BRUSSELS — The move to break up Belgium gathered pace on Sunday as a separatist won an emphatic election victory in Flanders, the more prosperous Dutch-speaking region of the divided nation.
A stunning electoral success for Bart de Wever’s Flemish nationalist party, which won the most parliamentary seats, is a significant new challenge to the fragile unity of a federal country where tensions between French and Dutch speakers run deep, and where voters in one region cannot vote for parties in the other.
It has also injected a new element of uncertainty into Europe at an especially difficult time for the European Union, struggling with serious problems over its finances and currency.
Belgium is due to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union in less than three weeks. But it is likely to take months to negotiate a new coalition, raising the prospect that Belgium will be struggling to assemble its own government at precisely the time it is supposed to be steering Europe out of a deep crisis.
In 2007, after the last general election, it took the Belgians roughly nine months to form a coalition government, a measure of the centrifugal forces threatening to destroy the already-loose federal state, or to make it even less relevant than it is today.
“We are close to the abyss,” said Lieven de Winter, professor of politics at the Université Catholique de Louvain. “Whether we are five meters or five centimeters away is difficult to say. But Belgians are at a crossroads where they are making a choice on whether they want to live together or not.”
Claiming victory on Sunday evening, Mr. de Wever said that it was too soon for independence, which he favors, for Flanders, the northern part of the country where 60 percent of the population lives. He promised to reach out to French speakers, even as he demanded radical reform of the federal state.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told Belgians. “Have faith in yourselves.”
Mr. de Wever, a 39-year-old political writer, said he would not seek the post of prime minister, which might frighten Francophones, but preferred to concentrate on negotiating “a deal” to reform the state and its finances.
Final results early Monday gave his New Flemish Alliance 27 of the 150 seats in Parliament, a gain of 19 seats, just ahead of the French Socialists, with 26 seats, a gain of six. The Flemish- and French-speaking voters elect different parties, but there is a Flemish Socialist Party as well.
In addition to Mr. de Wever’s party, which got nearly 30 percent of the vote, Flanders gave 12.5 percent of its vote to the far-right separatists of Vlaams Belang and about 4 percent to another populist party, meaning that nearly half of the Flemish electorate voted for separatists. Mr. de Wever’s success appeared to come at the expense of the Christian Democrats of the current prime minister and his Liberal allies.
In French-speaking Wallonia and the capital, Brussels, the French Socialists won about 36 percent of the vote. Their leader, Elio di Rupo, may be asked to become prime minister, which would make him the first Francophone prime minister since 1974.
Perhaps Mr. de Wever’s greatest success has been to make the cause of independence respectable. Other separatist parties like Vlaams Belang were identified with the extremist and xenophobic far-right, which limited their appeal.
By contrast Mr. de Wever is a mainstream politician who argues for the gradual, slow death of Belgium, rather than its immediate dismemberment. “We do not want a revolution,” he said in Brussels last week. “We do not want to declare Flanders independent overnight. But we do believe in a gradual evolution.”
Belgium’s 180-year history contains many of the seeds of today’s difficulties. French-speakers in Wallonia dominated the country for much of the last century. The resentments of Dutch speakers in Flanders, who remember being treated as second-class citizens, run deep. As Wallonia’s traditional industries like coal and steel have declined, the Flemish increasingly feel that they are subsidizing the less productive south.
The parallel political system, in which each region has its own parties, reinforces the divisions. Politicians on either side increasingly have little in common, but have to form a federal coalition anyway.
Though the Czech Republic and Slovakia managed a “velvet divorce” in 1993, such a feat would be more difficult for Belgium, which would have to find a solution for Brussels, a largely French-speaking city that is also the capital of Flanders. Brussels is home to the headquarters of the European Union and of NATO.
While the two regional governments have considerable autonomy, the Flemish parties want to decentralize authority over justice, health, social security, taxation and labor, while the poorer French speakers fear losing federal social security protections.
Few symbols of Belgian unity remain, other than the royal family, the cartoon character Tintin and Brussels itself. There is a national soccer team, but it did not qualify for the World Cup.
Stephen Castle reported from Brussels, and Steven Erlanger from Paris.
DARIUSH ZAHEDI is a Research Fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches at Zirve University, in Turkey. GOKHAN BACIK is Associate Professor of International Relations at Zirve University and a contributor to Zaman and Today’s Zaman.
In both Turkey and the West, Kemalism -- the principle that Turkey should be secular and Western -- has been pronounced dead. The country is drifting away from both, the argument goes, and Islamists, led by the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), are socially and politically aligning the country with the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East.
Turkey’s domestic and foreign politics are indeed transforming. In the ongoing Ergenekon trial, state prosecutors, encouraged by AKP officials, are indicting a group of alleged Kemalist academics, journalists, officers, and politicians (accusing them of plotting to overthrow the government) in order to purge them from public institutions. Meanwhile, a growing AKP-aligned religious bourgeoisie is starting to dominate various sectors, including energy, finance, manufacturing, and the media. Trade unions and professional associations, such as the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, are also increasingly under the sway of the AKP. And in terms of foreign policy, Turkey is pursuing ties with Iran and Syria while putting some distance between itself and its old allies in the region, such as Israel.
But in reality, most of the AKP’s policies are not incompatible with Kemalism. Indeed, the irony of Turkey today is that the AKP -- a religiously rooted, conservative political party -- has become the closest thing the country has to a defender of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Turkey’s original Kemalist vision.s
For the last several decades, military Kemalism has been the organizing principle of Turkish politics, with a small group of military officials (along with a few bureaucratic and judicial representatives) responsible for guarding European values in Turkish society. But the military’s dominance has always been a distortion of Ataturk’s idea of Kemalism. Beginning in the 1920s, a few years before the declaration of the Republic of Turkey, the leaders of the Kemalist movement were adamant that the new state should embrace European social, economic, and political practices. Recognizing that Turkish society was still a long way from achieving secular modernity, they urged a period of tutelage during which the government would lay the socioeconomic and cultural foundations needed for transformation, such as modern infrastructure, better provision of social services, Western legal codes, a cadre of economic technocrats, and a reorganized educational system.
