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both in Britain and in the rest of Europe politics is increasingly structured by a divide between “winners” and “losers” of globalisation and this has led to issues of cultural and national identity becoming more salient politically.

between the general elections of 2015 and 2017 Labour and SNP voters, on the one hand, and Conservative voters, on the other, became more polarised with respect to one another along the cultural dimension (see the diagrams above). However, this was almost entirely due to a shift amongst Conservative voters towards the “closed” pole of this dimension and (in Scotland) a similar shift by the SNP towards the “open” pole

The Brexit referendum was most likely the catalyst for a strategic re-positioning by the Conservative Party. By championing a “red, white and blue” Brexit and by dismissing “citizens of the world” as “citizens of nowhere”, Theresa May moved the Tories towards the “closed” end of the political spectrum, occupying much of the territory that UKIP had occupied in 2017. The appeal was partly successful insofar as the Tories tended to gain votes in constituencies in which the Leave vote exceeded 63%, even if they lost the votes of “open” Remainers who had voted for the party in 2015. Labour meanwhile sought to reframe the debate away from “open”/”closed” issues such as Brexit, giving centre stage to economic issues, framing the struggle as one between “the many” and “the few”. Even though they had limited success in this respect, they managed to win over many young, well-educated, middle class Remainers at the “open” end of the spectrum.

the SNP successfully “framed” the issue of independence as one about freedom from London-imposed economic austerity and inequality. If Labour could similarly frame Brexit as “project about neoliberal deregulation… Thatcherism on steroids”, as David Lammy suggests, it may be possible to reconcile the two competing Labour narratives, but it would require the kind of deft leadership that the SNP showed during and after the independence referendum

For the Tories the task of holding together is likely to be even more complicated as the gap between “open” pro-European Tories and the hardline Eurosceptics of the European Reform Group seems unbridgeable

In every country surveyed, those on the right are more likely than those on the left to prioritize sticking to traditions, to say people today are too easily offended by what others say, and to say the bigger societal problem is seeing discrimination where it does not exist.

Outside of France, more people say it’s a bigger problem for their country today to not see discrimination where it really does exist than for people to see discrimination where it really is not present.

issues of pride for some were often sources of shame for others. In the UK, one such issue was the concept of empire. Those on the ideological right praised the historic empire for its role in spreading English and Western culture overseas, while those on the ideological left discussed how the UK had disrupted local cultures and often left chaos in its wake in its former colonies.

whereas groups composed of Republicans discussed American history through the lens of opportunity, groups composed of Democrats stressed the inadequacy of how American history is taught – and how it often glosses over racism and inequitable treatment of minority groups. Republican participants, for their part, even brought up how political correctness itself makes them embarrassed to be American – while Democratic participants cited increased diversity as a point of pride

While Britons are as ideologically divided as Americans on issues of pride, when it comes to every other cultural issue asked about in this report, Americans stand out for being more ideologically divided than those in the Western European countries surveyed.

Younger people – those under 30 – are less likely to place requirements on Christianity, language, birth or adopting the country’s traditions to be part of their country than older age groups. They are also more likely to say their country will be better off if it is open to changes. The notable exception to this pattern is Germany, where opinion differs little by age.

“The ‘cordon sanitaire’ which once kept far-right groups and thought out of mainstream discourse has collapsed, both here and on the continent.”

increases in hate crime across Britain, and warnings over rising Islamophobia and antisemitism.

Outside the UK, the report said that the international far-right terror threat had hit “unprecedented levels” following the attacks in Christchurch, El Paso, Halle and Hanau. It found that the threat was involving younger and more violent individuals, and that the ideological paths into extremism had become more diverse because of the rise of conspiracy theories, incels and the “manosphere”.

“In 2020, far-right terror operates through a virtually leaderless online, global community waging its battles internationally, from Christchurch in New Zealand to Halle in Germany, through a new generation of increasingly young and more extreme terrorists, but the authorities have been slow to make connections between offline hate crimes and the ideological ecosystem behind them.”

