If Afghanistan is its test, NATO is failing

By John Feffer Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [1] is looking peaked and significantly worse for wear. Aggressive and ineffectual, the organization shows signs of premature senility. Despite the smiles and reassuring rhetoric at its annual summits, its internal politics have become fractious to the point of dysfunction. Perhaps like any sexagenarian in this age of health-care crises and economic malaise, the transatlantic alliance is simply anxious about its future. Frankly, it should be. The painful truth is that NATO may be suffering from a terminal illness. Its current mission in Afghanistan, the alliance's most significant and far-flung muscle-flexing to date, might be its last. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of many an imperial power from the ancient Macedonians to the Soviets. It now seems to be eyeing its next victim. For NATO, this year should have been a celebration, not a dirge. After suffering a trans-Atlantic rift of epic proportions during the Bush years, the alliance thrilled to the election of Barack Obama and his politics of conciliation. The new American administration swore it would shift troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to give NATO more of what it wanted to fight "the right war". United States Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both promised to push the "reset button" on US-Russian relations, potentially removing one of the greatest obstacles to NATO's health and well-being. And in a final flourish for the alliance's diamond jubilee, France agreed to return to the fold, reintegrating into NATO after 43 years of standoffishness. But hold those celebrations. Afghanistan has an uncanny ability to spoil anybody's best-laid plans. At the April 2009 NATO summit in Strasbourg, Obama failed to get the troop reinforcements he wanted from his European allies. The NATO powers, in any case, have attached so many strings and caveats to the troops they are supplying - Germany has kept its soldiers away from the conflict-ridden south, most contingents have complex rules limiting combat operations, Canada will be pulling out in 2011 - that NATO's mission resembles Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. The real nail in NATO's coffin, however, has been its stunning lack of success on the ground. The Taliban have, in fact, not only increased their hold over large parts of southern Afghanistan, but spread north as well. Most embarrassingly for NATO, a recent surge of alliance troops seems only to have made the Taliban stronger. Nearly eight years of alternating destruction (air bombardment, over 100,000 troops on the ground) and reconstruction (US$38 billion in economic assistance appropriated by the US Congress since 2001) have all come up desperately short. A new counter-insurgency campaign doesn't look any more promising. What was once billed as the most powerful military alliance in history has been thwarted by an irregular set of militias and guerrilla groups without the backing of a major power in one of the poorest countries on Earth. Worse yet, the Afghan operation has become a serious political liability for many NATO members. European politicians fear the kind of electoral backlash that in some measure ousted Britain's prime minister Tony Blair and Spain's prime minister Jose Maria Aznar when the Iraq War went south. Despite enthusiasm for President Obama, European public opinion is, by increasingly large margins, in favor of reducing or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan (55% of West Europeans and 69% of East Europeans according to a recent German Marshall Fund poll). Mounting combat fatalities, a rising civilian casualty count, and devastating snafus like the recent bombing of two fuel trucks stolen by the Taliban in Kunduz province that killed many civilians have only strengthened anti-war feeling. Meanwhile, in the United States, both elite and public opinion is turning against the war. With the American economy still reeling from recession, Obama faces a guns-versus-butter dilemma that threatens to wreck his domestic agenda as surely as the Vietnam War deep-sixed former president Lyndon B Johnson's Great Society reforms of the 1960s. No surprise then that the president is ambivalent about following his top general's request to send yet more US troops to fight in what the press now calls "Obama's War". Not so long ago, pundits were calling for a global NATO that would expand its power and membership to include US partners in Asia and elsewhere. This hubris has given way to despair and discord. Although the United States still holds out hope for a NATO that focuses on global threats like terrorism and nuclear proliferation, other alliance members would prefer to refocus on the traditional mission of defending Europe. Add in disagreements between the United States and its allies over how to approach the Afghan situation and NATO begins to look more like a rugby scrum than a military alliance. NATO officials are now scrambling to sort things out, in part by calling the allies together to debate a new Afghan strategy before the year ends. Meanwhile, NATO's secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen is preparing a new "strategic concept" that would recode the organization's operating system for the next summit in Lisbon in 2010. It might be too little, too late. Some US officials are fed up with what they consider European dilly-dallying about Afghanistan. "We have been very much disappointed by the performance of many if not most of our allies," Robert E Hunter, the US ambassador to NATO during the Bill Clinton administration, recently said in testimony before the US Congress. "Indeed, there are elements within the US government that are beginning to wonder about the continued value of the NATO alliance." As for the Europeans, they are building up their own independent military capabilities - and will continue to do so whether or not NATO gets its act together. The question is: will the Afghan War eventually push the United States and Europe toward an amicable divorce? If so, the military campaign that was to give NATO a new lease on life and turn it into a global military force will have proven to be its ultimate undoing. Near-death experiences This is NATO's second brush with death since the collective security organization was founded in 1949 to counter the Soviet Union. Although it didn't fire a shot during its entire Cold War existence, NATO did fulfill its mission: to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down, according to the infamous catechism of Lord Ismay, NATO's first secretary general. When the Cold War ended and the Warsaw Pact vanished, NATO was suddenly an organization without a mission. During the early 1990s, it cast around for new portfolios - environmental work, humanitarian missions, anything. It needed a raison d'etre fast. After all, the conflict-prevention mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe spoke more directly to the post-Cold War temperament, and trans-atlantic publics were eager for their peace dividends. NATO was seen as a pillar of the old world order at a time when even president George H W Bush seemed prepared to accept something radically new (though he settled, of course, for a rough approximation of the status quo ante). Tragedy proved NATO's salvation. The organization got a second wind when Yugoslavia disintegrated into warring states and European governments did little to prevent the bloodletting in the Balkans. The United States belatedly turned to NATO in 1995 to fly a few bombing missions against Serbian forces during the Bosnian conflict. Then, in 1999, responding to fears of Serbian escalation in Kosovo, NATO engaged in its first-ever war. During the 77-day conflict, the alliance conducted 38,000 air sorties against Serbian targets that resulted in considerable "collateral" damage including Serbian civilians, Albanian refugees, and, famously, the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Although no NATO personnel died during these combat operations, the alliance acquired a reputation as the gang that couldn't shoot straight. As if the Balkans weren't rationale enough, NATO also fell back on an old directive: to keep Russia out. Eastern Europe's persistent fear of its former overlord injected new purpose into the organization. Although Russia's leaders believed that Washington had promised not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, the alliance did just that - and with gusto. First, it established a kind of alliance halfway house in 1994 that it dubbed the Partnership for Peace; then, in 1999, NATO accepted the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland as members; and five years after that, it expanded into the former Soviet Union by absorbing the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia along with Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Russia has, to put it mildly, been less than thrilled by NATO's eastward leap and then creep. Meanwhile, wary of Russia's military campaigns in Chechnya, Georgia, and Moldova as well as its energy power plays against countries to its west, the Eastern Europeans have eagerly huddled beneath the NATO "umbrella". As it happens, neither the Balkan tragedies nor the putative Russian threat proved to be unalloyed blessings for the alliance. The Balkan campaigns created enormous stress for its military command, and only the brevity of the air war over Kosovo saved it from popular repudiation across Europe. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, meanwhile, made consensus within an already unwieldy institution more difficult. The once central focus of NATO - a commitment to the collective defense of any member under attack - was, by now, looking ever less workable. Western European countries appeared anything but enthusiastic about the idea of defending the former Soviet bloc states against a prospective Russian attack. And despite promises to station troops in Central and Eastern Europe, the United States left its new NATO allies in the lurch. "While they are loath to say it publicly, [Central and Eastern European] leaders have told me that they are no longer certain NATO is capable of coming to their rescue if there were a crisis involving Russia," wrote Ronald Asmus, former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. "They no longer believe that the political solidarity exists or that NATO's creaky machinery would take the needed steps." On the eve of September 11, 2001, a decade after the end of the Cold War, NATO had become an overstretched alliance with an ill-defined but expansive mission and a collection of member states increasingly at odds with each other. When the United States prepared to attack Afghanistan and then Iraq, the Bush administration simply bypassed NATO, constructing its own ad hoc coalitions "of the willing". (Only in 2003 did the George W Bush administration turn to NATO to shoulder some of the local burden.) There could have been no greater vote of no-confidence in the institution. The Afghan test case Since the end of the Cold War, the US troop presence in Europe has been plummeting. From a Cold War peak of several hundred thousand, it had dropped to around 44,000 by 2007. Reductions to the 30,000-level or even lower have been discussed. With US forces stretched to the limit elsewhere in the world and US strategists fixated on the energy heartlands of the Middle East and Central Asia, the European theater of operations has been (and remains) the obvious place for force reductions. Continued 1 2

Nature as a standpoint for social criticism

The Usefulness of Cranks

Jackson Lears

Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery

By Steve Nicholls

(University of Chicago Press, 524 pp., $30)

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Edited by Bill McKibben

(Library of America, 1,047 pp., $40)

Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant

By Jonathan Peter Spiro

(University of Vermont Press, 462 pp., $39.95)

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

By Donald Worster

(Oxford University Press, 535 pp., $34.99)

A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature

By James William Gibson

(Metropolitan Books, 306 pp., $27)

Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet

By Edward Humes

(Ecco Books, 367 pp., $25.99)

I.