The military was never meant to lead this process. Ataturk, who had been a general in the Ottomanarmy and a field marshal in the Turkish army, set aside his military fatigues upon assuming the role of head of state in 1923. He removed other military officers from political posts, promoted civilian control of the armed forces, and cautioned the military against intervening in political affairs. He gave responsibility for developing the public’s understanding of liberal, Western values to politicians, civil servants, schoolteachers, journalists, and public intellectuals. Finally, he encouraged the country to adopt modern, liberal economics, though the worldwide depression of the 1930s forced him to resort to state control of the economy.
Elite guardianship over the country’s political and economic systems was to be temporary, lasting only until the bulk of the people had embraced modern norms and institutions. Thereafter, the guardians would relinquish their control over the economy, institute multiparty elections, and extend greater rights to the citizenry.
In 1938, Ataturk died and Ismet Inonu, who had served as prime minister until Ataturk removed him shortly before his death, became president. It was during Inonu’s 12-year, increasingly autocratic rule that civilian Kemalism warped into military Kemalism. Inonu relied on the military (which had supported his bid for the presidency) to implement his policies. Even after he was voted out of office in 1950, the military remained the most powerful actor in the Kemalist establishment. The Cold War only perpetuated this distortion: in exchange for Turkey’s alignment with the Western bloc, the United States gave its support to an increasingly strong military, which, in 1960, carried out the first of three Cold War–era military coups and brought Inonu back to power.
At the end of the Cold War, with communism no longer a threat, Turkish military rulers shifted their sights to creeping Islamization. Beginning in the 1990s, they sought to use the army’s status as the protector of secular Kemalism to justify its continued dominance in Turkish politics. In 1997, they forced the elected government to resign, purportedly because it was pursuing an Islamic agenda. Working with allies in the judiciary and bureaucracy, they banned Islamic political parties, jailed their leaders, and expelled suspected members from government posts. The media, which was supportive of military Kemalism, hailed their actions.
But the military’s claim that it is the protector of Kemalist values is increasingly falling on deaf ears. Many of the AKP’s policies represent an actual fulfillment of Ataturk’s notion of Kemalism. Western values are no longer abstract; they are codified in the Copenhagen criteria for EU accession. The AKP has tried to institutionalize civil liberties, improve minority rights by ending martial law in Kurdish regions, promote civilian control of the military, and further develop the free market.
The emerging industrial, commercial, and financial bourgeoisie, most of which is linked to the AKP, in effect accomplishes Ataturk’s grand historical vision. This rising middle class no longer wants (or needs) to be treated like an adolescent in need of supervision. It willingly embraces democracy, participation in civil society, and the market. It yearns to be a part of the modern world and -- if allowed -- would want to become a member of the European Union.
Rather than being apprehensive about the AKP and its political, economic, and foreign policies, the West should welcome it. A democratic, market-oriented, prosperous, and stable Turkey, at ease with its Islamic identity and at peace with its neighbors, will prove to be a more natural ally than a military Kemalist state. It will also be better positioned to promote Western interests. A Turkey that is respected and trusted by its neighbors can serve as a broker between, for example, Iran and the West, Israel and Palestine, and Israel and Syria.
This is not to suggest that the AKP is completely benign. Indeed, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s frequent attempts at silencing dissent in the media are worrisome and should be countered.
In time, however, the rise of a middle class will be the most effective guarantee that Turkey will continue its route to secular, Western democracy. Although much of the emerging pious bourgeoisie is closely linked with -- even dependent on -- the AKP, this class will shun extremist policies that endanger its economic interests, even as it continues to embrace moderate Islam. Eventually, the AKP and parties like it may play a role akin to that of the Christian democratic parties of Western Europe.
Finally, those who worry that the AKP’s already lengthy tenure appears set to continue, thereby affording it the opportunity to erode Turkey’s secular foundations further, should recognize that the opposition’s prospects would improve if it embraced some of the more liberal tenets of the AKP’s political platform, such as market reform, civilian control of the military, and the extension of greater cultural rights to the Kurdish minority. But rather than dividing the AKP’s base among its intellectual, religious, entrepreneurial, and Kurdish components by championing progressive causes, the opposition parties have so far opted for reflexive opposition dismissal to its religious platform and bemoaned the end of Kemalism.
As a student during the 1980s, I gave the "European Union" section in the library a wide berth. The pall of soporific technocracy that hung over it made the adjacent shelves of books on law and political science enticing by comparison. A lot more has been written on the EU since then, most of it perpetuating that same "mortal dullness," to borrow a phrase from the historian Perry Anderson. Dullness, on the other hand, is one charge no one has ever levied at Anderson, whose new book, The New Old World, is as insightful, combative and invigorating as its illustrious predecessors. Given Anderson's long and intimate engagement with Europe, both as an editor of the New Left Review and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books for the past two decades, one looks forward to what one gets--a bracing assault from somewhere on the left on the conventional Europieties, and new perspectives on the evolution, and likely future trajectory, of one of the most important political and cultural experiments of our time.
Anderson states the fundamental analytical difficulty of his project at the outset. Europe appears to be an "impossible object," constantly slipping among three quite distinct literatures. There are histories of the postwar continent, mostly written in the shadow of the cold war and paying little attention to the European Union; there is the vast outpouring of works, popular and scholarly, focusing not on Europe per se but on this or that European country. (The EU may be a polity of sorts, but the political and intellectual energies of most Europeans still flow at the national level.) Finally, there is what we might call professional EUrology: a series of interventions, chiefly by legal scholars and political scientists, on the technicalities of the integration process and its institutions. Given the amnesiac quality of much of this last in particular, Anderson's ability to move fluently among the three literatures, and above all to evaluate the EU as an ideology, is necessary and timely.
