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jlessner

In Cold Political Terms, Far Right and French President Both Gain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rench-president-both-gain.html

french president history politics culture

shared by jlessner on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Amid the horrors of the last week, François Hollande is widely judged to have kept his calm, acted decisively and spoken the words of condemnation, defiance and unity expected of a French president, who by tradition is called on to embody the nation.
  • But no one expects this mood of solidarity to last very long; indeed, the attacks have already sharpened his clash with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Mr. Hollande remains the most unpopular French president since World War II. He is troubled by a weak economy, high unemployment and an underlying atmosphere of anxiety and even fear, among both Muslims and Jews, about the impact of homegrown Islamic radicalism.
  • “Hollande has been extremely good in this crisis, showing calm and self-control, and using all the right words,” said Alain Frachon, an editorial writer for Le Monde. “If we do a cold, cynical political analysis, he did rather well. Afterwards, of course, all these questions will be raised about security failures and the future.”
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  • The homegrown terrorism here, with its apparent links to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, will also be used by other far-right, nationalist and anti-immigration movements in Europe, from the United Kingdom Independence Party to the Sweden Democrats and Germany’s Pegida — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. That is another reason so many European leaders from the mainstream parties of the center right and center left, from Angela Merkel of Germany to David Cameron of Britain and Mariano Rajoy of Spain, came to show their own solidarity with France and Mr. Hollande.Continue reading the main story Invitees also included the leaders of all the main French political par
Javier E

'A very dangerous epoch': historians try to make sense of Covid | World news | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...istorians-try-make-sense-covid

climate change environment international history culture

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • “I remember him saying: ‘History will be written Before Covid and After Covid.’ And I thought, he’s got something here. It began to sink in that this was different from anything I’ve ever encountered in my 30-year career at the British Library, and that we should do something about it.”
  • For the past year, that has meant gathering interviews with thousands of NHS workers, archiving websites, recording TV and radio channels, and collecting poetry and audio diaries, sometimes with partner organisations. It will build, he hopes, into a national archive of Covid-19 reminiscences, and an “amazing resource” for future researchers.
  • It is not just the Covid pandemic that can make these feel like unusually significant times. Populism, Trump’s rise and (perhaps) fall, Brexit, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo protests, mass movement of refugees, the increased might of both China and India and many other issues have contributed to a sense of humanity having reached a historic moment, all while the climate crisis rages with ever more urgency.
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  • “A lot of people are arguing that these kinds of zoonotic pandemics [originating in other species] are expressive of biodiversity ecosystems coming under uncontrollable stress. “And so the question is whether in 100 years, people will look back and see this as being the first of a number of epidemics [caused by] humanity crashing into ecosystems that previously humans were not part of. “I suspect that they will, and I feel quite pessimistic about that.
  • Holland – who has written widely about the ancient world, Rome and the influence of Christianity – believes social movements in the west such as BLM are part of a cultural and moral upheaval that began in the 1960s, and which he sees as being as significant as the Protestant Reformation.
  • Describing herself as “a global historian who thinks in big waves”, Damodaran says what we are living through is “clearly a period of heightened uncertainty where the old ideologies no longer work” – naming liberalism, colonialism and the free market economy.
  • In specific local contexts around the world, she says, small- and large-scale tipping points are being reached, all of which add up to a global sense of crisis, the impact of which, particularly on the environment, is being felt even by those in more prosperous and comfortable societies.
  • “There is a price we are paying for intensive farming practices. Covid has not just suddenly sprung upon us. You just have to be a historian to understand this moment.”
  • But the problem is not new, she says: “There’s this hubris which comes out of the Enlightenment of the 18th century, that humans in some senses can dominate nature” – and we should not claim to be surprised.
  • “Everything that is going on at the moment, it seems to me, all links together.”
  • History has seen great civilisations in China, India and across Eurasia, “but they’ve not caused these crises that we are living through now, and nor has the African world. “You know what happened? Roughly 500 years ago, these small, aggressive maritime powers on the shores of Europe went across the world with their technology and created their empires by sea.
  • Other societies may now be enthusiastic participants, but it was not they who created western industrial capitalism, he argues.
  • His most recent book is about China, and he argues that for all that country’s environmental problems, the scale of the climate crisis is well understood in Beijing given the risks to its society from food and water insecurity. “Everything comes back to the climate crisis, because everything is affected by it – the political order, social order, food, water, the migration of people. So we are in a very, very dangerous epoch.”
  • In that sense, is not history – and the significance or otherwise of this time – in our own hands? “It is totally in our hands,” says Wood
  • “And if you were going to be really hopeful, you’d say this is the moment when we are going to wake up and realise that our true interests on the planet are served by cooperating.
  • “These are things that are self-evident, there’s no denying them. What we will do about it is the imponderable.”
Javier E

Hollande Creates a French Prosecutor for Fraud and Vows to End Tax Havens - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hen-stance-on-tax-evasion.html

