In 2024, almost 19 million of us will choose elected officials to represent us at all three of these levels: 33 new members of the European Parliament (MEPs), 3,000 new mayors across Romania, 588 new members of the Romanian Parliament, and 1 new president.

So why is there fatigue, rather than campaign excitement? And are the Romanian and European contests functioning in opposition to each other—distracting citizens from the important issues in both sets of races—or are they mutually beneficial, because they’ll bring so many people to the polls?

Thus far, the current Romanian government seems to have abandoned meaningful debate about the issues the country faces. Projects are stagnating. There is no real strategy to deal with the Ukraine war at our border. There is no plan to modernize the Romanian economy in a digital era, or industry and agriculture in the era of green transition. Candidates merely praise the work of party colleagues, and criticize the opposition, avoiding concrete proposals or explanations of their positions. Flattering photographs on social media encourage us to vote for candidates, without giving us a reason why.

Even electoral debates are missing. Instead, politicians secure spots on popular television shows and list their achievements from a safe seat. In fact, the first and probably only real electoral debate between the Romanian candidates in the EU elections was organized by my NGO, Europuls,  and Democracy International, which took place at the recent Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy*.

The EU elections, meanwhile, will lead to the renewal of the European Parliament, the institution that adopts EU laws. They will also indirectly reshape the European Commission, the bureaucratic body that proposes EU laws.

According to the latest Eurobarometer survey, 74% of Romanians say they intend to vote in the EU elections, 19 percentage points more than those who said they intended to vote in 2019. It will be interesting to see whether the intention will translate into actual presence and whether the turnout will be higher than in 2019.

The decision to hold Romania’s local elections on the same day as EU elections sparked heated debate here. The ruling coalition has cited several reasons for the move: reducing administrative costs (though leaders have provided no figures to indicate any likely savings), keeping local constituents engaged and avoiding electoral fatigue over what would otherwise have been four rounds of elections, and even counteracting extremism. The opposition argues that merging elections is anti-democratic and undermines small parties’ chances.

In practice, the local contests seem to overshadow the EU elections, as EU parliament candidates campaign in their districts, and often promote candidates for local elections instead of talking about EU-level priorities.

Romanian citizens seem confused, disillusioned, and indifferent. Because they don’t know what distinguishes the people and parties on their ballot, the European elections here seem more like a popularity contest rather than a political one. That’s unfortunate because the story of this election is mainly one about the future of Romania as part of the European family—a family in which we have lived for nearly 20 years, and which makes our lives better every day.

An EU infusion of more than 60 billion euros into the Romanian economy financed essential reforms in our public administration and justice systems, as well as investments in roads, railways, schools, and hospitals. EU values of democracy, human rights, and rule of law have made us more inclusive and tolerant—a more modern society. Being part of the EU single market has increased our GDP. Romanians can travel and work throughout the EU; our goods, services, and money move around almost as freely as within a single country. EU membership means we have no cellular roaming costs or extra fees for credit and debit card purchases within the EU, full protection of our personal data, and a guaranteed four weeks of paid leave per year. We benefit from the unified emergency and health insurance systems for all 27 EU countries. We have enjoyed fast access to vaccines during the pandemic, great food quality standards, and the strictest environmental targets in the world.

Romanians are distracted from the high stakes these elections represent for us and for the whole European continent. Even now, 17 years after becoming an EU member state, our country doesn’t fully embrace its responsibility to the project.

With 33 seats in the European Parliament, Romania is the sixth most powerful country in the EU. Forty percent of Romania’s children live in poverty and social exclusion. By leaning in to the European project, we can rescue those kids by helping to erase social and economic disparities across EU regions and by helping the EU achieve economic and climate targets.

We can influence geopolitics, too. Strategically positioned on the Black Sea, sharing a border with Ukraine, and a NATO member, Romania could play a key role in resolving the war in Ukraine, and planning for that country’s reconstruction. Romania strongly promotes the rapid integration of our neighbor Moldova into the European Union. This is essential because the faster Moldova transitions toward the organization, the faster its citizens can escape poverty, and Russian threats to their freedom and resources.

But accomplishing all of this requires that we elect candidates that understand the world, as well as the EU agenda and how Romania could benefit from it. And we need responsible and informed citizens to elect them. As a Romanian citizen, I would like to ask our candidates for the European Parliament about these issues before going to the polls and casting my ballot. These are questions that will shape the EU agenda in upcoming years. I hope that, as of June 9, I and Romanian voters like me will get more insight into what our leaders are thinking when it comes to our future and our future role in the continent.

*Zócalo columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews is a founder of Democracy International, and sits on the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy’s supervisory committee.

The post What Kind of European Future Do Romanians Want? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The heart of the problem is that Brits have been told, before the June 2016 referendum and after, that Brexit is about exiting the European Union. That’s true, but it leaves out the bigger, more difficult part of the story. Brexit is also about setting up a border with the EU.

The brutal truth is that erecting a real border between the U.K. and the EU is nearly impossible. This truth explains why the United Kingdom keeps losing at Brexit and why it never will find an effective approach for leaving the EU.

For nearly two years now, the U.K. government has pursued Brexit negotiations under a fundamentally false premise: that everything is on the table and every element of departing the EU can be worked out. Clinging to the meaningless mantra that “Brexit means Brexit,” Prime Minister Theresa May has approached EU negotiators as if on equal footing, suggesting that the U.K. will leave the EU and both parties must simply reach an agreement on how to accomplish the separation.

Big issues like the rights of EU member states’ citizens in the U.K., the U.K. contribution to the EU’s current budget, the continued jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in the U.K. during the transition period, and the structure of the negotiations themselves—with the U.K. pressing to talk about a new trade deal before the “exit” terms were established—all have been treated as open matters to be settled.

During the process to date, the U.K. has behaved as if it had leverage. Last year, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson smartly told EU leaders that they could “go whistle” (i.e., get lost) if they expected the U.K. to pay a large divorce bill.