Anderson takes as his starting point a series of reflections on the work of the historian Alan Milward, who in The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-51 (1984), The European Rescue of the Nation-State (1992) and The Frontiers of National Sovereignty (1993) demonstrated the degree to which the politics of the nation-state remained vital in explaining the postwar drive toward European integration. Milward's argument was that the revival of democracy in the nation-states of Western Europe, shaken by the experience of occupation and war, depended on the pursuit of prosperity through the rebuilding of cross-border economic networks. As this rebuilding took place, it became the motor of more permanent and far-reaching European cooperation. Accepting the basic insight, Anderson argues that Milward nevertheless exaggerates the degree to which this process was democratic; in fact, far from restoring and deepening democracy in Europe, as the EU's founders wished, the institutions they built have eroded and weakened it. This tendency has reached an apogee in the creation of a single currency defended by a powerful centralized monetary authority that exerts deflationary pressure on wages in order to guard the rigid conditions of the Stability and Growth Pact. The lack of comparably powerful legislatures at the European level means that the voice of the popular will is silenced. (A rare exception was the rejection by French and Dutch voters of the EU's constitutional treaty in 2005, a wrinkle ironed out by the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009.) Any democratic impulse in the integration process long ago withered away and has been replaced by an elitarian, even oligarchic form of consensus policy-making conducted behind closed doors and consummated in faits accomplis.
Anderson is significantly more admiring than Milward of the federalist impulses of EU architect Jean Monnet and his peers. He applauds their transnational vision, their dirigiste commitment to welfarism and their desire to set Europe on foundations that would allow it to forge its own path between the superpowers. At the same time, he insists that the federalists' idealism needs to be set against the enduring impact of continental geopolitics: France's fear of Germany after World War II; West Germany's desire to rejoin the comity of powers; and above all, the brute reality of the American desire to see Europe as a stable garrison in the cold war. For Anderson, Europeans have simply failed to acknowledge their real status as an outpost of the American imperium; worse, over the decades from Truman to Bush II, they have become more subservient, not less.
Despite the disagreements, all this is presented with the utmost respect for Milward's intellectual achievement. (Indeed, Milward is the book's dedicatee.) The tone changes when Anderson takes up contemporary EUrology, dispatching with gusto the various models--intergovernmentalist, confederalist, imperial--that social scientists have offered as guides to understanding what has become in only a few decades one of the most complex of contemporary political structures. Common to most if not all versions of EUrology, Anderson charges, is an overestimation of what the EU has really achieved, an underplaying of its continued geopolitical weakness and a complacency about its embrace of neoliberal economics. The lack of accountability in European institutions cannot be written off as easily as the mainstream scholarship assumes, nor should we excuse or dignify the Eurocrats' attempt to replace the guns and blood of political struggle with consensus reached through secret diplomacy.
That the initial chapters of The New Old World are based for the most part on pieces published previously in the London Review of Books does not make them any less valuable: such a penetrating and wide-ranging critique of the field is still rare. But at this point in the book, just when one expects Anderson to elaborate his own analysis of the European Union in more detail, he instead reprints a number of tours d'horizon of the three countries--Italy, France and Germany--that constitute what he terms the European "Core." The shift in gears from the EUrological to the national is abrupt and justified perfunctorily as though to set before our eyes that very impossibility of writing about Europe that Anderson notes to be such a striking feature of the intellectual landscape.
Part of the problem is that these pieces, although worth rereading, are in some cases quite old and have inevitably dated. (The first part of the Germany chapter was originally published as an essay in the LRB in January 1999.) Anderson's political antennas, sensitive to considerations of the longue durée, are always closely attuned to the demands of the conjuncture. In his hands, historical analysis, massive and precisely crafted, invariably serves as ammunition in an unceasing war of position. Thus his essays, despite their dense scene-setting, distancing tone and expert knowledge, are nothing if not assessments of the moment. In this sense, though in almost no other, they resemble that effort at a "history of the present" that Anderson himself has castigated in the work of Timothy Garton Ash. (Like Garton Ash, Anderson focuses on the political class and its machinations; but whereas Garton Ash, in Anderson's view, cozies up to it and offers a view from over its shoulder, Anderson stands at a remove and is constantly unmasking it.)
There is another difficulty. Anderson singles out his Big Three not only because of their role in the European Union but also--perhaps primarily--for their predominant place in European cultural life. A strictly EUrological intent might have suggested a different choice of candidates; momentum toward integration has frequently come, after all, either from smaller countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands or from the European Commission (the chief administrative organ of the EU). But Anderson's idealist bent pushes him away from such themes and back to the specificities of Old Europe's national Kultur bearers. In each case, the rise of neoliberalism is linked to the left's loss of ideological and philosophical vigor. Something of the former Gramscian is manifested here: the implication is that because the left lost the war of ideas in Italy, France and Germany, catastrophic political consequences followed. Once there were titans like Sartre and de Gaulle, runs the message; now we are left with BHL and Sarko. The tone is regretful; the analysis, acerbic. But the overarching political conception is surprisingly old-fashioned--what counts is Big Three politics, each mediated by the international balance of forces but unfolding largely within its national borders. Dealing with exactly the same three countries, historian Charles Maier once wrote a classic of comparative history, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975), in an effort to explain the wider mutation of political life and institutions across Europe after World War I. Anderson does not do this. As membership in the EU has expanded from six states to twenty-seven, he has remained focused on the Big Three. He sees the EU as one further--perhaps the last--triumph of the Western European bourgeoisie, but his eschewal of systematic comparison offers less guidance than Maier's on the reasons for its success.
These somber analyses of the hollowing out of Europe's Core are followed in a quite different vein by a sequence of essays (originally published in the LRB in 2008) on Cyprus and Turkey. Here we move from domestic institutions and struggles over national cultures to sweeping, morally charged narratives set in an emphatically geopolitical context. Anderson terms his subject the European Union's "Eastern Question," in the belief that its treatment of Cyprus and Turkey reveals as much about the EU as the treatment of the old Eastern Question (the fallout from the decay of the Ottoman Empire) did about the real nature of the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century. This is, in short, all about the unmasking of European pretensions. Despite their fine talk about human rights, the Europeans have consistently left the Greek Cypriots in the lurch and acquiesced in Turkey's de facto partition of their island. At the same time, Anderson says, they have welcomed the prospect of Turkish membership, as EU policy-makers and polite opinion do their best to sweep inconvenient mention of the Armenian genocide under the carpet.
