Longer Reads.

Who hates who?

1. New World Order?

The history of international order….provides little reason for confidence in top-down, cooperative solutions. The strongest orders in modern history—from Westphalia in the seventeenth century to the liberal international order in the twentieth—were not inclusive organizations working for the greater good of humanity. Rather, they were alliances built by great powers to wage security competition against their main rivals. Fear and loathing of a shared enemy, not enlightened calls to make the world a better place, brought these orders together. Progress on transnational issues, when achieved, emerged largely as a byproduct of hardheaded security cooperation. That cooperation usually lasted only as long as a common threat remained both present and manageable. When that threat dissipated or grew too large, the orders collapsed. Today, the liberal order is fraying for many reasons, but the underlying cause is that the threat it was originally designed to defeat—Soviet communism—disappeared three decades ago. None of the proposed replacements to the current order have stuck because there hasn’t been a threat scary or vivid enough to compel sustained cooperation among the key players.

Until now. Through a surge of repression and aggression, China has frightened countries near and far. It is acting belligerently in East Asia, trying to carve out exclusive economic zones in the global economy, and exporting digital systems that make authoritarianism more effective than ever. For the first time since the Cold War, a critical mass of countries face serious threats to their security, welfare, and ways of life—all emanating from a single source…… 

Anti-Chinese sentiment is starting to congeal into concrete pushback. The resistance remains embryonic and patchy, mainly because so many countries are still hooked on Chinese trade. But the overall trend is clear: disparate actors are starting to join forces to roll back Beijing’s power. In the process, they are reordering the world. 

The emerging anti-Chinese order departs fundamentally from the liberal order, because it is directed at a different threat. In particular, the new order flips the relative emphasis placed on capitalism versus democracy. During the Cold War, the old liberal order promoted capitalism first and democracy a distant second. The United States and its allies pushed free markets as far as their power could reach, but when forced to choose, they almost always supported right-wing autocrats over left-wing democrats. The so-called free world was mainly an economic construct. Even after the Cold War, when democracy promotion became a cottage industry in Western capitals, the United States and its allies often shelved human rights concerns to gain market access, as they did most notably by ushering China into the WTO. 

But now economic openness has become a liability for the United States and its allies, because China is ensconced in virtually every aspect of the liberal order. Far from being put out of business by globalization, China’s authoritarian capitalist system seems almost perfectly designed to milk free markets for mercantilist gain. Beijing uses subsidies and espionage to help its firms dominate global markets and protects its domestic market with nontariff barriers. It censors foreign ideas and companies on its own internet and freely accesses the global Internet to steal intellectual property and spread CCP propaganda. It assumes leadership positions in liberal international institutions, such as the UN Human Rights Council, and then bends them in an illiberal direction. It enjoys secure shipping around the globe for its export machine, courtesy of the U.S. Navy, and uses its own military to assert control over large swaths of the East China and South China Seas. 

The United States and its allies have awoken to the danger: the liberal order and, in particular, the globalized economy at its heart are empowering a dangerous adversary. In response, they are trying to build a new order that excludes China by making democracy a requirement for full membership. (Source: foreignaffairs.com)

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2. A New Force on the French Right.

Until​ recently, a rematch between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in April’s presidential election looked inevitable, with polls predicting a comfortable Macron victory, albeit narrower than in 2017, when he won 66 per cent of the vote. But then, last summer, a new candidate emerged, as it became clear that the right-wing writer and commentator Éric Zemmour had presidential ambitions. Long before he formally announced his candidacy on 30 November, he was dominating media coverage. His campaign launch was held on 5 December at a convention centre in the Paris suburbs in front of a wildly enthusiastic crowd of 13,000. Marine Le Pen could only dream of filling a hall that big. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leading candidate of the left, held a rally at the same time, also in the Paris suburbs, and attracted an audience a third of the size. There were many more young people – most of them men (and many maskless) – at Zemmour’s rally than you see at meetings held by the established political parties. Almost all of them were white and looked like they came from Paris’s posher areas. They were not the progeny of the gilets jaunes or working-class Le Pen voters in the dying mill towns of northern France. Many of them would have received their political baptism in La Manif pour tous, which led the opposition to gay marriage legislation in 2013, taking the entire political class by surprise. The conservative Catholics of La Manif pour tous were a key constituent of François Fillon’s base in 2017, when he was the presidential candidate for Les Républicains (LR), the current incarnation of the main centre-right party in France. LR’s candidate this time, Valérie Pécresse, is seen as insufficiently right-wing by this group, who have instead given their support to Zemmour…..

Zemmour is aware that he is offering a heightened version of what much of France privately thinks. The claim that he is being honest where others are defeated by cowardice, political correctness and ‘le wokeisme’ is central to his appeal. He names major political figures, including some on the left, who he claims privately share his views; some have asked him for policy advice, among them Macron, Chevènement, François Hollande and Xavier Bertrand (a prominent member of LR who sought the presidential nomination). Zemmour’s policy prescriptions on immigration would include an almost complete halt to the issuing of residence cards, and an end to family reunification (French citizens who marry non-citizens would not be able to live in France with their spouses), the principle of jus sanguinis in nationality acquisition (children born and raised in France to foreign parents would have to apply for citizenship when they reach adulthood), dual nationality for non-Europeans, social benefits for non-citizens (which they have paid taxes to receive), and almost all student visas and asylum requests. Dual nationals convicted even of minor crimes (presumably including drug offences) would be stripped of French citizenship, and ‘national preference’ in employment would be implemented. Many of these policies are backed by the hard right of LR, particularly by Éric Ciotti, who ran against Pécresse in the second round of the LR primary. The former Parti socialiste prime minister Manuel Valls has also called for the suspension of family reunification, among other restrictive measures. Zemmour has plenty of company.

In the introduction to Un quinquennat pour rien, Zemmour claims that France’s ‘civilizational war’ with Islam can only be won through a protracted ‘cultural revolution’, via a modern-day ‘Kulturkampf’. A ‘state of cultural emergency’ must be decreed, which would ‘render inoperative all jurisprudence enacted in the name of human rights, to stop the invasion and colonisation of our land, if there is still time’; the rule of law would be suspended ‘to protect the nation in peril’. Zemmour has, in true Bonapartist style, promised a referendum immediately after his election to rubberstamp his ability to stop the courts blocking his measures – in effect, to allow him to rule as a dictator. If he gets through to the second round of voting and turnout is high on 24 April, he will lose. But if there is a face-off between Macron and Zemmour and a sizable percentage of Macron-loathing voters on the left – and there are many – choose not to vote, Macron’s victory will be narrower, particularly if Zemmour gets all Le Pen’s votes plus a majority of Pécresse’s. As in 2017, Macron will have won thanks to voters who wanted to block his opponent. A respectable loss will establish Zemmour as the hegemonic figure on the French far right – and possibly the dominant figure on the right more generally – during Macron’s second quinquennat. Given the fragmentation and weakness of the left, the failure of Macron to create a centrist party worthy of the name, and a Zemmourized LR, there is legitimate cause to worry for the future of France. (Source: lrb.co.uk. The article is free to read, provided you have not previously “accessed” 3 articles from the site recently)

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