But time has revealed that these tactics and maneuvers rise out of a kind of delusion. The U.K. has caved on all major issues so far, and the EU has gotten everything it wants. EU citizens in the U.K. will have rights, the U.K. will pay a hefty sum to the EU, and the CJEU will maintain jurisdiction in the transition period. And the U.K. has conceded that the terms of the divorce, including a payment, must be settled before the elements of a new relationship are explored.

As negotiations veer further afield from what the U.K. wants, chaos within the government and legislative branches has increased in volume and intensity. Deep rifts are splitting the Tory party. Government officials seem to take opposing stances every other day. The Labour Party appears fractured and confused. And no one knows what Prime Minister May really wants.

This has happened because of a failure to recognize the magnitude of establishing a border. That failure goes back to the Brexit campaigners who, ahead of the referendum in which voters chose to leave, decided not to reckon with reality.

Put simply, the political and economic difficulties for the U.K. of constructing a border with the EU are almost insurmountable. As such, the situation is akin to someone making preparations to embark on a train trip whose destination remains unknown. Should you pack for hot or cold weather? For the mountains or the beach? Under such circumstances, the ability to strategize, plan, and set priorities is greatly diminished.

What makes it nearly impossible to create a new border for purposes of trade and regulation? Let’s start by recalling what the EU is fundamentally about. The EU is first and foremost a common market: a free trade area (for goods, workers, services, and capital) with a common external tariff (CET). The free-trade area means that everything within the EU can circulate freely across the member states. This has been accomplished by the removal of internal tariff barriers and a massive effort at regulatory harmonization in countless policy areas. The CET regime means that everything coming into the EU is subject to the same tariff restrictions no matter which member state imports it.

The U.K. has been part of this regulatory and economic body for more than four decades, joining after realizing it did not want to be left out. Leaving now is hard to fathom and will be harder to do, for both political and economic reasons.

The political challenges relate primarily to Northern Ireland and Scotland. The Irish question is the most pressing at the moment, due to the question of where the border, including the CET boundary, should be. A border between Northern Ireland and Ireland is unacceptable to the Irish, Northern Irish (including Sinn Fein), and the U.K. itself.

But it would also be madness to put the border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., given that the former is part of the latter. For one thing, it would mean that the U.K. is not fully out of the EU, since Northern Ireland would remain inside the EU. For another, it would separate Northern Ireland—in tariff but also, critically, regulatory terms—from the rest of the U.K., which remains unacceptable to Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, on whose support May depends. The logistics associated with managing that border would present another extraordinarily complicated challenge. There is, in effect, no place to put the Irish border.

The Scottish situation has unique dynamics but is fundamentally similar. The Scots, while part of the U.K., cannot imagine being outside of the EU. Yet severing Scotland from the U.K. is not something that a majority of Scots, or Brits, want to do.

On the economic side, the harsh reality is that the U.K. cannot afford to erect a new border anywhere when it comes to the EU. It is too dependent on the EU market to turn away from it. To avoid harrowing effects on its economy, the U.K. will need to stay aligned with the EU’s regulatory frameworks (currently amounting to around 50 percent of all national legislation in any one member state) and retain an essentially tariff-free relationship. And, for all this to be possible, the U.K. will have to accept, in effect, a CET or otherwise pay the EU a heavy fee for not following it.

Alternative scenarios are hard to contemplate. The only thing the U.K. must decide is whether it wishes to retain some control over EU law (by staying within the EU) or not. Since Brexit means leaving the EU, the U.K. looks as if it is headed for an unenviable arrangement wherein it will be intimately connected to the EU but will have no control over its trajectory.

As it turned out, on May 8 the House of Lords voted on precisely this question. It was framed as a vote on whether to follow “The Norway Model,” which involves acceptance of all EU laws, paying a hefty fee for access to its market to the tune of billions of euros every year, and accepting judiciary oversight to ensure compliance. Norway follows this framework as part of the arrangement known as the European Economic Area (EAA), to which Iceland and Liechtenstein also belong. Of course, it also means that Norway has zero control over the direction of the EU regulatory regime with which it must comply.

The House of Lords’ “yes” vote forced a forthcoming vote in the House of Commons on the Norway Model. A similar vote in the lower house would set Parliament on a collision course with May’s government. All this is a far cry from a clean break with the EU. It is the opposite, and is, in fact worse than being an EU member: continued participation, meaning no border—this time with loss of control.

It is time for reality to sink in and for the U.K. government and British people to accept the truth: A clean, pure Brexit is simply a mirage. The U.K. will remain deeply connected to the EU and should therefore remain a member of that organization if it wishes to retain some control over the relationship. Hubris, the vestiges of imperial superiority, and false promises brought the Brexit idea about and have muddied the path forward. Honesty and decisiveness can clarify the next steps.

The post “Brexit Means Brexit” Is a Meaningless Mantra appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In an epic act of self-harm, Britain has voted to leave the European Union. The British people have voted to sever ties with their largest trading partner, ending freedom of movement and trade between Britain and mainland Europe. This means I have to put stickers on my car.

The stickers are for my headlights because the lights of British cars are angled to point away from oncoming traffic: that is, to the right. In Europe, where they drive on the right, my British headlights will blind passing drivers. Applying reflective stickers on my lights will change me from a pariah to a law-abiding citizen of the EU.

And that is important because, with our baby and possessions, my wife and I are about to drive off the Channel Tunnel train, on which we are currently rattling from England to France, and onto a European road. We are a new thing: Brexpats. We are leaving Britain in the hopes of finding a new home in Germany. But it’s not a sure thing that they will take us. As the U.K. prepares to leave the EU on March 29, 2019, under terms nobody can predict, the clock is ticking for us to establish ourselves in Europe as firmly as possible.

I wonder how my small family will survive the turning of these great gears of history. We are British, though, so we don’t mention our anxiety directly. We prefer to reveal it through overreactions to minor difficulties.

“You might prefer me to do the first leg of the driving in France,” says my wife from the passenger seat. “It’s terrifying.”

I’m a new driver.

My wife explains: “When you come out of the train, you go round this funny roundabout thing, and suddenly you’re on the wrong side of the road.” The baby starts to cry. “It’s okay, sweetie darling,” coos my wife.