Anderson is in less familiar territory here, and it shows. His lengthy retelling of the Cyprus tragedy manages to be schoolmasterly and polemical at the same time. The pendant pieces on Turkey push tendentiousness further. He exaggerates the chances of Turkish membership in the EU (which currently look bleak, since Europeans, pace Anderson, do not do everything the Americans tell them to). But it is the history offered here that is uncharacteristically ropy. Having reminded us at the outset that the European Union is dealing with the descendant of an imperial state, he warns that the early modern Ottoman Empire was "designed for the battlefield, without territorial fixture or definition." One could as easily describe the British Empire in analogous terms, but to what end? The character of states is not fixed by their origins, and even when such assertions about empires are true, they are idle as guides to the present outlook and behavior of their postimperial successors. As for his suggestion that nineteenth-century imperial reforms failed to transform the religious foundations of Ottoman rule, this is scarcely borne out by the facts. If political Islam emerged in the late nineteenth century as a new program for the empire--dismissed by Anderson, with a typical impatience for the politics of piety, as "ideological bluster"--it was precisely because of the dramatic impact of the reform program on Islam's place in Ottoman society.
A matter highly relevant to the worldview of the Turkish political elite also deserves more weight than Anderson devotes to it: namely, the massive human cost of imperial decline, as millions of Muslims over the century after 1821 were forced to abandon their lands in the arc from Greece through the Balkans to the Caucasus, and made a new home in Anatolia. But accounting for that forced migration would have complicated and contextualized the story of the Armenian genocide, which is Anderson's real subject. It would have required explanation rather than indictment. One would have had to situate the genocide, for instance, within the embrace by the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling party at the time, of a much more sweeping population politics, one that identified a bewildering range of ethnic groups--Christian and Muslim--as suspect and potentially disloyal elements, and brought to the fore the tight interconnection between the bureaucracies of mass murder and refugee resettlement during World War I.
As for the politics of the memory of the genocide, too much in Anderson's charge sheet is dictated by rhetorical positioning. It is true, as he says, that the Turkish elite has connived in a silence about the genocide that remains hard, indeed dangerous, to break. But his allegation that European sympathies in this matter are on the side of Turkey's Kemalist, secular elite strains belief. Turkey's cover-up has been denounced in the French Parliament, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, among other venues. Of the many reasons Europeans are balking at Turkish membership, this is not the least important. And while it is certainly correct that Western historians of modern Turkey fight shy of using the "G-word" (just as Soviet historians used to weigh carefully what might jeopardize their access to the archives), this professional deformation does not inhibit the European commentariat that Anderson unnecessarily pillories.
A litany of authorial errors serves little purpose. It is more useful to explain the peculiarities of Anderson's perspective and tone. Fundamentally, this book charts the reaction to a deep and evidently wounding disappointment, one that has more to do with Anderson's ideas than can be explained solely by the global rise of neoliberalism and the long retreat of the left. It is Europe, perhaps above all, that has disappointed him. From very early in the history of the New Left Review, which turns fifty this year, Anderson embraced a Europeanist position for at least three reasons. First, it offered a convenient perch from which to lambaste the parochialism of the British left. Second, one could imagine that the regional concentration of power achieved by the Western European bourgeoisie through the economic integration process in the 1950s might paradoxically--if the left ever got its hands on the reins--pave the way for a coordinated continental path to socialism. And third, perhaps most important, the New Left Review regarded (Western) Europe as a kind of cultural and intellectual font and devoted itself to disseminating the works of Gramsci, Althusser, Mandel and many other social theorists previously neglected or unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world.
So far as the first of these reasons is concerned, the battle is over. The British Labour Party is now more unambiguously pro-European than the Tories, and Europe is not by and large a major bone of contention within it. As for the third reason, the scale of the achievement of the New Left Review and its associated imprint, Verso, which turns forty this year, is now clear: their dissemination of Euro-Marxism influenced intellectual life in Britain, especially on its campuses. But this did not have any greater political impact, since the universities were never, as the NLR once anticipated, the "weak link" of capitalism. Worse still, the fountainhead of ideas has dried up, and the European left is--so Anderson suggests--intellectually bankrupt.
This brings us to the remaining reason for Anderson's embrace of a Europeanist position: the chances of turning the European Union into an engine of socialism, or at least of social democracy. As late as 1998, Anderson was still willing to see this as a possibility; in an exchange with the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio, he anticipated that if the German Social Democratic Party won elections that year, "the four major countries of Western Europe...will for the first time in history be ruled simultaneously by governments declaredly of the Left. This constellation would occur just as the great project of a single continental currency comes into being. The power to reshape the conditions of life for the peoples of Europe for the better would lie in the hands of the official Left, across national frontiers, in a way that it has never done before." The Social Democratic Party did prevail, and under Gerhard Schröder it did form a government, but the outcome belied Anderson's hopes. In short order, the Schröder government cut taxes, reduced welfare benefits and sent German troops into combat (in Kosovo and Afghanistan) for the first time since World War II. It was the latest in a series of disappointments--in the EU, its institutions, its electorates--that has left Anderson facing a Europe very different from the one he has believed in over so many years.
What is left for him, then, but to pour scorn upon the pretensions of contemporary liberal Euroboosters? Do they see Europe as a beacon of light, a reminder of a better world than that across the Atlantic? They forget, says Anderson, that the European Union in geopolitical terms is nothing more than a "deputy empire." Do they praise it for having devised a postconflictual form of politics? Prove them wrong by reminding them that key member states retain strong senses of their own self-interest. All of this makes Anderson enjoyable to read. But it also makes him a better prosecutor than judge.
The desire to rout the liberals and pick holes in their woolly self-delusions leads Anderson into strange company. In particular, he has a soft spot for tough-minded realists and neocons. Robert Kagan is commended for providing, in Of Paradise and Power (2003), the best account of Europe's subservience to the United States; Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (2009), Christopher Caldwell's assault on the hypocrisies of immigration debate in the EU, is said to break "free from the prevailing morass of sanctimony and evasion" thanks to "the clarity of its historical analysis and sharpness of its comparative perspective." Not that Anderson cannot spot the weaknesses in the realists' and neocons' arguments; but their readiness to ignore taboos, to castigate the self-satisfaction of Old Europe's elites, is something he seems to relish.
