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mcginnisca

The European Prospect (Fall Preview) - 0 views

prospect.org/...european-prospect-fall-preview

european prospect fall economics refugee crisis french revolution history

shared by mcginnisca on 25 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • European project after World War II was among the most noble in modern history. Germany, twice the cause of catastrophic wars, would not be punished but rebuilt, rehabilitated, and contained within a larger democratic European whole.
  • hristian Democrats called it a social market economy; social democrats thought of it as a more flexible alternative to socialism
  • urope would be not just a continent with common traditions, converging aspirations and open trade, but an emergent political federation. It would be more than a customs union—an economic union with a single currency, consistent economic rules, and social Europe balancing market Europe at a continental scale.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • All of the pathologies evident in the 1930s, which weighed so heavily on the minds of the EU’s architects, are resurgent—the high unemployment, the economic extremes, the perverse austerity policies, the popular backlash against ineffectual parliamentary politics, and the resulting ultra-nationalism.
  • For the right, the remedy was a return to a more laissez-faire model, even though there was little evidence that Europe’s social market had anything to do with the economic slowdown
  • For the first four postwar decades, democratically mobilized citizens in strong nation-states anchored the social part of Europe while the European Economic Community, predecessor of the EU, promoted the market part
  • WHEN JACQUES DELORS, a moderate French socialist, launched a full-blown European Union in the 1980s, the hope was to expand social Europe and market Europe in tandem. But in the actual Maastricht Treaty of 1992—Europe’s de facto constitution—free movement of goods, services, capital, and people are fundamental rights, and social protections are add-ons
  • IF EUROPE NEEDED ONE more assault to further undermine the model, it came via the refugee crisis. The crisis laid bare two awful fragilities. The first is the dysfunction of the EU as a confederation with multiple veto points and little capacity for leadership in a crisis
  • Politically, the collision of a lingering and needless economic crisis with a random refugee crisis has energized nationalism, both moderate and neo-fascist. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Austria, and elsewhere, the second- or third-strongest party is far-right populist. Much of this support is working-class, at the expense of social democrats.
  • he refugee crisis also makes clear that much of Europe’s social compact assumes a common national identity, to which foreigners do not easily fit in.
  • Europe might be able to accept a million refugees economically, but it cannot do so politically. The refugee crisis is simply an overlay on a deeper crisis of solidarity and common purpose. Unless there is a renewal of popular energy and a burst of progressive leadership, the three-decade era of broadly shared prosperity—les trente glorieuses, as the French call it—will be remembered as a historical blip. The EU aspired to combine that impossible trinity of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. All three are now on the defensive.
alexdeltufo

What does World War I mean? A century of answers - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • England, France, and Russia blamed Germany and Austria-Hungary, while the latter blamed the former.
  • A century later, the guns have long been silenced, but the war over the war continues. To an extent that seems amazing for a modern conflict, there is still no consensus over who was responsible for World War I,
  • influencing US foreign policy in different ways with each generation.
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  • it’s World War II, Vietnam, or Iraq that tend to be invoked more often—it remains a point of contention among academic
  • Six months after Wilson was reelected, he asked Congress to declare war against Germany to “make the world safe for democracy.”
  • He Kept Us Out of War.” Two years after shooting began, the prevailing American sentiment was that the war was an uncivilized exercise conducted by savages
  • part of its mission was to stay free of such senseless carnage, which it did—until 1917.
  • American story of WWI may not always tell us much about the war itself, but offers an excellent window into the outlook of the nation at any given time.
  • The 1920s also saw the beginnings of a cultural revolution: flappers, bootleggers, and jazz. There was enough change at home
  • an emerging continental power with a new sense of its role in the world.
  • ith the aftermath of WWI would be an understatement. Immediately following the war, the Versailles Peace Treaty swiftly disintegrated
  • -turn, the idea behind it wasn’t. Europe was still barbaric—but instead of hiding from the old continent, America needed to redeem it
  • America returned to “normalcy,” a word Warren Harding coined in his successful presidential campaign.
  • From this, he drew many lessons, among them that simply showing up and winning isn’t enough:
  • He cultivated Republicans to ensure continued US engagement, acceded to the reality of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe
  • That’s what President Clinton meant when in 1995, making the case for intervening in the former Yugoslavia,
  • “The Guns of August.” A history of WWI’s origins, the book argued that none of the combatants wanted a war—
  • ‘The Missiles of October,’” JFK told his brother.) Tuchman’s view would become the most popular one among an American public scarred by the futile-seeming war in Vietnam,
  • This wasn’t initially an American idea, however: It came from a 1961 book by the German historian Fritz Fischer, whose work blaming his own country rocked the nation.
  • Fischer’s argument found a sympathetic audience in America, reassuring doubters that US participation in the war, and its ultimate role in stopping Germany, hadn’t been futile after all.
  • In 2011 Sean McMeekin, an American historian who works at a Turkish university, released a book in which he pointed to a new culprit: Russia,
  • raming the war as an Eastern land grab that just happened to lead to the deaths of millions of Europeans might not ever become the standard narrative,
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Jordan Michael Smith 
Javier E

Europe's Dependence on the U.S. Was All Part of the Plan - POLITICO Magazine - 0 views

www.politico.com/...rope-history-dependence-219011

europe dependence WWII foreign policy history world order

shared by Javier E on 17 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Unfair? A world that revolves around American military, economic and cultural power, and uses the U.S. dollar as its reserve currency?
  • What Trump fails to understand is that the disparity in spending, with the U.S. paying more than its allies, is not a bug of the system. It is a feature. This is how the great postwar statesmen designed it, and this immensely foresighted strategy has ensured the absence of great power conflict—and nuclear war—for three-quarters of a century.
  • Dean Acheson, George Marshall and the other great statesmen of their generation pursued this strategy because they had learned, at unimaginable cost, that the eternal American fantasy of forever being free of Europe—isolationism, or America Firstism, in other words—was just that: a fantasy.
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  • Our postwar statesmen were neither weak nor incompetent. They were the architects of the greatest foreign policy triumph in U.S. history.
  • o successful was this policy that Americans now—most of whom weren’t alive to witness the enormity of these wars—see peace, unity, prosperity and stability as Europe’s natural state. This is an illusion. For centuries, Europe was the fulcrum of global violence. With the age of global exploration, it became the globe’s primary exporter of violence
  • The U.S. military was always an integral part of the plan to unite and rebuild Europe from the rubble. Since World War II, U.S. troops have been deployed in Eurasia to ensure the continent cannot be dominated by a single power capable of monopolizing its resources and turning them against the U.S. The United States has built overwhelmingly massive military assets there to deter local arms races before they begin, and it has simultaneously assured those under U.S. protection that there is no need to begin local arms races, for their safety is guaranteed.
  • Only America, and massive power as the U.S. exercised it, could have pacified and unified Europe under its aegis. No other continental country possessed half the world’s GDP. No other country had enough distance from Europe to be trusted, to a large extent, by all parties and indifferent to its regional jealousies. No other country had a strategic, moral and economic vision for Europe that its inhabitants could be persuaded gladly to share
  • The founders of these institutions fully intended them to be the foundations of a United States of Europe, much like the United States of America. Profound economic interdependence, they believed, would make further European wars impossible.
  • At the same time, the United States built an open, global order upon an architecture of specific institutions: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the International Court of Justice. This order is in many respects an empire—a Pax Americana—but it is more humane than any empire that preceded it, with institutions that are intended to benefit all parties.
  • Through the application of economic, diplomatic and military force majeure, the United States suppressed Europe’s internal security competition. This is why postwar Europe ceased to be the world’s leading exporter of violence and became, instead, the world’s leading exporter of luxury sedans.
  • American grand strategy rests upon the credibility of its promise to protect American allies; this credibility rests, in turn, upon U.S. willingness to display its commitment.
  • The Soviet Union’s criticism of the Marshall Plan and other American involvement in Europe was eerily similar to the language Russia’s now uses in its campaign to undermine NATO and the EU. The vocabulary and tropes of Russian propaganda are widely echoed, wittingly or unwittingly, by far-right, far-left and other antiliberal politicians, parties and movements throughout the West
  • The loudest exponent of the idea that the U.S. is getting rolled, that the European Union was “created to destroy us,” and that multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization assault the “sovereignty” of the nations concerned is, unfortunately, the president of the United States.
  • It’s hard to understate how foolish and reckless these notions are. History can be shoved down the memory hole, for a time, but reality is never so cooperative.
  • The Second World War proved not only that isolationism and American-Firstism were fantasies, but exceptionally childish and dangerous ones, at that. In the age of hyperglobalized trade, international air travel, the internet, nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, these fantasies are even more childish and dangerous. The U.S. may be on another continent, but it is not on another planet.
  • It is true that the U.S. spends more on its military, in absolute dollars and as a percentage of GDP, than any European country. That was always part of the deal. The U.S. is a global superpower. It can fight a war anywhere in the world, invade any country at will, and (at least in theory) fight multiple simultaneous major wars—even in space. Of course this costs more. It is in America’s advantage to be the only power on the planet that can do this.
  • Conversely, it is not remotely in America’s advantage for other countries to spend as much money on their militaries as we do
  • Trump’s refusal to deter our shared enemies and protect our allies risks provoking a regional European arms race—exactly what the U.S. has sought to avoid for 74 years
  • Above all, Trump’s overt support for sordid, Kremlin-backed actors who seek to undermine Europe’s unity is unfathomable: How could it be in Europe’s interest, or in ours, for the American president to lend the United States’ prestige and support to Europe’s Nazis, neo-Nazis, doctrinal Marxists, populists, authoritarians, and ethnic supremacists, particularly since all of them are ideologically hostile to the United States?
  • Should the unraveling of the order the U.S. built proceed at this pace, the world will soon be neither peaceful nor prosperous. Nor will the effects be confined to regions distant from the United States. America will feel them gradually, and then, probably, overnight—in the form of a devastating, sudden shock.
  • The American-led world order, undergirded by the ideal of liberal democracy, has been highly imperfect. But it has been the closest thing to Utopia our fallen and benighted species has ever seen. Its benefits are not just economic, although those benefits are immense. Its benefits must be measured in wars not fought, lives not squandered
Javier E

