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Soriek  9mo ago (text post)   1682 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 7

Turning this into its own weekly thread. I’m hoping for this not to really be a thing I lead,, more like an open place each week where people can talk foreign policy/international relations. That could mean country updates, analysis of some dynamic (ie the Ukraine War), or even history or interesting books you’re reading.

The response on these have been positive but engagement has been pretty low, I think partially because a lot of the countries I find interesting just aren’t that interesting to other people. I’m trying to address that by finding a balance between the more obscure places I like with bigger name countries like Brazil, Italy, Korea, etc. As always others are strongly encouraged to add on coverage of any country you find interesting, or just anything else you want to talk about.

Guatemala

As mentioned last week, the electoral success of anti-corruption underdog Bernardo Arevalo, son of Guatemala’s first democratically elected leader, represented a major upset. Currently he’s supposed to go into a runoff election with Sandra Torres in August, but the latter has accused voting software of biasing Arevalo. The establishment has responded cheerfully and the courts have suspended the results of the first round of the election and called for a tribunal to review the voting tallies. The US, EU, and OAS election observers have criticized the court’s decision. Regardless of the Presidential results, the current conservative ruling party Vamos has surprised everyone by winning a majority, so there’s a limit to how much an isolated executive will accomplish.

Brazil

Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal has banned Bolsonaro from running for office again for eight years by the for fueling the January 8 uprising:

Brazil’s electoral court ruled that Mr. Bolsonaro had violated Brazil’s election laws when, less than three months ahead of last year’s vote, he called diplomats to the presidential palace and made baseless claims that the nation’s voting systems were likely to be rigged against him.

Five of the court's seven judges voted that Mr. Bolsonaro had abused his power as president when he convened the meeting with diplomats and broadcast it on state television.

He can appeal the ruling but hasn’t made a lot of friends in the high courts and as of now he has accepted the ruling.

Venezuela

While we’re on a roll with candidates being pushed out by their systems, María Corina Machado, the favorite to lead the opposition in the 2024 elections, has been banned from running for 15 years. The charges are based on her being a fifth column for the US, supporting American sanctions and former opposition leader Juan Guaidó. All true, but also nobody expects Maduro to allow a free and fair election under any circumstances:

“If you want free elections, we want sanctions-free elections. Therein lies the dilemma”

Speaking of sanctions, oil production has actually risen recently in spite of them, though much of the gains have gone up in smoke from corruption and crime, with everything from fuel theft to an audit finding that middle men have pocketed an astounding $21 billion in unpaid sales. Partially in light of these finding and PDVSA’s significant debt to its Russian partner, Roszarubezhneft, the European oil magnate has now requested the ability to take control of joint exports itself to avoid massive middle men losses.

At least negotiations over sanctions and the election have resumed, with Venezuela and America resuming direct communications in Qatar, a nation which has unexpectedly come to play the recent role of mediator between the two rival countries.

Italy

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right wing coalition has continued a year of electoral success with victories in the longtime center-left stronghold of Tuscany.

The Eurozone Stability Fund was created in 2012 to provide “eurozone states in difficulty with loans at below-market rates in return for reforms to public finances”. It’s been suspended since the pandemic but its latest iteration is near to passing. However, it requires the approval of every member and Italy remains the last stalwart not having voted for it yet. Italy would actually qualify to use it but Meloni has pledged not to, because she’s afraid of having austerity imposed upon Italy, although the Italian Treasury apparently thinks it might actually lower debt costs.

One way or the other Italy’s enormous 145% debt to GDP ration must be addressed. Bloomberg has an interesting article on Meloni’s turn towards a more industrial policy, increasingly intervening in the corporations the government has a stake in, or buying larger stakes. She’s betting on her pro-business policies getting the Italian economy back on its feet; in particular she cut corporate taxes, taxes on the self employed, and taxes on the rich by phasing in a flat tax on labor. She's partially offset the loss in revenue by cutting benefits, in particular an anti-poverty measure called the Citizen’s Income (remember southern Italy still has exceptionally high poverty for a European country). She also gave employers more flexibility in hiring short term contracts and has strictly opposed public sector unions demands for wage increases. Predictably, this hasn’t made her many friends in the unions, who have been consistently on and off strike (it should be said Italy has more strikes than a normal country in the best of times). Actually there’s another major strike happening tomorrow, a 24 hour nationwide strike tomorrow of all public transit workers, bus, metro, ferry, and even airline staff.