The conflation of genuine grievances with obsessive repetition of imminent existential threat should terrify everyone.

In a way, Netanyahu’s fantasies are even more egregious. They lack any basis of actual injury by Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, historical or present. This group is never involved in organizational terror, and individual incidents are exceedingly rare. The community has no secessionist tendencies, has participated in the Israeli political process for decades, and repeatedly states its desire for greater political, civil, and economic integration. The one demand that challenges Israeli Jews is symbolic: preservation of their battered Palestinian identity. The great political demand associated with that identity is their call to release Palestinians in the territories from a five-decade military occupation and allow their independence.

outside of the context of a domestic insurgency like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, there is no example of state security forces being deployed under circumstances like this inside any democratic state.

There are, however, eerie similarities to what governments do during civil wars. During Sri Lanka’s fight with the Tamil Tiger insurgency between 1983 and 2009, state security officials would use unmarked white vans to scoop up citizens who had run afoul of the Sri Lankan government. This sort of abduction typically ended in the detainee’s torture or disappearance; they were so common at one point that Sri Lankan citizens started using the term “white-vanning” as a shorthand. Obviously, that’s not what’s happening to protesters detained in Portland, but experts find the echoes chilling.

The federal deployments to Portland and the tactics they use given the context are not normal. They are the tools of authoritarian states and military occupations.

a radical de-democratization of American politics: a sense, on the part of the president and his allies, that the residents of Portland and Chicago are the enemy.

Are there limits to what political actors will do in the name of pursuing their partisan interests and hurting the other team? The Portland situation represents an edge case in these discussions. Trump is engaging in behavior that should clearly be unacceptable in a democracy; the historical and international comparisons make that excruciatingly clear.

One key element of what we’ve seen in the United States in the past several decades is the rise of what’s called “negative partisanship”: the growth of a political identity defined not so much around liking one’s own party as hating the other one. A negative partisan feels like they “win” by inflicting defeats on the other team rather than passing their own positive legislative agenda (though sometimes they’re the same thing).

For a democratic system to work, all sides need to accept that their political opponents are fundamentally legitimate — wrong about policy, to be sure, but a faction whose right to wield power after winning elections goes without question. But if political leaders and voters come to hate their opponents so thoroughly, they may eventually come to see them not as rivals but as enemies of the state.

“I don’t even think calling it polarization is sufficient,” Mason, the Maryland scholar, says. “We are witnessing a crisis of democracy that is perfectly acceptable to a significant portion of the population — as long as it hurts their enemies.”

in an extremely polarized environment, members of Congress are pushed to align more with a president of their own party than with the institution. Republican senators act like Republican partisans first and members of Congress second; if they don’t, they suffer the wrath of primary voters all too willing to punish deviation from the president’s line. This has, throughout the Trump presidency, made him largely immune to congressional oversight, the Ukraine impeachment being the most vivid example. Now it allows him to get away with the imposition of a kind of occupation on American citizens with no real risk of congressional blowback.

one reason Portland has become such a dangerous situation is that it’s fused some of the deepest drivers of polarization, America’s culture wars and conflicts over identity, with Trump’s personal authoritarian instincts.

“It’s not just about partisanship — it’s about who gets to be considered a ‘real’ American, with the full rights and privileges that entails. But it also clears the way for Trump’s push toward authoritarian rule,”

How could an American president start abusing federal authority in such a blatantly authoritarian fashion? How could he get one of the country’s two major parties to acquiesce to this, especially the party that claims to be for federalism and states’ rights? How could any of this be happening? What we’re seeing, according to experts on comparative democracy and American politics, is our polarized political system reaching its breaking point — and our democracy buckling under the pressure of Trump’s authoritarian impulses and near-total control of the Republican Party.

Trump is running a “law and order” reelection campaign that works by entrenching partisan divides and stoking racial resentment. His unprecedented deployment of federal law enforcement personnel is a means to that end; he gets away with it because American politics is so dangerously polarized that Republicans are willing to accept virtually anything if it’s done to Democrats.