tax haven france fraud luxembourg austria europe financial

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • President François Hollande on Wednesday announced the creation of a position of special prosecutor to pursue cases of corruption and tax fraud, and vowed to eradicate tax havens “in Europe and the world.”
  • one of those tax havens, Luxembourg, announced that it would bow to pressure from its European allies and begin forwarding the details of its foreign clients’ accounts to their home governments. Luxembourg, with only half a million people and a banking sector more than 20 times the size of its gross domestic product, is one of Europe’s largest financial centers and has been compared to Cyprus
  • Luxembourg’s announcement came a day after five of the biggest European countries — Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — agreed to exchange banking data and create their own automatic tax data exchange. That mechanism would be modeled on the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, passed by Congress in 2010 to track the overseas assets of Americans who might be dodging taxes.
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  • they urged the European Union commissioner responsible for taxation, Algirdas Semeta, to work to get all 27 members of the European Union to sign up.
  • Mr. Cahuzac was fired and expelled from the party, but that the minister in charge of fighting tax fraud had committed it himself has been deeply damaging.
  • the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists announced that it had obtained confidential information relating to tens of thousands of offshore bank accounts and shell companies. The leaked data, which centered on the Caribbean and especially the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, embarrassed European governments, including Luxembourg, by showing how wealthy citizens routinely hide assets, sometimes illegally, and avoid paying taxes by setting up offshore companies.
  • In addition to creating the prosecutor position, he ordered cabinet ministers to disclose their finances and asked legislators to do the same. He also promised to create an independent authority to monitor the assets and possible conflicts of interest of senior officials and legislators.
  • The journalist consortium, a project of the Center for Public Integrity, disclosed confidential information on more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts and nearly 130,000 individuals and agents, including 4,000 Americans. But the consortium has refused requests by governments for access to the files, saying that it is not an arm of law enforcement.
  • France’s resilience to external shocks is “diminishing” and its medium-term growth prospects are “increasingly hampered by long-standing imbalances,” the report said, noting that France’s share of European Union exports declined by 11.2 percent from 2006 to 2011, while rising labor costs have damaged competitiveness.
  • The move by Luxembourg toward disclosure leaves Austria as the lone holdout in the European Union. It pays a 35 percent withholding tax on the interest income of accounts held by foreigners in Austrian banks to their country of residence, but refuses to disclose the account holders’ identities.
maddieireland334

In France, government vows 'no retreat' from labor reforms amid growing unrest - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-b2a3-0929b622f1d2_story.html

France Government Policy Hollande Reforms

shared by maddieireland334 on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • France’s government vowed “no retreat” from planned labor law reforms Thursday even as unions called for wider strikes that have choked off fuel supplies and created chaos on highways blocked by barricades of burning tires.
  • Union members overwhelmingly oppose President François Hollande’s new labor law, which would relax some of France’s famous worker protections — among the strictest in the world — in order to curb unemployment and stimulate economic growth.
  • The government has offered no hint of compromise as the country struggles with unemployment over 10 percent and near historical highs.
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  • Similar waves of protests in the past successfully halted a government plan to cut the French pension system in an effort to curb its spending deficit.
  • In addition to fuel shortages, which that have created huge lines at gas stations, the unions have also called for nationwide strikes in the public transportation sector, including air traffic controllers and at many of the 19 nuclear plants that provide electricity for much of the country.
  • With approval ratings below 20 percent, Hollande is the least popular president in modern French history.
  • The tumult raises the possibility that Hollande may not be chosen to run for re-election in 2017, which would be the first time in more than 50 years that a first-term incumbent was not tapped to pursue a second term.
  • Protests could grow until then, when France will have already begun hosting the Euro 2016 soccer tournament.
  • Many are concerned that the disruptions to fuel supplies — and possibly even electricity — could affect the tournament, a major sporting event with millions of viewers that will place France, yet again, in the international spotlight.
Javier E

A Proud Nation Ponders How to Halt Its Slow Decline - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-to-halt-its-slow-decline.html

France economy

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Today, however, Europe is talking about “the French question”: can the Socialist government of President François Hollande pull France out of its slow decline and prevent it from slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier?
  • At stake is whether a social democratic system that for decades prided itself on being the model for providing a stable and high standard of living for its citizens can survive the combination of globalization, an aging population and the acute fiscal shocks of recent years.
  • France’s friends, Germany in particular, fear that Mr. Hollande may simply lack the political courage to confront his allies and make the necessary decisions.
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  • Today, at Nanterre, students worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits are demanding that nothing change at all.
  • as the European economy slowly mends, the French temptation will be to hope that modest economic growth will again mask, like a tranquilizer, the underlying problems.
  • The French are justifiably proud of their social model. Health care and pensions are good, many French retire at 60 or younger, five or six weeks of vacation every summer is the norm, and workers with full-time jobs have a 35-hour week and significant protections against layoffs and firings.
  • the question is not whether the French social model is a good one, but whether the French can continue to afford it. Based on current trends, the answer is clearly no, not without significant structural changes — in pensions, in taxes, in social benefits, in work rules and in expectations.
  • the challenge in France seems especially hard, in part because of the nation’s amour-propre and self-image as a European leader and global power, and in part because French life is so comfortable for many and the day of reckoning still seems far enough away, especially to the country’s small but powerful unions.
  • “The young people march now to reject all reforms,” he said. “We see no alternatives. We’re a generation without bearings.”
  • The Socialists have become a conservative party, desperately trying to preserve the victories of the last century.
  • There is nonetheless an underlying understanding that there will be little lasting gain without structural changes to the state-heavy French economy. The warning signs are everywhere: French unemployment and youth unemployment are at record levels; growth is slow compared with Germany, Britain, the United States or Asia; government spending represents nearly 57 percent of gross domestic product, the highest in the euro zone, and is 11 percentage points higher than Germany. The government employs 90 civil servants per 1,000 residents, compared with 50 in Germany.
  • Hourly wage costs are high and social spending represents 32 percent of G.D.P., highest among the industrialized countries; real wage increases outpace productivity growth; national debt is more than 90 percent of G.D.P.
  • In the World Bank’s ranking of “ease of doing business,” France ranks 34th, compared with 7th for Britain and 20th for Germany.
  • Last year, France was ranked 28th out of the 60 most competitive economies in the world, according to the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. The United States was first. Even China, at 21, and Japan, at 24, outranked France.
  • About 82 percent of the new jobs created last year were temporary contracts, up from 70 percent only five years ago, not the kind of full-time work that opens the door to the French middle class. That keeps nearly an entire generation living precariously, no matter how hard people study or work.
  • France is the world’s fifth-largest economy, with strong traditions in management, science and innovation.
  • The country retains plenty of strengths.
  • The gap between rich and poor is narrower in France than in most Western countries, although it is growing.
  • When the French work, they work hard; labor productivity, perhaps the single most important indicator of an economy’s potential, is still relatively high, if dropping. But with long holidays and the 35-hour week, the French work fewer hours than most competitors, putting an extra strain on corporations and the economy.
  • Large French companies compete globally; there are more French companies in the Fortune 500 than any other European country. But the bulk of their employees are abroad, and there are few of the midsize companies that are the backbone of Germany.
  • Ninety percent of French companies have 10 or fewer employees and fear expansion because of extra tax burdens and strict labor regulations.
  • In poll after poll, the French insist that they want renovation and modernization, so long as it does not touch them. That is always the political challenge, and Mr. Hollande’s conservative predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, is considered to have failed in his promise to make serious structural changes.
  • One of Mr. Sarkozy’s advisers, Alain Minc, who tried to get him interested in Germany’s social market revisions, once admitted that Mr. Sarkozy was simply afraid to confront the unions and the social uproar that real change would provoke.
  • There is a broad consensus that real social and structural renovation can be carried out only by the left. But that can happen only if Mr. Hollande, who has a legislative majority, is willing to confront his own party in the name of the future, as the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder did a decade ago with a series of legal modifications that now get much of the credit for Germany’s revival.
julia rhodes