The baby begins to bellow. My wife opens her door and clambers into the back seat. I peel off the sticker and peer at the offending British bulb.

“In the diagram the light is flat, but in real life it has a really slanty case!” I fret.

“Just bung it on, we’re slowing down.”

I bung it on.

The train stops. The doors open. The car in front starts its engine. I crumple up the instructions and look at my wife in the back seat. The baby is casually chewing her nipple.

“I thought you were going to negotiate the terrifying roundabout?” I protest.

“You’ll have to get on with it!” she shouts and slams the door.

Cringing and flinching, I creep the car over the clanging threshold of the train-shed. Some chatting officials look far too nonchalant for their own good. They have no idea; I’m a new driver. I’m going to crash out of panic on the roundabout of terror, with my baby in the back!

This move is going to be a disaster.

I’ve almost got my eyes closed … but no roundabout appears. Just straight road, and a breezy reminder: REMEMBER TO DRIVE ON THE RIGHT. Turning left for the first time, I remember to cross the traffic rather than drive into it. My lights have been corrected; I’m blinding no one. I’m flooded with optimism.

This move is going to be a great success.

After the rigmarole of traversing Britain’s moat, the drive to Berlin is basically one road through four countries. The French A16 becomes the Belgian E40; the Belgian E34 becomes the Dutch A67, which becomes the German A40. As I drive from one country to the next, I find myself lazily judging the people by the quality of their roads:

French roads are badly kept and not at all as nice as British ones. They have weeds and illegible, faded signs. This makes the French an irresponsible people.

The Belgian roads are much smarter. This makes the Belgians a smart people. We drive through Flanders and past lots of World War I battlefields. The Belgians are steeped in trenches, misery, and needless death. The Belgians are soulful.

The Dutch roads are clean, much like the Belgian ones. Lots of places ending in “-hoven,” which makes me think of Beethoven. The Dutch are a musical people. And windmills—old ones that make you think of clogs. The Dutch are a wooden people.

I find these thoughts deeply disturbing. I reassure myself that suspicion of foreigners is an intrinsic part of being human. But I can’t help feeling an uneasy connection to those of my British compatriots who voted for Brexit—millions of them—because they didn’t like the idea of foreigners coming to Britain to live and work.

I am dealing with my fear of the strange by making instant, comforting judgments. I am revealing in myself the very attitudes that have led me to flee Brexit, as I am fleeing it.

Brexit forced me to decide that I am a European before I’m a Brit. I made that choice because I am inspired by, and want to contribute to, the cooperative spirit of the European Union. It’s that spirit of cooperation in which I want my daughter to flourish. Which is why we are on the road to Germany, and why my wife and I hope to establish ourselves in German life as much as possible before March 29, 2019. At that point, we may well have no claim to live in Germany, since we will no longer be citizens of the EU. We will have to argue for our continued residency there. Because we are both freelance, it will be difficult to cite jobs or job offers in our favor. We are likely to be deported back to the U.K.

The mainstream, right-wing British press characterize people such as myself, who embrace the EU and wish the U.K. to remain a member, as “remoaners,” “saboteurs,” “enemies of the people,” and “traitors.” The irony of being a migrant from anti-migrant Brexit Britain is matched only by the irony of being dragged back there by the very people whose views make me persona non grata.

When faced with the suspicious questioning of right-leaning friends and relatives, I have a convenient excuse for moving to Germany: My wife is an opera singer. Britain has five major opera houses, whereas the German-speaking world has closer to 85.

However, I’m not moving just to support her (as much as I like to claim that in arguments). I have been desolated by the architects of Brexit. I am infuriated by the short-sightedness of my countrymen, whose prejudice allowed them to be hoodwinked, and who will suffer hardship as a direct result.

Yet my fierce desire that Britain remain an open, tolerant, and prosperous country gives me a deep sense of shame as I leave it. “All evil needs to triumph is that good men do nothing.” This idea has been plaguing me. I never feel more defined by my Britishness than when I am abroad, so being in Germany only makes me more painfully conscious of it. I want to coin a new term to describe my bitter situation: “Brexpatriotism.” But what’s patriotic about abandoning your country to criminals? Can I cast myself as one of these “good men” as I do nothing?

As I run from the field to stand on the sidelines, I have to acknowledge that I’m not necessarily putting myself in a less precarious position than I had been in Britain. Angela Merkel has yet to form a coalition in the face of a resurgence of the far-right in Germany. Running is no real strategy: That’s why Brexpatriotism is an illusion, and just another attempt at self-comfort.

I’m escaping to Europe, for a year at least. Perhaps, if my plucky Nissan and I are dragged back to my car crash of a homeland, I’ll have enough fire in my belly to join the fight.

The post Why “Brexpat” Brits Like Me Are on the Road to Germany appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The groundwork for the Brexit debacle was laid the previous summer when Europe crushed the progressive pro-European SYRIZA government elected in Greece in January 2015. Most Britons were not directly engaged with the Greek trauma. Many surely looked askance at the Greek leaders. But they must have noticed how Europe talked down to the Greeks, how European Commissioners scolded the Greek officials for their supposed lack of fiscal rectitude, and then imperiously dictated terms for any debt restructuring. The British public witnessed how the European Union made the rebellious country into an example, so that no one else would ever be tempted to follow the same path.

If the submission of Greece to the political will of the EU and its bankers helped set the tone for European disharmony, the Leave campaign won by turning the British referendum into an ugly expression of English nativism, feeding on the frustrations of a deeply unequal nation and concerns about the EU dictating migration policy to member states. Americans can surely relate, both to the ugly nativism and to some of its underlying causes.

Fellow academics and media pundits spend a lot of time decrying the public’s embrace of destructive, so-called “populist” politics. But we should be spending more time evaluating just how out of touch our technocratic elites have become these days. These elites have only themselves to blame for the fact that people are looking for options, and often landing on unsavory ones.