So too is their geopolitical realism. In Anderson's Europe, one is constantly waiting for the old demons to return. Unified Germany in particular is depicted as a potential Bismarckian, if not quite Nazi, Grossmacht ready to impose its will on its cowering neighbors; the European Union is a new Concert of Powers replaying in a new key the old struggle for mastery. Throughout The New Old World, present-day presidents and prime ministers are termed "rulers," their governments "regimes," as though to imply their fundamental illegitimacy--despite their electoral victories. It is a view of the continent--and its voters--that sits oddly with the other plank of the Andersonian critique: the EU's lack of democracy. Either power has relocated in some unaccountable way to the neoliberal corridors of Brussels, voiding national politics of much of its autonomy, or in fact it remains in the hands of the Germans, the French and other would-be hegemons. Anderson wants us to fear the old tyrannies and the new one at the same time, but this seems inconsistent, if not incoherent.
Elitism can take many forms, of course. Anderson's political goals have, on the showing of this book, moderated considerably over time: what counts now for him in Europe is the revival of popular politics and the struggle against growing economic inequality. But if previous positions have been tacitly abandoned, there has been no diminution in authorial certainty: the tone of omniscience remains for the most part intact, and there are flashes of the author's trademark hauteur. More discordant with his avowedly democratizing goals, it seems to me, is his prose. Connoisseurs of Andersoniana will enjoy recherché gems such as "amphibology," "capsizal" and "conflictivity." Without touching on the obiter dicta in French, German, Latin and Italian, we find, in only a few pages, "decathexis," "semi-catallaxy," "paralogism" and "censitary," alongside archaisms like "estoppage," "prebends" and "brigade" (used as a verb). Such language stands as testimony to elitism of a different kind, that of a small substratum of the postwar British left whose basically Leninist conception of radical politics led them to abjure too close a contact with the masses, whose ultimate victory they supposedly championed. But now another kind of elitism, much more impenetrable in word and deed, is in the ascendant in Europe. Anderson is good at puncturing its self-serving myths. But the explanation of its staying power must be sought elsewhere.
About Mark Mazower
Mark Mazower is the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton)
Turkey’s governing party moved this week to further reduce the power of the country’s staunchly secular old guard, submitting a series of amendments to Turkey’s military coup-era 1982 constitution, but passage is far from assured.
A number of the 26 amendments, if passed, would strike at a center of power for the old elite, the judiciary, by opening up its appointment process and expanding its membership.
For generations, Turkey’s judiciary has been controlled by a small class of hard-line secularists with a nationalist ideology, and the European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, has long urged that it be changed. The amendments require 367 votes out of 550 to become law, more than the governing party has. At the same time, the secular opposition party is having trouble gathering the 110 votes needed to kill the package in the Constitutional Court.
Some liberals criticized the measures for falling short of what is needed for deeper democracy in Turkey, while opponents of the party, Justice and Development, say the amendments are an effort by its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to consolidate his power. But supporters say the changes would start to bring Turkey in line with European countries.
“When you actually look at what the amendments propose, you see that all changes are copied from examples that function quite well in E.U. member states,” said Joost Lagendijk, senior adviser at the Istanbul Policy Center at Sabanci University and a former European Parliament member.
The current constitution, which enshrines Turkey’s secular mandate, has been amended several times since it was put in place, and most Turkish intellectuals argue that it should be scrapped entirely.
But Mr. Erdogan’s past efforts to change it have met with ferocious criticism. His party commissioned a new draft in 2008, which was written largely by a group of intellectuals, but was forced to scrap it after the secular opposition party filed suit against Justice and Development, which is Islamic-inspired, and a high court threatened to ban the party.
The government argues that the changes as necessary to break away from a troubled past of military coups and strong control of the state by a small coterie of unelected officials in the bureaucracy and the judiciary. Critics of the newly proposed amendments fear that the key changes — the way appointments are made to the constitutional court, the main watchdog of secularism in Turkey, and to the Senior Council of Judges and Prosecutors, responsible for judicial appointments and monitoring court officials — would damage Turkey’s founding principles. They do not trust Mr. Erdogan, whose party arose from a class of Muslim entrepreneurs that upper class secular Turks long looked down upon.
“The secular democratic state in Turkey is in danger,” said Sabih Kanadoglu, the chief prosecutor of the Court of Appeals, another powerful court.
Other changes include trying military officers in civilian courts and making it harder to ban political parties.
If Mr. Erdogan fails to pass the changes in Parliament, he has said he would bring them to a nationwide referendum, though some have criticized that approach as too black-and-white for the complexity of the amendments.
The disagreement follows a long-running divide in Turkish society between the broad sector of society that supports Justice and Development and secular Turks, who believe Mr. Erdogan is dismantling the old system to establish a new one that empowers him.
At the same time, liberals who were hoping for bolder change expressed disappointment. One of the principle authors of the 2008 draft, Ergun Ozbudun, a professor of law at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, noted that the amendments offered no concessions to ethnic or religious groups, for example, whose rights in Turkey have been routinely abused.
“The desire deep in their hearts was probably to go more courageously,” he said by telephone, “but they are maybe afraid of the opposition and constitutional court.”
Nor do the amendments lower the steep 10 percent threshold that political parties must meet to claim seats in Parliament, which keeps out smaller political parties, including those that represent ethnic groups such as Kurds, out of Parliament one of the liberals’ central demands.
Ibrahim Kaboglu, a professor of constitutional law at Istanbul’s Marmara University, said the changes would expand the president’s powers, for example by allowing him to choose more members of the constitutional court, and he said he worried that the court, a bastion of secular resistance, would soon be packed with Mr. Erdogan’s allies.
“They seem to be in a rush to fill both institutions with judges and members who are closer to their political line to secure their future,” he said, referring to the Constitutional Court and the Senior Council.
