Quick Travel Notes

Greetings from Budapest! I dont have a ton of time, and please excuse the poor typing, because hungarian keyboards are quite strange.

Bratislava - It’s amazing that so many beautiful women can live in a city that is mostly none as being the but of jokes about soviet-era shitholes. Also, there was a poster in our hostel that said “Slovakia:Part of Europe Worth Seeing.” In all seriousness, it has a beautiful old castle, weird looking “modern” Soviet bridges and…well, beautiful women. Great for a day.

Vienna - We were there for the euro 08 final, and luckily, we decided to root for Spain. So, we got decked out in spanish flags and scarves and dance and sung in the streets with thousands of drunken, pleasantly roudy spainards and Germans. Once the game ended, it was absolute pandemonium. The germans and local vienesse joined in with the Spanish revelers and drunkenly danced the night away in St. Stephen’s Square. Oh yeah, the hofburg was super cool, as were all the Klimt paintings.

Budapest - Best city so far. Kinda like Prague, but less cute and a bit more spread out and bustling. The baths are awesome, and the “house of terror” - a museum commerating the victims of communist rule that’s housed in the old hungarian secret police building is one of the most sobering, shocking and intensly political museums i’ve ever been to. I’d say that it, along with just a general tour of eastern europe is a must for American liberals who thought that anti-communist had gone too far in the cold war. Even though hawkish conservative policies probably didnát do much to liberate the hundreds of millions who lived in soviet prison states or in the Eastern bloc, it1s certainly true that soviet communism was as profoundly evil (if not more so) than german nazism. Hungary was not liberated in 1945, it was instead embarking on 45 years of the worst possible oppression. I’ll have more coherent thoughts on this later. Oh yeah, gorgeous women abound in budapest as well.

Well, next is Belgrade. Yep, Belgrade. Weren’t there violent anti-american riots there not too long ago.

PS - David Brooks column on Grand New Party is notable for mentionig quite a few people who are my g chat friends or at least occasional email correspondents. Kinda weird.

Bratislava

Reasons Why Europe Is Awesome, No. 49372

Prague is a tourist city, especially the central area where most of the night life is. As we pubcrawled, we met up with some Spanish guys who were sporting Spanish flags and scarves. We ran into some Germans, and instead of some sort of brawl, both sides merely jumped around (together) and sang their respective team songs. Something tells me that in the US, when inebriated fans encountered eachother, the resulting incident would be less lightheareted. Maybe I’m blinded by the fact that the Oakland Raiders are my home team, but there was a distinctly European flavor to the whole interaction. Of course, if the final featured more traditioanlly belligerent soccer-nations (England, Italy), it could have easily been much different.

I guess we’ll see if the lack of violence will be able to survive the final in Vienna. It should be fun either way.

Why Do Europeans Scorn Identity?

Bret Stephens, riffing on Natan Sharansky’s new book which emphasizes the importance of national identity in building up democracies, says that Europe will be ultimately doomed because it has flattened out national distinctions that provide a sense of identity, and now a growing Muslim majority which has a very strong attachment to Islam will ruin the society:

If there is one place where all the people are living for today, it is the European Union. The EU has deliberately set about trying to smother the identities of its 27 member states (including Lithuania) in a set of common laws, common regulations, common ethics, a common approach to problem solving, a common view of the rest of the world. It has sought to suppress the identities of its component parts in the name of a higher identity – Europe – which turns out to be no identity at all.

No surprise, then, that Europe today increasingly finds itself troubled by a Muslim minority within its midst – now perhaps 50 million strong – that draws confidence and growing power from the sureness of its identity. Does Europe, like America, offer a higher identity to which this minority might adapt itself – even die for? It does not.

Instead, it either pretends that no problem exists, or it attacks outward manifestations of identity, like Muslim headscarves, without making any real effort to integrate Muslims into a genuine European identity that means something more than the absence of identity. Meanwhile, frank discussions of the identity issue are pushed to the neo-fascistic fringe.

Stephens is right about one general point: Europeans have become very wary of identity and nationalistic claims in serious matters (not Euro Cup soccer, for instance). But just about everywhere else, Stephens is very wrong. For one, it’s unclear if the flattening of national distinctions from an administrative perspective (like monetary policy) leads to a flattening of holding sentimental feelings towards one’s nation or people. Just tell that to Basques, Scots, Catalans, Flemes or Walloons who are all fighting (some literally) for self-determination. In fact, I would argue that the EU taking on the mantle of legislating much “nation-level” policy has allowed those small national and ethnic groups to take the risk of leaving their nation-state, which they no longer need as a large scale provider of certain public goods.