That the Leave campaign could prevail testifies to the high-handed incompetence of the establishments on both sides of the English Channel. Remain ran a campaign based on fear (of recessions and other bad things that happen when you aren’t prudent in the eyes of bond markets), condescension and bean-counting, as though Britons cared only about the growth rate and the pound. And the Remain leaders seemed to believe that such figures as Barack Obama, George Soros, Christine Lagarde, a list of ten Nobel-prize-winning economists or the research department of the International Monetary Fund carried weight with the British working class.

So far, since the vote, the economic effects of the vote have been more muted than initially expected. And the political effects will be rather protracted: New Prime Minister Theresa May has announced that formal divorce negotiations won’t start with Brussels until March 2017, with the United Kingdom expected to actually leave the Union in 2019. Meanwhile, markets have settled down and British life has continued normally, undermining the scare campaign waged against a Brexit last spring.

Over time, however, as they apply to the United Kingdom, the structures of EU law, regulation, fiscal transfers, open commerce, open borders, and human rights built over four decades will start eroding. Exactly how this will happen—by what process of negotiation, with what retribution from the spurned powers in Brussels and Berlin, by what combination of slow change and abrupt acts, with what consequences for the Union of Scotland to England—is clearly unknown to the new pro-Leave Tory government.

And Europe’s crisis of confidence will likely continue spreading across Europe: In Holland and France, but also in Spain and Italy, as well as in Germany, Finland, and the East. If nativist populism can rise in Britain, it can rise anywhere.

And if Britain can exit, so can anyone; neither the EU nor the Euro is irrevocable. And most likely, since the apocalyptic predictions of economic collapse that preceded the Brexit referendum will not come true, such warnings will be even less credible when heard the next time.

The European Union has sowed the wind. It may reap the whirlwind. Unless it moves, and quickly, not merely to assert a hollow “unity” but to deliver a democratic, accountable, and realistic New Deal—or something very much like it—for all Europeans. Technocratic elites have to stop bemoaning the ignorance of voters in their countries—be it in Greece, the UK, or closer to home—and start looking at their ineffective and out-of-touch policies that are triggering the “populist” backlash.

The post How the EU’s Greek Tragedy Became a British Farce appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Barcelona is a great place to have a kid. Max is in his first year of free preschool offered at the same primary school he’ll attend to age 12, before heading to one of the public high schools and maybe the $1,500-a-year public university. Add a park every two blocks and free public health care and you have paradise for raising children. Which is what makes it odd that hardly anyone is having any. Anyone except foreigners.

When we’re not crocodiles, I am American and my wife is from here, from a Catalan town 40 miles outside of Barcelona. Among her local friends, she is the rare one who’s had a child. Among Max’s friends—the other three-year-olds at Diputacio—our binational marriage seems like a trend. About a quarter of his 26-child class seems to have a similar story: a Catalana mother, and one parent from elsewhere in Europe, Africa, South Asia, or the Americas. At least in our school, children with one parent from abroad appear to outnumber classical migrant families.

This caught my eye because Spanish fertility is at historically low levels. Earlier this year, the local census figures showed that women of my wife’s generation—the generation just hitting 40—have so far had the fewest children per capita of any Spanish generation since the 1870s. According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical service, Spain has the second-lowest birth rate on the continent. For every four women in Spain there are just five kids. My wife’s mother had three children, which was almost exactly the average for 1975, when four women gave birth to 11 kids.

Fertility matters for a lot of wonky reasons—who will pay the pensions? But, lately the conversation in Europe has been less about intergenerational economics than about politics. The trope, flatly racist, is that foreigners come and they breed like an invasive species, imposing foreign cultural norms and draining the public service budgets. The discussion feeds a lot of European paranoia (and increasingly American, too) that lives around the intersection of biology and borders, in which everything from abroad is framed as potentially viral: poverty, extremism, Zika, Ebola. My work as a journalist has me accustomed to hearing these accusations around the edges of refugee camps in Calais, France, and along a border wall dividing the EU from Morocco. But when I come home from those places, I’ve also seen the start of a more hopeful discussion about Europe’s future, by walking into Max’s school.

I am not a demographer. Numbers on European migration are easy to get, but a sense of how many newcomers end up starting families with locals is a bit too esoteric a number to nail down, so far.

But I see my family fitting into some kind of change. Our social life has broken down by national as well as procreative lines—and that’s turned out to be the same line. Like many new parents, Max’s arrival has meant new relationships with parents of kids of the same age, and more often then not one of them is from outside Spain and usually outside Europe. Our Catalan friends, meanwhile, are the ones we need to get a babysitter to see; they don’t have kids, so they go out later. When we recently saw an old university friend of my wife’s for lunch with her new beau, Max did have a playmate his age there. The beau was from Argentina, and has a small son.

What has happened here? My wife is part of a baby boom generation that has faced a historical whipsaw, from excessive optimism and sudden affluence to a failure of confidence in Europe and a sudden loss of security. When Franco, that crusty old Spanish fascist, died in 1975, my wife’s mother and her friends could finally join the 20th century. They had large families. Those kids grew up in an era of social reconstruction and torrid economic expansion. Jobs were easy to find, and growth seemed inevitable. In the 1990s, people ascribed falling birth rates in Spain to an embrace of modernity and prosperity.

But by the early 2000s, that boom overheated. Spain’s young men left high school to work as builders. In 2004, a young man could make $40,000 a year swinging a hammer, double what his father earned.

Compared to the men, the women stayed in school, targeting secure jobs in the public sector. Career counselors would tell new college grads to earn the equivalent of tenure within about a decade, and in many cases such new opportunities for women delayed childbirth. A 30-year-old woman could then settle down with her future assured. When my wife and I met in 2006, she was working for the government as a librarian, patiently acquiring “points” toward her tenure.

Three years later—about the time we started thinking about kids—the bubble had popped. Spanish unemployment soared to Depression-level numbers: 50 percent for under-25s. All those guys who’d dropped out of school had neither jobs nor degrees. My wife and her friends were the age their mothers were when Franco died and the Spanish miracle began; now they were going to watch it unravel.

