23 oktober 2021

On page 4 of his new book “Reset” Mark Elchardus quotes a paragraph from a Bruce Springsteen song. This should not surprise anyone. Years ago i sometimes told friends that Bruce was the most important political philosopher I knew.

In his songs Springsteen has on some occasions reflected the individual that fights the chaos in society (“badlands”/the lonesome individual in “Nebraska”!) and gave voice to what I describe as “American existentialism”. On other occasions he demonstrated an intricate understanding of the importance of the community for the individual (“the ties that bind”) or of the impact of the falling apart of communities (“my hometown”, “Youngstown”).

23 augustus 2021

After a long delay and incentivized by recent events in Afghanistan I’ve only recently read Khaled Hosseini’s book “The Kite Runner”.

A central item around which the story has been woven is the treatment of the Hazara, a minority in Afghanistan. They suffer from discrimination both by Pashtun tribes and Taliban. I understand that the Hazara are marginalized in Afghanistan because they are Shiia and because they have a typical physiognomy.

Having read this book i wondered to which degree the local Afghan habits persist in the Afghan communities in the USA. The book gives only a hint to answer that question (and admittedly, it is not the theme of the book).

Further I’ll remember especially three sentences from the book:

• There is no monster, just a beautiful day
• For you, a thousand times over
• I want my old life back

21 augustus 2021

In the second part of his biography Jordi Pujol describes how he built the Catalonian institutions shortly after the death of dictator Franco.

Reading this biography it becomes clear how the political situations of Flanders and Catalonia differ profoundly from each other:

(1) While Flemings form the majority in Belgium, Catalonia is in Spain one of the many regions and in no way in a position to push through its will;

(2) While Flanders has a territory in which Dutch is unequivocally the language of the region, in Catalonia two languages are formally recognised: Catalonian and Spanish;

(3) reading Pujol’s description it is clear that migration was (and is?) a point of concern, BUT the migration which drew his attention is the immigration from other Spanish regions in the fifties and sexties and was to a certain degree a tool to break the Catalonian identity.

21 augustus 2021

Sometimes the statement is made that politics is nowadays moving to the right, that public opinion is adopting opinions which were considered 20 years ago to be rightist or even extreme rightist. In that context specially reference is made to two different themes: (1) discussions on migration and citizenship; (2) deconstruction of the state and the privatisation of a lot of the public services.

I believe that this statement is only correct for 50%. With respect to the 1st theme, the statement is overall correct. Of course we can question how extreme “leftist” and naive public opinion once has been with respect to migration and citizenship.

Also with respect to the first theme we should take into account that we come from a period in which government instutions and corporations were highly inefficient. But, overall people are NOT of the opinion that the government should be abolished or should be “minimal”. Overall people want an efficient government and reject waste.

Further, public opinion expect governments to be able to intervene in emergency situations, be it of a financial or economic nature (saving banks and restarting the economy), an epidemiological threat (Covid- organizing vaccinations), a natural disaster event, or geopolitical tensions (evacuating citizens from Afghanistan). The state is currently deemed to be very important.

21 juli 2021

In this book Andric describes the history of the bridge over the Drina in the Bosnian (Serbian) city of Visegrad. He describes how it was being built on orders of the son- in- law of the sultan, Mehmet Pasha Sokolli, and follows its life until what happens during World War 1.

It is no use recounting here the historical phases the bridge passes. Andric is at his best when he describes the mentality of the peoples when confronted with new events or ideas and I limit myself to quote some interessant descriptions from his book. For the ones who might be interested in “impalements” i can recommend chapter iii.

Andric on the character of the perfect bureaucrat (chapter vii):

“Hedo was that true conscientious official who does not really see or hear whomever he talks to, and who only considers him in so far as it is necessary to find the place for him set out by the regulations in force. Until he had done this he was deaf and blind and when he had done it he became dumb as well.”

This is how Andric describes how the Bosnians perceive the Austrians after they replaced the Turcs as rulers over the area (chapter xi):

“… what most astonished the people of the town and filled them with wonder and distrust was not so much their numbers as their immense and incomprehensible plans, their untiring industry and the perseverance with which they proceeded to the realization of those plans. The newcomers were never at peace; and they allowed no one else to live in peace. It seemed that they were resolved with their impalpable yet ever more noticeable web of laws, regulations, and orders to embrace all forms of life, men, beasts and things, and to change and alter everything, both the outward appearance of the town and the customs and habitat of men from the cradle to the grave. All this they did quietly without many words, without force or provocation, so that a man had nothing to protest about. If they encountered resistance or lack of understanding, they at once stopped, discussed the matter somewhere out of sight and then changed only the manner and direction of their work, still carrying out whatever was in their mind.”