May's desperate pitch for cross-party unity is a leap into the dark | Rafael Behr | Opi... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...theresa-may-labour-brexit

brexit tories

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • The specific challenge that posed for Northern Ireland was identified and baked into the commission’s negotiating mandate in May 2017. But in February 2019 Dominic Raab, a man who briefly led Brexit negotiations, and fancies himself as a potential prime minister, admitted he had not read the Good Friday agreement. It is only 35 pages long.
  • The prospect of Britain ending up in a customs union with the EU has been at the forefront of Brexit argument for nearly two years. On Monday around 50 Tory MPs attended a training seminar organised by colleagues on what a customs union is and how it works. At least they were curious. Breathtaking, wilful ignorance of facts has been a routine feature of the debate
  • Last week Boris Johnson told Telegraph readers that May should “drop the deal” and, in the next line, that she should “extend the implementation period to the end of 2021”. The implementation period is part of the deal. Drop one and you lose the other. Johnson is not stupid, but he has affected stupidity for so long that the difference no longer matters.
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  • a large minority still want to saddle up unicorns and ride back to lost terrain. They cry “WTO transition”, “Malthouse compromise”, “Brady amendment” as if these were negotiable concepts and not exotic acts in the clammy circus tent of Eurosceptic imagination.
  • Another frustration is that British politicians are incapable of telling their voters the truth about difficult trade-offs. Some officials and leaders think the value of EU partnership will only be grasped once the benefits of membership are lost and the task in hand is buying them back
  • Continental leaders thought the pragmatic diplomat they dealt with in Brussels was the real Britain and the spittle-spraying nationalist was a stock character, strutting the repertory stage. It turns out to be the other way around. Or rather, the Conservative party has strapped the grimacing mask so tightly to its face that it is no longer a mask. Those are now the distorted features we show to the world.
Javier E

Brexiteers Face Reality-They Need the Political Class After All - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...al-class-after-all-11552603710

brexit state reality competence government intervention

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The most astonishing poll result so far this year lurks in a flash YouGov survey released this week, on the eve of yet another incomprehensible parliamentary vote. Some 20% of respondents “don’t know” if Mrs. May’s deal is good, tolerable or bad. That is up from the 17% who didn’t know what they thought in early January, before lawmakers voted down that deal the first time.
  • one can draw two lessons about the perils of modern electoral insurgencies.
  • One is that revolutions against “politics as we know it” tend to fail eventually on their inability to conduct politics as we know it
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  • British voters thought they were rebelling against a remote political class when they vetoed that class’s desire to remain in the EU. But Britain’s political class knew that, despite frequent griping about Brussels overreach, British voters are fundamentally European and are better off inside the European club.
  • Only thanks to the economic gains from EU membership—yes, there are quite a few—could Britain barely sustain the socialized health system its public treats as a national religion, to name one example. British voters would never accept the radical trade liberalization a successful Brexit would require, to name another.
  • The root of Britain’s Brexit derangement since then has been the tension between what the electorate said about itself and what Britain’s politicians know from experience about their voters
  • Those voters succeeded in giving their politicians a good fright, to the point that substantial numbers of lawmakers in both major parties have fretted for two years about the implications of “betraying Brexit.” This suppressed the sort of politicking Britain needed around Brexit by deterring lawmakers from arguing, say, for the reversal of Brexit if they believe that is the right thing to d
  • What was missing all along was a willingness by large enough swathes of the public—now represented in Parliament by parties touting either Continental-style Christian democracy or 1970s-style socialism—to embrace genuine change.
  • The real education British voters have received since 2016 concerns not only how deeply EU rules had reached into every nook and cranny of the British economy, but how many things any modern state has to be prepared to do.
  • This has led in turn to an awkward recognition that Britain’s long-atrophying national government lacks the technical expertise to do much of this stuff itself.
  • This complexity is the source of the power of the ham-fisted administrative apparatus voters claim to hate and of the allegedly aloof politicians they keep trying to oust. Despite their oft-stated frustrations, they keep demanding more services of one sort or another from government
Javier E

Ancient DNA is Rewriting Human (and Neanderthal) History - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...554798