As the dark clouds of ethnic and religious tensions gather yet again across the world, the experiences of these Bosniaks not only about surviving a genocide but also living through the post war era and dealing with all the disappointments surrounding the promises of transitional justice are more relevant and significant than ever before.

Just like the mass murder of European Jewry in the 1940s, the mass-murder of Bosniaks in the 1990s was a direct consequence of the faulty and highly dangerous way "Europeans" define their identity. Muslims - together with Jews - have been playing the role of Europe's "other" for centuries. The myth that has been built on the perception of Muslims as the inferior, aggressive and at times dangerous "other" was undoubtedly one of the core reasons for Bosniaks' suffering.

Next year will mark the 25th anniversary of the butchery of Srebrenica. To say that what happened in Srebrenica in July 1995 was the first such crime on European soil after World War II is to completely disregard the horror of the concentration camps discovered in 1992 or the rape camps for which there is no precedent in European history. Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a long process of systematic extermination.

Next year will mark the 25th anniversary of the butchery of Srebrenica. To say that what happened in Srebrenica in July 1995 was the first such crime on European soil after World War II is to completely disregard the horror of the concentration camps discovered in 1992 or the rape camps for which there is no precedent in European history. Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a long process of systematic extermination.

what happened in the 1990s in Bosnia serves as an inspiration to far right terrorists across the world as well as their "anti-imperialist" allies. Today, we can no longer claim that another genocide is impossible.

what happened in the 1990s in Bosnia serves as an inspiration to far right terrorists across the world as well as their "anti-imperialist" allies. Today, we can no longer claim that another genocide is impossible.

the Christian democratic ideology can be characterized in terms of three core principles: a morally tinged conception of the “natural order” as a harmonious and organically integrated society; a remedial conception of the welfare state as a way to protect social unity and stability from the threat of radical takeover; and a conception of democratic practice as a constant process of compromise and reconciliation between conflicting social interests.

This approach is justified with reference to another classically Christian democratic idea: that everyone should contribute to the best of their ability to the well-being of society as a whole. While this involves some measure of socioeconomic redistribution, it steers clear of the more radical idea that society should aspire to some form of substantive—as well as formal—equality.

Biden has a similar view of the Democratic Party’s role in the contemporary United States. Given the way in which the Republican Party has been transformed under the leadership of Trump, Biden seems to think it’s now the role of the Democrats to reunite the whole nation under the banner of its traditional moral and political principles of inclusiveness and civility.

In contrast to Sanders’s advocacy for universalist welfare entitlement programs such as “Medicare for All” and free public college tuition, Biden thinks that the role of state intervention in the economy should be focused on the protection of socially disadvantaged groups

the deeply conservative dimension to Biden’s promise to “heal” the divisions that cut across American society—one that is reminiscent of European Christian democracy’s historic emphasis on the values of “national unity” and “restoration” of the social order in the aftermath of World War II

the logic of the Christian democratic parties in Europe that supported welfare-state policies in the aftermath of World War II as explicitly anti-revolutionary measures.

throughout the 1950s and ’60s, it was Christian democrats—not social democrats—who pushed forward many policies incentivizing homeownership for the working classes in both Germany and Italy

Biden’s approach to such law-and-order questions again parallels the thinking of Christian democratic parties in Europe. For instance, during the 1960s and ’70s, both Italian and German Christian democrats took a very firm stance against the so-called “Red Terrorism” of far-left revolutionary groups such as the Brigate Rosse and Baader-Meinhof—in some cases going as far as reviving extraordinary criminal justice procedures that hadn’t been used since the end of the fascist and national-socialist regimes. These measures were justified precisely as a compromise between the far-right’s demands for a complete suspension of the democratic order and the center-left’s calls for a more lenient approach.

Although Biden is a devout Catholic (one who has apparently been wearing a rosary under his sleeve since the death of his son Beau in 2015), he remains firmly within the American tradition of secularism, which posits a strict “wall of separation” between politics and religion. Europe’s Christian democracy, by contrast, is partly rooted in an attempt to directly translate principles of Catholic social doctrine into a democratic political platform. In this sense, Biden is a distinctly Americanized version of this European strand of political conservatism.