And here Andric describes how the young people from Visegrad return to the city after they have follewed trainings at the university (chapter xviii)(maybe a comparison with “les deracines” is possible) :

“It seemed fantastic and improbable but was none the less true; they could do with their youth what they liked, and give their judgments freely and without restriction; they dared to say what they liked and for many of them those words were the same as deeds, satisfying their atavistic need for heroism and glory, violence and destruction, yet they did not entail any obligation to act nor any visible responsibility for what had been said. The most gifted amongst them despised all that they should have learnt and underestimated all that they were able to do, but they boasted of what they did not know and waxed enthousiastic at what was beyond their powers to achieve… Only the best and strongest amongst them threw themselves into action with the fanaticism of fakirs and were there burnt up like flies, to be immediately hailed by their fellows as martyrs and saints (for there is no generation without its saints) and placed on pedestals as inaccessible examples.“

21 juli 2021

In this book, the French author, describes the whereabouts of seven young people who leave their native ground of Lorraine for Paris, after receiving a training from professor Bouteiller, a Kantian professor of filosophy.

We follow how they live and survive in the French capital. Two of them, Racadot and Mouchefrin, become marginalised and commit a murder for money. While Racadot is easily connected with the crime by the French justice system and will beheaded, Mouchefrin escapes prosecution. He is not denounced by his “friends” from Lorraine, though one of them, Sturel, was to a certain degree a witness of the crime.

The question Barres wants to raise is who is to blame for the failure of Racadot and Mouchefrin to live according to the socially accepted practices. Sturel and Roemerspacher answer in his place. According to Sturel (and probably Barres) France has failed to accompany the seven youngsters when they deracinated them from the soil in Lorraine and planted them in the chaos of Paris without proper guidance. That two of them got derailed is no surprise and only the French leaders are to blame. And one of the choices these leaders have to make is whether they want to transform the youth of Lorraine in French citizens or in universal citizens. It is this assessment which is the reason why Sturel does not denounce Mouchefrin.

18 mei 2021

Israël was born with a sin.

In 1948, as a result of a war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, some 750.000 Palestinans fled the war zone and left their homes and grounds behind. The Israeli authorities never allowed them to return. Since then they and their descendants (6 million people by now) live in refugee camps.

In a fair world these refugees would be allowed to return to their own territories. However this is not a fair world and such a return would destroy the Jewish character of the Israeli state. Plan A is not realistic in our world.

Hence, we need a Plan B. Plan B entails the creation of two states: a Palestinian state next to a Jewish state. And awaiting the realisation of Plan B Israel continues its efforts to occupy additional territories on the Westbank, which should be the core of the Palestinian state.

It should be clear from these facts that Israel is not really worth to be called a “Rechtsstaat” and is also not a full democracy. However, Israel positions itself as the only democracy which respects the rule of law in the Middle East and claims therefore the support from the West against other, destructieve, forces in the Middle East. And many in the West follow this representation and forget Israel’s sins.

Some in the West refuse to support the Palestinian case because terrorist groups like Hamas en Hezbollah and a rogue state called Iran, support the Palestinian case. But who can blame the Palestinians for supporting Hamas or Hezbollah ? Is there an organization in the West who fully supports their case ? The Palestinians do not have a choice: it is not that they can choose between support from Hamas or from the West. Today, their only option is to search support from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.

Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks by Hamas. But Palestinians also have rights and currently only Hamas is standing up for these rights.

Some refer to the European Union and state that they should use their “soft-power”. Unfortunately the word is terribly accurate. This power is so soft that it is irrelevant.

The West should create credible pressure on Israel to (1) stop the occupation of Palestinian territories and (2) to make the two state solution a hard realiteit.

And in the absence of sufficient pressure to realise plan B, plan C should be implemented: The full development of a Palestinian nation and state independent of a territory.

13 maart 2021

In this book Gerstle succesfully explains major constraints in American politics which enable us to understand current explosive tensions between Democrats and Republicans and sometimes tensions within both parties.