As the crisis dragged on, the future failed to materialize. Unemployment was still nearly 30 percent in 2012. If you were single, you had to be very lucky to meet a man or woman capable of being an equal partner in the family’s financial or emotional stability.

Max came along when the crisis was nearly five years old. We weren’t necessarily more optimistic than most Catalans, but you can’t always let macroeconomics dictate your life. Plus, mixed marriages like ours do have the advantage of a hedged, diversified bet. Our family would live in Barcelona, but I would not be solely dependent upon the local economy—I am able to work for clients abroad.

I do not believe my wife married me in 2009 for my blue passport, or agreed to have a child with me in 2012 for it. Nor did I marry her for the free health care or automatic residency in the rest of Europe. But I can certainly report that we married with the understanding that her passport gave us access to European social services, and mine gave us access to the United States and its economy.

We’re betting that being binational will be an advantage in the future. Where my New York grandparents went out of their way not to teach me any of the Russian, Romanian, and Yiddish they spoke, we are insisting Max speak Catalan, English, and Spanish. Rather than encourage him to have a national identity, we are encouraging him to have a transnational one. He’ll need to find stability for himself over and around borders.

I also want him to be able to see both his homes with a foreigner’s optimism. When his mother complains that ticket prices for Spanish trains have soared 200 percent, I want him to marvel, as I do, at how well they work anyway. Spain, even in its lowest moments, still feels like a miracle to me, with its low crime rate, healthy diet, and long, generally happy lives. And I hope he has a European’s fascination with American indifference to obstacles, the can-do culture that feels like a cliché to me, but is clearly part of my makeup.

I’d like to think that as Max moves on from his crocodile phase, the EU will move on from these vicious discussions about borders, migrants, and viruses. Someday there will be enough Maxes in the schools to make the borders—and the arguments—less meaningful.

The post My Transnational Son Has a Passport to Optimism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In November 1990, Margaret Thatcher had been the Conservative Party’s leader for 15 years and had never lost a general election. Indeed, as her strongest supporters never tired of pointing out, she’d won three of them on the trot since her first victory in 1979. Getting rid of the Iron Lady half way through the parliament, they argued, was madness. There must, therefore, be an ulterior motive. That motive, as they saw it, was Europe.

The Tories had always been ambivalent about the U.K.’s participation in the European integration project. It was their government, reflecting centuries of British imperial thinking about not getting mired in continental affairs, which had shown no interest in joining the original six member states when they created the European Economic Community back in 1957. And although it was a Conservative government that belatedly signed the U.K. up to the project in 1973—mainly to gain greater access to growing European markets—many MPs and activists remained unconvinced. To them, the economic gains could never compensate for the inevitable sacrifice of the country’s sovereignty and the loss of its cultural identity as an English-speaking island nation.

Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party two years after the U.K. joined the EEC, in 1975—a year in which the country held its first referendum on membership and one in which she played an active part in persuading the country to vote yes to Europe, believing like most of her colleagues and the vast majority of businesses (especially big businesses) that the U.K. would otherwise kiss goodbye to a continent’s worth of economic opportunities. She was a powerful advocate in part because she herself hailed from precisely the kind of provincial, “middle-England,” “Main Street” middle class which, with its belief in Britain’s innate superiority and its hatred of anything which smacked of waste, was innately suspicious of a project that involved increased cooperation with foreigners and was already a byword for boondoggles.

As the U.K.’s prime minister after 1979, her initial doubts about Europe, however, seemed to be confined to what she regarded as Britain’s outsized contribution to the European Community’s budget. The result became the substantial (and symbolic) rebate which she—half Boudica, half Britannia—famously forced out of her fellow heads of government in 1984.

Two years after that, however, Thatcher signed the Single European Act—a treaty which made serious moves towards a truly free market in the EC. As such, it was very much in keeping with her economic philosophy. But there was a price to pay: The U.K., like other member states, surrendered its right to veto any European legislation it didn’t like in favor of a complicated system of qualified majority voting. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, regret soon set in, particularly when it became obvious to Thatcher that other countries wanted to move much further than she was prepared to contemplate towards a federal multinational entity, complete with supposedly progressive social and labor market policies (such as the setting of maximum hours for workers). These struck Thatcher as nothing less than an attempt to reintroduce socialism into Britain by the back door. Worse, Thatcher considered these same countries’ clamor for a single currency as completely out of the question—the loss of the pound sterling would amount to a surrender, a negation of national sovereignty.

It was at that point, at least according to her diehard supporters in the Conservative Party, that her less “Euroskeptic” Cabinet colleagues chose to stab her in the back. They had previously strong-armed her, despite her doubts, into locking the pound sterling into what amounted to a nascent currency union, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM); but she insisted that there was no going further.

Supposedly convinced that they could no longer work with a prime minister only barely on-board and bad-mouthing her own government’s economic and foreign policy, her Cabinet colleagues took advantage of Tory MPs’ mounting panic about the party’s dire opinion poll ratings to ditch her in favor of a less fervently “Euroskeptic” leader. From that moment on, the Conservatives’ long-standing ambivalence about Europe—an ambivalence Thatcher had in some ways always embodied—became a full-blown schism. It has continued to destabilize the party since.

Promising to keep the country “at the very heart of Europe,” Thatcher’s less strident successor as both party leader and prime minister, John Major, helped negotiate the 1991 Maastricht Treaty which, notwithstanding the opt-out he secured allowing the U.K. to avoid signing up to the single currency, turned the European Community (EC) into the European Union (EU)—a step on the road, according to skeptics, to a “federal superstate.” Thatcher, free from the constraints of office, shared their analysis but kept her powder dry—until the 1992 general election, when Major managed to win an unprecedented fourth consecutive term for the Conservatives. That was when his luck, and her patience, finally ran out.

Within months of the 1992 election, the pound sterling, which had come under pressure from speculators convinced (quite rightly) that it was overpriced relative to other currencies in the ERM, was forced out of the system, resulting in a humiliating devaluation, economic dislocation, and the sudden loss of the Tories’ lead over the opposition Labor Party. Thatcher (now in the House of Lords) then chose to make it increasingly obvious that she was deeply disappointed in her successor, and that she herself would never have signed Maastricht. Those Tory MPs who considered themselves keepers of the Thatcherite flame immediately took their icon at her word and made the Treaty’s ratification process, and many other parliamentary votes on matters European, an absolute misery for Major.