human origins dna migrations history archaology

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Sarah Zhang: You recently published two papers in which you analyzed over 600 genomes from ancient Europeans
  • Reich: In our hands, a successful sample costs less than $200. That’s only two or three times more than processing them on a present-day person
  • Reich: In Europe where we have the best data currently—although that will change over the coming years—we know a lot about how people have migrated. We know of multiple layers of population replacement over the last 50,000 years. Between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago in western Europe, the Neanderthals were replaced by modern human populations. The first modern human samples we have in Europe are about 40,000 years old and are genetically not at all related to present-day Europeans. They seem to be from extinct, dead-end groups.
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  • After that, you see for the first time people related to later European hunter-gatherers who have contributed a little bit to present-day Europeans. That happens beginning 35,000 to 37,000 years ago. Then the ice sheets descend across northern Europe and a lot of these populations are chased into these refuges in the southern peninsulas of Europe. After the Ice Age, there’s a repeopling of northern Europe from the southwest, probably from Spain, and then also from the southeast, probably from Greece and maybe even from Anatolia, Turkey
  • Again, after 9,000 years ago, there’s a mass movement of farmers into the region which almost completely replaces the hunter-gatherers with a small amount of mixture
  • And then again, after 5,000 years ago, there’s this mass movement at the beginning of the Bronze Age of people from the steppe, who also probably bring these languages that are spoken by the great majority of Europeans today.
  • Reich: Archaeology has always been political, especially in Europe. Archaeologists are very aware of the misuse of archaeology in the past, in the 20th century. There’s a very famous German archaeologist named Gustaf Kossinna, who was the first or one of the first to come up with the idea of “material culture.” Say, you see similar pots, and therefore you’re in a region where there was shared community and aspects of culture.
  • He went so far as to argue that when you see the spread of these pots, you’re actually seeing a spread of people and there’s a one-to-one mapping for those things. His ideas were used by the Nazis later, in propaganda, to argue that a particular group in Europe, the Aryans, expanded in all directions across Europe.
  • This was used to justify their expansionism in the propaganda that the Germans used in the run-up to the Second World War.
  • So after the Second World War, there was a very strong reaction in the European archaeological community—not just the Germans, but the broad continental European archaeological community—to the fact that their discipline had been used for these terrible political ends. And there was a retreat from the ideas of Kossinna.
  • one of the things the ancient DNA is showing is actually the Corded Ware culture does correspond coherently to a group of people. [Editor’s note: The Corded Ware made pottery with cord-like ornamentation and according to ancient DNA studies, they descended from steppe ancestry.] I think that was a very sensitive issue to some of our coauthors
  • Our results are actually almost diametrically opposite from what Kossina thought because these Corded Ware people come from the East, a place that Kossina would have despised as a source for them.
  • it is true that there’s big population movements, and so I think what the DNA is doing is it’s forcing the hand of this discussion in archaeology, showing that in fact, major movements of people do occur. They are sometimes sharp and dramatic, and they involve large-scale population replacements over a relatively short period of time. We now can see that for the first time.
  • Zhang: As you say, the genetics data is now often ahead of the archaeology, and you keep finding these big, dramatic population replacements throughout human history that can’t yet be fully explained. How should we be thinking about these population replacements? Is there a danger in people interpreting or misinterpreting them as the result of one group’s superiority over another?
  • When you see these replacements of Neanderthals by modern humans or Europeans and Africans substantially replacing Native Americans in the last 500 years or the people who built Stonehenge, who were obviously extraordinarily sophisticated, being replaced from these people from the continent, it doesn’t say something about the innate potential of these people. But it rather says something about the different immune systems or cultural mismatch.
  • Zhang: On the point of immune systems, one of the hypotheses for why people from the steppe were so successful in spreading through Europe is that they brought the bubonic plague with them. Since the plague is endemic to Central Asia, they may have built up immunity but the European farmers they encountered had not.
  • ut there have been profound and Earth-shattering events, again and again, every few thousand years in our history and that’s what ancient DNA is telling us.
  • if you actually take any serious look at this data, it just confounds every stereotype. It’s revealing that the differences among populations we see today are actually only a few thousand years old at most and that everybody is mixed.
  • I think that if you pay any attention to this world, and have any degree of seriousness, then you can’t come out feeling affirmed in the racist view of the world. You have to be more open to immigration. You have to be more open to the mixing of different peoples. That’s your own history.
manhefnawi

Spain | Facts, Culture, History, & Points of Interest - The early Bourbons, 1700-53 | B... - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...The-early-Bourbons-1700-53

Spanish Succession Philip-V Ferdinand-VI Charles-III

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Spain’s central problem in the 17th century had been to maintain what remained of its European possessions and to retain control of its American empire
  • In the 17th century the greatest threat had come from a land power, France, jealous of Habsburg power in Europe; in the 18th it was to come from a sea power, England, while the Austrian Habsburgs became the main continental enemy of Spain
  • In 1700 (by the will of the childless Charles II) the duc d’Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV of France, became Philip V of Spain
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  • Austria refused to recognize Philip, a Bourbon
  • a Bourbon king in Spain would disrupt the balance of power in Europe in favour of French hegemony
  • Spain under a Bourbon king as a political and commercial appendage of France
  • He wished to regenerate and strengthen his ally by a modern centralized administration
  • the allied armies of Britain and Austria invaded Spain in order to drive out Philip V and establish the “Austrian” candidate, the archduke Charles (later the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI), on the throne
  • An efficient administration had to be created in order to extract resources from Spain for the war effort and thus relieve pressure on the French treasury
  • Castile was ferociously loyal to the new dynasty throughout the war. The support of Castile and of France (until 1711) enabled Philip V to survive severe defeats
  • Spanish lawyer-administrators such as Melchor de Macanaz
  • They were supported by the queen, María Luisa of Savoy
  • The opponents of reform were those who suffered by it
  • Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia
  • a Castilian centralizing imposition in conflict with the local privileges, or fueros
  • the church, whose position was threatened by the ferocious and doctrinaire regalism of Macanaz
  • The disaffection of all these elements easily turned into opposition to Philip V as king
  • war taxation and war levies drove Catalonia and Aragon to revolt
  • When Philip V tried to attack Catalonia through Aragon, the Aragonese, in the name of their fueros, revolted against the passage of Castilian troops
  • When the archbishop of Valencia resisted attempts to make priests of doubtful loyalty appear before civil courts, the regalism of Macanaz was given full course
  • This was the last direct triumph of the reformers. With the death of Queen María Luisa in 1714
  • Macanaz was condemned by the Inquisition
  • the fueros were abolished and Catalonia was integrated into Spain
  • The “Italian” tendency was influenced by Philip V’s second wife, Isabella, and her desire to get Italian thrones for her sons.
  • The attempt to recover the possessions in Italy involved Spain in an unsuccessful war with Austria, which was now the great power in Italy
  • Nevertheless, Isabella’s persistence was rewarded when her son, the future King Charles III of Spain, became the duke of Parma in 1731 and king of Naples in 1733, relinquishing his claims to Parma
  • The “Italian” and “Atlantic” tendencies existed side by side in the late years of Philip V’s reign
  • It made possible an alliance of France and Spain against Austria, giving Isabella the opportunity to settle her second son, Philip, in an Italian duchy
  • Ferdinand VI (1746–59) was concerned with the domestic recovery of Spain rather than the extension of its power in Europe
  • the treaty merely strengthened Spain’s position in Italy when Philip became duke of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. The Atlantic tendency became dominant under Ferdinand VI
  • Because Britain was Spain’s most significant enemy in the Americas (as Austria had been in Italy), Spain’s “natural” ally was France
  • hence a series of family pacts with France in 1733 and 1743
  • The American interest was reflected in increased trade
  • Charles III, Ferdinand’s successor, implemented dramatic reforms that followed along the path set by Ferdinand.
manhefnawi

War of the Austrian Succession | Europe [1740-1748] | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...War-of-the-Austrian-Succession

Silesian-War Frederick-II Maria-Theresa

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • with the overall aim of crippling or destroying Austria, France’s long-standing continental enemy
  • Frederick II of Prussia invaded Silesia, one of the richest Habsburg provinces. His army defeated the Austrians at Mollwitz in April 1741 and overran Silesia
  • an alliance with Bavaria and Spain and, later, with Saxony and Prussia against Austria
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  • The Austrian ruler Maria Theresa (daughter of Charles VI) derived her main foreign support from Britain, which feared that, if the French achieved hegemony in Europe, the British commercial and colonial empire would be untenable. Thus, the War of the Austrian Succession was, in part, one phase of the struggle between France and Britain that lasted from 1689 to 1815
  • Austria temporarily neutralized Prussia by allowing it to retain Silesia in July 1742, drove the French and Bavarians out of Bohemia (1742), and overran Bavaria. Austria’s allies—the British, Hanoverians, and Hessians—defeated the French
  • the emperor Charles VII (Charles Albert of Bavaria), who was also chief claimant to the Austrian succession, died. His son Maximilian III Joseph gave up these claims and pledged to support Francis Stephen at the imperial election in return for Austria’s restoration of its conquests to Bavaria
  • The British had withdrawn their army to England to oppose the French-supported efforts of the young pretender, Charles Edward, to win the thrones of Scotland and England for the Stuarts
  • The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (see Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of) in October 1748 preserved the bulk of the Austrian inheritance for Maria Theresa. Prussia remained in possession of Silesia
Javier E

The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...suffocation-of-democracy

democracy authoritarian fascism illiberal history

shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
  • Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
  • Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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  • Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
  • If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
  • Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
  • Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
  • In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
  • The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
  • the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
  • Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
  • Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
  • In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  • The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
  • To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
  • Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
  • In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
  • the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
  • No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
  • Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
Javier E