From independance on there existed a major contrast between the Central State and the different states. As described by Gerstle, it seems as if the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (1791) had as its purpose to ensure that the Central State would not interfere too much in the domains of the individual states. The Bill of Rights only impacted the Central State. The different states were not at all impacted by that Bill and based on the so-called “police power” were free to impose whatever they considered on the private lifes of their citizens. That situation also did not change after the Civil War and nothwithstanding the introduction of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868). Eventually, only the Civil Rights Act (1964) was able to make clear that also states had to respect the Bill of Rights and had to respect a certain private sphere of each citizen, mostly related to sexual preference and reproduction.

The constant fight of the states to retain full powers, also to regulate things in a sometimes rather illiberal way, and this against a Central State which is inclined to defend right of the citizens, is a red line in Gerstle’s book.

Based on the reading of this book it remains clear to me that Constitutions, Bills and Acts are only scraps of paper, which on their own, have no impact whatsoever. And following that line of reasoning i’m not sure that Gerstle explains sufficiently clear why the Civil Rights Act succeeded where the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights had failed before. Yes, the Central Government had money available to force the states to do the good thing. But was that all ? Was that enough to change the culture in the South of the USA after 1964 ?

2 februari 2021

After the victory of liberalism in 1989 the world changed in one open space. People who did not feel at home in this new environment experienced these developments as a chaos organised by a progressive elite. These people were in need of a Structure that would protect and defend them and in which they could enjoy their freedom.

Some harked back to old distinctions in which racism and old religious categories played a key role. Rigid definitions of good and evil; concepts like guilt and penance and blind submission to divine authority; the importance of the traditional family and the patriarchical axis. All these concepts from the past were polished up as a reaction to the universalist philosophy.

In this essay we defend the nation state as a modern alternative for the universalist philosophy and for a reactionary escape to old solutions. The nation state, which is based on the linguistic homogeneity of the nation, forms the horizon in which the West realised two of its major successes: the liberal democracy and the wellfare state. Also in the globalized world the nation state will remain the reference point par excellence.

“Blinded by universalism” builds further on the ideas which we developed earlier in “Liberal Quicksand”.

8 januari 2020

In this book Lionel Shriver tells the story how the Mandible family deals with the decay of the USA and the dollar, and the loss of the family fortune. As such she describes how the family deals with “the notion of a lost everything, a permanent, irreversible decline – it’s alien to this country’s psyche”.(p. 291) Under the circumstances “the last thing to go is ego.” (p. 322)

The author is especially successful in describing the psychological (in)capacity of the different members of the family to adapt to the new realities. Some have theorized about decay but are nevertheless incapable of applying theory to reality. Others adjust their behavior (e.g.. stealing) and morality as smoothly as downloading a new version of a software. The loss of value of the dollar is a reason to overthink the old fashioned values of hard work and saving for later. Overall it seems a world in which following the rules and compassion are not really rewarded.

An interesting Psychological exercise…

1 januari 2020

Dear reader,

Hereby i wish you all the best for 2020.

You might notice that I’m updating this website with a lower frequency and maybe you have the impression that my insights are not as sharp as they used to be.

Do not worry about this.

I have started writing my next book and it requires my (nearĺy) full attention.

Best Regards !

17 december 2019

Something I try to understand already for a while is why so many immigrants want to reach the United Kingdom, even at the risk of their lives.

Based on what I find in newspapers, I come to the conclusion that the immigrants are not interested in the sunny climate, the delicious food, the friendly or handsome natives but in something completely different :

1. There are no identity cards in the UK which makes access to the labour market much easier. Both the left and the right would consider the introduction of such identity card as a threat for privacy. (The same goes for the United States.)
2. There are not so many rules in the labour market.
3. The wages are low which again explains an easy access to the labour market .
4. In the UK, society is organised in a more communautarian way than on the Continent. As an illegal it is easier to hide in your own community.

14 december 2019

Now that Brexit will have been done, it is clear that the unity of the United Kingdom is under threat. That unity is not evident; it requires an explanation why it exists in the form that it does.

I dare to believe, and indeed this is speculative, that the United Kingdom lasted because there was an Empire built around it and this Empire allowed all creative and energetic powers of the English, Scottish, Welsh and even Irish populations to make a career in that Empire.

Once the Empire was lost, the unifying power was lost and we only had to wait for some careless politicians to shake the tree.

14 december 2019

Ursula von der leyen, the new President of the European Commission, presented the “Green Deal” to the European Parliament. The intention is to make “Europe” carbon/climate-neutral by 2050.

On 12-13 December the Green Deal was discussed at the level of the European Commission which reached a “unanimous” decision (with an exception for Poland) to support the Deal. The new Council president, Charles Michel, showed that his previous experience as Prime Minister of Belgium, had prepared him perfectly to explain the inexplicable.