After the 1997 election, during which Major’s Conservatives were roundly beaten by Labor’s Tony Blair, they needed to choose a new leader. Thatcher eventually made her support for one of several Euroskeptic candidates public, not least because she was determined, like all of her ardent fans in the parliamentary party, to do whatever she could to prevent a “Europhile” candidate carrying on from where Major left off. She, and they, got what they wanted, and although the winner, William Hague, proved a huge disappointment in electoral terms, he (and the two equally Thatcherite and equally unsuccessful Tories who succeeded him) moved the party farther and farther in a Euroskeptic direction. By the time the current Conservative leader, David Cameron, took over in 2005, the die was well and truly cast.

Cameron wanted to bring the Tories back into the center ground of British politics but at the same time he needed to keep the Thatcherites on board. The obvious way to do this was to maintain the party’s antipathy towards Brussels and all its works. The party went into the 2010 election promising that any further transfer of power to Brussels would automatically trigger a referendum, and that he would see how the U.K. might “repatriate” some of the powers that had previously been transferred to the EU.

Once in government after May 2010, Cameron hoped that the honoring of these promises would be enough to enable him to “turn down the volume” on Europe. How wrong he was. Appeasement rarely succeeds—as, ironically enough, Thatcher herself could have told him. Euroskeptics now made up the vast bulk of the parliamentary Conservative Party and wanted more of the kind of Brussels-bashing the Iron Lady had provided back in the day, not least because they were worried about losing support to the increasingly popular, ultra-skeptical United Kingdom Independence Party. Accordingly, a couple of months before Thatcher died in April 2013, Cameron finally promised his party and the country an in-out referendum on the U.K.’s membership in the EU.

And now Cameron is stuck trying to pull off the tricky balancing act, which Thatcher only managed at the height of her powers, of being simultaneously critical and supportive of the U.K.’s membership of the EU. Thatcher, having cast her long shadow on the Tories’ handling of the European issue for decades, would doubtless have been pleased at the arrival of a milestone vote. Whether her acolytes will get the result they firmly believe she would have wanted remains to be seen.

The post How the Iron Lady Fell Down the European Rabbit Hole appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No one really knows what a British exit from the EU might mean and anyone who says otherwise is lying (or, more likely, campaigning). What we can begin to discern, however, are the factors that will shape the contours of a Britain outside the EU with its erstwhile fellow member states.

The first layer of uncertainty is that polls provide no clear guidance on what the outcome of the referendum will be. Differences between telephone and online polls; large shifts in opinion over the course of the last year; a large number of as yet undecided voters—as many as 30 percent according to some surveys—conspire to make prediction of the ultimate result a hazardous exercise. The possibility of a “Leave” vote on June 23 cannot be ruled out.

The second level of uncertainty is the question of whether such a vote would actually trigger the procedure (known in the jargon as Article 50) for an exit? The British government does not need to inform its partners of its intention to leave the European Union immediately following the referendum. What if, say, the outcome was 51-49? Would that suffice? Or would a British government, as some on the Leave side have intimated, use the vote as a negotiating chip, a way of approaching our partners across the channel to say, “It was close, and if you give us just a little bit more, we could win this in a second vote”?

Even if Leave were really to mean leave, things might only move slowly. Despite his protestations to the contrary, it is hard to see how Prime Minister Cameron could survive a defeat. Having campaigned so openly for the “Remain” side, a popular vote to leave Europe would make it very difficult for Cameron to remain in office. Britain’s first priority at that point would be to find itself a new prime minister.

Britain’s second priority might be to ensure its own survival as presently constituted. It is conceivable that the recent Scottish vote in favor of continued membership in Britain would be trumped by an English majority to leave the EU. The Scottish National Party has made it clear that they would see such an outcome as cause to call for a second independence referendum. And they might well want this to take place sooner rather than later, bundling discussion of a British exit with one on Scottish EU membership in the event of a vote in favor of Scottish independence.

But leaving that complication aside for a moment, and even assuming a united United Kingdom with a prime minister in place to negotiate separation, it is still hard to know precisely what form this might take.

A striking feature of the campaigns for Britain to leave the EU has been their profound ambiguity concerning what British relations with the EU might look like after such a vote. For some, Britain could continue to enjoy access to the EU’s single market, whilst escaping the stifling embrace of the EU legal order, and regaining the ability to limit the movement of EU nationals into the country. For others, the new relationship would be more akin to that enjoyed by Canada with the EU—based on a treaty covering specific aspects of the trading relationship.

There is little doubt that the former type of relationship would be less disruptive in the short term. It would alleviate the need for the extremely complex and massive trading relationship between the U.K. and the EU to be renegotiated from scratch.

All member states involved in the intricate negotiations that follow would have a strong incentive not to disrupt their nations’ economic performance at a time of sclerotic growth, when the Eurozone currency crisis continues to simmer slowly.

That said, there are strong legal and political reasons that may lead the EU to play hardball with a Britain that has voted to leave. First, the experience of states such as Norway suggests that the price of access to the single market is compliance with EU laws and acceptance of the principle of free movement of people. Would the EU be willing to compromise the integrity of its rulebook for a Britain that has just walked away? If not, could we really imagine members of the Leave campaign, who had based their case on the need to take back control, accepting a situation in which, as a condition of access to the EU market, Britain obeyed EU rules over which—as a non-member—it would have no say?

On top of which, as much as there will be economic forces arguing for as amicable a divorce as possible, there are compelling political reasons for member states not to grant the U.K. any special favours. Britain is not the only member state where Euroskeptic insurgents are challenging the established political order. In France, most polls suggest that the National Front on the far right will make it through to the second round of next year’s presidential election. Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland represents the first serious manifestation of Euroskepticism in that country’s modern political history. Consequently, incumbent governments have little incentive to offer London an attractive deal—out of a fear that their opponents at home would demand the same for their own country. The danger of contagion, in other words, might compel EU member states to punish the U.K., rather than reward it.