In contemporary public discourse, concern for “the environment” is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.

After all, we have been here before. The pragmatic, ethical, and aesthetic arguments for conservation are roughly the same as they were in the 1970s--the only difference being that they have acquired even more urgency in the face of depleted oil reserves, fished-out oceans, and “climate change,” the current euphemism for global warming. Yet contemporary politicians and pundits treat green concerns as if they were fresh discoveries. Their amnesia is an understandable response to recent history. For the last thirty years--despite the absorption of environmentalist slogans and sentiments into our popular culture, the frequent legal skirmishes on behalf of endangered species, and the spread of serious ecological thought into many academic disciplines--broad environmental concerns all but disappeared from mainstream political debate.

Noble green intentions left little impact on everyday life. Quite the contrary: for most Americans it was as if the 1970s--the decade of the “energy crisis,” Small Is Beautiful, and presidential commitments to solar energy--never happened. Who could be bothered with worry about waste amid acres of wired McMansions and herds of lumbering SUVs?

It will take historians many years to sort through the political, economic, and cultural wreckage left by Ronald Reagan and his ideological heirs. But the disappearance of ecological issues from the national agenda was an essential part of the devastation. Environmentalism was one of Reagan’s targets from the beginning. During the campaign, he and his handlers shrewdly exploited Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech of July 1979. Carter never used the offending word, though he did refer to an American “crisis of confidence,” arising from the discovery that “owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.” Carter’s big mistake was to question this accumulationist ethos in arguing for conservation as a “moral equivalent of war” and committing the government to long-term research into alternative energy sources. It was an extraordinarily prescient speech, one that acknowledged the limits to economic growth and anticipated nearly all the environmental themes that have only recently returned to fashion.

But it was a political disaster for Carter. Polls indicated that popular reaction to the speech was generally favorable, but then the chattering classes weighed in. By 1979 Carter’s media stock had bottomed out. Pundit after pundit took Carter to task for having the temerity to blame the American people for their wasteful ways. Reagan, meanwhile, was prepared to argue that any talk about limits was un-American. This was the country where the sky was the limit. “America is back,” he announced after his election. He lost no time in removing the solar panels from the White House roof. Three decades of denial were under way.

The story of Carter’s speech is a cautionary tale for environmentalists. It suggests the ease with which environmentalists could be identified as puritanical moralists, dour pessimists, enemies of fun and the future. Carter’s public persona reinforced this connection--his sober homiletical tone, his sloping shoulders, his overall limpness. Reagan tilted his head with practiced spontaneity, smiled his lemon-twist smile, and dispensed upbeat aphorisms as if they were freshly minted. His shoulders were padded and his posture was perfect. He was superbly suited to exorcise the demons of doubt, even when doubt had a strong foundation in reality.

And Reagan was not the only villain of this tale. The denial of environmental concerns was part of a broad cultural shift that also swept up the postmodern left. During the 1980s and 1990s, leftists were as likely as rightists to scold environmentalists for their allegedly puritanical preoccupation with limits--as Julian Simon did (from the right) in The Ultimate Resource in 1981 and Andrew Ross did (from the left) in Strange Weather in 1991. Ultimately this critique pushed beyond ethics to epistemology. At its most inane, the postmodern project challenged the very notion that something called “nature” existed apart from human constructions of it. By the late 1980s, no self-respecting professor in the humanities would use the word “nature,” or even the word “reality,” without inverted commas. The literary theorist Fredric Jameson revealed the social origins of this style when he announced that “postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good”--a view that could be held only by an upper-class professional who spent most of his waking hours insulated from the natural world.

The bizarre notion that “nature is gone for good” had unintended political consequences. It neatly complemented the Republican right’s equation of environmentalism with sentimental nostalgia. The postmodern Left and the reactionary Right deployed different idioms in a common celebration of the untrammeled individual. There was no room at this party for environmentalist killjoys.

But now, as we are constantly reminded, the party’s over. The collapse of credit markets has produced a lot of loose talk about a return to fundamental values, to scrimping and saving and living within our means. But how these ideas and emotions will affect environmental policy or everyday practice remains to be seen. Decades of doctrinaire optimism, uniting everyone from Marxian social critics to development economists to free-market fundamentalists, have undermined the notion that there are natural limits to economic growth. Technological innovation, we have constantly been told, has rendered Malthusian scenarios obsolete.

But these assertions are based on flawed assumptions. Whatever its potential, green technology will take years, perhaps decades, to implement. Meanwhile the urgent need to restore high levels of economic growth by any means necessary--including renewed production of greenhouse gases and consumption of fossil fuels--will trump environmental protection. And the preoccupation with short-term priorities may well promote long-term disaster. A consensus of statistical estimates projects that global population could rise as much as 50 percent over the next forty years. This will probably intensify international competition for scarce resources as the world gets hotter. The techno-utopianism of the last thirty years will prove to have been a flash in the pan, and Malthus may yet have the last word: we shall rediscover that there are natural limits to growth after all.

(continued on next page)

O pior dos cenários

Erro na execução ou erro por acidente, sem alternativas para a medida do erro, o país pode estar a entrar em alta velocidade no cenário errado.

Porta-voz do PS promete esforço em prol do bom relacionamento.O porta-voz do PS, João Tiago Silveira garantiu, esta quarta-feira, que, apesar de toda a polémica criada em volta do caso das supostas escutas a Belém, promovidas pelo Governo, os socialistas vão empenhar-se para que exista um bom relacionamento institucional com o Presidente da República.«O PS cumpre o seu dever e vai fazer tudo o que estiver ao seu alcance para que exista um relacionamento institucional adequado entre o PS, o Presidente da República e o futuro governo», assegurou o porta-voz socialista.

Greeks Prepare to Elect Socialists

By ALKMAN GRANITSAS

ATHENS -- Five years after Greeks chose a government to cut taxes, privatize big companies and tackle corruption, they are preparing to throw it out in elections Sunday.

The New Democracy Party government is seen as having failed. The Greek economy is contracting, the country's debt burden is rising fast and cash-for-favors scandals have continued to erupt.

On Sunday, polls show, Greeks are likely to elect a socialist government led by a party that pledges to raise taxes on the wealthy, spend more on the public sector -- including €3 billion ($4.38 billion) in stimulus -- and run the government better. The latest opinion polls give the socialist Pasok party 36.7% of the vote against 29.8% for New Democracy, but a hung parliament is possible.

"We need first to jump-start the economy," said the Pasok party's candidate for prime minister, George Papandreou in an interview. "But really it's a question of governance."

The likely switch goes against the rightward trend in other parts of Europe. German voters returned center-right Chancellor Angela Merkel to power on Sunday, and she will now rule in a coalition with a pro-market party, dropping the Social Democrats who have slowed her down. The U.K. is moving toward choosing a Conservative government next year, ending Labour's unbroken rule since 1997.

However, many Greeks say that instead of making a positive choice for Mr. Papandreou -- who is seen by voters as likeable, clean, and uninspiring -- they're voting against the current government.

The Greek government is getting a thumbs-down for its handling of the economic crisis. Because Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis failed to reduce the government deficit as planned, he had little room for stimulus measures. The economy is now likely undergoing a second straight quarter of contraction, meaning it is in recession.

Spiros Pengas, a 41-year-old carpet merchant in Greece's second city, Thessaloniki, says one of his stores is having its worst sales for a decade, and some customers' checks are bouncing. He says he hasn't felt so poor before. He voted for New Democracy five years ago, but blames the government for his troubles and said he is planning to change to Pasok this time. The two parties dominate Greek politics.