Stephens also never mentions why Europeans tend to be warier of identity than most: the two world wars. Literally, in World War One, tens of millions of people died because of BS nationalistic attachment. In World War II, millions of civilians were slaughtered in the name of the strongest identity claim ever. Now, I tend to agree with Sharansky that some sort of nationalism is necessary for democratic movements to be strong, credible and legitimate. But the nationalist democratic revolution occurred in Europe 200 hundred years ago! (if we believe Kojeve) And at this point, they’ve managed to build a society in which a greater number of people have more positive freedom and higher standards of living than any other comparably sized group of people in the history of the world. And claims that an unassimilated Muslim majority can really threaten a deeply embedded, strong institutional structure like the EU have simply not been substantiated beyond chauvinistic concerns that the darkies are outbreeding the White folk.

And even if Stephens was raising a valid concern, he would do himself lot better if he at least tried to understand why Europeans have pretty resilient feelings about the danger of deep understanding of nation-state identity.

Those Selfish Belgians Shouldn’t Be in Jail, They Should Be Under House Arrest

Nothing brings out the liberal fascist in me like people who refuse to take vaccines.  And so when I read about four Belgians parents who are facing jail time for refusing to make their kids get polio shots, I couldn’t help but admire Belgium for taking real public health interventions as seriously as we ought to.

Vaccinations are excellent for showing how coordinated, state action is the only necessary way to deal with a certain public policy issue, and also how simplistic concepts of individual autonomy are not useful in all situations.  Now, in most cases, I’m a total Millian individualist - I think that people should have as near unlimited freedom of choice, assuming they don’t harm others or violate their freedom of choice.  And it’s part because of this combination utilitarianism/individualism that I come down so hard on vaccine rebels.

That’s because, as Megan McArdle so well explained, vaccines are only effective when everyone, and I mean everyone, takes them.  That’s because vaccines do two things.  They protect the people who take them from contracting an infectious disease, and they also create “herd immunity” which means that they prevent the disease from incubating in the population.  This means that if vaccines become ineffective, there won’t be any disease left to contract and that they also protect those who are unvaccinated.  So we have a free-rider problem - there will be those, who because of the small risks associated with vaccination, think that because everyone else is protected, they don’t need to take the shots.  The problem is compounded when just a few brave souls - like these Belgian parents - get away with not vaccinating.  Why are other parents supposed to let their kids shoulder the burden of vaccination risk if only the other 90% of kids need to get vaccinated.  When you have a collective action problem, and you can’t get everyone on board, it makes sense for everyone to defect.  So how do we prevent defection?  By coming down hard on those first few free-riders so that we can make the cost to not vaccinating high enough to outweigh the low risks of vaccination.  This means that kids shouldn’t be allowed to go to school if they aren’t vaccinated and/or their parents should pay fines or even go to jail.  Of course, we should also make vaccinations free and easily available.  I don’t want to see any parents get punished, but I want to threat of harsh punishment to be there.

21st vs 19th centuries

One of the weirdest ticks of hawkish types that extoll the virtues of American hegemony is the disdian they have for the European approach to geopolitics.  To them, it’s downright shameful that Europe — after having tens of millions killed in decades of massive war — has largely departed from high military expenditures and gaining influence through their military might in favor of economic cooperation.  To them, it’s a sign of Europe’s weakness and, even worse, hypocricy, as they free-ride of American military might.

What’s odd about this argument is that American hegemony — which they favor — is supposed to bring about this state of affairs.  The entire point of a unipolar system to provide two things, which are really the same, stability and a set of public goods that benefit everyone (they are, after all, public).  One of these public goods is protection against the rise of revisionist powers that want to screw the global order.  The idea is that the US’ security umbrella will allow Europe to de-militarize, thus neutralizing the threat of a resurgent Germany, or even more hypothetically, a resurgent Russia.  This isn’t Europe being weak, or America being particularly strong - it’s just the way it’s supposed to work. So it shouldn’t be the neoconservatives and the hegemonists (I really try to use that term in a value neutral way) that get all high and mighty when extolling America’s willingness to allow Europe, instead, they should point to European welfare-states and stability with pride.