MOSCOW -- The inauguration of Viktor Yanukovych as Ukraine's president was celebrated in Russian media last week as a long-sought victory for the Kremlin, which tried to put him in office five years ago, only to be thwarted by the mass protests known as the Orange Revolution.
Now that he has taken power, though, the man who had been Russia's preferred choice to govern the former Soviet republic could prove to be far less accommodating to Moscow's interests -- and more open to Washington's -- than the Kremlin would like.
Breaking with tradition, Yanukovych is scheduled to make his first official trip abroad Monday to Brussels, the seat of the European Union, instead of Moscow, which he will visit Friday. The decision follows a campaign in which he labored to shed his image as a Kremlin lackey and recast himself as a proponent of further integration with Europe as well as closer ties with Russia.
The line that Yanukovych and his advisers have used is that he will be a pro-Ukrainian president, not a pro-Russian or pro-Western one. In his inaugural address, he pledged that Ukraine would serve as a "bridge between East and West, an integral part of Europe and the former Soviet Union at the same time" and "a European state outside of any bloc."
How such rhetoric will be translated into policy, especially in Ukraine's strategically important energy sector, remains uncertain and will be the subject of close scrutiny in Yanukovych's meetings this week and in the months ahead.
Many analysts say Moscow is more likely than the West to be disappointed, if only because it wants much more from a Yanukovych presidency. In five years of bitter feuding with his predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-West hero of the Orange Revolution, the Kremlin built up a substantial store of grievances that plunged relations between Russia and Ukraine to a low point.
Near the top of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's agenda is greater control over Ukrainian pipelines that transport much of the natural gas that Russia sells to Europe. Other goals include scaling back Ukraine's cooperation with NATO, extending basing rights for Russia's Black Sea fleet in the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol, and providing broader market access to Russian investors and businesses.
"I think that the elites here expect much more than Yanukovych could possibly give them," said Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst and scholar in Moscow, noting that the new president has been portrayed in Russian media as "a very pro-Russian politician."
In reality, though, Oreshkin said, Yanukovych is under pressure to broaden his political base, in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, by winning over voters in western Ukraine who are wary of Russia and feel more strongly about integration with Europe.
Washington and its European allies, analysts said, have more limited expectations, in part because they have looked on with frustration for five years as Yushchenko bickered with other Orange Revolution leaders and failed to deliver on the promise of the pro-democracy uprising.
"If the West was disappointed with Ukraine for the last five years, I think now it's Russia's turn," said Samuel Charap, a scholar of the region at the D.C.-based Center for American Progress. "If you believe the Russian press, they arrived with a wish list . . . and I don't think they'll get everything."
Charap said Washington's goals will be modest in comparison. U.S. and European officials will urge Yanukovych to continue cooperation with NATO and adopt legislation authorizing joint exercises, he said. They will also push for economic measures that would unlock a suspended emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund.
But the Obama administration is also expected to continue pressing Ukraine to clean up its corrupt energy sector, which is considered a source of political instability and was singled out as a priority by Vice President Biden in his visit last summer. The business interests that backed Yanukovych, however, make significant progress on that front unlikely, analysts say.
Mikhail Gonchar, director of energy programs at the Ukraine-based Nomos Center, said a key early test will be the fate of proposed legislation to bring regulation of Ukraine's domestic gas market to European standards. Another will be whether Yanukovych can put off a Russian proposal for an international consortium to upgrade and manage Ukraine's gas pipelines -- a plan that makes little financial sense for Ukraine, Gonchar said.
He added that Yanukovych is considering Russian proposals to establish partnerships in uranium and nuclear fuel production that would push out the U.S.-based atomic giant Westinghouse. "He's under a high level of pressure from the Russian side in the energy sector," Gonchar said. "It's a serious challenge."
Irina Kobrinskaya, a scholar at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, said she expected "tough bargaining" on energy issues but an easing of bilateral tensions because Yanukovych will drop his predecessor's efforts to appeal to Ukrainian nationalism by rewriting history and taking "ideologically anti-Russian steps."
While the Kremlin endorsed Yanukovych five years ago and sent political operatives to help his campaign, it hedged its bets in the recently concluded race by signaling its willingness to work with Yanukovych's chief opponent, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who lost by 3.5 percentage points.
Putin had praised her handling of a gas contract and said Russia was staying neutral because it had been let down by candidates in the past -- a remark widely read as an expression of disappointment in Yanukovych's ability to deliver for Moscow while serving as prime minister from August 2006 to the end of 2007.
How that snub will affect Yanukovych's view of Russia is complicated by the fact he still presides over a divided government, with Tymoshenko refusing his demand to resign as prime minister. To oust her, he will need to win over lawmakers in her coalition or call early parliamentary elections, and thus continue reaching out to western Ukraine.
Ivan Lozowy, president of the Institute of Statehood and Democracy in Kiev, warned that Yanukovych might also make an autocratic bid to consolidate power that triggers a confrontation with Ukrainian society. A similar authoritarian turn in the early 2000s alienated the West and strengthened Russia's influence in Ukraine.
Still, Lozowy said, Yanukovych is unlikely to embrace Russia immediately because the powerful businessmen who support him are more interested in Western markets -- and wary of Russian competition -- than they were five years ago. "Europe is what's exciting for them now," he said. "I don't expect Ukraine to be throwing itself into the Russian bear hug."
The European Union on Saturday opened its borders to visa-free travel for more than ten million Serbs, Montenegrins, and Macedonians after nearly 20 years of tight restrictions.
By Andrea Gregory Contributor posted December 20, 2009 at 9:57 am EST
At a snowy bus stop in New Belgrade, Serbia, Nadja Miladinovic waited to venture abroad for the first time without a visa.
She hadn't done much planning, but said Friday that she was headed to Vienna for the weekend for no other reason than that she could now take advantage of a new agreement with the European Union that allows residents of Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia to travel visa-free throughout most of Europe.
The EU's dropping of a 17-year, strict visa requirement now allows residents of those countries to visit European countries with ease. It's sparking travel plans among eager young people who've long felt trapped by the visa requirements, some of whom have never left the borders of the former Yugoslavia.