In China and India, men outnumber women on a massive scale. The consequences are far-re... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...too-many-men

india china gender gap crisis policy birthrate

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.
  • Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations.
  • Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as wel
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  • “In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,
  • Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex.
  • India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males
  • The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution.
  • Village life and mental health. Among men, loneliness and depression are widespread. Villages are emptying out. Men are learning to cook and perform other chores long relegated to women.
  • Housing prices and savings rates. Bachelors are furiously building houses in China to attract wives, and prices are soaring. But otherwise they are not spending, and that in turn fuels China’s huge trade surplus
  • In India, there is the opposite effect: Because brides are scarce, families are under less pressure to save for expensive dowries
  • Human trafficking. Trafficking of brides is on the rise. Foreign women are being recruited and lured to China, effectively creating similar imbalances in China’s neighbors.
  • Public safety. With the increase in men has come a surge in sexual crime in India and concerns about a rise in other crimes in both countries. Harassment of schoolgirls in India has in some towns sparked an effort to push back — but at a cost of restricting them to more protected lives.
oliviaodon

Theresa May Fends Off Labour Party in Local U.K. Elections - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tives-labour-uk-elections.html

politics

shared by oliviaodon on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • Despite mounting troubles over Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union and a recent cabinet resignation, Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party emerged relatively unscathed from local elections, according to results released on Friday that showed that its opponents had failed to make the breakthrough many expected.
  • Labour was victorious in some key areas, but it fell short in its efforts to take control of two Conservative strongholds in London — Westminster and Wandsworth — that had been thought to be vulnerable, as well as the capital’s northern borough of Barnet, a much easier target.
  • The results will be a relief for Mrs. May, whose leadership has been in question since she called an unnecessary general election last June in which she lost her parliamentary majority. That has forced her to rely on an uneasy alliance with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to get legislation through Parliament.Mrs. May has survived the various threats to her leadership, and her position seemed to have stabilized thanks to her handling of the aftermath of the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei V. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
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  • Labour had allowed expectations for election gains to grow high, particularly in London, where some senior figures talked up prospects of a victory in Wandsworth. A dispute over the handling of anti-Semitism in the party may have also cost support for Labour and Mr. Corbyn, particularly in Barnet, where there is a significant Jewish population. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Nevertheless, the voting took place at a difficult time for a divided government facing many problems. In recent weeks, Mrs. May’s predicament has been complicated by the House of Lords, the unelected chamber of Parliament, which has inflicted 10 defeats on her Brexit legislation, adding amendments that she will try to overturn in the House of Commons, the main chamber.
  • Mrs. May’s problems over a withdrawal are coming to a head over her promise to leave Europe’s customs union, which guarantees tariff-free trade with Continental Europe.
  • This issue has come to symbolize a deep division: Pro-Europeans want to stick close to the bloc, Britain’s biggest trade partner, in order to protect the economy, while hard-line Brexit supporters want to break free and to negotiate other trade deals with non-European nations.
Javier E

We are Europeans. Brexit will make us face up to it | Rafael Behr | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...xit-leaving-eu-irony-diplomacy

UK brexit

shared by Javier E on 17 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Meanwhile, the prime minister has to persuade EU leaders that her country is not turning its back on them; that it offers something in return for favourable exit terms.
  • The best economic argument that the remain campaign failed to communicate to voters was that no EU satellite arrangement combining market access and influence over the rules could rival the one we already have as full members.
  • May’s negotiations have to go well beyond the list of current benefits that Britain might salvage. She needs a broader agenda to discuss what we have to offer as a strategic partner to the European project.
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  • But the pitch in Brussels, Berlin, Paris and Warsaw must aspire to more than tariff elimination. It must include promises to engage with continental challenges: Isis-inspired terrorism, Russian territorial expansion, energy security. The question is not whether we can cobble together a thin facsimile of EU membership but how the UK can be an upstanding friend and neighbour to the EU after we leave. That is the terrain on which the best deal is struck.
  • Brussels-baiting Euroscepticism and the internal dynamics of the Tory party have for a generation set the terms of the debate about Britain’s status as a European nation. Yet history, geography and global diplomacy dictate that we can be no other kind. A stark irony of the Brexit vote is that it demands of the prime minister a more thorough, ambitious and diligently applied vision of Britain’s strategic relationship with the rest of the continent than has been possessed by any of her predecessors since Ted Heath. Leaving the EU will involve diplomacy as ardently and explicitly pro-European as that required for joining in the first place. In the intervening years we have spent a lot of energy arguing about what Europe means to Britain. It is time to consider what the rest of Europe might see in us.
Javier E

Failure Is an Option: Does History Forecast Disaster for the United States? - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...258846

