up mistrust and hatred and harnessing them to benefit themselves and their cronies.

The post-war order of open trade and universal values is strained by the rivalry of America and China. Ordinary people feel threatened by forces beyond their control, from hunger and poverty to climate change and violence. Using paranoid nationalism, parasitic politicians prey on their citizens’ fears and degrade the global order, all in the pursuit of their own power.

As our Briefing describes, paranoid nationalism works by a mix of exaggeration and lies. Vladimir Putin claims that Ukraine is a nato puppet, whose Nazi cliques threaten Russia; India’s ruling party warns that Muslims are waging a “love jihad” to seduce Hindu maidens; Tunisia’s president decries a black African “plot” to replace his country’s Arab majority. Preachers of paranoid nationalism harm the targets of their rhetoric, obviously, but their real intention is to hoodwink their own followers. By inflaming nationalist fervour, self-serving leaders can more easily win power and, once in office, they can distract public attention from their abuses by calling out the supposed enemies who would otherwise keep them in check.

Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua, shows how effective this can be. Since he returned to power in 2006, he has demonised the United States and branded his opponents “agents of the Yankee empire”. He controls the media and has put his family in positions of influence. After mass protests erupted in 2018 at the regime’s graft and brutality, the Ortegas called the protesters “vampires” and locked them up. On August 23rd they banned the Jesuits, a Catholic order that has worked in Nicaragua since before it was a country, on the pretext that a Jesuit university was a “centre of terrorism”.

Rabble-rousing often leads to robbery. Like the Ortegas, some nationalist leaders seek to capture the state by stuffing it with their cronies or ethnic kin. The use of this technique under Jacob Zuma, a former president of South Africa, is one reason why the national power company is too riddled with corruption to keep the lights on. Our statistical analysis suggests that governments have grown more nationalistic since 2012, and that the more nationalistic they are, the more corrupt they tend to be.

But the more important role of paranoid nationalism is as a tool to dismantle the checks and balances that underpin good governance: a free press, independent courts, ngos and a loyal opposition. Leaders do not say: “I want to purge the electoral commission so I can block my political opponents.” They say: “The commissioners are traitors!” They do not admit that they want to suppress ngos to evade scrutiny. They pass laws defining as “foreign agents” any organisation that receives foreign funds or even advice, and impose draconian controls on such bodies or simply ban them. They do not shut down the press, they own it. By one estimate, at least 50 countries have curbed civil society in recent years.

An example is the president of Tunisia, Kais Saied. Before he blamed black people for his country’s problems, he was unpopular because of his dismal handling of the economy. Now Tunisians are cheering his bold stand against a tiny, transient minority. Meanwhile Mr Saied has gutted the judiciary and closed the anti-corruption commission, and graft has grown worse.

Abuses are easier when institutions are weak: the despots of Nicaragua, Iran or Zimbabwe are far less constrained than the leaders of say, Hungary or Israel. But in all these countries (and many more), the men in power have invented or exaggerated threats to the nation as a pretext to weaken the courts, the press or the opposition. And this has either prolonged a corrupt administration or made it worse.

Paranoid nationalism is part of a backlash against good governance. The end of the cold war led to a blossoming of democracy around the world. Country after country introduced free elections and limits on executive power. Many power- and plunder-hungry politicians chafed at this. Amid the general disillusion that followed the financial crisis of 2007-09, they saw an opportunity to take back control. Paranoid nationalism gave them a tool to dismantle some of those pesky checks and balances.

Because these restraints often came with Western encouragement, if not Western funding, leaders have found it easier to depict the champions of good government as being foreign stooges. In countries that have endured colonial rule—or interference by the United States, as have many in Latin America—the message finds a ready audience. If a leader can create a climate of such deep suspicion that loyalty comes before truth, then every critic can be branded a traitor.

First resort of the scoundrel​

Paranoid nationalism is not about to disappear. Leaders are learning from each other. They are also freer to act than they were even a decade ago. Not only has the West lost faith in its programme of spreading democracy and good governance, but China—a paranoid nationalist that is inclined to spot slights and threats around every corner—is promoting the idea that universal values of tolerance and good governance are a racist form of imperialism. It prefers non-interference from abroad and zero-criticism at home. If only they could see through the lies behind paranoid nationalism, ordinary people would realise how wrong China’s campaign is. There is nothing racist or disloyal about wishing for a better life.

