Archive for the 'News' Category

By Frederick Bowie, in Open Democracy

Europeans just cannot seem to get Islam, or more properly, Islamism, out of their heads. This seems to be particularly true of Europeans who have not spent much time in the Islamic world, and whose idea of immersion journalism is to spend an afternoon wandering round an immigrant neighbourhood in the European capital city of their choice with a view to chatting up a few swarthy-looking men over a cup of mint tea.

And even some more serious writers have ended up falling into the same trap over the last few weeks. Take Timothy Garton Ash, for instance, whose reporting of the decline of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe in the 1980s was exemplary in its combination of in-depth research and first-hand experience. In a series of articles in The Guardian, Garton Ash has been greeting the wave of insurrections sweeping across the Arab world with a wall of worry. In his latest piece, published last week, a visit to the Calle de Tribulete in Madrid plunged him into new depths of anxiety.

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By Mark Blyth, in Triple Crisis

One of the most interesting organizations to come out of the crisis is the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which is dedicated to “fresh insight and thinking to promote changes in economic theory and practice.” I attended its first conference in April 2010. The mood was optimistic. Rational expectations theories, the efficient markets hypothesis, capital account openness, Ricardian equivalence, were all on the chopping block. The book of the conference was Skidelsky’s The Return of the Master. We were all Keynesians now, again…for about eight months.

Then came the ECB June 2010 Monthly Report that raised the specter of ‘Ricardian consumers’ and ‘expectation effects,’ while the G20 meeting that same month (coincidence?) focused attention upon ‘Growth Friendly Fiscal Consolidation’ and the overwhelming need to reduce debt. Led by the UK (whose net debt-to-GDP ratio was at that time was below the Maastricht threshold) the voices of orthodoxy quickly regrouped and triumphed. Austerity and belt-tightening gained traction as the advocates of a reinvigorated Keynesianism shifted their sights from dismembering the neoclassical corpus to simply maintaining the legitimacy of spending under any circumstances.

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By Paul Krugman, in The New York Times

There’s something peculiarly apt about the fact that the current European crisis began in Greece. For Europe’s woes have all the aspects of a classical Greek tragedy, in which a man of noble character is undone by the fatal flaws of hubris.

Not long ago Europeans could, with considerable justification, say that the current economic crisis was actually demonstrating the advantages of their economic and social model. Like the United States, Europe suffered a severe slump in the wake of the global financial meltdown; but the human costs of that slump seemed far less in Europe than in America. In much of Europe, rules governing worker firing helped limit job loss, while strong social-welfare programs ensured that even the jobless retained their health care and received a basic income. Europe’s gross domestic product might have fallen as much as ours, but the Europeans weren’t suffering anything like the same amount of misery. And the truth is that they still aren’t.

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From Slavoj Zizek in London Review of Books

In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s organiser, a real-life counterpart to the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? In the film, the district attorney, Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante who is corrupted and himself commits murders, is killed by Batman. Batman and his friend police commissioner Gordon realise that the city’s morale would suffer if Dent’s murders were made public, so plot to preserve his image by holding Batman responsible for the killings. The film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder the only figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain. He makes it clear that his attacks on Gotham City will stop when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and protect Batman, Dent tells the press that he is Batman – another lie. In order to entrap the Joker, Gordon fakes his own death – yet another lie.

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