Christian democrats succeeded in keeping both the far-left and the far-right out of power for several decades after the end of World War II precisely on the basis of a coalition that united social elites, the urban middle classes, and the rural poor against the perceived threat of radical takeover

if he is indeed elected, Biden is likely to be far more open to political influence than either Clinton or Sanders would have been as president. His presidency would likely leave ample space for the two main factions within the Democratic Party—the Clintonian liberal wing and Sanders’s democratic socialist one—to continue shaping policy in important ways, even though neither is likely to get all of what they want. In this sense, the result wouldn’t be very much unlike the constant struggle for compromise between the center-right and the center-left wings of continental European Christian democratic parties during their period of political hegemony in the postwar years.

As the prospect of both fascist resurgence and communist revolution began to wane in postwar continental Europe, Christian democracy lost its way, falling prey to widespread clientelism and corruption. Ultimately, this is what brought down the Italian democrazia cristiana at the beginning of the 1990s and has also weakened the German Christian Democratic Union and other continental European Christian democratic parties’ political identities ever since. Seen in this light, Biden might succeed in defeating both Sanders and Trump. But his presidency would probably end up being rather weak and aimless, without doing much to address the United States’ deeper social and political problems.

Liberman called for a change to the status quo on matters of religion and state and laid out a path to achieve this, i.e., a unity government without the ultra-Orthodox or the ultra-Orthodox nationalists.

most of the party’s new voters supported it because it established itself in their minds as a kind of middle ground with a message of unity, and as a party capable of solving problems of religion and state, such as public transportation on the Sabbath, conversion, the Conscription Law,

the second generation of immigrants, who came here when they were very young or who were actually born in Israel, are now suffering because of the Chief Rabbinate, which is forcing them to prove that they are Jewish in order to get married. This is especially insulting to them, given that they fought so hard to preserve their Jewish identities under the Soviet regime.

One possible explanation for this movement of voters from the Likud to Yisrael Beitenu could be the characteristics of many such voters — people who immigrated to Israel from Russian-speaking countries, or people whose parents did. In the past, these people voted for the Likud, because their politics traditionally veer (nationalistic) right, but in this election, they internalized Yisrael Beitenu’s campaign message concerning religion and state. Liberman’s focus on these issues is particularly dear to them. The fact that they have to prove to the Rabbinate that they are really Jews before they can get married seems to have clinched the deal.

One other group where Liberman was successful was the Druze sector. According to the Globes analysis, Yisrael Beitenu received 10,000 votes from the Druze sector, compared to just 6,000 in April. What is remarkable is that Yisrael Beitenu won these votes even though it supported the Nationality Law, which infuriated Israel’s Druze community. Hamad Amar, a Druze Knesset member for Yisrael Beitenu, told Al-Monitor that these Druze voters were very impressed by the way Liberman stuck to his principles in last May’s coalition negotiations. “They recognized that Liberman sticks to his word and that he is reliable. That is the most important thing for us.”

Huge and complex problem such as climate change, the march of the machines, an aging population and endemic loneliness require complex answers that no single party or clique within one can hope to answer. Our politics is going to have to become so much bigger, more adapt and agile to meet these challenges. And thankfully, everywhere in the gaps and cracks between the state and the free market, people and organisations are practicing the participative and negotiated spirit of the age. And the networked citizen is replacing the industrial worker as the agent of change.