Kosovo

In April Kosovar Serbians boycotted municipal elections, which were then won by Albanian candidates who tried to install their candidates by force, leading to ethnic violence and dozens of injuries. By now 4000 NATO Peace Keepers have entered Kosovo to stave off the rising ethnic tensions. Serbia’s troops are currently mobilized on the border and they have now threatened to militarily intervene if ethnic Serbs aren’t protected from Albanian violence.

South Africa

Seven opposition parties, led by the Democratic Alliance and excluding the radical EFF, have formed a big tent coalition to challenge the African National Congress in the 2024 legislative elections. Popularity with the governing party is at (probably) an all time low with crime, a faltering economy, and mass electricity shortages.

Speaking of which, South Africa’s power grid has been wracked by mass corruption, and instability and load shedding has become a norm this past year. However, blackouts have been reducing recently and surprisingly, Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has said the period of electricity cuts will soon come to a close.

In a contentious case with shades of the America dreamer debate, South African high courts have ruled against the government’s attempt to end the special permitting exemptions for Zimbabweans who fled instability at home. This would require some 200,000 people to return to Zimbabwe if they can’t obtain normal work permits, even if they have had children in South Africa.

Thailand

Eyes are peeled on Thailand as the new parliament has come into session. The major victors of the election, the anti-military, anti-monarchical Move Forward and Pheu Thai, now have the unenviable task of creating a coalition big enough to form a government. This is harder than it might sound because a third of seats are automatically given to the military, and the two upsetters have campaigned on an anti-establishment platforms that made some of their more establishment potential allies understandably skeptical (ex they want to “abolish monopolies,” aka make enemies with every business interest).

For now the two parties have managed to at least work with each other; there was some tension over which party gets to pick the new Speaker of the House but ultimately they settled on a respected Pheu Thai ally from a third party. The real question is who would be the Prime Minister if they can form a coalition. The military’s motivation is to prevent Move Forward’s leader Pita Limjaroenrat from winning at all costs; they might even accept being pushed into the minority if they could avoid that situation. They’re already investigating him to see if he broke election laws and will likely pursue other tricks as well.

Korea

President Yoon Suk-Yeol ran on a comically anti-labor agenda, once quipping that they should replace the 52 hour work week with a 120 hour work week. Since coming to power he’s pushed for and backed away from a 69 hour work week (this is probably much closer to what South Koreans actually do) and has pursued the unions doggedly, attempting to standardize professional requirements, refusing to extend a minimum wage increase, and demanding that labor unions submit their records of spending. In response to his labor agenda the Korean Confederation of Teachers Union (KCTU) has gone on strike (and separately they’re mad about Japan discharging Fukushima waste water into the open ocean). It’s pretty massive in size, a two week strike of over half a million people; this last time a smaller strike happened it led to notable fuel shortages.

Separately (or related?) President Yoon’s popularity has hit a high of 42%, mostly to his restoration of trade ties with Japan and public posture against the “cartels” (Suk-Yeol pursued some of leading Chaebol businessman during his time as a prosecutor, but it remains unclear if he will actually oppose them significantly in office.)

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Thank you for adding this in!! I've been waiting for months to find out haha.

I'm impressed by the variety each week. What sources of news do you use?

Thanks. It's a pretty big variety. If I'm reading the news for more opinion/analysis stuff I'll use Foreign Affairs & Foreign Policy; for broader overviews of what's happening I use the Associated Press, Reuters, and aggregator zines that cover a whole region, like El Pais, The Diplomat, or Africa News. If I find something I'm interested in that I don't know a ton about I search it in Google and just try to read whatever sources come up till I feel like I understand the issue from a few angles, or give up if I don't. This often pulls from a wide mixture of stuff like Bloomberg, the Economist, BBC, Al Jazeera.

A good amount of the countries I cover are ones I follow at least semi-regularly though, so there are sources I'll have for those specific countries, like the Korea Herald, Buenos Aires Times, Japan Times, etc, plus background knowledge I have on the areas.

korea's teacher strike: does anyone know how the shrinking population in Korea affect this? I remember reading that schools in Korea are closing due to fewer students, so what happens to the surplus teachers?

The Korea thing interests me. I always thought that was a pretty left-wing country by rich-world standards. But I guess it's all about the deltas. Maybe Koreans are all for unions, but as a result they've been so powerful that everyone is sick of them now (kind of like Britain under Thatcher).