All of this is a long way of saying that Robert Kagan’s Post Op-Ed chiding Europe for practicing “postmodern” global politics while Russia plays bare-knuckle power politics very unconvincing.  He points to Russia playing nasty with its “near abroad” — getting testy with Georgia, attacking Estonia’s cyber infrastructure, exercising influence by refusing to sell gas — as a sign that Europe’s politics, which involve inviting people into a club that guarantees access to large markets and economic growth and stability, are not working.  I guess all I  can say is that Kagan is clearly incorrect.  Since 1991, Russia was shedding influence and power, while the EU literally had countries begging to join it.  They’ve been so successful at integrating so many former Russia-sphere countries so quickly that it is now taken as a sign of failure or weakness that they appear to be drawing a line (temporarily) at a large, poor, Muslim country (Turkey).

Kagan asks, after unconvincingly trying to tell us that Russia is somehow competing with Europe - despite the massive corruption and depopulation — “Can [Europe] bring a knife to a knife fight?” This is an incredibly shortsighted and misleading question.  If you look at the major trends, you have two political systems, the EU and Russia.  One has sporadic, oddly distributed and highly corrupt resource-driven growth, the other has sustained, roughly egalitarian growth based on technological innovation and productivity increases.  One attracts hundreds of thousands of migrants, has decent fertility and has managed to massively expand — peacefully — for more than a decade, the other is facing depopulation and has been shrinking geopolitically and demographically since the early 1990s.  Sure, with high gas prices, Russia is able to throw its weight around in its super near abroad (Georgia, Moldova) while what was once it’s true near-abroad (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states) have firmly decided that they want to be part of Europe.

So the reason Europe isn’t bringing a “knife to a knife fight” is that there is no fight, or at least not one worth fighting.

Talking About Missile Defense

Star Wars was an expensive, inflammatory, unnecessary program in the 80s, when there was a rival country, hostile to us, with thousands of ICBMS armed with nuclear warheads that could hit the United States. Now, in 2007, we are trying to build a missile defense system that is still expensive and unworkable, to protect Europe and ourselves against a country that doesn’t have nuclear weapons and has abandoned its nuclear weaponization program (Iran). And yet, the Bush administration is still trying to push Eastern European countries to host missile defense bases in their territory. The unending push for spending more billions of dollars on missile defense is an odd one, and even odder to do so to counter a threat that isn’t even real. But while it’s easy to say that spending billions of dollars on a military-industrial boondoggle is bad but not particularly awful, the costs of pursuing missile defense in Eastern Europe are greater than just the wasted money.

Well, it turns out that it’s difficult to convince a country to host missile defense systems that would inflame Russia and serve no real purpose, and accordingly,Poland’s new government has rejected hosting a missile defense base, “‘This is an American, not a Polish project,’ Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said in an interview published in the weekend edition of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.” It makes sense for Poland to do this: they gain no real security from hosting the base and it just pisses off a very close and powerful neighbor. For the US to try to bully these small, Eastern European states into accepting this boondoggle is not only strategically inane, but also politically misguided.

The costs of missile defense run deeper: the Bush administration’s insistence on developing the system is destroying the series of arms control treaties between Russia and the United States. One of Bush’s first actions was to withdraw from the ABM treaty, and now our pursuit of missile defense has lead to Russia suspending participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, which limits the build up of conventional forces and allows for on-site inspections and verifications of these reductions.

It’s worth stating again just how pointless this destruction of arms control norms and inflamming of Russia over missile defense in Europe have been. The threat from Iran was overstated on a few levels. One, Iran doesn’t have the missiles to hit Europe accurately. Two, those missiles are only dangerous with nuclear weapons. Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, it suspended the weaponization program in 2003, and even if they were to develop nuclear weapons, it would take another 5-10 years to develop the technology to deliver those weapons onto missiles. Most importantly, there’s almost no scenario for Iran launching a strike. There are multiple levels of deterrence. First is the extensive commercial ties between Iran and Europe. Second is that France and the UK, not to mention the US, have robust nuclear deterrents to use against Iran. And unlike some hypothetical scenario in which Iran slips a nuclear device to a terrorist group that then can not be authoritatively traced back to Tehran, a missile strike against Europe would be ridiculously easy to trace. If a missile is launched from Iran, everyone will know. So there you have it. Billions of dollars, worse relations with Russia, weakening of non-proliferation norms and treaties, putting pressure on Eastern European allies, Russia threatening to point ballistic missiles at Europe. All for a defense* nonfunctional defense against a non-existent, highly deterrable threat.

*Look at the first comment

The Case For Mill

Ezra Klein links to this piece in the New Statesman which discusses John Stuart Mill’s relevance to modern left wing struggles, mostly in Britain, but the argument is applicable everywhere.  David Marquand argues that we have simply outlived many of Mill’s concerns, in Britain at least  Mill’s enemies in On Liberty were the twin dragons of social conformity and governmental tyranny.  Britain’s society is much more open, and there aren’t many like Napoleon III striving across Europe these days, so maybe Mill isn’t the most useful liberal lodestar out there.