Portugal shows that both pluralism and proportional representation don’t have to hold socialists back

governments still harass, expel, and attempt to exterminate minority groups in the name of the nation-state ideal, and sovereignty still gives them carte blanche to do so

insistence on the nation-state as the only legitimate and legal actor on the world stage leaves substate groups vulnerable to exploitation, attack, and shady dealing

the issue isn’t limited to the Kurds. In the news this week are Rohingya refugees stuck between two countries that don’t want them, Uighurs forced into detention camps, and Catalan protests for independence. History offers even more parallels, from the United States repeatedly breaking treaties with Native Americans to World War II, in which the United States was willing to go to war to protect the territorial integrity of France along with the people in it but was not willing to accept refugees fleeing the Holocaust. The nation-state system is designed to protect itself and its members, rather than people

nonstate groups are at a particular disadvantage. Though they may hold de facto territory, they don’t hold it legally; they have no international rights to a military or to self-defense. They have no seat in international or supranational organizations, leaving them outside global decision-making and with no recourse in attempting to hold states accountable for their actions. Their leaders are not accorded head of state status, and they have no official diplomats. Since even the most generous autonomy statutes don’t confer the protections of statehood, separatist groups are often willing to risk high losses to win independence, fueling conflicts

While interstate conflicts have fallen over the past 50 years, intrastate fighting has soared. These wars disrupt trade and world politics, weaken countries, and raise uncertainty in neighboring states. On the other hand, states have proved themselves adept at using substate actors to further their own interests within foreign countries while evading responsibility for it, from the United States arming the Contras in Nicaragua to Sudan and Chad supporting each other’s rebel movements.

States remain reluctant to break the collective agreement on the legitimacy of sovereignty. They are similarly reticent about adding more states to their exclusive club, in part because it might suggest to dissidents within their own area that renegotiation of borders is possible

it remains difficult to garner international recognition for a new state. That leaves mediators attempting to convince vulnerable groups to settle for something less, in the face of all evidence that a recognized state is their best chance for security and self-determination.

Substate groups are not the only example that the system is failing. Nonstate actors from terrorist groups to multinational corporations have increasing impacts on global politics, and traditional geopolitical theory does not do a great job of dealing with them. Even for bilateral issues, the nation-state is not always the most useful unit of analysis.

Russian elites attempted to tip the scales of U.S. leadership in order to win more modern spoils: unfettered soft power in their region, access to trade, and, notably, the ability to infringe on other countries’ sovereignty without consequences.

the United States—and other nation-states—has little or no control over multinational corporations, with their complex legal structures and tenuous ties to geography

we need to recognize both the rights of substate groups and the legal responsibilities of extrastate entities and create mechanisms in the international system to include them in the halls of power

some of the continent’s more democratic states have failed to end corruption or deliver high levels of economic growth. On the other hand, Ethiopia and Rwanda achieved impressive successes, attracting international praise for reducing poverty and unemployment while consistently securing high economic growth

Ethiopia received almost $5 billion in foreign aid in 2018, while Rwanda received just over $1 billion. The figure for Rwanda is particularly striking when one considers that democratic Malawi, which saw a peaceful transfer of power to the opposition in June 2020, receives considerably less aid per person: $70 for each Malawian in 2018, compared with almost $91 for every Rwandan

recent trends in academic and policy research have played an important role in the rise of authoritarian development. These trends provided donors with an intellectual foundation for investing in countries that, on the basis of their human rights records, the EU and the UK might have been expected to avoid.

researchers suggested that when patrimonial systems are tightly controlled, waste can be minimized and resources channeled toward productive investments to support developmental outcomes

The combination of the rise of China, democratic malaise in the West, and the economic struggles of many African democracies has led citizens and political elites to increasingly question the value of democracy for development

there is some evidence that the empirical data used to identify Ethiopia and Rwanda as success stories may not be as impressive as it was first thought

official figures are part of a broader propaganda campaign designed to sell the regime both at home and abroad

The Tiger economies of East Asia, such as South Korea and Taiwan, entrenched the economic progress they achieved in the 1970s and 1980s by undergoing relatively smooth transitions to more open and inclusive—and hence legitimate and stable—political systems in the 1990s. The prospects for such transitions have always seemed less likely in Ethiopia and Rwanda, where opposition parties are not allowed to operate effectively and limited social and political cohesion remains a cause for concern.