"The current government hasn't done anything, and now we are paying for that," he says. Still, he adds, "I think the two parties are pretty much the same overall."

Greece is plagued by long-term problems such as tax evasion and inefficient administration. This summer, wildfires reached the outskirts of Athens after firefighters were slow to react; last year students rioted in the capital after a policeman fatally shot a schoolboy. Worse, in the eyes of most Greeks, corruption continues.

"We are always faced with a choice between two parties," says Dimitris Kyriakos, a 58-year-old Athens storekeeper, "but neither of them have done anything for the country. I see no progress."

Greece thrived after adopting the euro in 2001. Rules for adopting the currency, such as holding down inflation and the government deficit, led to lower interest rates, which triggered consumer and housing booms. Before the global economic crisis struck, the Greek economy expanded at an annual average rate of 4% for five years, one of the best performances in the euro zone.

But Greece has been buffeted by fallout from the financial crisis. Shipping companies lost business, and though the Greek economy continued to grow until the first quarter of 2009, it was hit this summer as northern European tourists saved money and stayed away.

What's more, the cost of Greece's government borrowing is rising at the same time as its debt, which is forecast to reach 108% of gross domestic product next year, according to the European Commission.

"The current economic situation has also brought to the forefront long-standing weaknesses in the Greek economy," Finance Minister Yannis Papathanassiou said in a response to questions.

Greece's deepest-rooted economic problem is tax evasion. About a quarter of tax revenue is lost through evasion -- double last year's deficit. Greeks are leery of paying more into a public sector seen as wasteful.

"I, who issue receipts and work hard, I am an idiot," says storekeeper Mr. Kyriakos, pointing to his cash register. "Why should I work so hard and pay my taxes when everyone else is skimming off the top?"

Another Czech legal challenge for the Lisbon Treaty – the objective is procrastination

The Irish will probably vote Yes to the Lisbon Treaty, but a group of Czech senators have now launched a legal appeal against the Lisbon Treaty in the Czech Constitutional Court, with the sole purpose of delaying Czech ratification. Under Czech constitutional law, President Klaus can only sign the treaty after the Constitutional Court has given his judgement, and it is not certain when this will be, possibly February or March next year. The Constitutional Court had already given a positive verdict on parts of the Treaty considered to be most controversial in the Czech Republic, and found that the Treaty does not breach Czech constitutional law. The Irish Times reports from Brussels that the new case brought by the senators technically rests on the guarantees given the Irish. The Senators claim that this constitutes a treaty revision, which would need to be approved by the Czech parliament.

The Czech European affairs mnisters tried to reassure his EU partners, saying that Klaus will sign once the Court gives a positive verdict – which no one seems to doubt. However, as EU Oberserver reports, former PM Mirek Topolanek has warned that a ratification delay would trigger a reduction in the size of the European Commission, and if that delay was due to Mr Klaus’ failure to sign the Treaty, it would be the Czech Republic that would end up with no seat on the Commission.

Watch out for the possibility that the court decides by March, and for Klaus to delay his signature until the UK elections in May. In case of a Conservative victory, which seems likely, Cameron promised a referendum, which will almost certainly produce a No vote – which would bring us into unchartered legal territory.

This is not over yet.

EuroIntelligence

Michel Rocard : « La France et l’Europe peuvent et doivent accueillir toute la part qui leur revient de la misère du monde ! »

Dans son intervention en introduction à la table ronde « Quel accueil de l’autre dans le monde de demain ? », organisée à Strasbourg le 26 septembre 2009, à l’occasion du 70e anniversaire de la Cimade, Michel Rocard a pris ses distances avec la politique actuelle de la France en matière d’immigration : il a dénoncé les « quotas annuels d’expulsions du territoire », la « traque pour atteindre l’objectif fixé par les préfets » et les « centres de rétention pour les personnes vivant avec leurs enfants dans notre pays ». L’ancien premier ministre a appelé l’Europe à inventer une politique de l’hospitalité.

Voici ce texte, dont les fortes paroles méritent d’être reprises, plus que la phrase ambigüe – « La France ne peut accueillir toute la misère du monde » – qui le poursuit depuis vingt ans.

La France et l’Europe peuvent et doivent accueillir toute la part qui leur revient de la misère du monde !

Permettez-moi, dans l’espoir, cette fois-ci, d’être bien entendu, de le répéter : la France et l’Europe peuvent et doivent accueillir toute la part qui leur revient de la misère du monde, c’est-à-dire de ces migrants courageux qui, prenant tous les risques, y compris celui de leur vie, viennent frapper aux portes des pays les plus riches dans l’espoir d’échapper à une destinée misérable pour eux-mêmes et leurs enfants dans leur pays d’origine. Que nous ne puissions à nous seuls prendre en charge la totalité de la misère mondiale ne nous dispense nullement de devoir la soulager autant qu’il nous est possible.

Il y a vingt ans, venu participer en tant que Premier Ministre au Cinquantenaire de la Cimade, j’ai déjà voulu exprimer la même conviction. Mais une malheureuse inversion, qui m’a fait évoquer en tête de phrase les limites inévitables que les contraintes économiques et sociales imposent à toute politique d’immigration, m’a joué le pire des tours : séparée de son contexte, tronquée, mutilée ma pensée a été sans cesse invoquée pour soutenir les conceptions les plus éloignées de la mienne. Et, malgré mes démentis publics répétés, j’ai dû entendre à satiété le début négatif de ma phrase, privé de sa contrepartie positive, cité perversement au service d’idéologies xénophobes et de pratiques répressives et parfois cruellement inhumaines que je n’ai pas cessé de réprouver, de dénoncer et de combattre. Je veux espérer qu’aujourd’hui, vingt ans après, pour le 70e anniversaire de la grande Cimade, placé sous ce titre magnifique : « Inventer une politique européenne d’hospitalité », on voudra bien retenir ma conviction que c’est bien là notre tâche aujourd’hui : non pas penser d’abord à dresser des frontières sécuritaires face aux migrants mais, au contraire, être capables d’assumer, dans une politique concertée responsable, notre devoir d’hospitalité - parce que la France et l’Europe peuvent et doivent accueillir toute leur part de la misère du monde !

Si j’ai été compris à l’inverse des mes intentions il y a vingt ans c’est qu’à cette époque une très large partie de la classe politique et de l’opinion françaises, de droite à gauche, s’était laissé enfermer dans le paradoxe consistant à obéir aux injonctions xénophobes de l’extrême droite sous prétexte de limiter son influence. Paradoxe qu’hélas l’Europe politique toute entière s’est mise à partager. Le résultat en est que les 20 années écoulées ont été marquées par le développement d’une réglementation européenne sur l’entrée et le séjour des migrants fondée sur une vision purement sécuritaire. Comme si le seul rapport à l’étranger désirant la rejoindre que l’Europe puisse avoir devait être de méfiance et de rejet.

En matière d’entrée, de circulation, de protection ou d’éloignement des réfugiés, qu’il s’agisse des accords de Schengen et de Dublin, de la Directive Retour, du « paquet asile » ou, actuellement, du programme de Stockholm, les européens se sont accordés sur un ensemble toujours renforcé de mesures techniques administratives, juridiques, sécuritaires et diplomatiques qui ont pour conséquence d’élever sans cesse plus haut de nouveaux murs en Europe et à ses portes.

Les conséquences de cette politique d’inhospitalité sont tout simplement tragiques et souvent criminelles : des milliers de morts en Méditerranée, dans l’Atlantique, ou au milieu du désert et, pour les candidats à l’exil, jamais découragés, des trajets toujours plus longs et dangereux, nos pratiques de rejets encourageant les filières mafieuses à s’engouffrer dans cette nouvelle manne de la traite des êtres humains.

A l’intérieur de l’Union européenne, ces législations fragilisent partout le respect des droits et des libertés de tous, en contribuant à renforcer une vision fantasmatique de l’immigration, un repli frileux sur soi et la peur de l’autre.

Au niveau international, c’est un gouffre d’incompréhension et de rancœurs qui se creuse avec les populations du Sud et leurs gouvernements, qui se voient souvent contraints de se plier à un marchandage humiliant entre l’aide au développement et la participation au contrôle policier des mouvements migratoires. Comment expliquer aux populations africaines, avec lesquelles nous avons une si longue histoire et des liens de toute nature, qu’elles doivent désormais être reléguées aux frontières de l’Union européenne et se soumettre à règles parfois humiliantes si elles veulent obtenir seulement un visa de court séjour ? Cette façon de procéder avec l’Afrique n’est pas conforme aux intérêts de l’Afrique., mais elle n’est pas conforme non plus aux intérêts de la France et de l’Europe qui se coupe ainsi petit à petit d’un continent dont tout devrait les rapprocher.