politics history

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 12 - Cached
  • it is clear that human societies do not progress inevitably toward greater wealth. Creating the conditions in which self-interest will foster economic development is harder than optimistic Enlightenment thinkers believed. Economic growth is not predestined: Many countries have seen long-term declines in standards of living, as did Argentina in the twentieth century. Others, such as large parts of Africa, seem mired in strife and poverty. With even the United States and Western Europe facing economic stagnation, burdensome debt levels, unfavorable demographics, and rising global competition, it seems that sustained stability and prosperity may be the historical exception rather than the rule.
  • Why some societies stagnate while others thrive is the question addressed by economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James Robinson in Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.
  • differences, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, can all be explained by institutions. Long-lasting institutions, not short-term government policies, are the key determinant of societal outcomes. Development is not as simple as adopting a smarter set of economic policies: Instead, "the main obstacle to the adoption of policies that would reduce market failures and encourage economic growth is not the ignorance of politicians but the incentives and constraints they face from the political and economic institutions in their societies."
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  • Acemoglu and Robinson outline a theory of how economic and political institutions shape the fate of human societies. They reinterpret the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history, showing how differences in institutions interact with changing circumstances to produce development or stagnation.
  • It also has implications for the contemporary United States, where increasing inequality and the growing influence of money in politics threaten to reshape our political institutions.
  • In more fortunate countries, pluralistic political institutions prevent any one group from monopolizing resources for itself, while free markets empower a large class of people with an interest in defending the current system against absolutism. This virtuous circle, which first took form in seventeenth-century England, is the secret to economic growth.
  • Economic institutions are themselves the products of political processes, which depend on political institutions. These can also be extractive, if they enable an elite to maintain its dominance over society, or inclusive, if many groups have access to the political process. Poverty is not an accident: "[P]oor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty." Therefore, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, it is ultimately politics that matters.
  • The logic of extractive and inclusive institutions explains why growth is not foreordained. Where a cohesive elite can use its political dominance to get rich at the expense of ordinary people, it has no need for markets and free enterprise, which can create political competitors. In addition, because control of the state can be highly lucrative, infighting among contenders for power produces instability and violence. This vicious circle keeps societies poor
  • Countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people," write Acemoglu and Robinson. Extractive institutions, whether feudalism in medieval Europe or the use of schoolchildren to harvest cotton in contemporary Uzbekistan, transfer wealth from the masses to elites. In contrast, inclusive institutions -- based on property rights, the rule of law, equal provision of public services, and free economic choices -- create incentives for citizens to gain skills, make capital investments, and pursue technological innovation, all of which increase productivity and generate wealth.
  • Acemoglu and Robinson differentiate their account from alternatives that they label the "culture," "geography," and "ignorance" hypotheses.
  • An example of the first is Max Weber's famous argument that Calvinism lay at the roots of capitalist development
  • the best-known recent example of the second is Jared Diamond's explanation of the Spanish Conquest as the inevitable outcome of geographic differences between Eurasia and the Americas.
  • Most economists, Acemoglu and Robinson assert, subscribe to the ignorance hypothesis, according to which "poor countries are poor because they have a lot of market failures and because economists and policymakers do not know how to get rid of them." According to this view, development can be engineered through technocratic policies administered by enlightened experts.
  • this focus on policy obscures the fundamental importance of politics.
  • Their perspective is informed by New Institutional Economics, an approach developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and associated with prominent economists such as Douglass North and Oliver Williamson, that focuses on how economic forces are mediated by institutions such as political systems and legal codes
  • A state based on extractive institutions, whether the Kuba Kingdom of seventeenth-century Central Africa or more recently the Soviet Union, can generate growth, especially when starting from low levels of development. But in most of these cases, the ruling elite is unwilling to allow inclusive economic institutions because they would threaten its political supremacy; the inevitable result is economic stagnation.
  • This leaves open the question of why some societies end up with inclusive rather than extractive institutions -- why some are rich and some are poor. The answer, according to Acemoglu and Robinson, is that institutions evolve -- and that history is messy.
  • Institutions change in subtle ways over time, allowing societies to drift apart. When major shocks occur, small differences in institutions can send societies down vastly different historical paths.
  • Early modern England, France, and Spain were all feudal societies with power-hungry monarchs. But the English Parliament had slightly more power than its continental relatives; as a result, the crown was unable to monopolize trade with the Americas, which made many merchants rich instead; in turn, this new commercial class became an important part of the coalition that overthrew James II in 1688, successfully fighting off absolutism. In Spain, by contrast, the monarchy controlled overseas trade, quashed internal challenges to its authority, and maintained extractive economic institutions -- and the country went into long-term decline. Crucially, Acemoglu and Robinson remind us that these outcomes were not preordained. James II might have suppressed the Glorious Revolution, or the Spanish Armada might have succeeded a century earlier. History is like that.
  • In this light, the material prosperity of the modern world, unevenly distributed though it is, is a fortunate historical accident.
  • But inclusive institutions can also break down. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a small group of families transformed Venice's semi-democratic institutions into a hereditary aristocracy and then monopolized long-distance trade, spelling the end of the city-state's economic expansion
  • Acemoglu and Robinson, by contrast, examine why nations fail. Societies, in their telling, are like Tolstoy's families: The success stories are similar -- pluralist democracies with regulated capitalist economies -- but failure comes in different forms. There are many ways in which elites can impose extractive institutions that cripple economic development.
  • The United States is one of the happy families of Why Nations Fail. Although our institutions have often been deeply flawed, Acemoglu and Robinson show how crucial moments in history, from Jamestown to the Progressive Era to the civil-rights movement, have led to the expansion of political democracy and economic opportunity.
  • Rather than as a series of inevitable triumphs, however, this history can also be seen as a warning -- that our institutions are fragile, always at risk of being subverted by elites seeking to exploit political power for their narrow economic ends. That risk has reappeared today.
  • The power of the financial sector is only one example of the broader threat to our inclusive political institutions: namely, the ability of the economic elite to translate their enormous fortunes directly into political power. In the wake of the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United, super PACs can mobilize unlimited amounts of money--and can accept contributions from 501(c)4 organizations, which do not have to identify their donors.
  • This may seem like a level playing field. But money is not distributed evenly. American Crossroads, for example, has consistently raised more than 90 percent of its funds from billionaires (with a "b"). The recent, breathtaking rise in inequality has put unprecedented resources at the disposal of the super-rich. With the ability to secretly invest unlimited sums in political activities, they now have the opportunity to swamp all other participants in American politics.
  • Rising inequality and deregulation of political spending have made possible a new kind of class warfare. The 1 percent can blanket the airwaves, install their chosen representatives, and sway public policy in their favor.
  • The most direct way to translate political power into cold, hard cash is to advocate for lower taxes. Republican presidential candidates spent the past year competing to offer the most bountiful tax cuts to the super-rich
  • Showering goodies on the rich would require draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare -- programs that are popular among the Tea Party rank and file. Republicans' current anti-tax orthodoxy reflects the interests of their wealthy funders rather than their middle-income base.
  • As Warren Buffett observed, "there's been class warfare going on for the last twenty years, and my class has won." This should be little surprise: "My side has had the nuclear bomb. We've got K Street, we've got lobbyists, we've got money on our side."
  • Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents were instrumental in unleashing unlimited corporate political spending in Citizens United, accelerating the concentration of political power in the hands of the super-rich.
  • The most potent bulwark of inclusive institutions is probably the rich variety of influential interest groups that all have the ability to participate in politics. Still, the accumulation of huge fortunes and their deployment for political ends has changed the nature of our political institutions. Funding by the economic elite is a major reason why Republicans advocate transfers from ordinary people to the rich in the form of tax cuts and reductions in government services -- and why Democrats have been dragged to the right along with the GOP
  • Acemoglu recently said, "We need noisy grassroots movements to deliver a shock to the political system," citing both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as potentially helpful developments. As he recognized, however, the one with more staying power -- the Tea Party -- has been co-opted by well-funded, elite-dominated groups (including Americans for Prosperity). If a popular movement can be bankrolled as easily as an attack ad, it is hard to see what money can't buy in politics. The next test for America will be whether our political system can fend off the power of money and remain something resembling a real democracy -- or whether it will become a playground where a privileged elite works out its internal squabbles.
manhefnawi

1704: Blenheim, Gibraltar and the Making of a Great Power | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...braltar-and-making-great-power

Europe in 1700s Philip V of Spain War Succession Gibraltar British Military Marlborough General