France Overhauls Its Government After Voters Rebuke Socialists - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-voters-rebuke-socialists.html

france government voters history politics policy

shared by julia rhodes on 01 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • President François Hollande of France announced the formation of a new government on Monday, after broad losses by his Socialist Party in recent nationwide city elections that were widely seen as a rebuke to the deeply unpopular president.
  • Mr. Hollande replaced Mr. Ayrault with Manuel Valls, currently the interior minister, who has made a name for himself as a stern proponent of law and order in a political party that is sometimes accused of leniency or naïveté.
  • “The message you’ve sent me, I’ve received it personally,” Mr. Hollande said in a televised address. He promised a “combat government” that would be charged with “giving strength back to the economy,” and announced reductions in corporate and payroll taxes.
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  • right, including traditional bastions like Limoges, which the left had held since 1912, and several other midsize cities.
  • In the elections on Sunday, the Socialist Party lost 155 cities to parties on the
  • “This vote, as much on a local level as on the national level, is a defeat for the government and the majority,” Mr. Ayrault said in an uncharacteristically frank statement on Sunday. “I think we have not done enough to explain that the recovery efforts undertaken since 2012 were essential for the future of our country.”
  • Voter abstention, at close to 40 percent, reached the highest rate on record. Opinion polling suggested a broad rejection of the French ruling elite, which is increasingly viewed as detached from the concerns of the population it governs.
  • One bright spot for the Socialist Party was in Paris, where its candidate, Anne Hidalgo, was elected the first female mayor.
  • speedy return to economic prosperity and reinforced social protections. But he quickly lowered his ambitions and said he had underestimated the dire state of France’s public finances. More recently, he was unable to make good on a pledge to stop the rise in unemployment by the end of 2013.
  • Mr. Ayrault, the outgoing prime minister, was viewed by voters and commentators alike as a bit bland and lacking energy. By contrast, Mr. Valls is intense and sometimes fiery. There has been little indication, however, that the change in leadership will be much more than cosmetic, and most policies are expected to remain the same, with the exception of the future tax cuts announced Monday. Other members of the new government have yet to be announced.
qkirkpatrick

BBC News - France to protect all religions, vows Francois Hollande - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-30829733

religion muslim France culture politics

shared by qkirkpatrick on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • French President Francois Hollande has vowed that his country will protect all religions, saying that Muslims are the main victims of fanaticism.
  • Speaking at the Arab World Institute, he said Islam was compatible with democracy and thanked Arabs for their solidarity over terrorism in Paris.
  • There are also funerals taking place for Charlie Hebdo columnist Elsa Cayat and Franck Brinsolaro, a policeman assigned to guard Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier.
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  • Mr Hollande said that radical Islam had fed off contradictions, poverty, inequality and conflict, and that "it is Muslims who are the first victims of fanaticism, fundamentalism and intolerance".
  • But some Muslims were angered by the edition and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu condemned it on Thursday as an "open provocation".
  • "Freedom of the press does not mean freedom to insult," said Mr Davutoglu, who on Sunday attended a Paris march in memory of the victims of last week's attacks.
  • qkirkpatrick on 15 Jan 15
     
    French President vowed to protect all religions in France.
katyshannon

Leaders due in Paris for COP21 climate change meeting - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...op21-climate-change-conference

leaders paris cops climate change meeting cnn politics US riots demonstrations

shared by katyshannon on 30 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • World leaders arrived in Paris on Sunday for potentially historic climate talks that will play out amid security concerns driven by the November 13 terror attacks in France.
  • Frustrations over restrictions on protests put in place following the attacks gave rise to what French President Francois Hollande called "scandalous" scuffles between protesters and police at the Place de Republique, the site of a memorial to victims.French authorities have clamped down on public demonstrations in the aftermath of the deadly attacks, blocking environmental campaigners' plans for a big march on Sunday.
  • Police arrested more than 200 people Sunday following flare-ups in which protesters pelted police with shoes, bottles and even candles police said were taken from memorials.
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  • Riot police responded with tear gas.Hollande said authorities knew "troubling elements" would arrive in Paris for the talks, and said that was why "these sorts of assemblies were banned and some were ordered to stay home."
  • Despite those tensions, demonstrators were largely peaceful ahead of the crucial climate change session. In place of the big march, protesters lined up thousands of shoes representing climate change activists.
  • The talks will begin in earnest on Monday. Nearly 150 world leaders are expected attend the United Nations climate change summit, called with the aim of reaching a landmark global deal on limiting greenhouse gas emissions.The leaders of the United States, China and India -- the world's top three carbon-emitting countries -- are among those scheduled to attend the opening day of the event, known as COP21.
Javier E