While the jury is still out on Rwanda, the political foundations of economic development in Ethiopia appear to be crumbling. When the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power in 1991, it initially appeared to have broken out of Ethiopia’s damaging cycle of repression and rebellion. Rather than seeking to enforce one ethnic identity over the others, the EPRDF committed to giving the country’s different communities the freedom and self-respect they had always desired. The government enshrined a right to self-determination in the Ethiopian constitution. However, the reality was very different

the ruling party kept itself in power by rigging elections and repressing opponents. As a result, many ethnoregional groups felt that in addition to being politically marginalized, they were denied the opportunity to press their concerns through democratic channels.

although he quickly won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for moving to end a long-running dispute with Eritrea and promising a raft of democratic reforms, Abiy was unable to return Ethiopia to political stability. Most notably, the growing political marginalization of the TPLF left the former dominant clique increasingly frustrated. Tigrayan leaders ultimately quit the government, while Abiy disbanded the EPRDF and replaced it with his own political vehicle, the Prosperity Party. From that moment on, civil conflict between the federal government and the TPLF, whose role was now limited to control over the Tigrayan regional government, became increasingly likely.

Since civil conflict began in November 2020, Ethiopia has had a new set of developmental challenges. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have been displaced, major infrastructure has been destroyed, and Abiy’s reputation as a reformer has been undermined. Moreover, there is a serious risk that even though federal government troops have regained overall control of Tigray, the TPLF will be able to wage guerrilla attacks that will continue to weaken political stability and investor confidence.

Abiy, like his predecessors, will use coercion to maintain political control, building up more problems for the future. Although negotiated and smooth political transitions are not impossible, they are less likely in heavily divided societies and have been rare in sub-Saharan Africa.

Although Ethiopia and Rwanda are often mentioned in the same sentence, Ethiopia is the more important example for the argument that authoritarian government models would serve Africa better than democratic ones. With a small population, a distinctive history, and an intensely authoritarian government, Rwanda is not a promising case from which to generalize. By contrast, Ethiopia, with a large and extremely ethnically diverse population, provides a more compelling example.

The empirical evidence in favor of authoritarian development models in Africa has always been remarkably thin. The vast majority of African states were authoritarian in the 1970s and 1980s, and almost all had poor economic growth. Fast-forward to today, and there are very few authoritarian regimes with the potential to join Ethiopia and Rwanda as notable success stories. Instead, most studies have found that democratic governments perform better when it comes to providing public services or economic growth.

On its own, Rwanda’s small and aid-dependent economy cannot sustain the narrative that authoritarian regimes perform better on development—and if it does not, there is no justification at all for supporting repressive regimes.

“Trump didn’t look up when I came in and I don’t think he looked up the whole time I was giving my spiel about the terrorist attack,”

Trump had decided he wanted a press release and assumed Hill, one of the few women in the room, was there to type it up.

“It’s not like the first time I’ve been mistaken for a secretary. I’ve been mistaken for many things, believe me,”

“A lot of this stuff which is described as policy is really all about personal fighting … And it’s kind of a comedy of errors, with all this intriguing. It’s very reminiscent of Kremlin intrigue and the kind of intrigue around No 10 in the UK – people always trying to do each other in.”

She argues Trump’s desire to forge a personal relationship with Putin is no different from his approach to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, or the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, or Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “He wants to be like he was as a CEO, he has all these discussions with people in private … He has a very informal style with everyone. Putin is similar. He just tries to engage with people in the way that he thinks kind of fits them best,” she said. “Boris is the same. It’s like the guy in the pub. It’s less getting into the weeds of the substance in some sort of formal way, and more two guys talking.

“He wanted to treat Putin the same way he treated Xi or Netanyahu. He wanted to be able to pick up the phone and talk to them.” But Putin could not be treated like the others. The Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian officials or Kremlin intermediaries, and the candidate had appealed to Moscow to interfere in the election by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails. Furthermore, as Hill made clear in her biography of him, Putin has taken all the skills of his long KGB career with him to the Russian presidency. And the Kremlin was constantly outmanoeuvring the White House, arranging events so that Trump would be alone with Putin with only the Russian president’s translator in the room. The state department, which stuck to rigid protocol rules on whose translator should be where and when, was being played.