What Marquand at the same time acknowledges and ignores is how much the industrialized West is a fulfillment of Mill’s views.  Especially outside the United States, social conformity has been practically erased.  The individual’s right to define oneself is practically enshrined in Western Europe and the blue states.  The threat of “the tendency of society to impose…its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them” is a diminishing one. Marquand largely admits that the chains of societal tyranny get more and more broken every day, but state tyranny is making a comeback, “State oppression, however, is a real and present danger as the politics of fear takes hold.”  Yet to say Mill is blind to the dangers of state oppression seems to be missing the point.  The man, after all, formulated the harm principle, whose strong application is the basis of many versions of libertarianism and provides a strong justification for individual freedoms.

What Mill doesn’t do is make any foundational or contractual claims about individual rights.  He didn’t just write On Liberty, but also Utilitarianism.  What Mill does so wonderfully is to reject the false claim that the primacy of the individual and a concern for average utility are necessarily conflicting.  Instead, his politics of an individual protected from the state and society is preferred because it is the most likely to promote happiness.  And this is what modern liberal or social democratic politics is at its best.  It recognizes that people face two threats to freedom and autonomy — the state and societal structures.  It acknowledges that individual rights, while important, are not absolute in their strongest forms and are in no way “natural.”  Thus, we can pursue a pragmatic politics that constantly strives to answer the question, “how can we protect the individual’s ability to be happy best?” And as long as we have a politics that doesn’t do that, then Mill is relevant.

The Marijuana Industry

Matt Yglesias, fresh from a trip to Amsterdam, notes some recent changes in their drug policy:

The policy reason is that the soft drugs for sale in the Netherlands had been getting stronger-and-stronger leading to a lot of problems with “drug tourists” unaccustomed to the Dutch product finding themselves in various kinds of trouble.

This seems like a sensible enough concern to me. The legitimate concern about marijuana legalization, in my view, is that the creation of a big marijuana industry could have some real deleterious effects, which I guess is what you were seeing in embryonic form with competition leading to an increasingly intense product. The Dutch policy has been aimed at the sensible goal of preventing the emergence of such an industry — no advertising, no large scale cultivation, etc. — while still letting consumers do what they want in private, and some cutback in the number of coffee shops in central Amsterdam (it’s still no hard to find one) seems consistent with that.

The so-called problems that Yglesias outlines with the Netherland’s drug policy are not problems with legalization or decriminalization, because they are all exasperated by the criminalization of marijuana. The market pressures for greater purity work much the same way in America, with harsh criminalization of marijuana. According to the ONDCP, purity has gone up since the early 90s, and even more since the 70s when enforcement was greatly stepped up. Even in a black market, superior quality is still rewarded with increased demand. America has the marijuana industry Yglesias fears, with all the so-called negative effects, except with the extra negative effects of hundreds of thousands in prison for a victimless crime, massive racial discrimination, distraction from real crime massive waste of moeny and the incentivizing for ever more violent drug dealers who are ruthless enough to stay ahead of the feds.

For a great run down of just how big a failure the War on Drugs was, is, and will continue to be, check out Benjamin Wallace Wells’ Rolling Stone piece.

Talk is Cheap: China and the EU

Before 9/11, William Kristol and much of the militaristic right was talking about the emerging threat of China in military, political and economic realms. As Francis Fukuyama remembered, “There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well.” Gordon Chang is back at it, fulminating against China for no reason:

Mandelson’s address and Sarkozy’s criticism come on the eve of the 10th China-European Union summit. Despite the fact that Beijing just placed large orders with Airbus and France’s Areva, observers say that the discussions this week in the Chinese capital will be tense. “For Europe, the ‘China honeymoon’ is over,” writes David Shambaugh of George Washington University.

We may think that Europeans are effete and spineless, but when was the last time someone from the Bush administration publicly told the Chinese off in their own capital? American officials like to speak about working cooperatively with China to solve “concerns,” while the Europeans are venting frustrations after years of useless dialogue. The welcomed departures of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder mark a change of mood in the heart of the EU. Perhaps President Bush should now take his cue from the new version of Old Europe.

Chang is celebrating Sarkozy, who went into Beijing and talked some smack to Hu Jintao about intellectual property, the currency and human rights. What’s weird is that Sarkozy, and also Mendelson complaining about product safety, haven’t actually pursued any policy changes. For Chang, it is worth celebrating whenever leaders simply talk tough to the Chinese.