Some concerns should however be addressed.

The Green Deal is in this phase only a vision without a clearly developed transition path and without financial support. The transition path should be made available by mid 2020 and the new long term fiscal plan for the Union by end 2020 at the latest. It remains to be seen if the high level ambition embedded in the Green Deal will be backed by the transition path and the financial means by then.

Von Der Leyen referred to the Green Deal as “Europe’s man-on-the-Moon moment”. I understand that VDL tries to create a “nationalist” European moment, an event which will unify all Europeans in a common project, like a long term HR European event. The comparison is however not fit in the sense that the man-on-the-moon was an event that did not impact everyday life of the Americans. The Green Deal however has a “totalitarian” character (which I want to use here in an objective, neutral way); The Government takes decisions which will impact all apects of our everyday lives : transport, food, living, factories. Private enterprise and the free market have a clear frame within which they will have to work.

Both the need for appropriate financing and the totalitarian impact might raise a revolt of the people, a “Europan Gillets Jaunes”, so to speak, if the European elites do not handle this with care.

Lastly, the Green Deal offers Europe an opportunity to free itself from some doubtful friends in the Middle East. However we should take care that our new friends are better than our old friends.

10 december 2019

From now on we (= all citizens of the world) have to think in two currencies.

One of them is the monetary currency, the other one is the CO2-emission. Every investment decision will have at least two dimensions, the monetary and the ecological one.

Whether you are a believer or a negationist, the CO2-reality starts to percolate the whole economy in the same way as the monetary currency already flows through the financial veins.

And of course we should also start to organize demonstrations to ensure that we reach strict goals for our debt reduction.

10 december 2019

In this small book, JWM proposes a definition which describes populism as a style of performing politics (and NOT as a set of political statements). For him populism is a way of performing politics in a democracy which claims to make the democracy stronger while in fact it erodes key elements of a robust democracy. Populism is therefore, according to JWM, a threat to real democracy.

Key elements of the populist style are that populists claim to fight the elites while, at the same time, they claim to be the representatives of the people. Hereby they believe that “the people” are a homogeneous group and that they are its representatives. People who do not fit in the homogeneous mass are outsiders or even enemies. Populists are therefore no pluralists and their ideology always contains some kind of identity politics (to determine the real people).

Once in power, populists try to occupy the state apparatus, they are corrupt, engage in “mass clientalism” and try systematically to suppress civil society. Sometimes they even re-write constitutions to outlaw pluralism.

JWM is strongly against the use of a concept like “illiberal democracies” because according to JWM a democracy without the necessary checks and balances, the liberal context, is no democracy at all. Critics of a regime who call it an illiberal democracy admit implicitly that it still is a democracy, quod non, according to JWM.

24 november 2019

Mounk starts from the given that Liberal Democracy as a political model is under attack all over the world. He sees how illiberal democracies and undemocratic “liberal” states come into existence and formulates the proposition that Liberal Democracy maybe only functioned well within certain constraints (“scope conditions”). (Fareed Zakaria had years ago already conceptually decoupled Liberalism and Democracy).

In Part Two of his book , he tries to define the origins of the current breakdown of Liberal Democracies. He sees in essence three items which have changed substantially and which also impact the proper functioning of Liberal Democŕacy. First, the development of the internet has reduced the cost to communicate alternative versions of the truth and the cost to set up alternative command structures. This enables challengers to break or to pass by the traditional political channels with ease. Second, the slowdown of economic progress or the more limited distribution of the existing economic progress (increased inequality) creates uncertainty over the future. Third, Mounk states that successful democracies were in the past in general momo-ethnic. The current levels of migration threaten that stability. He however takes note that populists are especially strong where immigration is still limited (but not in the area with high levels of immigration) and concludes that it is only fear for the unknown that generates that uncertainty.

I’m positively surprised to see how Mounk puts forward the idea that successful democracies are/were in general mono-ethnic. Unfortunately Mounk does not focus on the importance of language and the possibility of an inclusive approach; mono-ethnicity is not necessarily exclusive if it is based on language. His wordings might suggest the opposite

Further, he seems to forget that in areas with high levels of migrants, populists might indeed no longer have political relevance if the immigrants with voting rights already form 40% or more of the population. I assume California is already in this situation. That populists are not so strong in those areas might be the result from the fact that they have already been put in a minority position from an ethnic point. This most plausible solution is not even mentioned by Mounk.