In her efforts to have US career officials included in Trump’s meetings with Putin, she found herself facing determined resistance from inside the president’s entourage, as they became more and more distrustful of career officials as disloyal potential whistleblowers.

It gave Russians unnecessary leverage

He has torn up one arms control agreement after another with the result that in less than a year’s time, there could be no limits left on the world’s major nuclear arsenals.

This growth in immigration, in turn, is changing the image of Japan from ethnically homogenous to moderately diverse. Among Tokyo residents in their 20s, 1 in 10 is now foreign-born. And Tokyo is no longer an outlier. Much of the migration is happening in small industrial towns around the country, such as Shimukappu in central Hokkaido and Oizumi in Gunma prefecture, where migrant populations make up more than 15 percent of the local population. In the mostly rural Mie prefecture, east of Osaka and Kyoto, foreign migration has reversed years of population loss.

Conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has based his support for the changing immigration policy not on any humanitarian concerns but rather on pragmatic, demographic arguments. By 2050, the world population is expected to increase by 2 billion people, according to the United Nations, but Japan’s population is expected to shrink by at least 20 million. Meanwhile, the fertility rate in Japan has fallen to 1.4 children per woman, while 28 percent of the country is over 65 years old. This means that the country’s population has been dropping by around 400,000 people a year

With unemployment consistently below 3 percent in recent years, even after the pandemic, employers are increasingly raising alarms about labor shortages. Last year, for the first time in Japan’s history, there were more jobs available than the number of job seekers in all of Japan’s 47 prefectures. In a country long known for its restrictive borders, immigration is now seen as the most obvious solution to that demographic challenge.

Japan has developed a unique program of customized immigration, based on specific requests for workers from various countries

Japan custom-orders a labor force in the 14 sectors where they are most urgently needed, including nurses and care workers, shipbuilders, farm workers, car mechanics, and workers in the fishing and construction industries

he said he prefers the casual xenophobia of Japan to the structural racism of America

most of Japanese society supports the changing immigration policy. In a recent survey by Nikkei, almost 70 percent of Japanese said it is “good” to see more foreigners in the country. “The nationalist, anti-immigrant groups here only make up perhaps 1-2 percent of voters. It’s not like Europe. And they have not raised their voices about this so far,”

given that latest bill allows an easier pathway for skilled foreign workers to apply for permanent residency and, eventually, Japanese citizenship—it may do more than simply sustain society. “More workers will try to stay here permanently,” Oguma said. “So even if the bill is not meant to change Japan, it certainly has the potential to change Japanese society in the long term.”

opposition has largely come from Abe’s left, over concerns about a lack of regulation on employers, which they fear could lead to exploitation. Many foreign workers are already forced to work overtime, receive less pay, and risk having their passports and travel documents confiscated by employers

some factories in the mostly rural Gifu prefecture have implemented segregated bathrooms and locker rooms for domestic and foreign workers

This dynamic was common in the immigration debate in Europe and the United States in the 1980s and ’90s, when pro-business conservatives often pushed for more immigrants and guest workers, while labor unions raised concerns for workers’ rights and downward pressure on wages.

The widespread xenophobia in Japan is hardly a myth. In 2010, the U.N.’s human rights experts called out Japan for racism, discrimination, and exploitation of migrant workers. Increased immigration has not changed the country’s notoriously strict asylum policies. In 2018, only 42 asylum-seekers were approved, out of around 10,000 applicants.

bilateral agreements Japan has drafted with countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, which will allow them to send tens of thousands of care workers to Japan annually. Both countries see this as a win-win proposition. Japan gets much-needed labor, the Philippines gets an increase in foreign remittances, and many workers will eventually return, having learned new valuable skills

Sooner or later, Japan may face nationwide debate on what it means to be Japanese in the 21st century. Few countries undergoing demographic shifts are able to avoid these challenges.

When South Korea accepted 500 Yemeni refugees in 2018, it created storms of protests, with street rallies demanding that the Yemenis be sent back, calling them “fake refugees.”