Milan Nikolic, a sociologist and political analyst in Belgrade, calls the change symbolic, pointing out that less than 10 percent of Serbs actually have passports. Mr. Nikolic does not expect the number to rise significantly anytime soon, but he does acknowledge the importance of this agreement between Serbia and the EU. “This is more important than the direct effects,” he says. “In Serbia, it is considered rare to be treated in a positive way. We are used to the Hague coming and saying, ‘You are not doing this.’”
End of a 'counterproductive' restriction
Before the wars of the 1990s, an old red Yugoslavian passport was quite well received. But war in the Balkans changed that. The passports were changed to blue and residents needed visas to gain entry almost everywhere in Europe. Upholding the requirement has contributed to a feeling of isolation in Serbia.
Nikolic says the visa requirement was a tool used to cut Serbia off, and that the “blanket punishment” was counterproductive. He says it's widely known that war criminals and members of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime easily traveled in the 1990s and beyond even with visa restrictions in place, but that everyday Serbians were blocked. “If criminals and Milosevic's people never had any problems with visas, what does that say about the punishment?” says Nikolic.
“This affected the generation who voted against Milosevic in 2000, and the people who protested against him in the 90s,” says Djordje Milojevic. “The conditions just offended the people who are pro-Europe.”
As a young hostel owner in Belgrade, Mr. Milojevic knows the art of travel, even if the bulk of his knowledge comes from the travel tales of his guests. He says it has been difficult explaining to visitors that he cannot travel the same way they do. “You are glad you have people coming over, but it is a problem when people are unaware. That’s when it can hurt,” says Milojevic. “Even though I have heard stories from travelers, I think you still need to go see for yourself what’s what.”
Milojevic left the country to travel in 2007. But there were hefty fees attached to the visa application and a month long wait. If his application had been denied, he would have been out more than 100 euros. It is living under such a system that has a trapping effect, say many of the people from his generation.
“People felt in prison. You couldn’t leave unless you asked permission and filled out a very long visa form,” he says. “It is a big liberation. You actually feel liberated right now.”
Feeling trapped
Jovana Stokanic tried several times to obtain a visa. She had dreamed of studying in Germany. Applying for a visa meant signing in with the embassy at 1 a.m. to ensure a spot at the beginning of the line when it opened at 7 a.m. Once the embassy opened, an hour or so wait was considered good and meant finishing around 11 a.m., she said. Then she had to come back one week later and find out if she had been granted a visa.
She said her third rejection made her feel like she was going to have a nervous breakdown. No one ever explained to her why she was being denied. All she was told was that she could apply again in six months. But the idea of going to Germany no longer seemed possible. She finally decided to stay and study in Belgrade.
“The worst is when you don’t know you are in jail. If you can’t see a better opportunity for life, you accept it,” says Stokanic.
“I think the whole generation of young people here were really damaged because they couldn’t travel freely,” said Nebojsa Milenkovic, media adviser to the Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration in Serbia. “It is like living in a box.”
Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration Bozidar Delic created a project to allow 50 Serbs that had never left the borders of the former Yugoslavia to spend eight nights abroad, traveling in Europe. The average age of those selected is 28. The group is traveling together and left Serbia late Friday night.
Aleksandra Jankovic, head of the office’s public relations unit, said the participants are from all over Serbia, including small villages. She said many of them might not have had such an opportunity to travel due to finances or obligations.
“It’s an opportunity to see other cultures, meet people and see how they live,” said Jankovic. “To make a bridge between Serbia and Europe.”
Choice of conciliator suggests bloc is not yet ready for bolder role
By Edward Cody Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, November 20, 2009
BRUSSELS -- Champions of European unity hoped their new president would be a continental George Washington, a brand name who could pull the European Union closer together and fulfill their dream of a strengthened role for Europe in world affairs.
But after weeks of backroom haggling and private international telephone conversations, the presidents and prime ministers of the 27 E.U. nations on Thursday picked a little-known politician, Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, as the union's first permanent president.
The choice of a conciliator, rather than a bold leader, for the new job suggested the European Union was not ready for the dramatic departure advocated by ardent unity advocates, analysts said. As a result, they added, the United States and other E.U. partners should expect little change in their traditional bilateral dealings with national governments in Europe despite Van Rompuy's addition to the vast Euro-bureaucracy in Brussels.
"Europe is not a country," said Nicolas Véron of the Brussels-based Bruegel institute for European and world economic affairs. Notwithstanding lyrical talk of European unity and joint action on the world stage, he added, the continent's elected presidents and prime ministers showed they were not yet prepared to cede significant new powers to an E.U. figurehead or choose an activist in Brussels likely to vie with national leaders on European policies.
Van Rompuy, 62, a professorial veteran of Belgium's intricate coalition politics, indicated he would be comfortable in a facilitator's role when he takes office Jan. 1. "As president of the European Council, I will listen to every country and make sure every country comes out a winner in every negotiation," he said.
The election of the European Union's first full-time president, along with the appointment of Britain's Catherine Ashton as high representative for foreign affairs, was made possible by ratification this month of a treaty strengthening and reorganizing the political and trade bloc.
The treaty, a watered-down version of an earlier pact rejected as overly ambitious, provided for a permanent president with a 30-month term to give Europe a recognizable face -- in effect, an answer to Henry Kissinger's question of where to call if he wanted to speak to Europe.
Leaders of the 27 E.U. nations have so far assumed the role of part-time bloc president on six-month rotations, which produced mixed results depending on the energy and clout of whoever had the rotation. It fell on the current president, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, to navigate the bloc through what turned out to be a difficult decision on the full-time post.
Former British prime minister Tony Blair quickly emerged as the early favorite, particularly among those pushing for a greater voice for Europe in places such as Washington and Beijing. The media-savvy Blair was well known, supporters argued, and had personal standing with leaders worldwide.
In addition, his candidacy was being pushed by the British government, which traditionally has dragged its feet on European integration. Having Blair at the helm, his backers said, would make British officials more amenable to further unity efforts, such as the project to mount an effective E.U. defense organization alongside NATO.