Ainsi deux décennies de cette politique n’ont rien réglé du tout. Au prix de leur vie, des milliers de personnes continuent de fuir les conflits, la misère et de chercher ailleurs un avenir meilleur pour eux et leur famille. En Europe, la question des migrants, de leur place dans la société et de leurs droits reste entière, et n’est pas sans conséquences très sérieuses sur la reconnaissance de l’autre et donc sur l’établissement d’un vivre ensemble harmonieux qui ne se limiterait pas aux beaux quartiers de nos villes.

Dans le même temps, la prévision d’une croissance démographique soutenue, notamment pour l’Afrique dont la population devrait doubler d’ici 2050, accompagnée des dérèglements climatiques et de leurs conséquences sur la vie des populations - n’annonce-t-on pas plus de 100 millions de « réfugiés climatiques » pour le milieu de ce siècle ? - souligne encore, si besoin en était, que les migrations sont encore pour longtemps non pas derrière mais devant nous. Rien ne laisse penser d’ailleurs qu’elles doivent s’interrompre un jour. Mais elles pourraient mieux s’équilibrer. A condition que nous sachions anticiper.

Ce n’est pas le lieu de développer ici ne serait-ce qu’une simple esquisse de traitement global du problème de l’émigration dite économique. Un mot quand même, pour rappeler que la solution principale ne saurait être dans le hérissement de barrières aux frontières mais se trouve, à l’évidence, dans la croissance économique des pays d’origine, qui implique aussi, et tout autant, une démocratisation politique. Nous devrions nous souvenir, en France, de l’expérience récente des émigration espagnole et portugaise : le processus d’adhésion réussi à la communauté européenne couplé à une croissance forte et à la mise de place de réformes politiques a réduit et progressivement éliminé les pressions migratoires. Il y a aujourd’hui 4 millions d’immigrés turcs dans l’Union Européenne : les adversaires à l’adhésion de la Turquie à l’Europe ont-ils bien conscience qu’une interruption du processus d’adhésion entraînerait un ralentissement de la croissance et une augmentation du chômage en Turquie, avec comme corollaire une reprise de l’immigration illégale ? Mais la croissance générale des pays pauvres prendra encore des décennies et, en attendant, des foules de migrants continueront logiquement à tenter leur chance en Europe.

Dans les conditions actuelles des moyens de communications tout circule, tout se déplace sur la planète, à une vitesse sans cesse accélérée dans notre société mondialisée : par trains, avions, téléphone, télévision, internet, les textes, les images et les sons et les biens matériels de toutes sortes parcourent en tous sens notre monde, et l’on voudrait que les hommes et les femmes demeurent dans leur lieu d’origine, se contentant de brefs voyages touristiques pour les plus riches d’entre eux ? Ca n’a pas de sens ! Les migrations de populations, discrètes ou massives selon les époques et les lieux, sont connues depuis aussi loin qu’on remonte dans l’histoire et déjà la préhistoire de l’humanité. Se déplacer sur la surface du globe à la recherche de meilleures conditions de vie est une constante depuis qu’est apparue l’espèce humaine, et c’est aussi ce qui nous lie tous les uns aux autres, et nous savons bien que c’est une formidable source d’enrichissement et d’évolution de nos cultures, une condition nécessaire de l’indispensable unification du monde, condition absolue de la survie à long terme de l’humanité. Chaque jour des jeunes gens de nos familles font le choix de vivre à l’étranger et nous n’accepterions pas que d’autres choisissent de vivre parmi nous ? La liberté de déplacement est un droit de l’homme fondamental, qui implique la pratique de l’hospitalité. Il n’en reste pas moins, évidemment, que dans nos sociétés si complexes, si fragiles sur tant de points, les Etats ne peuvent pas laisser leurs portes grandes ouvertes, mais il ne doivent surtout pas les fermer non plus : il faut en finir avec le tout ou rien ! Le droit à l’émigration et le devoir d’hospitalité doivent s’exercer selon des règles qui les rendent acceptables par tous.

La réglementation actuelle ne proposant aucune solution réelle au problème, il y a donc urgence pour l’Europe à inventer d’autres règles, se fondant sur le respect du droit international et les principes des droits humains dans le cadre d’une vision réalistes des conditions économiques et sociales de l’intégration des émigrés basée sur une nouvelle lecture du monde, des risques et des chances de son avenir prévisible. Des règles qui acceptent les migrations comme un fait incontournable et qui sachent les transformer en un vecteur d’évolution positive des relations sociales, économiques et culturelles entre les régions d’origine et les pays d’arrivée.

Des règles donc qui, premièrement, répondent aux défis des migrations par la volonté collective, lucide et réfléchie des Etats européens de s’attaquer autrement que par des discours, c’est-à-dire par des engagements concrets, des accords mais aussi parfois des sanctions, aux dramatiques inégalités économiques n’offrant aucune perspective à des centaines de millions d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants, ainsi qu’à l’absence de paix, de justice et de démocratie qui les accompagnent le plus souvent et qui sont, ensemble, les causes premières des migrations, dernier espoir des sans-espoir.
Des règles, corollairement, qui lient les Etats de l’Union européenne, qui sont les pays parmi les plus riches du monde malgré la crise actuelle, dans l’engagement de prendre, comme je le disais d’entrée, toute leur part, dans l’accueil de ces migrants pour construire avec eux, en fidélité avec nos valeurs et notre histoire, un autre avenir.

Cette nécessité impérieuse de transformer les logiques à l’œuvre depuis 20 ans, j’aimerais qu’elle trouve en premier lieu sa concrétisation par un changement des pratiques politiques développées en France à l’égard de la question de l’émigration prise dans son ensemble. Je fais le rêve que la France ouvre là-dessus le chemin de l’avenir, en osant poser les bases de cette politique d’hospitalité sans laquelle elle-même et l’Europe perdront inévitablement le sens des valeurs politiques et éthiques qui les fondent, et l’art de vivre en commun qu’elles peuvent seules garantir.
Le Président Sarkozy, reprenant à son compte le concept d’Edgar Morin, a soutenu la nécessité de promouvoir une « politique de civilisation ». Il me paraît clair qu’une politique de civilisation implique une vision tout à fait neuve du fait migratoire et de la façon de le penser et de le traiter en France et en Europe.

C’est un pas symboliquement fort que de renoncer au recours aux tests ADN voulu par la majorité parlementaire. Cette opportune marche arrière sur un aspect fondateur de la conception française de la filiation, rend sur ce point son visage à la France. Mais il y a d’autres aspects où une semblable intervention s’impose si l’on veut que notre politique d’immigration renonce aux inhumanités qu’elle entraîne parfois et qui défigurent notre pays.

Je retiendrai trois points sur lesquels je crois indispensable une véritable évolution.

Le premier porte sur la fixation de quotas annuels d’expulsions du territoire. Pas besoin de longues phrases pour dire ce qu’il y a d’humainement inacceptable dans le fait de donner à la police un objectif chiffré de ce type. Je ne nie pas la nécessité de recourir dans certains cas à des expulsions. Mon gouvernement aussi l’a fait. Mais c’était dans le cadre des actions de police normales de maintien de l’ordre public. Les quotas entraînent, au contraire, les services policiers à mener une sorte de traque pour atteindre l’objectif fixé par les préfets, avec le risque permanent des drames que l’on déplore trop souvent.