For the outside world, then, Brexit would provide a gripping melodrama of politics, economics, and intrigue between former EU partners. The intricacies of the treaty arrangements for exit, of the British constitutional settlement, of parliamentary politics in Westminster, and of the costs and benefits of offering Britain a deal will be there for all to see. It remains to be seen whether hostility towards an unpopular status quo will trump concerns arising from ignorance about what might replace it. Ultimately, the divorce settlement, if it comes to that, will shape the destiny of the United Kingdom for years to come.

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Four years ago, in Germany’s newspaper for intellectuals, Die Zeit, the prominent author Gero von Randow called for Tunisia to be granted membership in the European Union. Today, we Europeans should be scratching our heads about why we haven’t already asked.

Yes, Tunisia is in North Africa, not far across the Mediterranean from Italy. But as a German who has done democracy work in Tunisia, I’ve learned there are three strong and rational reasons for making Tunisia an EU member, as well as an emotional one, which might be more important.

But first, the rational reasons. There is the strategic argument that, at a time when millions of migrants are flooding into EU countries from Arab regions, the EU would be wise to have its own beachhead on Arab soil.

After all, the integration of our new Arab citizens who have already arrived in Europe will require great efforts. A European Tunisia might well mitigate some immigration pressure to Europe, by offering an Arab option. (Tunisia today already shelters more than 300,000 refugees, mainly from neighboring Libya.) And it would be a wise parallel. Just as European communities learn through integrating people into their cities and towns, the whole of Europe would learn by working to integrate a new country.

The billions in development aid that would flow to Tunisia, a nation of 11 million with a per capita income that is less than half of the EU’s poorest members today, would pay off in the long term, since success in Tunisia could bring about a change for the entire Maghreb, where people are watching the struggling democracy closely. EU membership for Tunisia would be akin to a Marshall Plan for the region.

Then there’s the argument that Tunisia has been building a deliberative and democratic society that we should encourage and honor. There is no greater effort to form an enlightened Islamic society, as the Nobel Peace Prize committee recently acknowledged in giving its award to Tunisia’s leading civil society group. And Europe, by embracing Tunisia’s commitment to democracy, would offer a contrast to Turkey, a would-be European Union member which is descending into illiberal Islamist nationalism. The moderate Tunisian Islamists, the Ennahda Movement, have no equal in the world, and Ennahda leader Rachid al-Ghannouchi was rightly applauded for willingly stepping down from power 2013 to make way for democracy and the rule of law.

Then there’s the fairness argument. Tunisia launched the Arab Spring, and its push for democracy, but the spring is now drowning in Arab blood. The West, with its disastrous collaboration with iron-fisted rulers in the region, bears responsibility for this. Many people in the Maghreb—the region that includes Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco—are already drawing the depressing conclusion that the West doesn’t really believe in democracy, so why should they? On a recent visit to Tunisia, students from the University of Carthage asked me pointedly why they couldn’t travel freely and go on student exchanges like their counterparts in Europe.

Offering Tunisia membership in the EU would counter this narrative—by rewarding democracy. And it would be fair—an acknowledgment Tunisians’ sacrifice, through violence and terrorism and economic struggle, to keep their democratic revolution alive.

Finally, there’s the emotional reality that Tunisia feels European. It’s a wonderful country, a pearl of the Mediterranean that resembles Sicily. It now grows more olives than the whole of Italy. Its multilingual population is very familiar with the French and deeply connected to the Italians. It’s in the heart of a region that has been deeply tied to Europe for thousands of years.

Those who have spent enough time in Tunisia know that this is where East meets West; that Tunisia is a European bridge.

Of course, the Tunisians may balk. The country was a French protectorate until 1956, and maybe Tunisia wouldn’t want to feel again like a European colony. But it would be the right thing to ask. And it surely is the right time.

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The panelists, who appeared together at Deutsche Bank in Berlin, praised many welcoming efforts in Germany and in other parts of Europe, and said the greater attention, money to support refugees and countries taking them in, and more local volunteers assisting refugees were good signs. “I’m really excited we’re living in these times,” said Astrid Ziebarth, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Immigration and Integration Program. “We’ve seen an Airbnb for refugees looking for places to stay … We have seen online universities for refugees who want to continue their education … It’s the birth of a new society.”

But panelists tempered talk of progress with criticism of how refugees were being treated and calls for much broader changes in how refugees are treated in Europe and around the world. “The situation is terrible for the people who reach Europe and Germany. Having said that, they are in a much better place,” said Wenzel Michalski, Germany director of Human Rights Watch. He added that on a recent trip to Athens, he saw refugees camping on cardboard boxes in a park—but they were able to sleep and were safer than they had been in theaters of war.

The panelists took a dim view of “hot spots” for refugees that have been set up to register and relocate refugees. Moderator and Reuters global news editor Alessandra Galloni said that police in Italy can look the other way as people avoid registration. And efforts to relocate people to other countries have been insufficient, with only a handful of people relocated so far.

The panelists, along with one lawyer in the New York audience, also suggested that existing legal definitions distinguishing asylum seekers and migrants did not fit human realities. Syrian refugees can have different needs and motivations when they leave Syria and head to Turkey than when they leave to Turkey for Europe. There’s also what was called a “two-class system,” in which Syrians are treated better than refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries.

“The idea that all EU countries need to play a role and they need to determine who will be responsible for asylum claims—establishing that principle has been very valuable,” said Susan Fratzke, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “In practice, there’s a lot more to be done.”

Much of the conversation focused on the commitment by Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel to welcoming refugees. Panelists discussed whether the political culture and labor markets of Germany could handle 800,000 refugees or more over a long period of time. But the impact of Germany’s more open door policy should serve as an example for others.

“If she hadn’t said that refugees and asylum seekers are welcome in Germany, we would have seen people piling up on these tiny Greek islands,” said Michalski of Human Rights Watch. “Probably we would have seen more people dying.”