Chang’s post is schizophrenic, he mentions yet ignores the fact that the EU is still pursuing high-level commercial ties with China, specifically the deal with Airbus. Isn’t it weird that a magazine who devotes much of its pages to decrying the utility of negotiating with Iran is so desperate to seek out confrontation with China that they’ll go head over heals when European leaders get blustery for domestic consumption. I wonder what Commentary thought about Gerhard Schroeder anti-American pose he put on for the German public. The parallels are obvious.

When Marxists Get it Right

While Perry Anderson is something of an unreconstructed Marxist, he is a brilliant political analyst and essayist. In a different world, he and John Judis would be trading off essay writing spots in TNR or the Atlantic, but unless I get a Peretzesque windfall, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see that day. But lets get to the point — his London Review of Books essay on the EU is quite eye-opening. He contends that contra so much of what we hear in the United States, the EU is actually the fulfillment of a Hayekian vision of government whereby economic policy is largely taken out of the democratic process and is instead administered by a night-watchmen state to which insures the free passage of labor, goods and capital:

By the 1990s, the Commission was openly committed to privatisation as a principle, pressed without embarrassment on candidate countries along with other democratic niceties. Its most powerful arm had become the Competition Directorate, striking out at public sector monopolies in Western and Eastern Europe alike. In Frankfurt the Central Bank conformed perfectly with Hayek’s prewar prescriptions. What was originally the least prominent strand in the weave of European integration had become the dominant pattern. Federalism stymied, inter-governmentalism corroded, what had emerged was neither the rudiments of a European democracy controlled by its citizens, nor the formation of a European directory guided by its powers, but a vast zone of increasingly unbound market exchange, much closer to a European ‘catallaxy’ as Hayek had conceived it… Today’s EU, with its pinched spending (just over 1 per cent of Union GDP), minuscule bureaucracy (around 16,000 officials, excluding translators), absence of independent taxation, and lack of any means of administrative enforcement, could in many ways be regarded as a ne plus ultra of the minimal state, beyond the most drastic imaginings of classical liberalism: less even than the dream of a nightwatchman. Its structure not only rules out a transfer, of the sort once envisaged by Delors, of social functions from national to supranational level, to counterbalance the strain these have come under from high rates of unemployment and growing numbers of pensioners. Its effect is to increase, rather than compensate for, pressure on national systems of social provision, as so many impediments to the free movement of factors of production. As a leading authority, Andrew Moravcsik, explains, ‘the neo-liberal bias of the EU, if it exists, is justified by the social welfare bias of current national policies,’ which ‘no responsible analyst believes can be maintained’ – ‘European social policy exists only in the dreams of disgruntled socialists.’ The salutary truth is that ‘the EU is overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets. Its primary interest group support comes from multinational firms, not least US ones.’ In short: regnant in this Union is not democracy, and not welfare, but capital. ‘The EU is basically about business.’

Add on to the fact that, as Perry even admits, because of the EU “Eastern Europe has been shepherded into the comity of free nations. There was no backsliding” and it looks like the Union is a classical liberal’s dream. Will Wilkinson, the most intellectually exciting libertarian out there, has (I think) largely jumped on the boat as far as supra-national provision of public goods goes; he has even discussed Hayek in relation to global federalism, one of the most under-discussed of the Austrian’s ideas. While Perry obfuscates a little on the extent of the differences between the European and American models, and has to explain away how an inexcusably large portion of the EU budget goes to agricultural subsides, though even Anderson could explain this percentage as a consequence of its small operating budget, his argument that the EU is the greatest force for privatization, integration and “flattening” in Europe is indisputably true. And almost as an aside, he very convincingly argues that on matters of foreign policy, where the US and Europe are reputed to have the largest differences, we are in fact very much in accordance.

In the syrup of la pensée unique, little separates the market-friendly wisdom of one side of the Atlantic from the other, though as befits the derivative, the recipe is still blander in Europe than America, where political differences are less extinct. In such conditions, an enthusiast can find no higher praise for the Union than to compare it to ‘one of the most successful companies in global history’. Which firm confers this honour on Brussels? Why, the one in your wallet. The EU ‘is already closer to Visa than it is to a state’, declares New Labour’s Mark Leonard, exalting Europe to the rank of a credit card.

And that, my friend, ain’t such a bad thing.