Le second, qui est directement lié au premier, porte sur les atteintes à la vie familiale qui se multiplient, à l’encontre des engagements de la France. Aujourd’hui, la politique de rétention et d’expulsion des migrants, en effet, n’épargne pas les couples et les familles, enfants compris, et semble souvent bien éloignée du respect élémentaire des libertés individuelles, banalisant des législations d’exception. On ne saurait approuver les tentatives d’instrumentaliser et de contrôler l’action des associations de défense des droits des migrants, notamment par la généralisation des logiques de marchés publics, pour prévenir leurs critiques. J’ai moi-même, quand j’étais Premier Ministre, fait l’objet de remarques dérangeantes sur les droits des migrants, comme le pasteur Jacques Maury, ancien Président de la Cimade, a toutes les raisons de s’en souvenir. Je veux dire ici quel soulagement moral c’était pour moi que de savoir qu’une aussi vigilante intransigeance saurait garder mon gouvernement de franchir la ligne jaune des droits fondamentaux de la personne humaine ! C’est l’honneur et le devoir des gouvernants de la France que de veiller à ce que de tels avertissements puissent toujours leur être donnés, afin que leurs politiques soient appliquées dans le respect le plus strict des droits de l’homme, et des recours qu’offre la loi.
Pour en revenir à la présence d’enfants, cet été encore, dans les Centres de rétention, j’ai entendu l’argument choquant qu’une telle mesure a été prévue pour permettre aux parents de ne pas être séparés de leurs enfants…Il y a pourtant une autre solution à ce problème, éthiquement incomparablement supérieure, qui est de renoncer purement et simplement à placer en centre de rétention les personnes vivant avec leurs enfants dans notre pays. Je l’appelle de mes vœux.

Le troisième point porte sur les permis de séjour. On estime qu’il y a en France entre cent et cent cinquante mille immigrés en situation irrégulière mais pourvus d’un travail, logés, pratiquant le français et donc pleinement intégrés à notre vie sociale et dont la grande majorité est originaire de nos anciennes colonies – et relèvent donc tout spécialement de « notre part ». Ces situation de sans-papiers intégrés mais privés de statut légal se retrouvent partout en Europe, comme aussi d’ailleurs, pour des millions de personnes, aux Etats-Unis. Là encore, il faut avoir le courage politique d’évoluer. Je ne plaide pas pour une régularisation massive, comme on dit souvent, car je pense au contraire qu’une politique d’intégration implique l’examen cas par cas. Mais à condition que l’objectif soit de donner un permis de séjour à tous ceux dont l’intégration constatée établira la vocation à vivre parmi nous. L’éthique des droits humains nous l’impose, mais aussi bien une politique responsable, car quel sens y a-t-il à maintenir sans permis de séjour des hommes et des femmes dont le travail contribue à l’activité du pays, souvent dans des secteurs où les français ne se bousculent guère, et dont les enfants sont scolarisés dans l’école de la République ? Une politique de civilisation qui ne reconnaîtrait pas leurs droit à résider là où ils vivent et travaillent n’en serait pas une.

Regarder les réalités en face est toujours à mes yeux le premier temps de la résolution des problèmes. Ce nouveau regard sur ces travailleurs de l’ombre, qui de toute façon demeureront parmi nous, aura des effets multiples sur la prise de conscience de l’évolution du monde par nos concitoyens. Il contribuera décisivement, j’en suis persuadé, à restaurer un espoir chez les jeunes issus de l’immigration qui désespèrent de trouver leur place au sein de notre société.

Pour une politique d’hospitalité en Europe, il est temps de sortir de la logique folle qui voudrait protéger nos libertés et notre identité en sapant les fondements même de notre humanisme. Il est urgent de redonner sens et contenu aux principes d’égalité et de fraternité, en restaurant un droit stable et protecteur, permettant à celles et ceux qui ont vocation à rester sur le territoire européen d’accéder à une véritable citoyenneté de résidence.

Je ne peux ici que me borner à quelques pistes.

La première est que l’inévitable partition des candidats à l’immigration entre ceux que la France peut accueillir et ceux qu’elle choisit de ne pas accueillir soit fait, en amont, le plus humainement possible. Il faut humaniser les services de visas de nos ambassades comme les services responsables dans les ports, gares et aéroports. Cela veut dire aussi qu’il s’agit d’établir des règles claires et transparentes pour mettre fin à l’opacité voire l’arbitraire qui règnent souvent en ce domaine.

La seconde vise à limiter la concentration de populations précaires de toutes sortes dans les mêmes zones. Il faut résoudre le problème de la relégation économique et sociale, qui est bien loin de ne toucher que les étrangers. Je suis heureux d’avoir pu faire adopter la loi qui oblige toutes les villes à construire au moins 20% de logements sociaux dans toutes leurs constructions neuves. Il y a encore des réticences à son application. Il faut en chercher les raisons, et peut-être durcir les sanctions. Peut-être faut-il d’autres dispositions, touchant par exemple le monde rural.

La troisième piste concerne les facilités d’apprentissage de notre langue pour tous ceux qui résident en France, quel que soit leur statut, les adultes, les conjoints et les enfants. Il y a beaucoup à développer là, car la maîtrise de la langue est un facteur déterminant de la participation effective à la vie sociale.

La quatrième est politiquement plus complexe et touche le droit. Il faut d’abord débarrasser notre législation de toute disposition ou contradiction tendant à créer cette catégorie inadmissible d’étrangers non régularisables non expulsables, qui, pour limitée qu’elle soit aujourd’hui, n’en reste pas moins aussi inacceptable. Il faut aussi que l’Europe invente rapidement un statut de droit pour les « réfugiés de fait » que sont notamment les afghans qu’on a vu chassés ce lundi de leur pauvre refuge à Calais, mais qu’on ne peut moralement pas renvoyer dans un pays en guerre depuis trente ans, et pas davantage les condamner à l’errance.

La cinquième est sans doute la plus importante. Je veux parler ici des maires, ces officiers publics principalement responsables de la bonne marche du processus local d’intégration. Tout cela leur tombe sur le dos et ils n’ont guère de moyens d’y faire face. Le temps paraît venu d’ouvrir entre l’Etat et l’Association des Maires de France la négociation d’un vaste contrat portant sur ce sujet. Analyse des difficultés, moyens de soutenir les mères à domicile, modalités d’un éventuel soutien scolaire, intensification de la lutte contre la discrimination à l’embauche, peut-être aussi campagnes publiques d’explications…le champ est immense. Il faudra bien l’explorer.

Au-delà de ces quelques pistes, le cadre nouveau dont la nécessité s’impose ne pourra être inventé qu’en sortant d’une vision européo-centrée, et en établissant un nouveau dialogue avec les pays du Sud, en premier lieu l’Afrique. Il ne pourra se construire sans y associer les sociétés civiles, notamment les syndicats et les associations qui, par leurs actions conjointes et leurs capacités d’innovation, sont un moteur essentiel de l’émergence d’un dialogue et de solutions pour l’avenir.

Ce qui me conduit à un dernier mot, en cette journée d’anniversaire des 70 ans d’action de la Cimade. La Cimade est depuis 1939, et dans toute la traversée de ces sept décennies au service des populations les plus menacées, l’honneur du protestantisme français d’où elle tire son origine mais aussi, au-delà de lui, de tous ceux qui en France sont attachés à la protection des plus faibles ! Dans un dévouement sans failles, la Cimade a su, tout au long de son histoire, inventer des solutions inédites pour adapter son action aux besoins spécifiques des réfugiés, des déplacés et des migrants. Elle a largement contribué au débat public et constitue, avec les associations d’origine catholique ou laïque qui partagent sa vocation et son exigence, un interlocuteur nécessaire des pouvoirs publics. Je ne doute pas que les gouvernants actuels sachent lui conserver et lui garantir toute sa place.

Michel Rocard

Afghanistan : "Nous pouvons gagner la guerre", affirme le général McChrystal

Dans les cercles militaires et politiques français, il est de bon ton de dire qu'en Afghanistan, la question n'est pas de savoir si l'on peut ou non "gagner la guerre" en Afghanistan. Ce serait une vision archaïque des conflits, explique la nouvelle pensée officielle. Patatras ! Le patron américain des forces alliées, le général Stanley McChrsytal, n'y va pas par quatre chemins. Interrogé longuement par mon confrère du Figaro, Renaud Girard, McChrystal répond simplement "Oui, nous le pouvons", à la question "Pouvons-nous gagner cette guerre ?" On peut lire l'intégrale de l'entretien sur le site du Figaro.

Cette franchise, sympathique, s'accompagne toutefois de propos qui (me) laisse pantois. "Nous devons nous rapprocher de la population en nous débarrassant de tous ces blindages et autres gilets pare-éclats". Et plus loin, détaillant sa stratégie ("Notre affaire, ce n'est pas de tuer le maximum de talibans, mais de protéger la population") : "On repère un groupe de dix insurgés loin dans la montage : si on arrive à en tuer deux, on risque de se retrouver avec un groupe de vingt, car six cousins de chacun des tués auront décidés de prendre les armes pour les venger". Message reçu : les insurgés peuvent donc se promener tranquillement "loin dans la montagne"...