22 november 2019

In this small book (only 91 pages) , KM confronts the West with some harsh realities. He starts from two key propositions : (1) In the past 30 years, i.e. since 1989, the world made an enormous progress. During that process the relative weight of the West versus the Rest (KM’s word), expressed in terms of GDP, has strongly diminished. The West has to adapt to that new reality; (2) The progress of the Rest is the result of a successful emulation by the Rest of Western best practices. “The biggest gift the West gave the Rest was the power of reaoning” (p. 11).

In this booklet KM raises a lot of interesting points for further critical thought. However what I will focus on hereafter is the contradiction I see between his second proposition and his more in depth analysis in the last part of his book. At this place I will not discuss whether KM is right or wrong with his analysis.

From page 75 on it becomes clear that the Western model is certainly not fully copied by the Rest and should, according to KM, not be fully copied :

• “The West is wrong in believing that democracy is a necessary condition for economic success. If it were, China could not and should not have succeeded. But it has. This… undermines many key pillars of Western ideology.” (80) With this statement KM contradicts to a certain extent what he wrote in the beginning. There he still stated that the spread of Western reasoning led to three silent revolutions. The first revolution he saw was political and ended ‘Oriental despotism’. However he acknowledges that huge imperfections remain but “most Asian leaders now recognize that they are accountable to their people, and as long as they have to demonstrate daily that they are improving their people’s lives Asian societies will continue to improve.” (15)
• “Democracies are not designed to take on long-term challenges.” This weakness hinders the West in taking the right strategic decisions.
• KM gives some examples of wrong strategic decisions from the past. He mentions the decision to keep Turkey out of the European Union and allowing Turks in. “It would have been wiser to keep Turks out and admit Turkey into the EU (with restrictions on free movement of labour)”. Of course with such a statement KM rejects an essential pillar of the European Union, the free movement of people.
• Another strategic mistake mentioned by KM is the European “Common Agricultural Policy” (CAP) which was launched in 1962. “It enriched a few European farmers. It impoverished millions of African farmers, especially in North Africa.”
• “There is no doubt that the Western elites failed to prepare their populations for the inevitable ‘creative destruction’ that flowed from China’s admission into the WTO in 2001.” In the same context KM makes the known statement that the elites in the West, but especially in the USA, enjoyed the advantages of globalisation while the masses did not. “200 million Americans live on the edge”.

KM states that the West made also other important mistakes. For completeness sake I mention ;

• Wars against Muslim countries, but especially the second war against Iraq
• The humiliation of Russia after 1989
• Europeans should understand that their strategic interest is different than the trategic interest of the USA. “The Americans have destabilized Europe’s Europe’s geographical neighbourhood.” (68)

17 november 2019

In de Knack van 6 November 2019 doet de socioloog Luc Huyse volgende uitspraak :

“Vandaar mijn pleidooi om de positie van de nieuwe Belgen juist in te schatten. Als men de inwoners van Vlaanderen een ‘leidcultuur’ wil aanpraten en men zo hard de nadruk legt op identiteit, moet men dan schrikken dat de inburgering van bijvoorbeeld de Turkse gemeenschap uiteindelijk een laag vernis blijkt te zijn ? Vlaams- nationalisten zouden vanuit hun eigen kijk op de samenleving toch kunnen veronderstellen dat als eigen identiteit zo belangrijk is, de inburgering van een grote groep vreemdelingen in een andere cultuur nooit echt voltooid kan zijn ?”

Uiteraard behoort Luc Huyse niet tot extreem-rechts, maar volgens mij bevestigt hij met dit statement minstens een light versie van de omvolking-these van Renaud Camus. Essentieel daarbij is dat de migratie vandaag de dag op zo’n schaal gebeurt dat het geen individueel gebeuren is maar een groeps (=volks)gebeuren van individuen met een collectieve gemeenschappelijke identiteit. Ten tweede zegt Luc Huyse dat het niet mogelijk (of zeer moeilijk) is om dergelijke groepen van nieuwkomers te integreren. Hij spreekt zich niet uit of dit wenselijk zou zijn. 

In dezelfde Knack stelt hoofdredacteur Bert Bultinck zich de vraag of “die ‘omvolking’ niet een gruwelijke overdrijving is ? Tenslotte heeft toch niet meer dan 12% van de Fransen een niet-Europese migratieachtergrond.” Het fenomeen ‘ghetto’ is Bultinck blijkbaar niet bekend (maar misschien mag je dat woord niet gebruiken omdat het stigmatiserend zou kunnen overkomen?)