 

Brexiteers have been vindicated after years of flawed economic propaganda​

Far from being the basket case of Europe, we are doing better than Germany - but there’s much still to do
MATTHEW SINCLAIR3 September 2023 • 11:00am
Matthew  Sinclair



It looks like the UK has not underperformed our European peers in recent years in the way earlier statistics suggested. Revised estimates from the Office for National Statistics show that the UK has instead been somewhere in the middle of the pack for big Western European economies with growth since the end of 2019 about the same as France and Italy and a bit better than in Germany.
The New York Times just last month was reporting claims that the UK had developed a reputation as a “bit of a basket case among major advanced economies since voting for Brexit” – one of a litany of articles lamenting the state of the country since the vote to leave the EU.
Hopefully they will report just as prominently on this much better news. But I am not holding my breath: for years now a toxic narrative has built up about Britain which has enabled rampant pessimism about our prospects. This hurts consumer and business confidence in an already challenging macroeconomic environment and encourages short-term politics. A corrective is long overdue to the fatalism that pervades too much institutional thinking here.
The UK has real advantages over its Western European peers. Whether that is strengths in financial and business services or the creative economy, we are well-positioned in many of the sectors that are growing fastest as economies everywhere mature. Our labour market is still better and freezes fewer people out, though too many people are out of employment since Covid.
But that does not mean everything is awesome. The position the UK finds itself in is still incredibly challenging. It’s just about as dire as the position of other large European economies, with outsized welfare states and high taxes in common. In an upcoming book, Chris Pope at the Manhattan Institute traces Europe’s high taxes (particularly on poor- and middle-income families) to fund increasingly unaffordable entitlements right back to the exceptional circumstances at the end of the war.
The perception of inevitably weak growth is too often an excuse for inaction on those kinds of long-standing challenges. The UK economy has been outperformed over years by the US, by fast-growing Eastern European economies and by East Asian success stories.
In the short-term, there were always going to be costs to Brexit with the transition out of the EU. Too many of the compensating opportunities for more flexible self-government have been neglected with politicians instead empowering an administrative state.
This is happening at home, for example with draconian new powers for regulators to intervene in digital markets. It is happening internationally, for example giving up the right to set our own corporate tax policy to the OECD, a right governments of all parties defended against EU encroachment when we were a Member State.
It is remarkable that the UK has done as well as it has with the terrible obstacles that politicians have put in the way of building things here. It can take seven years or more to get a grid connection for a new industrial facility. Tens of thousands of street-by-street permits to install fast broadband. As well as delaying new services, that drives up the cost of infrastructure. Britain Remade has found that the UK is taking longer and therefore spending far more per mile of road or track. We are working with weaker infrastructure as a result.
We can take on these problems more effectively if we are clear about the issues in front of us: the UK is not condemned to be a basket case compared to our European peers; no that does not mean that our economic performance is good enough. Growth means opportunities, stagnation means our best and brightest looking abroad. Now we have a more accurate picture of what has been going on in the UK economy, there is a fresh opportunity to lift our ambition and get out of the low growth club.


 
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Macron is getting assistance from the Biden administration which also pursues nationalist and protectionist policies.


How Emmanuel Macron became the most powerful leader in Europe​

France is exploiting a power vacuum to mould the Continent in its image

BySzu Ping Chan3 September 2023 • 10:00am

macron europe protectionism trade brussels


France’s love affair with trade barriers stretches back more than a century, ranging from the Méline tariff in 1892 that slapped taxes on imported foods to jibes about the country’s so-called “strategic yoghurt” policy in 2005 when Danone faced a US takeover threat. (Edit: Go back further through Colbert to Phillip II's war on Lombards, Jews and Templars to find enough gold to finance his authority)
Paris’ international trade policy is now ceded to a bigger club: the European Union. But rather than watering down the protectionist impulses of the Élysée Palace, membership has allowed Emmanuel Macron to pursue the policies on a bigger stage.
Only this time the French president has declared that it’s not France first, but Europe – with Paris very much in the driver’s seat.
The main source for EU protectionism is the Élysée Palace in Paris and Emmanuel Macron who represents a very Gaullist type of idea of political control over the economy,” says Fredrik Erixon, director of the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), in Brussels.
In the 2010s, Berlin was the centre of EU power, with Paris and London providing a counterbalance. Germany, with its close economic ties to China, and Britain, with its vibrant international financial sector, favoured open trade, while France was more focused on protecting its national champions.