shared by manhefnawi on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • glories of Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), ‘that short period of our History, which contains so many illustrious Actions
  • The most significant of these actions were in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13, Britain not involved until 1702), as the European powers jostled for control of the Spanish empire following the death of the last Spanish Habsburg king, Charles II, in 1700. On July 23rd, 1704, British naval forces captured Gibraltar and held out against Franco-Spanish attempts to regain it, while a few weeks later on August 13th, John Churchill, then Earl of Marlborough, heavily defeated a Franco-Bavarian army at Blenheim in Bavaria
  • The Blenheim campaign was crucial in preventing French hegemony in western Europe. Allied with Britain and the Dutch against France, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (r.1658-1705) was central to the struggle on the European mainland as his defeat would have allowed the French to dominate both Germany and northern Italy and to concentrate against the Anglo-Dutch efforts in the Low Countries and the lower Rhineland
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  • A combination of Louis XIV of France, the Elector of Bavaria, Max Emanuel, and Hungarian rebels, threatened to overthrow Leopold, and thus to end the Habsburg ability to counter-balance French power
  • These depots enabled the army to maintain cohesion and discipline, instead of having to disperse to obtain supplies
  • Marlborough had been more successful than his opponents in integrating cavalry and infantry; his cavalry were better trained for charging; and the artillery, under Colonel Holcroft Blood, manoeuvred rapidly on the battlefield, and was brought forward to help support the breakthrough in the centre
  • The victory ended the threat to Austria. Most of the Franco-Bavarian army was no longer effective after the battle and its subsequent retreat to the Rhine. The Allies followed up the battle with the conquest of southern Germany, as Bavaria was ‘taken out’ of the war, and took the major fortresses of Ulm, Ingolstadt and Landau before the close of the year. It was not until 1741 that French forces were again to campaign so far to the east – and later, and more seriously, in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when no British army marched to the Danube. In contrast, Marlborough’s advance into Germany had prepared the way for George II to campaign there in 1743, a campaign that culminated in another victory for the British and Austrians over the French at Dettingen, to the east of Frankfurt
  • Under Marlborough at Blenheim, the British army reached a peak of success that it was not to achieve again in Europe for another hundred years, until Wellington
  • Marlborough’s army was the most battle-hardened British army since those of the Civil Wars of the 1640s, but the armies of the Civil Wars had not been engaged in battles that were as extensive or sieges of positions that were as well fortified as those that faced Marlborough’s forces
  • The British in Gibraltar were now besieged on land by the French and the supporters of Philip V, but, as with the lengthy siege of Gibraltar by the Spaniards in 1780 during the American War of Independence, British fleet action proved crucial to the relief of the besieged garrison
  • As Marlborough was Master-General of the Ordnance as well as Captain-General of the Army, he was able to overcome any institutional constraints on co-operation between artillery and the rest of the army
  • Like Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Thirty Years’ War seventy years earlier, Marlborough made his cavalry charge fast and act like a shock force, rather than as mounted infantry relying on pistol firepower
  • Marlborough went on to win other battles – notably Ramillies (1706), Oudenaarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709) – but none had the dramatic impact of Blenheim, in part because that victory ended the danger that the anti-French alliance would collapse. But he also found that victory did not make it any easier to get the Allied forces to work together, and this, combined with differences in military and diplomatic strategy among the political leaders (the Dutch were especially cautious), made his task very difficult
  • Meanwhile, a few weeks earlier the seizure of Gibraltar had brought together Britain’s role as a Continental power with her interests as a maritime state. British troops were engaged in Iberia in support of ‘Charles III’, Leopold I’s second son and the Habsburg candidate for the crown of Spain, against Louis XIV’s second grandson, Philip V of Spain, who had been installed in 1700 under the terms of Charles II’s will. It proved far easier for Britain to intervene on the littoral, however, than to control the interior
  • the seizure of Gibraltar proved important as it registered the shift of naval hegemony from France to Britain. In the early 1690s Britain and France had contested the English Channel, but following the British victory at Barfleur in 1692, the navy had become far more effective in the Mediterranean. The dispatch of a large fleet under Russell to the Mediterranean in 1694 had been followed by its wintering at the then Allied port of Cadiz, a new achievement. The competing interests of Austria, France and Spain in the western Mediterranean ensured that this area was the cockpit of European diplomacy
  • n 1702, Sir George Rooke had concentrated on Spain’s Atlantic waters as a consequence of an attempt to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World. His attack on Cadiz had failed, but the Franco-Spanish fleet at Vigo was successfully attacked. British naval strength encouraged Portugal to switch sides in 1703; but, in an even more significant move, the same year Sir Cloudesley Shovell entered the Mediterranean and persuaded Victor Amadeus II of Savoy-Piedmont to abandon his alliance with Louis XIV
  • Rooke’s capture of Gibraltar on July 23rd, 1704, when the landing force was crucially supported by naval gunfire that silenced the enemy battery on the New Mole, led the French to mount a naval response to regain Gibraltar for Philip V and to demonstrate that France was still the leading naval power in the Mediterranean
  • Marlborough’s battles were fought on a more extended front than those of the 1690s, let alone the 1650s
  • These blows led the French to abandon the siege. Gibraltar’s inhabitants had been allowed to remain in the town if they took an oath of fidelity to ‘Charles III’, but ultimately the victory of Philip V, the Bourbon claimant, in the wider war removed this option, and instead the British acquired Gibraltar under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. In an attempt to improve relations with Spain, in 1721 George I promised to approach Parliament for consent to return Gibraltar to Spain, but this was not deemed politically possible
  • Three years later a fleet based at Gibraltar discouraged a junction between Bourbon naval forces in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when the Mediterranean formed a frontline between the alliance systems of two clashing empires, Gibraltar was a key British resource
  • Maintaining a presence in Gibraltar thereafter ceased to be of vital strategic concern to the British and became a curiosity to many; but its major role for a quarter-millennium of national history should not be underplayed.
  • It failed, after a night-time error in navigation led to the loss of eight transport ships and nearly 900 men in the St Lawrence estuary, but the Peace of Utrecht of 1713 left Britain with recognition of its wartime gains: not only Gibraltar and Minorca, but also Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This weakened the defences of New France and left the British clearly dominant in North American waters
manhefnawi

Return of the King: The Bourbon Restoration | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...eturn-king-bourbon-restoration

France Monarch Restoration Europe Napoleon Louis XVIII

shared by manhefnawi on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • On June 18th, the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end Napoleon's attempted comeback in the Hundred Days
  • At this point, two centuries ago, the victorious Allies – Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia – would determine the fate of France
  • The Austrian chancellor, Metternich, came from Vienna, Tsar Alexander from St Petersburg and, from Berlin, the 72-year-old Prussian Marshal Blücher
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  • Since both the republican and imperial models were discredited and unacceptable to the victorious Allies, a royal restoration was inevitable; Wellington warned that there would be no peace in Europe unless the Bourbons mounted the throne again. The Congress of Vienna, held to define European frontiers after two decades of war, reversed Napoleon's conquests but was otherwise generous to France
  • The new monarch, Louis XVIII, had made a poor fist of it on his first return from exile in Britain in May 1814. He surrounded himself with appointees who had been out of government business for more than two decades and the first restoration was brought to an abrupt end by the Hundred Days. Louis fled once more, to return three weeks after Waterloo
  • Louis Stanislas Xavier Bourbon, grandson of Louis XV and brother of Louis XVI, became heir to the throne when Louis' son died in prison in 1795
  • If France is still France, it is thanks to the Russians
  • Ignoring the king's desire for national unity, royalists in various parts of the country exacted their revenge for events since the Revolution of 1789
  • The Allies imposed financial indemnities on an economy that had been weakened by the demands of Napoleon's constant war-making and the effects of the British naval blockade
  • At the end of November 1815 a white-faced Richelieu signed the definitive peace agreement dictated by the Allies, lamenting that 'all is finished (by) this fatal treaty'
  • Russia, Prussia and Austria proclaimed their Holy Alliance and Britain joined them in the Quadruple Alliance
  • Then came 15 years wandering around Europe, including two in remote Courland in the Baltic, after which he came to rest for seven years in England
  • France was on its way to being re-integrated into the European system. This reflected the country's continental importance; Europe could not function without it. The path to national recovery was faster than might have been expected in the summer of 1815
  • the Hexagon between the Alps and the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Channel could no longer aspire to dominate Europe as it had sought to do under Louis XIV and Bonaparte
Javier E

Ecology and Society: Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity - 0 views

www.ecologyandsociety.org/...main.html

ecology society planetary boundaries crisis environment

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • We propose a new approach to global sustainability in which we define planetary boundaries within which we expect that humanity can operate safely. Transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental- to planetary-scale systems.
Javier E

The Arrogance of the Anthropocene - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...595795