Korea is definitely on the more conservative end for a rich country, especially socially, and they have a uniquely really active right wing, anti-feminist youth movement. Economically they had a neoliberal reform era in the 80s that has never fully reversed. The country's relationship with unions is complicated because their emergence is associated with the establishment of democracy in the country. Still, there's not much transparency into how they spend their money and corruption is a concern, especially in construction:

A survey by the Korea Specialty Construction Association from Dec. 29 to Feb. 10 found that 67 percent of construction sites had suffered three or more instances of unfair practice by labor unions. The most common issues were the compulsory recruitment of labor union members (17.58 percent), mandatory payment for full-time unionists (17.58 percent) and a monthly fee for construction cranes (17.58 percent)...

The police announced on March 9 that they had conducted a special crackdown on illegal acts of violence at construction sites across the country for about three months from December. As a result, 2,863 people were caught and 102 of them were sent to the prosecution.

The police said that 2,153 people were caught extorting money or valuables in the name of extra wages, accounting for 75 percent of the total. In addition, there were 302 cases of obstruction of work and 284 cases of hiring union members and forcing them to use equipment which accounted for 11 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

There's also the sense that big labor has come to mostly support Chaebols, or the mega-size conglomerates, against small businesses.

Not just conservative, but moderate voters generally don’t hold favorable views on the country’s powerful labor unions, he explained.

A 2021 survey, conducted by the Korea Institute of Public Administration, showed that the public’s confidence in labor unions stands at 47.8 percent, lower than big corporations or the central government which recorded 56.7 percent and 56 percent, respectively.

One significant critique of the unions is that they predominantly advocate for the interests of well-off workers at the largest corporations, particularly those who hold permanent positions.

Government data shows that the union organization rate at workplaces with 300 or more employees stands at 46 percent, while just 0.2 percent of employees at workplaces with less than 30 employees are unionized. The figure for workplaces with 30-99 employees stands at 1.6 percent.

Yoon is the anti-corruption, anti-cartel guy so he leaned into it here. The teacher's union also in particular is a notorious conservative enemy because of their really bizarrely pro-North Korean bend, and they are far away one of the largest and most influential unions in the country.

In general though working conditions are really awful. There are a lot of reasons people voted for Yoon but it's still pretty remarkable so many people voted for the guy who wants people to work even more.

Thanks, that's really helpful.

It seems my impression of Korea being left-wing was skewed by emphasis on labour -- Unions being powerful and traditionally respected but now a bit too big for their boots. Kind of similar to my own country, Australia where construction workers are the last holdouts able to engage in actual gangsterism and teachers are radically left wing (of course in Korea that takes a special form).

Yeah of course.

I don't know much about the labor history in Australia. Is there any back and forth between union power as the Labour and Liberal parties trade out or is it pretty entrenched?

Yes, the whole historical point of the Labor and Liberal was to ding-dong the labour laws. It's still true, but less so.

The labour movement used to have a power struggle between the unions themselves and the more PMC-dominated Labor party. The party has definitively one that fight, and the unions are themselves bureaucratic PMC-run organizations (except maybe in construction where thug life requires footsoldiers).

The Liberals are struggling with the fact that their traditional backers (captial) have become woke capital while all the political energy and opportunities are in the fightback against wokism.

I've posted my Finnish news recaps on my blog for some months now, so maybe I'll link them here. I try to do them each Tuesday/Wednesday and talk about the preceeding week's events.

https://alakasa.substack.com/p/finnish-news-recap-week-26-nazi-drama

Last week, almost all of the Finnish news were related to an ongoing affair with the new government's nationalist party's ministers and politicians being scrutinized for various follies, with one minister resigning after several cases of Nazi-related rhetoric and a MP having his free festival tickets rescinded for comments on trans issues.

NAZI JOKE RESIGNATION: As the culmination of the last week’s “Nazi joke minister” scandal, the parliament ended up confirming the controversial minister Vilhelm Junnila and giving the government a vote of confidence. Junnila did not even get the support of all the parties in the government. Most of the Swedish People’s Party, the most liberal party in the government, voted against him; he only survived since many of the opposition party MPs had already checked out of parliamentary work.

Nevertheless, two days after this vote, Junnila tendered his resignation. This was officially out of his own accord due to the controversy making his work more difficult, but it is obvious he was getting pushed out by the National Coalition, the government’s leading party. Before this, he had also managed to piss off Christian Democrats, the small socially conservative party, after it turned out that he had suggested “climate abortions” as a solution to the climate crisis.

(...)

NO FREE FESTIVAL TICKETS: Meanwhile, in the OTHER major The Finns Party story of the week Provinssi, one of Finland’s major music festivals, rescinded its VIP tickets to Juha Mäenpää, a rather notorious party MP. This was ostensibly for a newspaper article he had written on advice given by the Education Department to teachers in schools and kindergartens on how to handle trans issues – particularly a sentence indicating that “some boys might have a fanny”.