Secret Défense

Germany's shift to the right

The election results in Germany are the latest example of the decline of Europe’s traditional parties and the crisis of the social democratic ideology. Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) remain the largest party in the German parliament despite losses in Sunday's elections, winning 33.8 percent of the vote. She secured a mandate to form a new coalition with the pro-business Liberal Democrats (FDP, 14.6 percent), which will succeed a "grand coalition" with the Social Democrats (SPD). Focusing on economic reform, tax cuts and a return to nuclear power, the new government will mean a shift to the right in German politics.

At the same time that the centre-right reunites the political left remains divided. The Social Democrats got slapped in the face by voters earning a devastating 23 percent of the votes, an all-time low for Germany's oldest party and another step in its continuous decline since it entered government in 1998. The radical Left Party, largely a spin-off of dissatisfied social democrats who joined elements of the former Communist Party of East Germany, scored 11.9 percent with 10.6 percent going to the Green Party.

The result is especially surprising against the backdrop of a financial crisis that has been ascribed to the neoliberal ideology by many. However, the FDPwon the elections with a program based on neoliberal ideas of deregulation and tax cuts and returns to power 11 years after the end of the last conservative-liberal alliance under former chancellor Helmut Kohl. But this time the coalition will be different: never before has one of smaller parties in a government coalition outside a "grand coalition" attracted more votes than the FDP this year. Unsurprisingly, FDP chairman and likely the next foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle was the happiest of the party leaders on election night. The strong performance of the FDP puts it in the position to demand more than the four ministries usually assigned to a smaller coalition partner during the negotiations on a coalition agreement and the composition of the next government.

Guido Westerwelle finds himself in a fortunate situation: In his campaign he had committed himself to a coalition with the conservatives and ruled out all other options for the formation of a governing coalition; a move that might have sent his party into opposition for another four years and possibly ended his career. Now he is the overall winner of the election, which will allow him to take a strong stand in coalition negotiations.

At the same time the pressure on him to deliver results will be intense. An outspoken critic of the lack of bold ideas and innovative policy making of the "grand coalition" he will now face high expectations and intense scrutiny from his electorate, mainly consisting of pro-business, relatively wealthy electorates. The FDP focused its campaign on the creation of a simpler and more efficient tax system in order to overcome the efficiency losses of the notoriously complicated current system. Already in 2005 CDU and FDP had run a campaign based on neoliberal economic reform, which brought the conservatives to the verge of a defeat by the incumbent and at the time largely unpopular SPD, which forced them into a "grand coalition". Subsequently the conservatives left the path of large-scale economic reforms. It is one of the most interesting questions whether the FDP will be able to sustain its plans in a coalition with the conservatives this time. At any rate, these undertaking will stir up great debates in a society that still adheres to a strong belief in social security and income redistribution.

A confrontational phase to come

Unpopular welfare cuts carried out by the Social Democrats in the early years of this decade have alienated many in their traditional voter milieus, the working class. This led to a constant decrease in support over the last years, which culminated in the founding of the Left Party. It is to be expected that the SPD faces strong internal debate about its future orientation, probably leading to a shift to the left and the expulsion of senior personnel. Despite prevailing differences the right shift of the government may cause the left-of-centre parties to rejoin forces throughout the next four years.

The result may be a stronger confrontation between a right-leaning government and the opposition. Besides economic reform the most intense debates foreseeable today will be around job protection and minimum wages, social security, and nuclear energy. As the CDU and FDP have campaigned for a return to nuclear energy despite strong disapproval in the population, this policy is expected to lead to protests both inside and outside the Bundestag. Another uniting factor for the leftist parties will be the debate about general minimum wages, which has proved to be one of the most controversial issues in German politics over the last years.

A topic that most politicians tried to keep out of the campaign, but which will take a prominent place on the agenda for the next months is the widely unpopular deployment of German troops in Afghanistan. Pressure on the government to present a plan for withdrawal is increasing steadily. The debate gained considerable ground after a large number of civilians where killed in an air strike ordered by the Bundeswehr. Although at present only the Left Party demands a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan, the new government won't be able to avoid the question of when and how the military should leave.

Moreover, terrorist threats by Al Qaeda against Germany in the run up to the election have brought the issue of national security back to the table. The FDP opposes any sort of increase in government-run observation and data collection while CDU Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, is notorious for his desire to increase the competences of police and intelligence organizations. This will be one of the major controversies within the new coalition as Schäuble is likely to keep his office.

Foreign policy strategies have proved to be comparatively stable over government changes in Germany. Nevertheless, the shift to the right will have some implications for the outside world. Angela Merkel is expected to remain her strong presence in external relations making it hard for Guido Westerwelle to develop his profile as foreign minister. Merkel will continue her efforts to balance between all major partners within and beyond Europe without taking a strong stand as her predecessor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) did with his close ties to Russia and opposition to the Bush administration.

The most notable consequence will be an increased opposition on the part of the German government to Turkish EU membership. The Social Democrats have long been outspoken supporters of the accession process and thus balanced the reservations of the conservatives during the "grand coalition". The CDU opposes the membership option while the FDP has been noncommittal. It is therefore expected that Germany will join France in its tough stand on the matter.

An alteration of German politics

Both mainstream parties lost significantly in the election, partly due to a lack of polarization in their campaign when two senior members of the government (Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Steinmeier) were running against one another. However, the shift towards the smaller parties (none of which scored more than 10 percent in 2005) also underlines a structural problem of the mainstream parties. In a society where traditional cleavages lose their importance they cannot rely on a large number of relatively obedient followers any longer. Both need to realize that every vote needs to be won anew, a fact that poses a great challenge to parties that try to cover all issues simultaneously. The smaller parties benefit from the niches they grew into over the last several years. They have outgrown their initial status as single-issue parties, but still cater to a certain electorate: FDP voters react to the party's focus on pro-business topics, the Greens attract environmentally conscious citizens, and followers of the Left are attracted by the party's calls for redistribution.

Demographics play a central role in the decline of the mainstream parties. Their electorate mainly consists of older voters while the smaller parties seem to be especially attractive to young people. In the group of under 30 year olds the FDP drew level with the SPD. The traditional parties seem to have lost touch with the younger generations. This in turn benefits single-issue parties embracing topics that are important for young people but largely disregarded by the established parties. Online regulation and copyright is a case in point. The Pirate Party won an overall two percent of the vote by mobilizing young voters with these topics.

The CDU has not yet had to realize its decline as a mainstream party. Conservative voters are still a relatively stable electorate, especially as long as there is no viable alternative for them. The situation looks much darker for the Social Democrats, whose traditional electorate, the working class, is declining in number. The SPD has not yet found a way to reinvent itself in order to attract voters who have moved to the Greens or the Left. The party faces an intense internal debate over a new programmatic orientation in order to ensure its persistence as a sizeable party. The election has in this sense been a caesura for the SPD. The party will use the next four years in opposition to redefine itself. It needs to answer the question whether there still is room on the left for a mainstream party.

Dennis Nottebaum

O primeiro dia do resto da vida do Presidente

Quando hoje falar, Cavaco Silva estará a dar um contributo decisivo para o derradeiro acto de uma experiência que faltava fazer - coabitar com um governo minoritário -com implicações ao nível do escrutínio do poder político, face ao novo desequilíbrio entre poderes que se controlam reciprocamente. Talvez o fim de uma esfera metapolítica, etérea, onde só existe virtude e o vício e a ambição de poder não penetram.

Short-Term Thinking Linked to Compensation Problems

Posted by Justin Lahart

Policymakers are working on the assumption that Wall Street pay helped cause the crisis.

The Federal Reserve is crafting a proposal that would allow it to police pay practices at the biggest U.S. banks. Group of 20 leaders agreed last month that countries should implement limits on compensation at financial firms immediately to align pay with “long-term value creation.” In testimony earlier this year, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner argued that “what happened to compensation and the incentives in creative risk taking did contribute in some institutions to the vulnerability that we saw in this financial crisis. We need to help encourage substantial reforms in compensation structures particularly in the financial industry.”

But how did compensation get so out of whack, with executives so richly rewarded for short-term gains, and so lightly penalized for failure? A recent statement from the Aspen Institute argued that the problem that stems from short-termism among financial-market participants. Among the statements signers were Berkshire Hathaway Chief Executive Officer Warren Buffett,Vanguard Group founder John Bogle and former International Business Machines CEO Louis Gerstner.

