Davos Newbies

Heather Hulburt:

I think it’s time for those of us who focus on foreign affairs to start thinking, again, about the implications of a Europe that is AWOL from its accustomed role in world affairs. Last week I promised to track and post on Europe’s reaction to the news that the US has outsourced its prisons to Central Europe. But another diplomat friend gently chided me:

Europe is too busy looking inward to care, he said, and reminded me that, while Paris burns, Spain is wrenching itself around the problem of Catalan autonomy, the Dutch are having a parliamentary wrangle over why they went to Iraq and whether they should up their ante in Afghanistan; Italy is in the throes of yet another corruption scandal as its government continues a long (by Italian standards) slow decline. Germany, remember, still doesn’t officially have a government.

Progressives have gotten into the nice but lazy habit of figuring the Europeans will help us over the humps we can’t quite get over ourselves: international pressure and money for Iraq, troops for Afghanistan, a new approach for Iran, aid money for Africa and Asia, greasing a final status deal for Kosovo, etc. etc. Then there’s the whole matter of trade policy, where the planets must align creativity and flexibility in both Europe and the U.S.

Fuhgeddaboudit.

I’m not saying Europe will disappear; but if you are a progressive thinker hatching plans that require Europe to stick its neck out, take the lead, or change its own policies dramatically, better start re-thinking.

As someone who lived in Europe for the last 27 years, I’d like to think her observation isn’t true. But I fear it is.

Chris Bertram: “I don’t assert that there is some direct causal connection between the Algerian war and the recent riots, but one cannot think seriously about the situation of the banlieue without noticing the unmentionable facts and silences. There has been no Truth and Reconciliation Commission for France, but until these wounds are acknowledged and examined, those of North African origin cannot be treated as just another immigrant group – like the Italians and Portuguese – they are not.”

Jonathan Freedland: “Yes, these riots are rooted in economic deprivation and urban decay. But they also have an ethnic, racial dimension. And France’s key problem is that it cannot face that fact… France’s refusal to see the ethnicity of some of its people as relevant translates into de facto racism. If human beings were free of prejudice, the French republican ideal would work beautifully. Because we are not, it allows racism a free hand.”

In contrast to Freedland’s convincing piece, there has been a lot of poor commentary written about the French riots in the past few days. Craig Smith, in The New York Times, wrote a naive analysis for Sunday’s paper, which largely rejected claims that France has an underclass. His conclusion: “Because France’s difficulties are relatively recent, it may have a chance to escape the depth of the American problems.” Subsequent pieces in the Times, including by Smith, have been hurriedly rowing away from that view.

Of course, the articles and blogs that have called the riots a French intifada are equally misguided. The problems are social and economic, not religious. The problems are particularly graphic in France, but policymakers in Brussels, Rotterdam and Berlin should be working overtime to make sure similar events don’t happen in their cities.

Dominique Reynié, a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, has a very pertinent observation in today’s Financial Times: “I do not think this is a crisis of the Fifth Republic, which is in the end only a form of government, so much as a crisis of the political class, which responds to these problems in an archaic way. They are responding as if there is a social group who want something and with whom they can open a dialogue. But this is not the case. It is not a pertinent response.”

There’s no hint that Reynié suggested to the FT what a pertinent response would be. I suspect it’s not what interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy apparently told the police yesterday, according to a report I heard this morning on NPR. He advised that they take care to address the rioters with the respectful “vous”, rather than the informal, disrespectful “tu”. That should solve it.