In early June, thousands of people participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Tokyo, which has contributed to a nationwide debate on harassment of migrants and foreigners—as well as race.

“Xenophobic nationalists are generally irrelevant in politics. If there is a backlash, it will most likely begin as a local uprising against Tokyo, a populist revolt against the central government, just as in the EU,” Oguma said. “But I don’t see it happening right now. The far-right here is too atomized, each faction want different things. So I don’t really worry about an organized uprising.”

With massive stimulus spending and a robust, universal health care system, Japan has weathered the pandemic fairly well. Unemployment in April was 2.5 percent. While there has been some anecdotal evidence of increased racist harassment of foreign workers, coupled with an emerging skepticism toward globalization and migration, Japan at the moment is one of the few countries where resentment against immigrants is not the defining feature of politics.

Like all armchair free-marketeers (she has never set up a business) she believes her nation is a blast of deregulation away from American levels of entrepreneurial vim. It isn’t. The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.) Someone who glides over that point is also liable to miss the contrasting appeal to investors of gilts and Treasuries.

the importation of identity politics from a republic with a wholly different racial history

You would think from British public discourse that Earth has two sovereign nations. If the NHS is fairer than the US healthcare model, it is the world’s best. If Elizabeth II was better than Donald Trump, monarchy beats republicanism tout court. People who can’t name a cabinet member in Paris or Berlin (where so much that affects Britain, from migrant flows to energy, is settled) will follow the US midterms in November. The EU is a, perhaps the, regulatory superpower in the world. UK politicos find Iowa more diverting.

It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower.

The Middle East and North Africa are becoming a kind of citizenship frontier: a region where certainty, permanence, and protection of citizenship is being uniquely and dangerously corroded. And Western countries are enabling this dynamic.

The creation of a new, opaquely defined but unambiguously lesser form of citizenship is not a symptom of exploitative labor conditions. It’s a symptom of a regional erosion of citizenship.

Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain all emerged as states containing substantial populations of bedoon—stateless residents who were not recognized as citizens and were, in some cases, denied even birth certificates.

Most significant of all are the post-1948 populations of Palestinians in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, millions of people who were eventually issued identity documents by several governments, such as subvariants of Syrian passports (Syrian travel documents for Palestinian refugees), which looked like and served as passports but faced adamant political insistence from all sides—save Jordan, which eventually largely naturalized Palestinians—that this documentation was not, in fact, citizenship.

that Qatar has redefined the very nature of citizenship—without fanfare, controversy, and with the sole goal of appeasing FIFA nationality regulations—takes this story of temporary citizen soccer players beyond the realm of Gulf labor exploitation

Since the 2010s, the Middle East is emerging as a kind of experimental zone where the erosion of citizenship rights can be trialed. While Qatari soccer players are temporary citizens naturalized with an expiration date—even if the details of when their passports expire is not public—Western countries are increasingly comfortable denaturalizing and revoking the citizenship of their own immigrant citizens of Middle Eastern origin when those citizens are accused of terrorist activity in the region.

some right-populist movements are claiming that Middle Eastern and North African immigrants are somehow not really American, Dutch, or British

The West looks the other way as Gulf states chip away at citizenship norms for expediency, and local governments don’t protest too much when Western governments strand their denaturalized ex-citizens in the region. Especially after the emergence of the Islamic State, with its large contingent of Western, immigrant-origin fighters, the revocation of citizenship became an appealing alternative to long and complicated criminal prosecutions.

Western institutions in the Middle East have led the way in demonstrating that the definition of citizenship can be changed to solve an embarrassing problem, be that one of your citizens swearing allegiance to the Islamic State or the fact that half your national soccer team is foreign

The erasure of citizenship rights in these cases can be tolerated by international legal regimes because they are considered exceptional. It’s just for some athletes. It’s just for terrorists. But it doesn’t stay that way: The model, once implemented, is attractive for other uses.

conditional citizenship, a term coined by the American author Laila Lalami to describe people who, through a web of big and small prejudices and bureaucratic procedures, have “rights the state finds expendable.”