The French Counter Terrorism Model

Max Boot thinks that the French model for fighting terrorism - extensive powers granted to magistrates to both investigate and prosecute terrorism suspects - is a good one and claims that it disproves any claims about a slippery slope to authoritarianism that American liberals think is occurring here:

France, they note, has been facing the threat of Middle Eastern terrorism since the 1980’s and has done an impressive job of marshaling its resources to defend itself. What’s the secret of French success? Gerecht and Schmitt point to the fact that the French “grant highly intrusive powers to their internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), and to their counterterrorist investigative magistrates (juges d’instruction).”The last office, whose most famous holder is Jean-Louis Bruguière, was created in 1986 and is utterly without parallel in the American system, because it gives a single magistrate the power to use both intelligence and police services to stop terrorists before they strike. Magistrates even have the power to lock up French citizens when there is not enough evidence to convict them of a crime.In fact, as they stress, the kind of steps the French take work. And yet in the more than twenty years since this system was created, “France has not gone down the slippery slope into tyranny. France’s society, its politics, and many of its laws have actually become much more liberal and open.”

Boot’s analysis is quite faulty. The first major difference between the French effort against terrorism and the American is that in France, despite giving very wide latitude to counter terrorism efforts, terrorism is still a law enforcement concern. There is no indefinite “war on terror” in France. All of the expansive powers granted to French law enforcement are very carefully codified within the legal system. In France, the President doesn’t claim the right to indefinitely detain French citizens because they’re “enemy combatants.” France doesn’t have a Guantanamo Bay, in which prisoners are in a near permanent legal limbo as to their status and reason for detention. France hasn’t opted out of any international treaties to allow for the torture of detainees, France doesn’t kidnap terrorism suspects in French airports and fly them to a third country so they can be tortured. France doesn’t operate a ring of secret prisons outside the French legal system.

So yes, France does have a more intrusive domestic intelligence operation as codified under their laws, but at least it’s all out in the open and inside the legal system. When we liberals talk about the slippery slope towards authoritarianism and the destruction of the rule of law, it’s because the executive branch claims powers that can be checked by any other branch and go against hundreds of years of common law tradition and jurisprudence.

Boot also fails to mention key differences in the French and American legal system. France’s legal system isn’t adversarial like ours. In America, we have prosecutors vs defense lawyers, and out of that adversarial process presided over by an impartial judge, the truth is supposed to emerge. In France, they have magistrates, which are a sort of combination of prosecutor and judge. Because of this key difference, the French legal model for terrorism investigations can’t be imported to the United States. Boot should have probably pointed this crucial fact out…

What is France?

Caroline Weber has a fascinating review of Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France in Sunday’s Times The basic conceit of the book is that “France” the modern nation-state, cultural and political unit is a rather recent invention, really only dating back to the mid 19th century. The geographic territory of France was much more of a mishmash of highly regionalized culturo-linguistic groups that had little contact with each other and would never even imagine themselves as part of a single political or cultural unit. “France” was Paris and its environs and everything else was..well, whatever it called itself.

“Before the revolution,” it turns out, “the name ‘France’ was often reserved for the small mushroom-shaped province centered on Paris.” What’s more, beyond that relatively small oasis, “France was a land of deserts” — of huge vacant spaces that had still not been accurately mapped in their entirety and that most natives never even tried to explore. (As late as the mid-19th century, it seems, “few people could walk far from their place of birth without getting lost.”)

Why is the history of France-before-France important? Because much of what can be said about the creation of France can be said about Belgium, Spain or Great Britain. Belgium, as we all know, is already cleaving apart, and Spain and England both have separatists within their national borders.

It used to be, however, that this cleaving of countries and grafting them together were incredibly violent processes (with respect to Basques in Spain, it still is); it looks like for the next few decades, if Belgium is any sign, we may begin to see the splitting up of European nation-states into more homogenous regions, with certain state functions — monetary policy, defense, central banking - moved up to the EU level and things like trash collection and cultural-linguistic senses of solidarity (which can be construed as a public good) moved downward to smaller jurisdictions. As Will Wilkinson puts it:

the goods states should provide. But then why shouldn’t Scots, Basques, Walloons, etc., have their own states — especially if that these turn out to be, in practical terms, something like a very grand garbage collection jurisdictions with monetary policy, defense, and other big ticket public goods outsourced to the larger supranational jurisdiction? If the more encompassing jurisdiction reinforces a cosmopolitan sense of identity that balances local ethno-cultural identities, then all the better.

I’d be very curious to know what the liberal blogosphere’s resident expert on 19th century cultural and ideological history, Dana Goldstein, has to say about the process of turning the geographic region that we call France into the modern political and cultural unit we know today.