Fareed Zakaria on the Age of Revolutions, the Power of Ideas, and the Rewards of Intell... - 0 views

conversationswithtyler.com/...fareed-zakaria

ideas intellectual curiosity conversation cowen china india devlopment liberal democracy west revolution

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • ZAKARIA: Yes. I think I’ve always been intellectually very curious. I don’t think I’m the smartest person in the world, but I am very intellectually curious. I get fascinated by ideas and why things are some way. Even when I was very young, I remember I would read much more broadly than my peers.
  • I think I looked this up once, but Henry Kissinger’s memoirs came out when I was 14, I think. I remember reading them because I remember my mom — at that point, she was working at the Times of India. They excerpted it. I remember telling her that they had chosen some of the wrong excerpts, that there were other parts that would have been better. I must have read enough of it to have had an opinion.
  • The Bengali intelligentsia was the great intelligentsia of India, probably the most literate, the most learned. I think it’s because they’re very clever. One of the things I’ve always noticed is that people who are very clever political elites tend to think that they should run the economy because they can do it better than the market.
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  • a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.
  • Milton Friedman used to say that there are two groups of people who don’t like the free market. Academics, intellectuals because they think they can do it better than the market, and businessmen because they don’t like competition. What they really want — this is a variation of the Peter Thiel argument — what they all really want is to be monopolists. That former part is, I think, what explains the Bengali intellectuals.
  • I think that the reality is, the market is much more powerful than they are in these areas. To give you one simple example, they decided, “Okay, we need to be making high-end chips.” Who do they bet on? They bet on Intel, a company that has failed miserably to compete with TSMC, the great Taiwanese chip manufacturer. Intel is now getting multi-billion-dollar grants from the United States government, from the European Union, because it fills all the categories that you’re looking for: big company, stable and well-run, in some sense, can guarantee a lot of jobs.
  • But of course, the reality is that chip making is so complicated
  • Who knew that, actually, it’s Nvidia, whose chips turned out to be designed for gaming, turned out to be ideal for artificial intelligence? That’s a perfect example of how the Hayekian market signals that come bottom-up are much more powerful than a political elite who tries to tell you what it is.
  • COWEN: What did you learn from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer?
  • One was a reverence for tradition, and in particular, I loved the hymnal. I think Britain’s great contribution to music is religious music. It doesn’t have anything to compete with the Germans and the Italians in opera and things like that. Religious music, I think the Brits and the English have done particularly well.
  • The second thing I would say is an admiration for Christianity for its extraordinary emphasis on being nice to people who have not been lucky in life. I would say that’s, to me, the central message of Christianity that I take, certainly from the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s imbued through the Book of Common Prayer: to be nice to the people who have been less fortunate than you. Be nice to poor people. Recognize that in God’s kingdom, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
  • There is an enormous emphasis on the idea that those things that make you powerful in this world are not the things that really matter, that your dignity as a human being doesn’t come from that. I think that’s a very powerful idea. It’s a very revolutionary idea
  • Tom Holland has a very good book about this. He’s a wonderful historian in Britain. I think it’s called Dominion.
  • He points out what a revolutionary idea this was. It completely upended the Roman values, which were very much, the first shall be first. The powerful and the rich are the ones to be valued. He points out, here is this Jewish preacher coming out of the Middle East saying, “No, the first shall be last, the last shall be first in the kingdom of heaven.”
  • COWEN: I went to Amritsar the year before, and it was one of the most magical feelings I’ve ever had in any place. I’m still not sure what exactly I can trace it to — I am not a Sikh, of course. But what, for you, accounts for the strong, powerful, wondrous feeling one gets from that place?
  • I think there’s something about it architecturally, which is that there is a serenity about it. Sometimes you can find Hindu temples that are very elaborate. Sikhism is a kind of offshoot of Hinduism. The Hindu temples can be very elaborate, but very elaborate and ornate. This somehow has a simplicity to it. When you add to that the water — I’ve always thought that water adds an enormously calming effect
  • Hindi and Urdu are two Indian languages, very related. They both have roughly the same grammatical structure, but then Hindi derives its vocabulary entirely from Sanskrit, or almost entirely from Sanskrit, and Urdu derives its vocabulary almost entirely from Persian. Urdu is a language of Indian Muslims and is the official language for Pakistan. It’s a beautiful language, very lyrical, very much influenced by that Persian literary sensibility.
  • If you’re speaking one of the languages, there’s a way to alternate between both, which a lot of Indian politicians used to do as a way of signaling a broad embrace of both the Hindu and the Muslim communities. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, used to often do that. He would say, “I am delighted to be coming here to your home.” He’d repeat the word home, first in Urdu, then in Hindi, so that in effect, both constituencies were covered.
  • Modi, by contrast, India’s current prime minister, is a great Hindu nationalist. He takes pains almost never to use an Urdu word when he speaks. He speaks in a kind of highly Sanskritized Hindi that most Indians actually find hard to understand because the everyday language, Bollywood Hindi, is a mixture of Hindi words and Urdu words
  • I think the partition of India was a complete travesty. It was premised on this notion of religious nationalism. It was horrendously executed. The person who drew the lines, a man named Radcliffe, had never been to India. He’d never been east of the Suez and was given this task, and he did it in a month or two, probably caused a million-and-a-half to two million lives lost, maybe 10 million people displaced. It broke that wonderfully diverse, syncretic aspect of India.
  • If you look at cities like Delhi and Lahore, what was beautiful about them is that they mix together all the influences of India: Hindu, Muslim, Punjabi, Sindhi. Now what you have is much more bifurcated. If you go to Lahore, Lahore is a Muslim city in Pakistan, and it has a Punjabi influence. Delhi has become, essentially, much more Indian and Hindu and has lost that Muslim influence. To me, as somebody who really loves cosmopolitanism and diversity, it’s sad to see that. It’s almost like you’ve lost something that really made these places wonderfully rich.
  • I feel the same way when you read about the history of Europe. You think of a place like Vienna, which, in its most dazzling moment, was dazzling precisely because it was this polyglot population of people coming from all over the Habsburg Empire. A large segment of it was Jewish, and it had, as a result — think about Freud and Klimt and the music that came out of there, and the architecture that came out at the turn of the 19th century. And it’s all gone. It’s like, at this point, a somewhat beautiful but slightly dull Austrian city.
  • I remember once being asked when I was a graduate student at Harvard — Tony Lake was then national security adviser, and his office called and said — I’d written something in the New York Times, I think — “Mr. Lake would like you to come to the White House to brief him.”
  • I think, in a sense, Islam fit in within that tapestry very easily, and it’s been around for a while. When people talk about cleansing India, Hindu nationals talk about cleansing India of foreign influences. Islam has been in India since the 11th century, so it’s been around for a long time
  • I was amazed that America — it wasn’t America; it was where I was at Yale and Harvard and all that — that nobody cared where I came from. Nobody cared.
  • the syncretic nature of India, that India has always been diverse. Hinduism is very tolerant. It’s a kind of unusual religion in that you can believe in one god and be Hindu. You can believe in 300. You can be vegetarian and believe that’s a religious dictate. You can be nonvegetarian and believe that that’s completely compatible with your religion. It’s always embraced almost every variant and variation.