anthropocene geology history arrogance

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages
  • At the end of all their travels—after cataloging all the bedrock of the entire planet—they might finally be led to an odd, razor-thin stratum hiding halfway up some eroding, far-flung desert canyon
  • Unless we fast learn how to endure on this planet, and on a scale far beyond anything we’ve yet proved ourselves capable of, the detritus of civilization will be quickly devoured by the maw of deep time.
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  • Yes, billions of dinosaur bodies died and fell to the Earth here in this span, and trillions more dinosaur footsteps pressed into the Earth, but hardly a trace remains today. A cryptic smattering of lakeside footprints represents their entire contribution to the Triassic period. A few bones and footsteps miraculously preserved in New England and Nova Scotia are all that remains from the entire 27-million-year Early Jurassic epoch. No trace of dinosaurs remains whatsoever from the 18-million-year Late Jurassic. A handful of bones from one layer in Maryland represents the entire 45-million-year Early Cretaceous; the Late Cretaceous gives up a Hadrosaurus in New Jersey, and part of a tyrannosaur in Alabama, but mostly comprises unimpressive fragments of bone and teeth that cover the remaining 34 million years of the Earth’s most storied age, until doomsday
  • So that’s what 180 million years of complete dominance buys you in the fossil record. What, then, will a few decades of industrial civilization get us? This is the central question of the Anthropocene—an epoch that supposedly started, not tens of millions of years ago, but perhaps during the Truman administration
  • as the example of the dinosaurs shows, the chance that any city-swallowing delta deposit from a window of time only a few centuries wide would be lucky enough to be not only buried and preserved for safekeeping, but then subsequently not destroyed—in the ravenous maw of a subduction zone, or sinking too close to the cleansing metamorphic forge of Earth’s mantle, or mutilated in some m
  • there exists a better word in geology than epoch to describe our moment in the sun thus far: event. Indeed, there have been many similarly disruptive, rapid, and unusual episodes scattered throughout Earth history—wild climate fluctuations, dramatic sea-level rises and falls, global ocean-chemistry disasters, and biodiversity catastrophes
  • we’re very likely to return to our regularly scheduled programming and dive back into a punishing Ice Age in the next half-million years. This means that sea level—after shooting up in the coming millennia by our own hand, and potentially burying coastal settlements in sediment (good for fossilization)—will eventually fall hundreds of feet below where it is today, and subject the shallow continental shelves, along with our once submerged cities and magnificent seams of garbage, to the cold winds of erosion (bad for fossilization), where they’ll be mostly reduced to nothing
  • What else of us could be sampled from this sliver of deep-sea-muck-turned-rock—these Anthropocene clays and shale layers? Pass it through a mass spectrometer and you would see, encoded in its elements, the story of the entire planet in this strange interval, the Great Derangement of the Earth’s systems by civilization. You would see our lightning-fast injection of hundreds of gigatons of light carbon into the atmosphere written in the strange skew of carbon isotopes in this rock—as you do in rocks from the many previous carbon-cycle disasters of Earth history. The massive global-warming pulse created by this carbon disaster would be written in oxygen isotope
  • The sulfur, nitrogen, thallium, and uranium isotopes in these rocks (to mention just a few) would whisper to you—again, in squiggles on a graph—that the global ocean lost much of its oxygen during this brief but enigmatic interval. Strontium isotopes would tell you that rock weathering dramatically accelerated worldwide for a few tens of thousands of years as sweltering, violent storms attacked the rocks and wore down the continents during a brief, CO2-driven fever.
  • The most enduring geological legacy, instead, will be the extinctions we cause. The first wave of human-driven extinctions, and the largest hit to terrestrial megafauna since the extinction of the dinosaurs, began tens of thousands of years ago, as people began to spread out into new continents and islands, wiping out everything we tend to think of as “Ice Age” faun
  • nd then, after all that, find itself, at a given point in the far future, fantastically lucky enough to have been serendipitously pushed up just enough so as to be exposed at the surface, but not too high as to have been quickly destroyed by erosion … is virtually ni
  • The first major mass extinction, 445 million years ago, took place in multiple pulses across a million years. An event. The second major mass extinction, 70 million years later, took place over 600,000 years—400,000 years longer than the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens.
  • The idea of the Anthropocene inflates our own importance by promising eternal geological life to our creations. It is of a thread with our species’ peculiar, self-styled exceptionalism—from the animal kingdom, from nature, from the systems that govern it, and from time itself. This illusion may, in the long run, get us all killed.
andrespardo

Will Florida be lost forever to the climate crisis? | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-crisis-sea-level-habitat-loss

enviro climate change global warming

shared by andrespardo on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Few places on the planet are more at risk from the climate crisis than south Florida, where more than 8 million residents are affected by the convergence of almost every modern environmental challenge – from rising seas to contaminated drinking water, more frequent and powerful hurricanes, coastal erosion, flooding and vanishing wildlife and habitat.
  • Below are some of the biggest threats posed by the climate crisis to south Florida today, along with solutions under consideration. Some of these solutions will have a lasting impact on the fight. Others, in many cases, are only delaying the inevitable. But in every situation, doing something is preferable to doing nothing at all.
  • Sea level rise The threat: By any estimation, Florida is drowning. In some scenarios, sea levels will rise up to 31in by 2060, a devastating prediction for a region that already deals regularly with tidal flooding and where an estimated 120,000 properties on or near the water are at risk. The pace of the rise is also hastening, scientists say – it took 31 years for the waters around Miami to rise by six inches, while the next six inches will take only 15 more.
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  • The cost: The participating counties and municipalities are contributing to a $4bn statewide spend, including Miami Beach’s $400m Forever Bond, a $1bn stormwater plan and $250m of improvements to Broward county’s sewage systems to protect against flooding and seawater seepage. In the Keys, many consider the estimated $60m a mile cost of raising roads too expensive.
  • The threat: Saltwater from sea level rise is seeping further inland through Florida’s porous limestone bedrock and contaminating underground freshwater supplies, notably in the Biscayne aquifer, the 4,000-sq mile shallow limestone basin that provides drinking water to millions in southern Florida. Years of over-pumping and toxic runoff from farming and the sugar industry in central Florida and the Everglades have worsened the situation. The Florida department of environmental protection warned in March that “existing sources of water will not adequately meet the reasonable beneficial needs for the next 20 years”. A rising water table, meanwhile, has exacerbated problems with south Florida’s ageing sewage systems. Since December, millions of gallons of toxic, raw sewage have spilled on to Fort Lauderdale’s streets from a series of pipe failures.
  • The cost: The Everglades restoration plan was originally priced at $7.8bn, rose to $10.5bn, and has since ballooned to $16.4bn. Donald Trump’s proposed 2021 federal budget includes $250m for Everglades restoration. The estimated $1.8bn cost of the reservoir will be split between federal and state budgets.
  • Possible solutions
  • The cost: With homeowners and businesses largely bearing their own costs, the specific amount spent on “hurricane-proofing” in Florida is impossible to know. A 2018 Pew research study documented $1.3bn in hazard mitigation grants from federal and state funding in 2017, along with a further $8bn in post-disaster grants. Florida is spending another $633m from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on resiliency planning.
  • Wildlife and habitat loss The threat: Florida’s native flora and fauna are being devastated by climate change, with the Florida Natural Areas Inventory warning that a quarter of the 1,200 species it tracks is set to lose more than half their existing habitat, and the state’s beloved manatees and Key deer are at risk of extinction. Warmer and more acidic seas reduce other species’ food stocks and exacerbate the deadly red-tide algal blooms that have killed incalculable numbers of fish, turtles, dolphins and other marine life. Bleaching and stony coral tissue disease linked to the climate crisis threaten to hasten the demise of the Great Florida Reef, the only living coral reef in the continental US. Encroaching saltwater has turned Big Pine Key, a crucial deer habitat, into a ghost forest.
  • As for the Key deer, of which fewer than 1,000 remain, volunteers leave clean drinking water to replace salt-contaminated watering holes as herds retreat to higher ground. A longer-term debate is under way on the merits and ethics of relocating the species to other areas of Florida or the US.
  • Coastal erosion The threat: Tourist brochures showcase miles of golden, sandy beaches in South Florida, but the reality is somewhat different. The Florida department of environmental protection deems the entire coastline from Miami to Cape Canaveral “critically eroded”, the result of sea level rise, historically high tides and especially storm surges from a succession of powerful hurricanes. In south-eastern Florida’s Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, authorities are waging a continuous war on sand loss, eager to maintain their picture-perfect image and protect two of their biggest sources of income, tourism dollars and lucrative property taxes from waterfront homes and businesses.
  • In the devastating hurricane season just one year before, major storms named Harvey, Maria and Irma combined to cause damage estimated at $265bn. Scientists have evidence the climate crisis is causing cyclones to be more powerful, and intensify more quickly, and Florida’s position at the end of the Atlantic Ocean’s “hurricane alley” makes it twice as vulnerable as any other state.
  • With the other option abandoning beaches to the elements, city and county commissions have little choice but costly replenishment projects with sand replacement and jetty construction. Federal law prohibits the importation of cheaper foreign sand, so the municipalities must source a more expensive alternative from US markets, often creating friction with residents who don’t want to part with their sand. Supplementary to sand replenishment, the Nature Conservancy is a partner in a number of nature-based coastal defense projects from West Palm Beach to Miami.
  • benefited from 61,000 cubic yards of new sand this year at a cost of $16m. Statewide, Florida spends an average $50m annually on beach erosion.
  • The threat: “Climate gentrification” is a buzzword around south Florida, a region barely 6ft above sea level where land has become increasingly valuable in elevated areas. Speculators and developers are eyeing historically black, working-class and poorer areas, pushing out long-term residents and replacing affordable housing with upscale developments and luxury accommodations that only the wealthy can afford.
  • No study has yet calculated the overall cost of affordable housing lost to the climate crisis. Private developers will bear the expense of mitigating the impact on the neighborhood – $31m in Magic City’s case over 15 years to the Little Haiti Revitalization Trust, largely for new “green” affordable housing. The University of Miami’s housing solutions lab has a $300,000 grant from JPMorgan to report on the impact of rising seas to South Florida’s affordable housing stocks and recommend modifications to prevent it from flooding and other climate events. A collaboration of not-for-profit groups is chasing $75m in corporate funding for affordable housing along the 70-mile south Florida rail trail from Miami to West Palm Beach, with the first stage, a $5m project under way to identify, build and renovate 300 units.
  • Florida has long been plagued by political leadership more in thrall to the interests of big industry than the environment. As governor from 2011 to 2019, Rick Scott, now a US senator, slashed $700m from Florida’s water management budget, rolled back environmental regulations and enforcement, gave a free ride to polluters, and flip-flopped over expanding offshore oil drilling. The politician who came to be known as “Red Tide Rick”, for his perceived inaction over 2018’s toxic algae bloom outbreaks, reportedly banned the words “climate change” and “global warming” from state documents.
  • Last month, state legislators approved the first dedicated climate bill. It appears a promising start for a new administration, but activists say more needs to be done. In January, the Sierra Club awarded DeSantis failing grades in an environmental report card, saying he failed to protect Florida’s springs and rivers and approved new roads that threatened protected wildlife.
  • The cost: Florida’s spending on the environment is increasing. The state budget passed last month included $650m for Everglades restoration and water management projects (an instalment of DeSantis’s $2.5bn four-year pledge) and $100m for Florida Forever. A $100m bridge project jointly funded by the state and federal governments will allow the free flow of water under the Tamiami Trail for the first time in decades.
  • Florida has woken up to the threat of climate change but it is not yet clear how effective the response will be. The challenges are innumerable, the costs immense and the political will to fix or minimize the issues remains questionable, despite recent progress. At stake is the very future of one of the largest and most diverse states in the nation, in terms of both its population and its environment. Action taken now will determine its survival.
andrespardo

