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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31243 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Josep Borrell (EU's top diplomat) summarizes EU's reasons for internationalism: EU is a garden, the rest of the world is a jungle

Mr Borrell said in his speech on Thursday: "Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build - the three things together.

"The rest of the world [is] not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.

"The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means."

This really comes off as a Kinsey gaffe: Borrell is getting reactions of shock simply for elucidating what has been the actual motive for various EU policies for a long time. It's not really about humanitarianism, it's about maintaining EU's soft power and stature so as to keep "the jungle" sufficiently away from Europe in subtle, behind-the-scenes ways - ie. avoiding having to just push the refugees back to the sea, or shooting them at the border.

I summarized earlier how I view EU's migration policies - often portrayed as "open borders" or "EU working to fill Europe with Africans and Muslims" or whatever - like this, and I think it fits in with Borrell's comments:

EU is not taking in an "endless number of migrants from Africa and the Middle East". The total number of migrants to EU in 2020 was 1,9 million, a small trickle compared to the total EU population. Out of this, ca 600 00 are asylum seekers. If EU was actually intent on ushering in an "endless number of migrants", this would be an incredibly weak effort, considering how many Africans and Middle Easterns are actually willing to move; it would also be strange for EU to run a whole agency (and keep giving it more and more funds, and turn a blind eye to its migrant pushbacks) to coordinate ways to keep unauthorized migrants, mainly from these areas, out.

EU countries do, indeed, wish to utilize migration to save the welfare state, but when it comes to first residence permits EU issues for employment/education purposes, far and away the biggest group, already in 2021, were the Ukrainians. That indicates who EU wants to work, currently, and it's not hard to imagine that there's a number of Eurocrats currently seeing the Ukrainian refugee flows to Europe as a major boon, presenting an employable and uncontroversial constituency for further work. EU does, at times, weakly try to get Eastern European countries to take in more refugees, mainly as a form of "burden sharing" to take the load off the Western countries, but as one can see from their demographics, these efforts are not really an example of "cajoling, threatening and twisting arms", since that sort of a thing would presumably actually get results.

EU migration policy can mostly be understood through three mandates: getting a modicum of labor-based migration (often from other, non-EU European countries, though that's a diminishing category) and then trying to balance the quest to maintain some sort of a de jure refugee/asylum system, since that is an important part of EU's self-image/external image as the bulwark of the international system and its underlying human rights treaties, and the quest to de facto ensure there's not too many asylum seekers and refugees, let alone illegal immigrants, since that would be destabilizing. The push/pull created by the conflict of the last two mandates then makes the whole immigration policy rather an unwieldy contraption, not really something that most mainstream EU forces are willing to discuss.

"Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works.

Do these people really think so, or was it a conscious lie ?

What do you mean?

Few things work in Europe. Let's name them: public order, generally okayish. Not too much serious crime. Infrastructure is mostly fine, iirc, with not much 'debt'. Businesses don't get stolen by corrupt officials too often.

But energy policies - the bulwark of prosperity, are absolute shambles. Shale gas is not exploited at all. Nuclear is barely supported.

Renewables are still pushed despite the abysmal track record.

Germany faces deindustrialisation; Americans are talking about inviting in German companies. I'm thinking nothing will come out of that, as the black-worshipping managerial classes are unlikely to start rubber stamping tens of thousands of green cards for German immigrants and families. Can you imagine the racial equity optics of that?

Educational policies are .. risible and a failure. Few now remember the 'Lisbon strategy' which was supposed to make EU the world's most competitive economy.

Youth unemployment is high in many places, particularly southern half.

EU, as a bloc, is mostly unable to deport criminal migrants with no right of being here. The consequence is worst hit places like Italy are leaning very much right.

I don't understand what ECB is doing, but a lot of people whom I follow and who made good predictions re: markets are outraged at the incompetence.

Can you name a place where you think things do work? Put another way -- a place where that isn't struggling with some form of large scale, systemic coordination problems?

This isn't meant as a counter to your post. I'm seeking clarification about your pov.

USA works in most respects, having a healthy well-rounded economy, resource independence and food/energy/everything security, affordability of goods and housing, and protection of rights (especially negative rights, which are poorly comprehended by European legal systems), retaining its unrivaled attractiveness for world-class talent and the virtuous cycle leading it to hegemony. Days when the EU could be seriously discussed as a peer partner/competitor are far behind us, now it's just a poor brain-drained province.

Taiwan works in most respects, having a humane culture (by East Asian standards, and very much unlike the Mainland), functional democracy and some capacity to innovate in governance, good affordable healthcare, and an economy that benefits from virtual monopoly on the most valuable industry near the top of the global supply dependency graph.