The Localizing Superstate

Alex Massie and Reihan Salam both have good takes on how the supra-state integration of the European Union has actually allowed the proliferation of local ethnic groups to split off, or to consider splitting off,  from their tenuous national structures.  Jonah Goldberg, however, just sees the peaceful emergence of more coherent, homogeneous regions — like the imminent split of Belgium — as a sign of the EU’s failure, and more broadly, the failure of intra-national institutional governance arrangements:

 The catch-22 is delightful. By scaling back the job description of a nation-state to a few ceremonial duties, ethnic minorities see fewer risks and a lot more rewards in breaking away. Countries such as Slovakia get to trade on their votes in the EU and the U.N. They get their own anthems and sports teams and to teach their own language and culture. It’s like a McDonald’s franchise. Sure, you man the register and keep the bathrooms clean, but the folks at corporate HQ do the heavy lifting. That’s why the Basques, Scots and Flemings are looking to open their own franchises. The question is whether the nationalist hunger of such McNations can be satisfied by just the symbolism of autonomy…

But what I really like about the Belgian crisis is that it puts a dent in the myth that Europe represents some enlightened new model exportable to the rest of the globe. After World War II and the Holocaust, a generation of diplomats and intellectuals predicted that nationality, religion and culture would matter less in the New Europe. But wishing didn’t make it so. Obviously, nobody wants the bloody nationalism of early 20th century Europe. But it’s nonetheless gratifying that the even on the EU’s Brussels campus, life resists the blueprints of the bureaucrats.

Well, Jonah, that’s not what the intention or function of the EU is.  The EU is not about dissolving nationalism or national feeling, but sensibly moving certain supra-national market functions and policies up to a larger levelso that markets and regulatory policies can be more easily integrated and harmonized.  Thus, these states like “Britain” or “Belgium” or “Spain” which have a history of jamming together disparate ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups largely in the pursuit of some great power struggle , are less and less necessary.  Also, because of the Euro, there is less pain in splitting away from another country, the Walloons or the Flemes can maintain their Brussels dictated monetary policy and currency while having their own nation.  Goldberg, who like many American conservatives, is too busy finding whatever dishonest way to denigrate any and everything European, doesn’t seem to recognize that this increased localization and regionalism is a feature, not a bug of the new European system.  Massie sums it up well:

Godlberg seems to think that the EU has failed since it wanted to destroy national identity but that’s not really true: it wanted to change the way we think of nationality and, in the European context, it’s largely succeeded in doing so, decoupling patriotism from nationalism in ways that have been overwhelmingly healthy.

The re-emergence of Very Old Europe is, then, a tribute to the EU’s successes and, consequently, rather more than the chance for a few cheap jokes at the Belgians’ expense (not that there’s ever anything wrong with said jokes).

My previous post concerning the entire Belgian situation as well as emergent nationalisms in the EU is here.

Reconciling Malthus and Simon

Bryan Caplan makes a smart criticism of Gregory Clark’s Malthusian history of the Industrial Revolution– namely that population growth increases the supply and demand for goods, enables economies of scale and allows for greater specialization and efficiency gains from trade. Caplan contends that England’s population in 1800 of around 9 million, which was a 70 percent increase from the (estimated) 1700 population of 6.5 million, provided the spark or tipping point for the Industrial Revolution.

Once you accept the long-run benefits of higher population, praising the Black Death for raising the average standard of living is severely myopic. Halving the population may double the standard of living of the survivors in the short-run. But in the long-run, a smaller population delays the arrival of modernity. On Clark’s account, it took England about two centuries to return to its pre-plague population. On his own terms, then, it is entirely possible that - but for the plague - the Industrial Revolution would have begun two centuries earlier.

In fact, once you take the long-run benefits of population on living standards seriously, the “Malthusian trap” takes on an new cast. Perhaps the real trap is that you have to be pretty rich to keep a big population alive long enough to reap the long-run benefits of a big population. For the pre-modern era, this story fits the facts as well as Clark’s, but it has the added virtue that it fits the facts of the modern era as well.

Clark’s position: that the Black Death was sweet for the English standard of living and Caplan’s: that population growth is the only way to ensure innovation, are easily reconciled. Clark’s argument is that from about 100,000 BC to 1800, the world was stuck in a Malthusian trap — any population increases spurred by gains in efficiency would be brought back down by increased disease and decreased resources. For about 800 years, however, the rich were bearing more children, and having more children survive, than the poor. Clark’s theory is that the values of the rich — the survivors — of thriftiness, low discount rate, delayed time preference, good hygiene and the lot enabled the industrial revolution to finally take off in 1800.