'Of course it could happen again': experts say little has changed since Deepwater Horiz... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rs-later-could-it-happen-again

enviro climate change global warming

shared by andrespardo on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • A massive deepwater oil spill is nearly as likely today as it was in 2010, experts warn, 10 years after the disastrous explosion of BP’s rig in the Gulf of Mexico that caused an environmental catastrophe.
  • Trump administration’s decision to loosen Obama-era safety rules. Those standards had grown from an independent commission’s damning findings of corporate and regulatory failures leading up to the spill.
  • “Of course it could happen again, and I think one of the things of most concern is that our ability to control a spill is pretty much the same as it was 10 years prior,” Beinecke said.
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  • Outside of safety concerns, the scientific community is also increasingly encouraging world leaders to consider that any new oil development is unwise, as emissions from fossil fuels exacerbate global heating, threatening human civilization.
  • Trump has pushed an agenda of “energy dominance”, which critics say encourages industry to take risks. A constant ally of fossil fuels, Trum
  • “BSEE is transitioning from an era of isolation to cooperation, from creating hardships to creating partnerships,” the bureau director, Scott Angelle, said at an industry symposium in August 2017.
  • “The next major oil spill, when it happens, will catch us off guard … like every previous one has, unless we decide that this time it’s going to be different,” Amos said.
  • “Offshore drilling is going after bigger and bigger wells that have more and more oil,” said Bob Deans, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council who co-wrote a book on the BP disaster. “These are being drilled in deep water and they’re being drilled in high pressure wells that are harder to control. And they’re being drilled in more complex geology.”
  • Deans called the current regulatory approach “an honor system” that “smacks of exactly the kind of self-enforcement that the independent commission found to be a fatal flaw” in the BP blowout.
  • “Many steps have been taken by both government and industry since the accident 10 years ago … I felt comfortable – not that the risk was reduced to negligible – but that we were in better shape now than we were,” Boesch said. “I’ve frankly been made more concerned about how the safety issues are being treated under the Trump administration.”
  • Wesley Williams, a petroleum engineering professor at Louisiana State University, who was awarded a nearly $5m research grant from a fund BP was forced to pay into, said the “real motivator” for industry was “the image issue that happened and the financial cost of what happened to BP”.
  • “BSEE is committed to its mission to promote safety, protect the environment and conserve offshore resources through vigorous regulatory oversight and enforcement,” said Day, adding: “Safety is a top priority for the Trump administration’s oversight of OCS [outer continental shelf] operations, and BSEE has significantly increased safety performance in comparison to the Obama administration through increased inspections and more effective use of data.”
  • Those companies work with large networks of contractors, and smaller independent operators are active in the Gulf of Mexico too. Williams said they did not always have the resources for extensive safety training.
Javier E

Who Won the Reformation? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...protestant-reformation.html

Reformation Protestant culture history

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Neither the Protestants nor Catholics won that war between the faiths: The instrumentalists did, the Machiavellians, the Westerners who wanted political and economic life set free from the meddling of troublesome priests and turbulent prophets
  • , it’s their propaganda that deserves the most scrutiny, the most skepticism, the strongest doubts.
  • At the heart of that propaganda is a simple story about authority and the individual. First, this story goes, Protestantism replaced the authority of the church with the authority of the Bible. Then, once it became clear that nobody could agree on what the Bible meant, the authority of conscience became pre-eminent — and from there we entered naturally (if with some bloody resistance from various reactionary forces) into the age of liberty, democracy and human rights.
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  • The Reformation and its wars did indeed diminish religious authority, secularize politics and allow certain kinds of individualism to flourish. But they also empowered (and were exploited and worsened by) the great new gods of modernity, the almighty market and the centralizing state, which claimed their own kind of authority over everyday life, making the divided churches into handmaidens or scapegoats, and using Christianity as an excuse for plunder rather than a restraining counterforce to worldly lust.
  • This simultaneous expansion of commercial power and state power made the Western world more orderly and rationalized and much, much wealthier. It also licensed cruelty and repression on an often extraordinary scale.
  • It also weakened or destroyed the places where one might retreat from commerce or refuse the world.
  • As the church did before its crackup, and might have done thereafter, these modern ecclesiastical agencies do have some gentling effect. But they are a made-up religion whose acolytes at some level know it — and the thinness of their metaphysics, their weak claim on human loyalties, makes them mostly just a pleasing cloak over the dark power that’s actually stabilized the modern world, the terrifying threat of nuclear war.
  • Cromwellism, mass murder in the service of secular power and commercial wealth, has just as strong a claim as liberty or individualism to define the world that succeeded Christendom’s collapse.
  • worse could be imagined. It is possible to imagine a world where Western Christendom remained united but Europe refused the gifts of science and the church sank into permanent corruption, with Ottoman armies delivering a coup de grâce. It is also possible to imagine a world where an undivided Roman church harnessed science and technology to its own sort of religious-totalitarian ends, and became a theocratic boot stamping on a human face, forever.
  • It is hard to read the history of Western colonial ventures, in which for hundreds of years it was mostly the intensely religious (as compromised and corrupted as their churches often were) that remonstrated against mass murder and enslavement, that sought to defend natives and establish norms for their protection, and not suspect that a still-united Western church would have found it easier to turn its moral critiques into more effective practical restraints
  • What are our pan-national institutions, our United Nations and European Union, all our interlocking NGOs, if not an attempt to recreate a kind of ecclesiastical power, a churchlike form of sovereignty, on the basis of thinner, less dogmatic but still essentially metaphysical ideas — the belief in human dignity and human rights?
  • It also brutalized religious resisters, stacked non-European bodies like cordwood … and eventually revived the worst tendencies of the old Christendom, anti-Semitism and millenarianism, in fascist and Communist experiments that added the genocide of millions to the modern state’s list of crimes.
  • since the unity of Christendom isn’t coming back any time soon and our own society has a thousand incentives to lie to itself about how religious division was for the best, it’s worth considering the dark version of the long view.
  • to assume that this division was a necessary means to a happy secular and liberal ending is to assume that we actually know the ending — even though the story so far has given us many novel forms of tyrannies as well as greater liberties, and the price of the modern experiment has been millions of unremembered dead.
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