Angela Merkel warned against growing government intervention in international trade: “If we are of the opinion that things are simply not fair, then we have to seek multilateral answers and not pursue a unilateral protectionist course where we isolate ourselves.” She was largely defending the Washington Consensus , a catchall term that suggests politics and economics ought to inhabit separate spheres. This is the orthodoxy upon which the current international order is based.
But that consensus is coming apart because, more than ever, state-led capitalism works — and it is here to stay. China’s consolidation of its state-owned enterprises (SOEs), Russia’s oligarch-led economy, the proliferation of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) and growing government intervention in the West are clear indicators of state-led capitalism’s success.
.. Moscow is able to use these corporations for political ends: threatening gas supplies to keep European governments compliant, for instance, or directing energy revenue to finance military development.
.. The Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute reports that there are dozens of SWFs, including 24 created in the past decade, which collectively control more than $7 trillion in assets.
.. SWFs are an important feature of today’s global economic landscape; governments also use them as agents of statecraft. SWFs in the Persian Gulf region, for instance, are investing in Russia because of concerns about America’s regional staying power, and they are deepening ties with Muslim countries in Southeast Asia to ensure export markets and potentially to facilitate counter-radicalization initiatives.
.. And in the United States, President Trump has bragged that he personally influences firms’ decisions about where to place their factories... This is a dramatic reversal of the trend from two decades ago... But a number of factors led to skepticism about free markets. One was the underwhelming developmental effect of SAPs and liberalization.
A further blow to the neoliberal model was a series of financial disasters caused by unrestricted flows of capital, notably the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis.Perhaps the factor that has most undermined neoliberalism’s attractiveness, though, is the persistent power of countries with state-led economies, such as China and Russia... We are not seeing a “universalization of Western liberal democracy” and free-market capitalism, as Francis Fukuyama predicted
Something Rises in the EU East
European nations like Hungary and Poland are reasserting their Christian culture, posing a bigger threat to Brussels than Brexit ever will.
The eastern states are reasserting their historic Christian character, much to the chagrin of politicians who see this as incompatible with the modern liberal creed. The head of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, wants his nation to show “the sick Europe of today the path back to health, fundamental values, true freedom, and a stronger civilization based on Christianity.”
Ancient faith and secular ideology are on a collision course. The intentional exclusion from the EU constitution of Europe’s Christian history was only the beginning of an inevitable clash between worldviews.
The intentional exclusion from the EU constitution of Europe’s Christian history was only the beginning of an inevitable clash between worldviews.
.. The more perceptive of Christianity’s detractors within the EU project realize that the truths of the faith have the potential to derail all that they believe in and strive for in this world.
.. Poland and Hungary have both been referred to the European Court of Justice after unequivocally refusing to take in migrants under the EU’s mandatory quota system. These governments watched Angela Merkel’s Germany open its doors to well over a million migrants, with the resultant assimilation problems and political fallout, and decided it wasn’t for them, while even in Germany the right-wing populist Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) took 13 percent of the vote in the last election, becoming the first nationalist party to enter the Bundestag in almost 60 years.
.. The most corrupt state in the union—Bulgaria—has now ascended to the EU presidency.
.. Bulgaria has “reached a stage of state corruption which we describe as state capture.”
.. For all the talk of Brexit, these frictions could prove much more damaging in the long run.
In Liberal Europe, Abortion Laws Come With Their Own Restrictions
Waiting periods, decried by American pro-choicers as infantilizing and unreasonably burdensome, are common in Western Europe.
.. In Germany, women seeking first-trimester abortions are subject to a mandatory three-day waiting period and a counseling session. Abortions after the first 12 weeks of pregnancy are forbidden except in cases of grave threat to the mother’s physical or mental health.
.. The Netherlands mandates a five-day waiting period between initial consultation and abortion; clinics must provide women with information about abortion alternatives. Abortion is then legal until viability (legally defined as 24 weeks, usually interpreted as 22 weeks).
In Belgium, where abortion was illegal until 1990, there’s a six-day waiting period and the woman must claim to be in “a state of distress” before receiving a first-trimester abortion.
.. In Finland (home of the now-famous Finnish baby boxes and other enviable government benefits), abortion is available up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, unless the woman is under 17 years old, in which case she may have an abortion until she’s 20 weeks pregnant. But even for early abortions, women must provide a “social reason” for seeking to terminate her pregnancy, such as poverty, extreme distress, or already having at least four children.