Mäenpää called this a sick statement, prompting Provinssi to cancel the free tickets for the reason of transphobia. It should be noted that the case was not that Mäenpää would have been entirely banned from buying a ticket, just from utilizing the free VIP ticket the festival had granted him. He was removed from the area, though, and since it was the last day of the festival, it could be argued it was impossible to buy a ticket any longer, but according to the festival, he had been notified of the ticket rescinding in advance.

Many thanks, would love to have your coverage. Any idea who will replace him?

Scandals aside, how do you feel things are going / will go for the new government's awkward coalition so far? Are there any policies you're particularly keeping an eye on?

Since these recaps always run a bit late, we know who will replace him. The replacement is Wille Rydman, a former centre-right MP who was smoked out of his party due to accusations of grooming young girls when he was the leader of his former party's youth organization (how serious you think these allegations are depends on your political views, as these things usually go). Of course the Finns Party bagging a MP thrown out of his old party and then making him a minister is not going to find them any friends in the said old party, which is of course a difficult thing when these two parties are forming a government.

The most important policies are probably going to be related to anti-labor legislation the government is planning, a major conflict with the unions is bound to cause major economic and everyday life repercussions.

Engagement is tricky. I enjoy reading international stories but I'm not in a great position to judge the credibility of international sources, so having some of that contextualized by Mottizens is something I appreciate. But I don't necessarily have much to say about it for the same reason: I'm not an expert on such things. What I suspect you're hitting for a lot of people, is "fargroup fascination," which raises interest but doesn't necessarily lead to much discussion.

That said, did New Zealand's uptake of affirmative action in medicine get discussed in one of your threads? Or somewhere else on the Motte? If so, I missed it, and I'm sorry to have done so. The issue did come up over on Scott's link post, where he said:

The government says this just “corrects” institutional biases which exist at other stages; I don’t know the New Zealand situation but have found previous claims of this sort flimsy. Here are various articles talking about how anyone who is against this system lacks context on how it won’t work that way, plus also it already works this way so nothing will change, plus it will revolutionize health equity so you’d have to be a monster to object, plus it will make no difference so anyone who protests is just manufacturing fake outrage. I can’t find the algorithm they say they’re using anywhere; here is a FOIA-equivalent request for it which hasn’t been answered yet. This file seems related and suggests Maori should get the highest priority and Asians the lowest priority, but I’m not sure they’re exactly following the science here. I think of this in the context of the US COVID vaccine prioritization effort; not only did it cause hundreds or thousands of unnecessary deaths by giving vaccines to young healthy low-risk members of favored groups before old sick high-risk members of disfavored ones, it also caused scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups because of implementation details. We should be fighting for less of this, not more.

But user "benwave" claims in the comments that:

Ethnicity was Already a factor taken into account in the algorithm for these surgery waitlists. This latest change makes ethnicity Less important in the algorithm than was previously the case, and raises importance of other various poverty indicators. But because this is the first most people have heard of it, so it has had a huge impact in the news and political spheres.

And see, once again: I personally have no idea whether this is true, and don't know off the top of my head how I would confirm it; probably by just spending an hour or two on Google, possibly coming away frustrated anyway. Also Scott's summary doesn't seem to differentiate between elective and emergency surgeries, but maybe he's using physician lingo that creates a distinction I can't notice.

So there's an example of an international story that piqued my interest, but concerning which I'm not sure I have anything useful to say.

That said, did New Zealand's uptake of affirmative action in medicine get discussed in one of your threads? Or somewhere else on the Motte? If so, I missed it, and I'm sorry to have done so. The issue did come up over on Scott's link post, where he said:

I definitely didn't, thanks for adding that! I don't have a great sense of New Zealand ongoings in general but their form of idpol seems somehow more mainstreamed than ours. I really need to check Scott's link posts more often, I feel like they're always full of nuggets.

NZ also has Maori-only seats in parliament and heavy promotion of Maori language everywhere.

Like seats reserved just for Maori? Is NZ a consociational democracy with sort of built in ethnic representation like North Ireland or Lebanon?

Yes, seats reserved just for Maori. 7 of the 72 electorate seats in the NZ parliament are Maori-only. (edit for clarity - NZ has 120 seats overall but they are a mix of electorate seats and party list seats as NZ uses Mixed Member Proportional)

The candidates do not specifically have to be Maori, but only Maori are allowed to vote for them. Maori have to choose whether to vote for the Maori seats or in their own general election district, they don't get to double dip.