Ira Millstein, senior associate dean for corporate governance at the Yale School of Management, and UCLA School of Law professor Lynn Stouthelped craft the statement. Here they discuss why they believe short-termism has become such a problem.

How does short-termism hurt the economy?

Ira Millstein: I think of short-termism as the deflection of capital needed for business survival and growth over the longer term. Growth can be defined in a number of different ways, such as meeting new customer demands or new competition. Growth requires capital investment, capital that may produce returns only over the longer term. With an overly short-term perspective, the capital that might fuel growth over the longer term is deflected to produce short-term results to satisfy apparent investor demands for such. Deflection can occur through dividend policy, stock buy backs, or simply pushing earnings earlier, among other things.

In such an environment, the economy loses because companies that are not using capital for long-term growth also aren’t innovating or becoming more competitive and they eventually stagnate. Corporate stagnation, or worse, can lead to large-scale job loss — the backbone and desired result of any economy — and to tax revenue loss, both of which can lead both to deteriorating standards of living and national infrastructure. The downward spiral continues as corporate stagnation can also lead to the destruction of shareholder wealth and eventually consumer demand, which further impacts an economy so dependent on consumer spending.

Lynn Stout: Investor and executive short-termism harms the economy in a number of ways. To begin with, and somewhat counter intuitively, investors’ collective pursuit of short-term trading profits harms investors themselves as a class. This is because the pursuit of short-term trading profits is by definition a zero-sum game in which one trader’s gains necessarily comes at another trader’s expense. If John makes money by buying low from Mary and then selling back to Mary at high price, Mary must lost money because she sold low and bought high. It was not coincidence that in the “lost decade” from 1999 through 2008, when the average investor who bought the S&P 500 suffered nearly flat returns, investors in hedge funds and private equity firms enjoyed 10% or more annual returns. Hedge fund and private equity investors grew rich through trades that made average investors poorer. Meanwhile, both sides incurred transactions costs, paying fees to brokers, dealers, and fund managers. Zero-sum games that involve transactions costs become negative-sum games.

The pursuit of short-term trading profits also has a corrosive effect on the wider economy because it distracts corporate managers who must respond to short-term investors’ demands from the important business of planning for and investing in the future. Corporations are complex business institutions that are particularly suited to, and historically have been associated with, the long-term commitment of large amounts of financial and human capital to large-scale, complex, uncertain, long-term economic projects. Corporations build railways, specialized manufacturing facilities, trusted international brand names, mass-produced software, new drugs and medical devices. Yet it can be difficult or impossible for corporate directors and executives to focus their attention on such projects when they are constantly being called upon instead to meet quarterly earnings targets and to raise tomorrow’s stock price…

Unions Must Move Left, They Have No Alternative

Reviewed: Solidarity Divided by Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Fernando Gapasin,(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 324 pages, $17.95, paper.

Through the 1980s I was a union organizer and activist in our Bay Area labor anti-apartheid committee. As we picketed ships carrying South African cargo, and recruited city workers to support the African National Congress (then called a terrorist organization by both the United States and South Africa), I looked at South African unions with great admiration.

The South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), banned in the 1950s, had found ways to organize African and Colored workers underground, to support a liberation struggle in a broad political alliance. Heroic SACTU leaders like Vuyisile Mini gave their lives on the scaffold for freedom. Then, as apartheid tottered and eventually fell, SACTU unions became the nucleus of a new federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). With roots in that liberation war, it declared socialism its goal, and still does today.

COSATU unions prize rank-and-file control over their elected leaders, and engage members in long and thorough discussions of the country’s development plans. The labor federation has the most sophisticated political strategy of any union in the world today. It balances its leading role in the tripartite alliance that governs South Africa with independence of program and action. It has struck to force policies that put the needs of workers before the neoliberal demands of the World Bank. Jacob Zuma owes his election as president of South Africa today to South African labor.

As an organizer during the same period, I worked with many others to force our own labor movement to recognize that organizing new members and changing our politics was necessary for survival at home. If we could double our size (at least), I thought, we’d have more power, while the street-heat generated by the intense conflict organizing creates would set the stage for political transformation. Needless to say, that transformation process turned out to be much more complicated than I expected.

At the beginning of Solidarity Divided, Bill Fletcher recalls a comment made by a health care unionist at a meeting in South Africa that sums up part of what makes COSATU so different from the AFL-CIO. “‘Comrades,’ the South African unionist began, ‘the role of the union is to represent the interests of the working class. There are times when the interests of the working class conflict with the interests of the members of our respective unions.’”

Fletcher and his coauthor Fernando Gapasin use the quote to dramatize two important differences between our movements. South African unions talk about workers’ class interests, using words that still frighten unionists here. And not only can COSATU militants see the potential conflict that can sometimes arise; they also believe that when it does, unions should put the interests of all workers before their own institutional needs.

There are many differences between the U.S. labor movement and other union movements around the world. In France in recent months, workers have imprisoned their bosses in their offices to force them to negotiate the closure of factories and job elimination. On May Day, hundreds of thousands of workers poured into the streets in Germany and Russia; and in Turkey, unions battled the police for the right to stand in Taksim Square. In El Salvador, unions supported the guerrilleros during a civil war to upend Central America’s most unjust social order, while their offices were bombed and their leaders killed. In the Philippines, workers commonly put up tents at the gate of a factory on strike, and live there until the strike is over. Even workers from Mexico and Canada use phrases like “working class” as part of ordinary conversation.

By comparison, we seem pretty conservative. Our labor movement has resources and wealth that are enormous in comparison with most unions around the world. But our own existence and power is just as threatened as that of many others.

The purpose of Solidarity Divided is not to compare us unfavorably with labor elsewhere, or to mount an unrelieved criticism of our conservatism. It is to ask questions, so that we can come to grips with the problems that endanger our survival. And, while the experience of unions and workers in other countries can’t be transferred or copied, it can at least inspire us with the courage to face our own situation with realism and the determination to change it.

Some activists criticize Solidarity Divided for the dark picture it paints of the situation faced by unions in the United States. It is not a hopeless one, but it is certainly sobering. Few would argue that, with 12 percent of workers in unions, there is no crisis for U.S. labor. And the authors are certainly not saying that workers can’t win in conflicts with employers today, or with the political system. The Bush era was defeated in large part by union activists, money, and votes. Workers can still win major organizing drives, as they did after a sixteen-year struggle at Smithfield Foods in North Carolina. U.S. Labor Against the War can win over labor to call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq, and for solidarity with Iraqi workers.

But in reality, the working class here at home faces profound changes that have fundamentally undermined its political rights and standard of living. Over the last four decades, corporations have built an international system of production and distribution that links the workers of many countries, but in which workers have no control over the expropriation and distribution of the wealth they create. Further, this system has forced devastating and permanent unemployment on entire generations of U.S. workers, especially in African American and Chicano neighborhoods. Meanwhile, neoliberal economic policies displace communities in developing countries, creating a reserve labor force of hundreds of millions who migrate both within and across borders, desperate for work.

Fletcher and Gapasin wrote Solidarity Divided before the current economic crisis, which only highlights the problems they describe. Many elements of this crisis are structural, and won’t disappear with the next turn of the business cycle. Workers increasingly can’t buy back what the system produces — the bizarre loan conditions that financed home purchases only illustrate that thousands of purchasers didn’t have the income necessary to buy housing.

Unions and workers must demand increasingly radical reforms if they are to survive in this environment. As Fletcher and Gapasin point out, the idea that “the needs of workers can be met by the bargaining demands and institutional needs of unions” is a relic of a vanished past.

Corporations today are almost entirely opposed to any reforms to the current system, whether single-payer health care or the right to a job. They’ve discarded the social charter in which employers, after the Second World War, reluctantly acquiesced to the existence of unions, under certain conditions. When one considers the ferocity with which they battle the relatively minor changes in U.S. labor law proposed by the Employee Free Choice Act, it’s clear that, to corporations, the idea that unions should be encouraged — an ideal enshrined in the preamble to the National Labor Relations Act — is just so much meaningless verbiage.

Despite a desperate desire by U.S. labor leaders to revive what formerly appeared to be a degree of mutual respect between corporations and unions, Fletcher and Gapasin say that “peace has not come. Nor can these leaders, nor anyone else, identify any sector of corporate America that intends to establish a new social compact with labor.”