.. In Denmark, abortion is available on demand up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. Afterward, exceptions are made for cases of rape, threats to the woman’s physical or mental health, risk of fetal defects, and — revealingly — in cases where the woman can demonstrate lack of financial resources to care for a child.
.. Eastern Europe, a stronghold of liberal abortion laws under Communism, has become increasingly strict of late. Russia recently passed a law restricting abortion to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and Russian clinics are also now forced to give (medically dubious) warnings about the health risks of abortion, which supposedly include cancer and infertility.
.. So why are Europe’s abortion laws not as libertine and laissez-faire as our stereotypes about those countries might suggest?
Here’s one way of looking at the difference between abortion laws in Europe and those in the U.S.: in America, abortion laws are about morality, while in Europe, they reflect national ideas of what constitutes the common good.
.. In America, anti-abortion activists and politicians construe abortion as a clear-cut moral issue: “abortion is murder,” “I am a person, not a choice,” “It’s not right versus left, it’s right versus wrong,” etc. Exceptions for rape, incest or the health of the mother are political concessions, not morally consistent positions.
.. If you believe fetuses are people and abortion is murder, why would you think the murder of a person conceived in rape is more okay than the murder of a person conceived in a happy marriage?
.. In Russia and other Eastern European countries with steeply declining populations, new abortion restrictions are explicitly aimed at boosting birth rates. The same is true of Israel, perhaps less explicitly. The Israeli restrictions on abortion have more to do with the idea that, as Roni Abramson writes in Haaretz, “The Jewish womb belongs to the Jewish people.” The baby of a married Jewish woman is considered a gain for the country that’s concerned about maintaining a Jewish majority in the region, so aborting is a social harm... So what are the countries with the most liberal abortion laws? Canada is a decent candidate, with abortion available on-demand, paid for by Canadian Medicare in most provinces. Though there is no federal criminal law governing abortion at any phase of pregnancy, in practice it is extremely difficult to find a doctor or facility willing to provide abortions past 20 weeks... In the end, though, the least restrictive country is probably China, where abortion is completely legal (and often encouraged, to combat overpopulation) throughout pregnancy.
The Roots of Poland’s Defiance of the European Union
last week, Poland challenged the very notion of what it means to be part of the bloc when the country pushed ahead with controversial measures to overhaul its judicial system and essentially put the courts under the control of the governing party. The action set off unprecedented censure from the European Union.
For the first time, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, used the most powerful threat in its arsenal to try to stop the measure, invoking Article 7 of the European Union treaty, which could strip Poland of its voting rights. It accused the government of trying to undermine core democratic values.
.. it also challenged the very notion of how effectively the bloc can deal with countries that step out of line. If Brussels fails to curb what it sees as behavior that undermines democratic values in Poland, other nations with their own populist leaders, like the Czech Republic and Romania, will be emboldened to chart their own course.
.. Poland is not Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban frequently antagonizes European Union leaders and cozies up to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
.. But when the Constitution was enacted in 1997, no right-wing party was represented, including Center Agreement, a Christian democratic party and the predecessor to Law and Justice, the current ruling party.
“They refused to give this Constitution legitimacy,”
.. this lack of inclusion led to a bitterness that still fuels the governing party and its powerful leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
.. When Law and Justice briefly held power before, from 2005 to 2007, its leader, Mr. Kaczynski, found himself stymied by the courts at every turn. He coined a term for what he viewed as obstructionism: prawny imposybilizm, or legal impossibilism.
.. The first move was to dismantle the Constitutional Tribunal, which is empowered to review Poland’s laws. They removed unfriendly justices and ensured the once-powerful body was little more than a rubber stamp for the party
“The mechanics of this attack on the Supreme Court are very similar,” he said. “First, you have an attack on judges.”
.. “The whole idea behind these two bills is to have full control over the national judiciary council, which has control over appointing judges,”
.. “And if you have control over the selecting committee, you need vacancies.”
.. He pointed to a new provision that allows for something known as a special extraordinary appeal, which would essentially allow any case over the past 20 years to be reopened.
.. “I am ashamed now,” he said. “We were a paragon of transformation of the rule of law. That has all changed.”