  • I walked in and there were five people around the table: Tony Lake; Deputy National Security Advisor Sandy Berger; George Stephanopoulos, who was then director of communications at the White House; Joe Nye, who was a senior professor at Harvard; one other person; and myself. And I kept thinking to myself, “Are they going to realize at some point that I’m not an American citizen? They’re asking me for my advice on what America should do, and I am on a student visa.” And of course, nobody ever did, which is one of the great glories of America.
  • My thesis topic was, I tried to answer the question, when countries rise in great power, when they rise economically, they become great powers because they quickly translate that economic power into diplomatic and military power. What explains the principal exception in modern history, which is the United States?
  • My simple answer was that the United States was a very unusual creature in the modern world. It was a very strong nation with a very weak state. The federal government in the United States did not have the capacity to extract the resources from the society at large because you didn’t have income taxes in those days.
  • COWEN: What put you off academia? And this was for the better, in my view.
  • ZAKARIA: I think two things. One, I could see that political science was moving away from the political science that I loved, which was a broad discipline rooted in the social sciences but also rooted in the humanities, which was rigorous, structural, historical comparisons. Looking at different countries, trying to understand why there were differences.
  • It was moving much more toward a huge emphasis on things like rational choice, on game theory There was an economist envy. Just as economists have math envy, political scientists have economist envy. It was moving in that direction
  • COWEN: After 9/11 in 2001, you wrote a famous essay for Newsweek, “Why Do They Hate Us?” You talked about the rulers, failed ideas, religion. If you were to revise or rethink that piece today, how would you change it? Because we have 23 more years of data, right?
  • He had a routine, which is, he’d get up about 6:00 a.m. He’d go down to the basement of his townhouse, and at 6:30, he would start writing or working on whatever his next big research project was. He’d do that, uninterrupted, for three hours at least, sometimes four. Then, at about 9:30, 10:00, he would take the subway to Harvard.
  • His point was, you got to start the day by doing the important work of academia, which is producing knowledge. All the rest of it — teaching, committee meetings, all that — you can do later. He was so disciplined about that, that every five years or so, he put out another major piece of work, another major book
  • I looked at that, and I said to myself, I do not have the self-discipline to perform at that level. I need to go into something that has deadlines,
  • It’s all within you, and you have to be able to generate ideas from that lonely space. I’ve always found that hard. For me, writing books is the hardest thing I do. I feel like I have to do it because I feel as though everything else is trivia — the television, column, everything else.
  • The second piece of it was actually very much related to Huntington. Sam Huntington was quite an extraordinary character, probably the most important social scientist in the second half of the 20th century. Huge contributions to several fields of political science. He lived next to me
  • ZAKARIA: Yes. Not very much, honestly. The central point I was making in that essay was that if you look at the Arab world, it is the principal outlier in the modern era, where it has undergone almost no political modernization.
  • The Arab world had remained absolutely static. My argument was that it was largely because of the curse of oil and oil wealth, which had impeded modernization. But along with that, because of that failed modernization, they had developed this reactionary ideology of Islam, which said the answer is to go further back, not to go forward. “Islam is the solution,” was the cry of the Islamic fundamentalists in the 1970s.
  • COWEN: I’m struck that this year, both you and Ruchir Sharma have books coming out — again, Fareed’s book is Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present — that I would describe broadly as classically liberal. Do you think classical liberalism is making a comeback
  • the reason these books are coming out — and certainly, mine, as you know, is centrally occupied with the problem that there’s a great danger that we are going to lose this enormous, probably the most important thing that’s happened in the last 500, 600 years in human history, this movement that has allowed for the creation of modern liberal democratic societies with somewhat market economies.
  • If you look at the graph of income, of GDP, per capita GDP, it’s like a straight line. There’s no improvement until you get to about, roughly speaking, the 17th, 18th century in Europe, and then you see a sharp uptick. You see this extraordinary rise, and that coincides with the rise of science and intellectual curiosity and the scientific method, and the industrial revolution after that. All that was a product of this great burst of liberal Enlightenment thinking in the West.
  • If you think about what we’ve gone through in the last 30 years — and this is really the central argument in my book — massive expansion of globalization, massive expansion of information technology so that it has completely upended the old economy. All of this happening, and people are overwhelmed, and they search in that age of anxiety. They search for a solution, and the easy solutions are the ones offered by the populists.
  • They’re deeply anti-liberal, illiberal. So, I worry that, actually, if we don’t cherish what we have, we’ll lose what has been one of the great, great periods of progress in human history.
  • COWEN: Why does your book cover the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age? ZAKARIA: The Dutch are the first modern country. If you think about politics before that — certainly with the exception of ancient Greece and Rome — in modern history, the Dutch invent modern politics and economics. They invent modern politics in the sense that it’s the first time politics is not about courts and kings. It is about a merchant republic with powerful factions and interest groups and political parties, or the precursor to political parties.
  • It’s the beginning of modern economics because it’s economics based not simply on land and agriculture, but on the famous thing that John Locke talked about, which is mixing human beings’ labor with the land. The Dutch literally do this when they reclaim land from the sea and find ways to manage it, and then invent tall ships, which is, in some ways, one of the first great technological revolutions that has a direct economic impact.
  • You put all that together, and the Dutch — they become the richest country in the world, and they become the leading technological power in the world. It was very important to me to start the story — because they are really the beginnings of modern liberalism
  • COWEN: Circa 1800, how large were the Chinese and Indian economies?
  • Circa 1800, the Chinese and Indian economies are the two largest economies in the world, and people have taken this to mean, oh, the West had a temporary spurt because of colonies and cheap energy, and that the Chinese and Indians are just coming back to where they were.
  • First of all, the statistic is misleading because in those days, GDP was simply measured by using population. All society was agricultural. The more people you had, the larger your GDP. It was meaningless because the state could not extract that GDP in any meaningful way, and it’s meaningless because it doesn’t measure progress. It doesn’t measure per capita GDP growth, which is the most important thing to look at.
  • If you look at per capita GDP growth from 1350 to 1950, for 600 years, India and China have basically no movement. It’s about $600 in 1350 and $600 in 1950. The West, by comparison, moves up 600 percent in that period. It’s roughly $500 per capita GDP to roughly $5,000 per capita GDP.
  • You can also look at all kinds of other measures. You can look at diet. There are economic historians who’ve done this very well, and people in England were eating four to five times as much grain and protein as people in China and India. You can look at the extraordinary flourishing of science and engineering. You can look at the rise of the great universities. It’s all happening in the West.
  • The reason this is important is, people need to understand the rise of the West has been a very profound, deep-rooted historical phenomenon that began sometime in the 15th century. The fact that we’re moving out of that phase is a big, big deal. This is not a momentary blip. This is a huge train. The West define modernity. Even when countries try to be modern, they are in some way becoming Western because there is no path we know of to modernity without that.
  • One other way of just thinking about how silly that statistic is: in pure GDP terms, China had a larger GDP than Britain in 1900. Now, look at Britain in 1900: the most advanced industrial society in the world, ruling one-quarter of the world, largest navy in the world, was able to humiliate China by using a small fraction of its military power during the opium era. That’s what tells you that number is really meaningless. The West has been significantly more advanced than the rest of the world since the 16th century at least.
Javier E