But at the same time the Industrial revolution was taking off, England’s population was growing, so shouldn’t the Malthusian trap kicked in? Well, no, Clark argues, because finally England’s population was able to not squander efficiency and population gains and instead advance technological efficiency even further and continue with more technological innovation. What happened immediately after 1800 is amazing, the population absolutely skyrocketed. Ultimately, the two views can be reconciled pretty easily. England’s population was growing from 1700 to 1800, but as this chart shows, it increased by some 300 percent in the 19th century. What made 1800 special, in Clark’s view, is that there was sufficient downward movement of those traits that are amenable to industrialization and wealth creation, so that the efficiency and population gains of the 18th century weren’t brought back down by a Malthusian death check. Instead, England transitioned into the second stage of the “demographic transition”: when death rates fall precipitously, while birth rates monentarily remain at their preindustrialized rates, and then start a much slower decline — resulting in massive population growth:

This is where Simon’s model, reproduced below, comes in. With the population increasing as technological innovation and efficiency gains continued apace, the positive network effects of increased population on further technological development were able to take hold without a Malthusian check. In Clark’s approximation, you need a few hundreds of years of Malthusian dynamics to slowly transform the traits and values of a population before Simon’s model can apply.

Why I Love the EU — And Why Traditional Conservatives Should Too

We are all hearing about Belgium’s imminent break up.  The Dutch speaking Flemes and the francophone Walloons can’t speak to each other, don’t read the same newspapers and don’t trust each other.  But it’s been like that for a while — the problem now is that they can’t form a government.  And serious people are talking about a “first 6″ EU nation breaking up, along ethinc-linguistic lines.  And there are no calls for war, no threat of violence breaking out in Belgium.  This is great progress.  You don’t need to be a close student of European history to know that a peaceful breakup of a country is a rare thing indeed.

Megan McArdle points out that one reason the break up is being talked about in near casual terms is because the big issue of monetary policy — the strength of the Belgian franc — has been taken out of Belgian hands, and the monetary policy is taken care of, in all places, Brussels.  This isn’t ironic at all.  In my more lighthearted moments, I dream of a Europe that is heavily federalized — where ancient linguistic and ethnic groups get to finally be split off from their Napoleonic era balance of power agreements and have some sovereignty and self government.  At the same time, there might no longer be nation states in Europe.  The EU will take care of ensuring a common set of basic rights, economic integration, monetary policy and common defense for all these mini-nations.  Finally the Lombards, Basques, Catalans, Scots, Welsh, Walloons, Flemes could recognize some sovereignty, and break off from their artificial national arrangements.  Yet, in a federalized Europe with an umbrella-like EU, this balkanization need not result in war or conflict.

The idea of many ethno-linguistic-culturo groups breaking off and forming their own mini-states, with limited sovereignty, should be a boon to conservatives — at least of the traditional type.  Shouldn’t a Burkean recognize that grafting the Walloon and Flemish together was highly unnatural, the result of power politics, not of traditional communal groups coming together around common things.  Yet it is these types of conservative who react most strongly against the EU.  They see the rather small assaults on sovereignty — regulatory cohesion, mostly — as the end of European nationhood.  They see technocratic Eurocrats in Brussels who don’t care for local distinctions or singularities.  And this is true, the EU involves the flattening of some local difference and sovereignty.  But if this common regulatory and defense umbrella can allow for peaceful decentralization and the increase of sovereignties, while sovereignty may decrease — that will be a boon not only for the safety of Europe from nationalized war, but also for peoples who can finally contemplate breaking off from “France” or “Belgium” or “Britain” without a call to arms.

Petty Criticisms Indicate Great Success

I don’t want to single out Andrew, but his complaint about the EU wanting to “streamline” such quaint local traditions as the British pint is in a way indicative of how amazing an institution the EU is.  For an organization as large, complex and historically anomalous as the EU, you’d think that there would better criticisms of it than lame, generic attacks on “evil bureaucrats” and their occasional misguided regulatory overreach.  Does Andrew really think that the trade off between the abatement of war in Western Europe for the last 60 years and for the foreseeable future and the possibility that the pint might be turned into a more reasonable metric meter comes out in favor of keeping the pint and resuming the wars?  I’m sure he doesn’t, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the fact that there hasn’t been an interstate war between Germany, England, France, Spain or Italy since 1945 is one of the more remarkable accomplishments in modern Western history, and the EU has played no small part in that feat.  Oh yeah, and developing poor Western European countries like Spain, Portugal and Italy — not too shabby either.