Naomi Steinberg, director of Refugee Council USA, said that Germany’s generosity offered a stark contrast with the far less welcoming response by the U.S. government. “I’m coming from a country where we have not seen leadership,” she said, noting that the U.S. has taken in fewer than 2,000 Syrian refugees, which represents a departure from more generous American responses in previous refugee crises. “The bottom line in the United States is: If we wanted to resettle more Syrian refugees, we could.”

NPR’s Jacki Lyden, who moderated with an audience watching a simulcast in New York for the Public Radio International program “America Abroad,” and CUNY professor Richard Alba, also in New York, raised questions about whether Germany could integrate so many refugees.

In response, Ziebarth and Michalski, the two Germans on the panel, were optimistic, while noting that it would take considerable work. They also argued that integration of and care for refugees are in Germany’s best interests—so that people who remain became productive members of society.

Michalski noted that he has a refugee living with him. “I have a young doctor living in my home,” he said. “My friend, the doctor, he needs another eight months or year at university, and then he can work as a doctor. There’s a lack of doctors here because our doctors tend to go to Norway or the United States because they make more money there.”

In response to a question from journalist Marcus Walker about how Germany became “the America of the E.U.” and whether it and other welcoming countries like Sweden could bear such a burden, Michalski noted that Germany has successfully welcomed Syrian refugees for many years “but the numbers were kept under the carpet.”

The panelists all said that the refugee question requires more European-wide and global policies—for the good of countries and refugees. Steinberg of the Refugee Council USA said the world needed to create more safe travel options and destinations for refugees. She also noted that very few refugees return to their home countries, which means their issues should be considered more in the context of resettlement.

Fratzke of the Migration Policy Institute said such conversations should include many more kinds of institutions and people, and must focus more on early interventions and on the 86 percent of global refugees who are hosted in developing countries.

“One of the lessons we can take is that migration and refugee crises aren’t just issues for migration policymakers or humanitarian agencies,” Fratzke said. “These are crises that need to be viewed from a foreign policy perspective, from a development perspective … from a global perspective.”

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The explanation is in the size of the nation. When you’ve got a total population of 16 million crammed into a country smaller than most individual U.S. states, everyone is within a couple of degrees of separation of everyone else. Wesley Sneijder, Robin van Persie, and the other stars of the country’s World Cup team are brought down to earth by the fact that, chances are, you know them, or your uncle does.

That thought came to mind as I’ve watched somber memorials unfold like dreams in cities all over the country this week. Roughly two-thirds of the 298 people who died on Malaysian Air flight 17 were Dutch. I asked several Dutch friends how they were doing. As I more or less expected, every one of them knew at least one person who was on the plane. One, who lives in The Hague, said her daughter was friends with a girl whose entire family was on the flight: They were going on vacation to Borneo. “They were in primary school together and took the same ballet lessons,” my friend said of her daughter and the girl who died. “When you think of their empty house, it is all very unreal.”

A few people want to lash out, saying the country should strike out against Russia. Someone posted the address of Vladimir Putin’s daughter, who lives in the Netherlands, on the Facebook page of the Netherlands-Russia Center. There are some vicious tweets.

But in the main the reaction to the sudden loss of a cross-section of Dutch society—the proportionate loss of life for a country the size of the United States would be about 6,000 people—has been muted. After some hesitation, the government decided to declare a national day of mourning, though it was already happening in a natural, non-official way. A mountain of flowers in front of a restaurant in Rotterdam. A pall of silence descending on the “Rose Kermis” gay festival in Tilburg. The deaths were evenly spread all over the country, and the memorials are localized.

The Dutch are strikingly different from Americans in their gut reactions to things. When hit with a national shock, Americans will almost instinctively reach for ideology or ideals. People saw 9/11 as an assault on “freedom.” The Dutch have an innate distrust of ideology. You could relate that to World War II and their experience under Nazism, but it goes much farther back. It has something to do with being a small country surrounded by larger countries that have had long histories of asserting themselves.

It also stems from the fact that Dutch society grew not out of war against a human foe but out of the struggle against nature. Living in low lands on a vast river delta, the Dutch came together to battle water. Building dams and dikes and canals was more practical than ideological. For better or worse, the Dutch are more comfortable with meetings and remembrances than with calls to arms.

Geography has defined destiny throughout Dutch history. The little country has reached outward, and prospered thanks to its ability to trade and engage with others; it also has proven a safe for refugees from less tolerant lands. Even before its 17th-century golden age, Holland had become an intensely polyglot hub for goods and ideas, intricately connected with far-flung places.

Flight 17 reflects and updates that history. Of course, by definition the plane was packed with travelers. But this tragedy gives an inadvertent indication of how racially mixed the country has become. Among the Dutch passengers listed on the flight manifest were a Vietnamese family who lived in Delft, the city of Vermeer; a Chinese couple from Rotterdam; a Dutch-Israeli student; a Dutch-Malaysian family; a Dutch-American; people born in Curacao and South Africa; and others with German, Indonesian, and British backgrounds.

We hear about the growing multiethnicity of the country mostly through the screeching of right-wing fanatic Geert Wilders, member of parliament and leader of the Freedom Party, who riles up some elements of society by declaring that newcomers (read Muslims) are torpedoing Dutch traditions and turning the land of windmills into a giant mosque. The international media is a sucker for Wilders because he seems to give the lie to what the Dutch are most famous for (besides tulips and marijuana cafes): tolerance. The Dutch pioneered the concept in the 16th century, enshrining it in their de facto constitution two centuries before “all men are created equal.” America’s history—especially New York’s—was deeply influenced by it, via the Dutch colony of New Netherland and its capital of New Amsterdam on Manhattan.

Wilders knows that the media always glom onto a counter-narrative, and he has used that fact repeatedly to his own advantage and to the detriment of his country’s image abroad. But one truth revealed by this tragedy is that the country is quietly becoming a melting pot, a place intricately connected to other parts of the world. The Dutch people who died on MH17 mirror their own rapidly evolving society, and remind the rest of us that our futures don’t lie in tribalism, but in expanding our connections.

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