François Hollande's Apology Tour-and What Americans Should Learn From It | Th... - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...what-americans-should-learn-it

france history responsibility apology us

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Not only has France apologized for some past actions, it has also stopped boasting of others. in 2005, the government of Jacques Chirac quietly but firmly refused to mark in any but the most restrained way the bicentennial of the Battle of Austerlitz—arguably, the greatest French military victory of all time, carried out by Napoleon Bonaparte against Austria and Russia. Modern France, it was explained, had no business celebrating a bloodbath carried out by a repressive, undemocratic ruler as part of a campaign of naked imperial expansionism.
  • in the past quarter-century, conservatives have successfully cast any attempt to discuss the country’s historical record impartially in the political realm as a species of heresy—“blaming America first,” as Jeanne Kirkpatrick put it as far back as 1984. A turning point of sorts came in 1994, when the Smithsonian Institution planned an exhibit of the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, accompanied by material that highlighted the human toll of the bombing,  inviting debate on its morality.  The outcry from conservatives and veterans groups was deafening, and few politicians dared to defend the Smithsonian, which eventually canceled the exhibit.
  • It would be wrong to say that the French have moved away from sentiments of patriotism and national pride. But the country’s cultural and political elites now tend, overwhelmingly, to phrase their patriotism in terms of “ideals” and “values” to which, they readily admit, the country has often failed to live up.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Both of France’s major political parties, Hollande’s Socialists and Sarkozy’s UMP, embrace this stance of “openness” to the world (as the political scientist Sophie Meunier phrases it). It only finds real opposition among the anti-capitalist radicals of the far left, and the reactionary nationalists of the far right. And openness to the world tends to prompt the rejection of narrowly chauvinist national pride, and a readiness to admit one’s own country’s faults and crimes.
  • anyone who strikes an overly contentious nationalist pose in French politics risks association with the far-right National Front, whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has predictably denounced Hollande, declaring that only God has the authority to recognize French guilt or innocence.
  • In France, in short, apologizing for your country can be good politics. It is in America where being a politician means never being able to say you’re sorry.
johnsonle1

Hollande: Trump administration is 'encouraging extremism' | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-against-trump-lisbon-meeting

world news policy

shared by johnsonle1 on 29 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • johnsonle1 on 29 Jan 17
     
    Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni said: "We have a message of confidence and hope regarding what we are and what the European Union has achieved over the past 30 years. It is not necessary that 2017 will be a year of crisis for the EU."
grayton downing

BBC News - Four French hostages freed in Niger - President Hollande - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-africa-24735293

french hostages Niger

shared by grayton downing on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Four French hostages kidnapped in Niger in 2010 have been released, France's President Hollande has announced.
  • "I have some good news. I just learned from Niger's president that our four hostages in the Sahel, the Arlit hostages, have been released."
  • They were all employees at the uranium mine run by the French nuclear company Areva.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "We can't say that they're in great health but their health is fine
  • During the military campaign, French troops forced Islamists out of northern Mali, killing or scattering them across the vast Sahel region.
  • Islamist militants claimed responsibility for the attack.
qkirkpatrick

Ratings of Muslims rise in France after Charlie Hebdo, just as in U.S. after 9/11 | Pew... - 0 views

www.pewresearch.org/...gs-of-muslims-in-france-and-us

politics history culture muslims religion

shared by qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The attack on the Paris offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo in January was the most devastating terrorist incident in France since the Algerian War more than five decades ago
  • In the aftermath, there has been considerable debate in France about the extent of radicalization among the country’s nearly 5 million Muslim
  • attitudes toward Muslims have become slightly more positive over the past year
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • A new Pew Research Center survey finds that 76% in France say they have a favorable view of Muslims living in their country, similar to the 72% registered in 2014.
  • The pattern is similar to what we found in the U.S. following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Favorable views of Muslim Americans rose from 45% in March 2001 to 59% in November of that year. The increase took place across partisan and ideological groups, with the biggest improvement occurring among conservative Republicans.
  • To many, these changes may seem counterintuitive, especially since much social science research suggests that the more people feel threatened by a minority group, the more likely they are to have negative attitudes toward that group.
  • However, following the attacks in both countries there were widespread calls for national unity, and important statements by national leaders (including presidents Bush and Hollande) making it clear that violent extremists do not represent Islam
  • It is also worth noting that favorable ratings of Muslim Americans declined slightly following the post-9/11 bounce. By 2007, just 53% of Americans expressed a positive view, down 6 percentage points from the November 2001 survey though still significantly higher than the 45% in the March 2001 poll.
  • qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15
     
    Ratings of Muslims in France go up after attack
jlessner

French Premier Declares 'War' on Radical Islam as Paris Girds for Rally - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...paris-terrorist-attacks.html

french war radical islam paris rally

shared by jlessner on 10 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • PARIS — Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared Saturday that France was at war with radical Islam after the harrowing sieges that led to the deaths of three gunmen and four hostages the day before. New details emerged about the bloody final confrontations, and security forces remained on high alert.
  • It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,”
  • The French government said it would put 500 additional troops on the streets over the weekend amid preparations for a giant unity rally in Paris on Sunday.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The crisis and its aftermath presented a major challenge to President François Hollande and his government, which are facing deep religious and cultural rifts in a nation with a rapidly growing Muslim population while simultaneously coping with the security threats stemming from Islamic extremists. Large numbers of French citizens have been traveling to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
  • Mr. Hollande, appealing for unity, has warned against seeing Muslims as the enemy, and Mr. Valls called again on Saturday for citizens to join the rally planned for Sunday.
sarahbalick

France's Fabius leaves office, wider reshuffle due | Reuters - 0 views

in.reuters.com/...france-politics-idINKCN0VJ144

france leaves office

shared by sarahbalick on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • France's Fabius leaves office, wider reshuffle due
  • French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced on Wednesday he was leaving the government ahead of a wider reshuffle that President Francois Hollande hopes can help bolster his chances for the 2017 presidential elections.
  • Fabius, 69, who played a prominent role in sealing an international deal with Iran limiting its nuclear programme and helped broker a global climate change deal, told reporters Wednesday's cabinet meeting would be his last before he took up a new post as head of the constitutional court.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "I will be leaving office," Fabius said.
  • This is a sensitive time for Hollande, whose plan to strip French citizenship from people convicted of terrorism is far from certain to be adopted despite passing a first hurdle in parliament on Tuesday.
  • But analysts said a reshuffle was unlikely to do much to help Hollande's popularity, which has been eroded by a debate on stripping dual nationals of their French passports in case of terrorism convictions - one of the key measures he announced after 130 people were killed by Islamist militants in Paris on November 13.
  • He is due to stay on as chair of U.N. climate talks until late 2016, monitoring implementation of the agreement to shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energies.
Javier E