But opposition to Blair flared almost immediately, particularly among smaller countries such as Belgium and Luxembourg that have been the most ardent advocates of increased integration. Britain has refused to use the European currency, the euro, they noted, and remained aloof from the common European visa. Moreover, Blair offered warm support for the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was opposed by most Europeans and their governments.
As a result, attention veered toward figures of less status but more flexibility, such as Van Rompuy or Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands. Both were hailed as able negotiators likely to reconcile competing national interests and sail the European Union on a smooth course -- without, however, boosting its place in world affairs.
Vaira Vike-Freiberga, a former president of Latvia, put forward her candidacy, which was backed in particular by those who complained that few women held E.U. positions of authority. Another small-nation champion, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, also declared his interest.
With the field opened up, however, a raft of competing interests among the E.U. nations' leaders complicated the negotiations, leading Reinfeldt to complain that he was having trouble getting his colleagues to agree on anything in all the horse-trading. The balancing act included small vs. large countries, left vs. right political leanings, and nations favoring unity vs. those leery of integration.
PRAGUE -- A charter meant to transform Europe into a more unified and powerful global player passed its last major hurdle Tuesday and appears set to become law within weeks.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who has been highly skeptical of increasing the European Union's powers, signed the Lisbon Treaty at the Prague Castle hours after his nation's Constitutional Court struck down a complaint that it violated the Czech constitution.
Klaus had been tirelessly attacking and stalling the document, saying it would hand too much power to E.U. institutions in Brussels. He awaited the court's ruling before deciding whether to endorse it. "I expected the decision of the Constitutional Court and respect it," Klaus told reporters Tuesday afternoon, but he added that he vehemently disagrees with the verdict.
"The Czech Republic will cease to be a sovereign state" under the treaty, he said.
Klaus represented the last obstacle to full ratification of the treaty, which was bogged down in negotiations for almost a decade and has been ratified by the 26 other E.U. countries. The charter is to take effect Dec. 1.
European leaders welcomed news of the signing. "President Klaus's decision marks an important and historic step for all of Europe," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in a statement.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted during a speech to the U.S. Congress in Washington that, with the new treaty, the E.U. "will become stronger and more capable of acting, and so a strong and reliable partner for the United States." She added: "On this basis, we can build stable partnerships with others, above all with Russia, China and India."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said of Klaus's decision: "This is great news for all Europeans." Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who has worked to seal the Lisbon Treaty under Sweden's E.U. presidency, said he would call for an E.U. summit as soon as possible.
Klaus's "signature ends a far too long period of institutional focus within the EU," Reinfeldt said in a text message sent from Washington. "It opens up for a more democratic, transparent and efficient Union."
Earlier in the day, the Constitutional Court's chief judge, Pavel Rychetsky, said that the Lisbon Treaty "does not violate the [Czech] constitution" and that all formal obstacles for ratification "are removed." In Brussels, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso of Portugal said he was "extremely pleased" with the Czech court's verdict.
"I hope that we can now move forward as quickly as possible on the nomination of the president of the European Council and vice president of the Commission High Representative," he said, referring to the newly created post of president, who will chair E.U. summits, and the bloc's new foreign policy chief, who will represent the bloc abroad.
Once the Lisbon Treaty becomes law, more policy decisions will be permitted by majority rather than unanimous votes at European summits. Those policies would then increasingly be shaped by the elected parliaments of each member nation and the European Parliament, which currently has little say.
E.U. leaders say such new voting rules are needed to promote stronger policies in combating cross-border crime, terrorism and ecological threats.
Projecting this more decisive E.U. abroad would be a new fixed-term president -- in place of a decades-old system that rotates the presidency among governments every six months.
BRUSSELS — European officials gave Turkey new warnings on Wednesday over threats to freedom of expression in the country as part of an annual progress report on its efforts to join the European Union.
The European enlargement commissioner, Olli Rehn, in particular criticized the Turkish tax ministry’s recent move to impose a fine of 5.7 billion liras — roughly $3.9 billion — on the country’s biggest media conglomerate, Dogan Yayin, whose affiliates and ownership have been critical of the governing party. The government reiterated on Wednesday that the issue was purely a tax matter, but Mr. Rehn argued that it seemed politically motivated.
“If a tax fine is worth the annual turnover of the company,” he said, “it is quite a strong sanction, and it may not only be a fiscal sanction but also it feels like a political sanction.”
Mr. Rehn also criticized efforts to take legal action against journalists and writers, including the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. And the report listed Turkey’s refusal to open its ports to vessels from Cyprus, a European government that Turkey does not recognize because of a longstanding territorial dispute over the island, as a continuing factor hurting Turkey’s efforts to join.
In general, the progress report, composed by the European Commission and including assessments of seven Balkan nations also seeking to join the European Union, did not close the door on Turkish membership. It praised several developments over the past year, including government efforts to end decades of hostilities with Armenia and open borders, and to ease tensions with the Kurdish minority in Turkey.
The Turkish minister in charge of negotiations with Europe, Egemen Bagis, called the reports a balanced document and said that the detailed nature of the criticism was a good sign for Turkey.
“The precise approach in the comments show that Turkey has entered an advanced phase in negotiations,” he said. “It tells us to keep up the good work, and continue with reforms, a message that we will be following in future.”
Still, the public criticism underlined the fragility of Turkey’s efforts to join. France’s and Germany’s outspoken opposition to full membership for Turkey have raised doubts both in Europe and within Turkey itself that a deal can be reached any time soon.
Sinan Ulgen, chairman of the Center for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies, an Istanbul-based research group, said that the European Commission appeared to be putting a positive gloss on the talks to try to keep the process alive.
“There has been a conscious effort on the part of the commission to appear a bit more positive than the situation warrants,” he said, “in view of the fact that there is a lot of opposition in Europe about Turkish accession.”
Mr. Ulgen added that France’s opposition, in particular, has given “the impression in Turkey that no matter what we do we will never get to the E.U.”
Stephen Castle reported from Brussels, and Sebnem Arsu from Bursa, Turkey.
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