Israel works in nearly every respect, especially considering geopolitical, natural resource etc. challenges it faces; it's truly jarring how its dubious liberal creds are emphasized by lobbyists and sycophants, yet nobody among policymakers cares about its most unlikely successes, unthinkable in the EU (chiefly, the ability to harmonize the economy of a first-tier developed country with tradition and reproduction). Pretty much all bad things about their system are either inherent to the ethnostate model (which is non-negotiable) or not very concerning to locals (bad visual design, accelerating shift towards right-wing ideology).

Those are, I think, the most successful and well-run countries on the planet, insofar as we leave aside European anomalies like Liechtenstein and other memes.

Within the EU, there are also more and less well-run «real» states, e.g. Finnish policymaking is, from what I can tell, generally devoid of bizarre unforced errors or even causes for culture war outrage (@Stefferi is that your handiwork?), but they're not that impressive or globally significant.

Ah, I see. I classify the EU much like Thiel does, as in, that it's a place where the dominant spirit is "indeterminate, negative." I don't have high hopes for its future, even in the near term (10-20 years), but I would still argue that if you're looking for a sleepy little hamlet, the EU is full of them--you get your healthcare and basic security, and you're free to live out your life in the style of Mann's Hans Castorp.

Taiwan ... benefits from virtual monopoly on the most valuable industry near the top of the global supply dependency graph.

ASML (which is Dutch) is upstream of TSMC on the dependency graph, and has a stronger monopoly. Right now nobody else is even trying to compete in EUV, and ASML have about an 80% market share in new wet DUV installations (the previous generation of photolithography tech).

ASML is valued like 50% less (it shouldn't be, though); in terms of revenue, TSMC is closer to Apple than to ASML. Also TSMC is only the frontrunner of an entire pleiad of electronic businesses (admittedly more replaceable) – from Asus to Foxconn to Mediatek to Synology, they control many world-class enterprises.

Europeans have a few more extremely successful and entrenched legacy companies of that sort (Zeiss etc.), and of course they're strong in other fields (e.g. pharmaceuticals), but AFAIK no European nation has such an impressively high-tech export structure, pound for pound.

Plus Europeans have other problems. The Dutch, for instance, have imported roughly a quarter of their current population, which the Taiwanese would not even consider.

The Dutch, for instance, have imported roughly a quarter of their current population, which the Taiwanese would not even consider

Hi, imported Dutch here. There are quite a lot of foreigners here for sure (and many aren't very desirable), but these numbers that people throw around are very disingenuous. It typically includes anyone with any parentage from "abroad". Have a Belgian mom? German expat? Fully assimilated and very productive n-th generation Surinamese immigrant? Congratulations you are padding the foreigner statistics. Numbers look especially grim since most locals I know don't think twice about dating a culturally equivalent "foreigner".

(@Stefferi is that your handiwork?)

Shh...

I think that one of the things here is that when people discuss Europe's problems, it is often some sort of a melange of individual country problems. Ie. the biggest issues with energy, including the disdain for nuclear, overreliance on non-European fossil fuels etc. do not affect all EU countries equally; not every country is Germany. EU, as an institution, just recently, classified nuclear as a green energy in its taxonomy.

Indeed. It is the inverse of what you'll find on blue-leaning fora, where Europe is a paradise with Mediterranean food and Dutch cycling culture and Nordic welfare states everywhere and the like. People who turn away from their blue peers reverse such stupidity, and see Europe as an amalgamated hell in much the same way.

Most places have problems, because as soon as we humans can half-ass something, we move onto the next thing.

However, there are many places that have at least the basics right. E.g. Japan/Korea have less insane energy policies.

They also did not outsource their heavy industries to the revanchist communist dictatorship that's worryingly also at the moment the most populous nations.

They aren't engaged in crazy, innumerate attempts at a green 'transition'. Or importing large numbers of people known to be a drain on state finances.

But isn't this picking one set of trade offs for another?

Japan has been wrestling with economic stagnation, where more and more younger people have to bust their asses even more for an uncertain future. Many of them are choosing to completely drop out of society altogether. They're also struggling with low birth rates to the point of working on robotic elderly aides. Also, high suicide rates.

I'm sure if I did the research, I'd find a lot of trouble going on in Korea, too.

That said, I would take all the places we're talking about (USA, most of EU, Japan, Korea, and a few others) as having their shit together enough to be classified as "working." Sure, they're all facing wicked problems, but on the whole, they still exhibit behaviors that signal they are capable of playing the larger game.

I wouldn't put Japan in the non-insane energy policy column. Have you seen their coal and LNG imports in the last decade? Their air quality must be getting awful from burning all that coal, and they're really paying the trade balance toll.

They went back to nuclear (stopped the phaseout) and want to build more.

Many European countries have also stopped their phaseouts and/or are planning to build more.

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Really? I'd have imagined that, being the country that suffered Fukushima, they'd have more strongly moved away from nuclear. Granted, Fukushima's worst effects had little to do with actual radiation leakage, but it was definitely a strong shock.

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