FC96: The English Revolution: (1603-88) - The Flow of History - 0 views

www.flowofhistory.com/...FC96

revolution english england

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • In religion, Elizabeth skillfully maintained peace in England while much of Europe was embroiled in religious wars. She did this by grafting moderate Protestant theology onto Catholic style ritual and organization.  She also blunted the ferocity of the religiously radical Puritans (Calvinists) by incorporating many of them into the hierarchy of the Church of England.  However, this put many Puritans into positions of authority where they could demand more sweeping reforms beyond the Queen's lukewarm Protestantism.  In addition, many of these Puritans were also members of the gentry (lower nobles) and middle classes who controlled the House of Commons in Parliament and voted on taxes.  Thus the issues of religion and money became even more tangled.
  • Religious wars, which threatened everyone's peace and security, and inflation, which made maintaining armies too expensive for rebellious nobles, also combined to help with the rise of absolutism in Europe.  This rising tide of absolutism would influence the Stuart kings of England to try to establish absolutism in their own realm in spite of popular opinion.  A less skillful and diplomatic ruler than Elizabeth would have trouble dealing with these new forces rising up in England.  Such an undiplomatic ruler succeeded Elizabeth in the person of James I (1603-1625).
  • While Elizabeth had so skillfully kept the issues of money and religion in check, James' absolutist beliefs and abrasive personality brought them to the surface.  As far as religion went, James fought the largely Puritan Parliament to keep the Church of England's Catholic style ritual, decorations, and hierarchy of clergy, over which he as king had control.  In money matters, king and Parliament clashed over James' growing requests for money to support his lavish lifestyle.  He also angered the middle class by raising customs duties, one of his main sources of revenue, to keep pace with inflation.  While James and Parliament never completely broke with one another over these issues, their constant squabbling did set the stage for the revolution that was to follow.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • While the individual events of the English Revolution could be somewhat involved and complicated, they did fit into a basic pattern.  Parliament and the ruler of England would clash over the issues of religion and taxes as the government became less decisive and/or reasonable.  This would trigger a reaction by Parliament that would bring in a new ruler, and then the process would start all over again.  This cycle would repeat itself three times over the next sixty years, with each successive stage feeding back into the aforementioned cycle as well as into the next stage
  • The first stage would see England plunged into civil war (1642-49) that would result in the beheading of Charles I and the rise of the Puritans and Parliament to power.  In the second stage, continued fighting over religion and money, this time between Parliament and its army, would bring in military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell in the 1650's.  After Cromwell's death (1658) would come the third stage with the restoration of the monarchy (1661-88).  However, the old conflicts over money and religion would resurface in the reign of James II and lead to his overthrow by Parliament with the help of William III and Mary of Holland in 1688.
sarahbalick

France foiling terror plots 'daily' - Prime Minister Manuel Valls - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-37334836

france terror prime minister

shared by sarahbalick on 12 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • France foiling terror plots 'daily' - Prime Minister Manuel Valls
  • The French prime minister has said the country's security services are foiling terror plots and dismantling militant networks "every day".
  • Previously the authorities said about 10,000 were identified as high-risk.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • France has been under a state of emergency since IS attacks on Paris in November killed 130 people in what President Francois Hollande called an "act of war".
  • It questioned the deployment of between 6,000 and 7,000 soldiers to protect schools, synagogues, department stores and other sensitive sites.
  • Security is a central issue in the run-up to next year's presidential election but Mr Valls said proposals by the former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to set up special courts and detention centres were not the answer.
  • "Every Frenchman suspected of being linked to terrorism, because he regularly consults a jihadist website, or his behaviour shows signs of radicalisation or because is in close contact with radicalised people, must by preventively placed in a detention centre,"
  • Meanwhile, prosecutors charged one of the women arrested over a foiled attack near Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
  • Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said on Friday that Ornella G's fingerprints had been found inside the car. She was known to intelligence agents as someone who was considering going to Syria.
davisem

Paris attacks: A year of grief, anger, change - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by davisem on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Salines' 29-year-old daughter, Lola, had gone to a concert at the Bataclan by US rock band the Eagles of Death Metal. Midway through the show, ISIS-linked gunmen opened fire on the audience and detonated suicide vests; 90 people were killed in the raid, one of a series of coordinated attacks across Paris
  • Lola Salines was killed in the attack on an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan in Paris.
  • It followed an emotional performance on Saturday night by musician Sting, a fundraiser for victim support charities at the newly opened Bataclan. He began with the words: "We shall not forget them."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • French President Francois Hollande unveiled plaques at attack sites in the city -- at the Stade de France, outside the Petit Cambodge restaurant, in the Boulevard Voltaire, and at the Bonne Biere and Belle Equipe cafes.
  • "For three hours, we had to listen to the shooting," he remembers. "That was terrible. Every time we thought it would end, it was just time for the terrorists to get their weapons reloaded, and then they would shoot again."
  • davisem on 16 Nov 16
     
    ISIS attacked audience an audience in Paris.
grayton downing

BBC News - US National Security Agency 'spied on French diplomats' - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-europe-24628947

security national agency french politics us spy

shared by grayton downing on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The US National Security Agency has spied on French diplomats in Washington and at the UN, according to the latest claims in Le Monde newspaper.
  • US spies allegedly hacked foreign networks, introducing the spyware into the software, routers and firewalls of millions of machines.
  • NSA tapped millions of phones in France.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • t claims bugs were introduced to the French Embassy in Washington (under a code name "Wabash") and to the computers of the French delegation at the UN, codenamed "Blackfoot".
  • The US was worried the French were drifting to the Brazilian side - who were opposed to implementing sanctions - when in truth they were always aligned to the US position, says our correspondent.
  • "It helped me know... the truth, and reveal other [countries'] positions on sanctions, allowing us to keep one step ahead in the negotiations."
  • I said again to John Kerry what Francois Hollande told Barack Obama, that this kind of spying conducted on a large scale by the Americans on its allies is something that is unacceptable."
  • The information he leaked led to claims of systematic spying by the NSA and CIA on a global scale. Targets included rivals like China and Russia, as well as allies like the EU and Brazil.
  • The NSA was also forced to admit it had captured email and phone data from millions of Americans.
Javier E

The Verdict, for Now, From France - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rdict-for-now-from-france.html

france politics election

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • In the first round of the French municipal elections on Sunday, the answer was not complicated: disenchantment with the Socialist administration of François Hollande, the most unpopular in modern times; fatigue with political scandals; and deep pessimism that either of the traditional parties of Left or Right is capable of addressing France’s structural and social ills.
  • The National Front fielded candidates in fewer than 600 of 36,000 municipalities, and won about 5 percent of the total vote, compared with 47 percent for the center-right Union for a Popular Movement and 38 percent for President Hollande’s Socialists.
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