This isn't a new woke invention either, the system was established over 150 years ago. It pre-dates women's suffrage!

Hmm very interesting. Do you feel the system is effective?

No idea, I'm not a Kiwi. XD

Ah haha my mistake, thanks still.

One reason I suspect engagement is low is that the "depth" per country per post is pretty low so unless I already know something apart from what you write here, I'll not really be able to engage. Maybe it will increase as people who are following it every week become more familiar. There are also relatively little "hooks" in the post that drive engagement, it's almost entirely descriptive so again there is little to argue about. Btw I don't think that's a bad thing, I enjoyed these posts so far.

I’m hoping for this not to really be a thing I lead

Ha, I'm sorry to say that this is in my experience not how it works.

One reason I suspect engagement is low is that the "depth" per country per post is pretty low so unless I already know something apart from what you write here, I'll not really be able to engage. There are also relatively little "hooks" in the post that drive engagement, it's almost entirely descriptive so again there is little to argue about.

All true. I'll admit I do avoid hooks partially because I don't actually have very strong opinions on how most countries other than my own should run things, but that's part of the reason I've shifted towards more newsorthy countries in this round in hopes that people would be more interested/have stronger opinions.

But I guess I've also seen the initial post less as a centerpiece that other people would respond to and more as a way to get the ball rolling / create an opportunity for people to drop their own coverage of places/events that interest them, like folks have done with the French riots or Irish anti-refugee protests.

There are also issues that I'm pretty confident will get a fair amount of response (ex: Meloni's migrant policy) that I intentionally avoid because I feel like we already have a lot of that throughout the culture war thread and I want to create something different. That isn't to say people can't add coverage of those issues if they personally find them interesting, they of course can - I just won't be taking the lead on them.

Ha, I'm sorry to say that this is in my experience not how it works.

Unfortunately so haha. I've seen a fair amount of interest in international relations scattered throughout the forum so I sort of thought having a gathering place would naturally bring folks together, like the way we used to have the Ukraine megathread.

Just wanted to echo some of the other commenters and state that I appreciate your posting these Transnational Thursdays. I don’t have enough background on some of these countries to comment to the level of erudition that this forum demands, but I hope you will continue to post. If I see and know something in the future I’ll happily share it.

Many Thanks! Feel free to drop in any time, I feel like the really long posts might make people feel like they need to add really high effort stuff too but I think casual discussion starters are totally fine too.

Kosovo

In April Kosovar Serbians boycotted municipal elections, which were then won by Albanian candidates who tried to install their candidates by force, leading to ethnic violence and dozens of injuries. By now 4000 NATO Peace Keepers have entered Kosovo to stave off the rising ethnic tensions. Serbia’s troops are currently mobilized on the border and they have now threatened to militarily intervene if ethnic Serbs aren’t protected from Albanian violence.

I find this particularly interesting given Serbia’s at times uneasy alignment with the West. If Serbian troops were to enter Kosovo, ostensibly to protect ethnic Serbs… Might we run into a situation where Serbian troops end up firing on NATO peacekeepers (perhaps intervening in a pogrom of Albanians)? If so, does that push Serbia further into the arms of Russia, and could it change any power dynamics as regards the Ukraine war? I note that Hungary is already oriented towards Russia; while there seems to be no way for Russia to easily support Serbia in attempted ethnic cleansing, further strife in the area seems capable of causing the EU further headaches on their eastern front.

It'a good question. Serbia didn't condemn the Russian invasion or join sanctions (though there was a leak that they planned to / might have sent weapons to Ukraine), and the EU outright said their non-participation would hurt their EU ascension process, which has been seemingly stillwater for a decade anyway. It does seem like if we want Serbia to remain neutral it's in everyone's best interests not to convince them Russia is the only large country looking out for their interests/willing to defend them.

Funnily enough, Serbia actually doesn't actually recognize the Russian referendums in Donetsk and Luhansk and Ukraine doesn't recognize Kosovo, though in both cases I assume it's less about currying favor with each other and more a shared to desire to not ackowledge the legitimacy of breakaway states (kind of like Spain not recognizing Kosovo or the Russian enclaves).

Hopefully cooler heads will prevail, or failing that hopefully there's enough peace keepers crammed into the country that less cool heads can't mess things up too bad.

On the other hand, Serbia’s sworn enemies are in NATO, which is also the biggest bully on the playground.

My initial thought was, "Aren't Serbia's sworn enemies pretty much all of the Balkans?" Then I checked a NATO map and saw an ocean of blue, except for Serbia and Kosovo.

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