But with Britain now out of the EU and German power weakened as its economy struggles, France is exploiting a power vacuum to mould the EU in its image.
In Macron’s eyes, the bloc should focus on sovereignty above trade and relax EU restrictions to allow lavish support for domestic industries.
Macron’s vision of a sovereign Europe was first articulated in a speech delivered six years ago at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
In it, he called for a bigger EU budget, a complete banking union and even a European army. He knew others would baulk at the idea of endowing Brussels with even more power.
“Some will tell you it’s not the right moment. But it’s never the right moment,” he told the audience seated in the Sorbonne’s ostentatious amphitheatre.
It seems now his time has come. The clearest recent example of Macron’s rising power is the French president’s decision to publicly intervene in the appointment of American economist Fiona Scott-Morton as chief competition economist at the European Commission.
Macron called the appointment “dubious”, forcing Scott-Morton to turn the job down after she concluded her position would have been untenable. Scott-Morton told The Telegraph she blamed “insecure” France for the debacle.

Fiona Scott-Morton’s routine appointment quickly spiralled into a diplomatic furore CREDIT: Frederic Camallonga/Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Alexandre de Streel, a former Belgian diplomat and professor of European law at the University of Namur in Brussels, says: “What it says about Europe is that Macron was able to influence that kind of position, which shows his and France’s influence in the Commission.”
Macron’s star has risen after he played a pivotal role brokering a deal on Europe’s new leadership team in 2019 that placed Ursula Von der Leyen at its helm.
Her first speech as the European Commission’s president elect drew clear parallels with Macron’s speech at the Sorbonne. In it, she called for more collective action on a range of issues from climate to completing a banking union.
De Streel says: “I actually do this with my students - ask them to compare the texts.
“It’s almost as if she plagiarised parts of [Macron’s speech].”
Erixon says: “The Commission led by Von der Leyen has sought to drive up the amount of money that is going to be given in industrial subsidies. This is something that has been called for by France for ages: a muscular industrial policy that is going to sprinkle a lot of cash on favoured industries.”
“Sprinkle” is an understatement. Official figures show more than €650bn (£550bn) of state aid has been doled out since March 2022, when the rules were relaxed to allow national governments to subsidise “the manufacturing of strategic equipment” such as solar panels, batteries and heat pumps, as well as the production of key components and related critical raw materials.
Germany, desperate to support its industrial base, has been the biggest beneficiary, accounting for more than half of the subsidies doled out.
Together with France, the two biggest economies in Europe account for almost 80pc of all subsidies handed out so far.

One former Brussels diplomat says: “In the gap left by the UK, some had speculated that other non-euro members would step up with more clout advocating the UK’s less interventionist path.
“That did not happen, in my opinion. The Danes, Swedes and Poles did not fill that role. Instead, the German-French duopoly became more prominent. The French and Germans almost always discuss all EU issues amongst themselves before they come to the broader EU venues and they try hard to get on the same page.
“This gives them more power now than before Brexit because there isn’t a counterweight in the UK.”
Germany’s role in the relationship has been diminished in recent years as its attention has been focused elsewhere. Erixon says a “gradual weakening has accelerated under this German government, which is focused very much on its own energy transition because it was overwhelmed by its misjudgment of Russia”.
Meanwhile, a global trend towards protectionism has provided the perfect excuse for France to ramp up its rhetoric.
State-backed industrial policies such as Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 are attempts to create a future shaped by sovereignty and security.
The IMF says trade restrictions have “exploded” in the past five years, with subsidies the protectionist measure of choice.
Erixon says there are few willing to stand up to Paris.

“Many of these small economies are exhausted. They’re exhausted by the avalanche of interventionism that this Commission has come up with. Some of them have kept a low voice because they have been prioritising other issues.
“For the Nordics, like Finland and Sweden, if you look at what’s happening to the east of them you can see that priority number one for these countries is Nato membership. Priority number two is Nato membership and priority number three is Nato membership.”
De Streel suggests maintaining a power balance in Brussels is the key to the EU’s future.
He says: “I think Europe can only work if [France and Germany] are equally strong and equally influential in the political decision making, because they reflect two different cultures. “There is always this risk that one member state becomes too powerful and imposes their values to the detriment of the others. But I still think Germany is economically powerful enough to exert its influence so I’m not sure we are there yet.”
Erixon believes Europe is losing its focus on economic growth in pursuit of power and influence.
Yet the EU can ill-afford to ignore its economy in pursuit of international status to rival the United States. Recent research from the ECIPE found that European countries would rank among the poorest states in the US if they were part of the union.
Protectionism is even more problematic for the wider challenge of raising living standards, Erixon warns.
“There is nowhere through history where any country regulated their way to economic success. That’s not a way to create more prosperity.”
As Macron’s influence grows, it’s a warning other EU leaders may do well to heed.

 
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