Each month, for the last half year, over half a million people have lost their jobs. Banks have been showered with hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars to keep them afloat, while working families can’t get their loans renegotiated so they can stay in their homes. Yet there has been no national demonstration called by either labor federation, demanding a direct federal jobs program or redirecting the bailout to workers instead of the wealthy. Remember those French workers? They’re not just organizing (yet another!) general strike protesting the same conditions; they’re holding their bosses hostage.

The book, then, is about change. Where did labor’s current conservatism come from? We, too, have a radical past. In the United States, people used to talk about the working class, debate the nature of capitalism, and discuss strategies for radically transforming or replacing it. So what happened? Why is it now so difficult for labor to change?

One of the most valuable parts of Solidarity Divided is its examination of our own history. It is not a detailed academic history, but it establishes the fact that U.S. labor has always had a left wing that advocated the organization of all workers and radical social change, even while racism limited its potential.

William Sylvis, for example, organized the National Labor Union and included African Americans during the post-Civil War decades, yet failed to protest the end of Reconstruction and the reestablishment of the racist white power structure in the south. The Wobblies organized immigrants in many languages, and used free speech fights and working-class songs and music to organize a population of itinerant floating workers. We see day labor unions developing the same ideas today. The CIO won the crucial battle to organize the country’s basic industry, but lost its radicalism in the purge of the left, substituting a centralized bureaucracy for earlier rank-and-file democratic traditions.

To change, we need to reexamine the ideas and strategy that are part of our own inheritance. But we also need to come to grips with the purges that drove that left-wing culture underground.

One of the most important reasons why change is so hard for U.S. unions is the continuing legacy of the Cold War. Fletcher and Gapasin go to the root of the problem in urging a reexamination of the cost that labor paid for the suppression of the left. That period may seem long ago, but it marked a turning point in the relationship between left-wing activists and their ideas, and in the centers of power in modern unions. “Today the dominant coalition of traditionalist and pragmatist union leaders continues to shape union culture,” they say, “whereas leftists get co-opted or marginalized. This situation limits the union movement’s scope and narrows unions’ political and social impact.” Although Solidarity Divided contains a rare analysis of the role new left militants played in unions during the post-Civil Rights years, it offers no comment on why those activists made so little effort to come to terms with the history that created the conservatism against which they rebelled.

No pair of authors can write a prescription for change: “just do what we say and your problems will be cured.” But they can urge us not to be afraid of facing the truth, and Gapasin and Fletcher do that.

Discussion in labor is difficult because the Cold War taught unionists that political differences beyond a limited range would result in marginalization at best, expulsion at worst. You can’t talk freely if you’re afraid for your career or your job. That Cold War straightjacket strengthened a hierarchical structure and culture, very different from the egalitarianism in COSATU or Salvadoran unions. We have forgotten the Wobblies’ idea that we’re all leaders, equals among equals. At the same time, unions have accumulated property, treasuries, and political debts, and have an interest in defending them, making institutional needs paramount. We don’t challenge the government out in the streets beyond a certain point because we don’t want to risk not being at the table when the deals affecting our future are made.

Fletcher and Gapasin spend a great deal of the book analyzing the various efforts to change labor’s direction following the 1995 New York convention election of John Sweeney as president of the AFL. One important reason for the halting and incomplete nature of these changes was the failure to come to grips with what had come before. Labor needed then, and still needs today, its own truth commission, to publicly discuss the consequences of the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s.

Radical ideas and the language to describe them continue to be illegitimate because their suppression has been unacknowledged. After 1995, the prevailing attitude in national leadership was, “We don’t need to rehash the past. Let’s concentrate on where we’re going now.” It’s difficult, however, to determine that new direction if you can’t talk about where the old one was headed, and what was wrong with it.

Nowhere is this confusion more evident than in labor’s attitude toward U.S. foreign policy. In Colombia, the barriers to solidarity with its left-wing union federation came down, and unions like the United Steel Workers of America became bastions of support for its embattled unionists. Yet next door in Venezuela, U.S. labor supported coup plotters against the radical regime of Hugo Chávez. Under pressure from U.S. Labor Against the War, the AFL-CIO publicly rejected U.S. military intervention in Iraq. Yet the Democratic Party’s support for war in Afghanistan and for Israel’s attack on Gaza are greeted with silence.

Change is always uneven and incomplete, but the change process in U.S. labor has virtually stopped, leaving unions increasingly caught up in internal divisions and conflict. Solidarity Divided was written before the current internal struggle between the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its California health care local, and its intervention in battles within UNITE HERE. But these are conflicts over the basic issues raised in the book — class partnership versus class struggle, and the right and ability of union members to control their own organizations.

Lacking agreement on how and why the power of unions was undermined by the suppression of the left, there has been no consensus on what should replace the old Cold War philosophy. Much of Solidarity Divided, then, is devoted to description and analysis of different ideas about how labor should be revitalized: some good, some at best ineffective, and some awful.

Both authors write as “participant observers,” Fletcher as a highly placed staff member at SEIU, then education director at the AFL-CIO and special assistant to Sweeney; Gapasin as a local union leader, labor council head, and labor and ethnic studies professor at UCLA. They were there for many of the arguments and movements they describe, and they outline some of the most important efforts to get the union movement to change direction: Jobs with Justice, the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project, and others.

They pay particular attention to the “organizing model,” which was developed in opposition to the philosophy of business unionism, in which members pay dues and receive in exchange union services, as though a union were an insurance program rather than an organization built to fight the boss. But, the book says, “reformers began to worship member mobilization and activism, certainly a component of a vibrant trade unionism, without much discussion of who should do the mobilizing, what the objectives should be, and what methods were appropriate.”

A bigger problem with this model, however, is that it has so little interest in the education of workers as to the nature of the society in which they live. A deeper understanding (that is, greater class consciousness) can lead to ideas for alternatives, both in radical reforms of the existing system, and even its replacement. This kind of education, part of the normal life of unions in South Africa or El Salvador, requires an investment of time, and a real interest in how workers think. People act autonomously, based on their ideas, and workers with greater understanding and consciousness are able to lead themselves and one another, rather than acting solely on directives from above. Further, while education doesn’t necessarily produce immediate mobilizing results, it does treat workers as the people whose thinking, and eventually whose leadership, is the key element in building a union.

Instead, Fletcher and Gapasin point out, the mobilizing model produces unions that are directed by full-time paid staff, in which workers play a subordinate role. At worst, workers become almost irrelevant in a numbers game in which the size of the union is what counts, rather than creating an organization they can learn to use to challenge an employer to win better wages and conditions.

Fletcher was himself the creator of the most ambitious effort in decades to educate union activists and local leaders, a program called “Common Sense Economics.” Strangely, Solidarity Divided has no discussion of that experience. There are some other puzzling omissions, especially the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That treaty caused a huge debate in labor, which coincided with the rebellion that eventually brought Sweeney into office. It marked a watershed in the growing awareness among U.S. workers of the impact of globalization, and brought forth important new movements of solidarity, especially between unions and workers in the United States and Mexico.

Solidarity Divided includes an important section on globalization, but sees it mostly in terms of military domination. But what is new about the role workers play in this system? Are the anti-globalization movements sweeping Europe and the developing world allies of the labor movement? Do they propose real alternatives, or are they united primarily by a common hatred of capitalism?

The battle in Seattle over NAFTA and the WTO not only profoundly affected the thinking of workers about the future of their own jobs, but it also set the stage for the huge debate over immigration that followed. Those workers and unions who were educated by the debate were in a much better position to understand the way neoliberal reforms displaced workers and farmers in Mexico and led to migration across the United States/Mexico border.

The debate over immigration policy now puts critical questions before U.S. unions. Are unions going to defend all workers (including the undocumented), or just some? Should unions support immigration enforcement designed to force millions of workers from their jobs, so that they will leave the country? How can labor achieve the unity and solidarity it needs to successfully confront transnational corporations, both internally within the United States, and externally with workers in countries like Mexico?

Understanding that NAFTA hurt workers on both sides of the border is a crucial step in answering these questions, providing the raw material workers need to critique globalization. But raw material is just that. Workers and unions need an education process, and educators who can help turn that raw material into consciousness and action. In more radical times, that role of educator was played by left-wing socialist and communist parties. Since this kind of organized left presence in labor is so small today, it is unclear what can take its place. Solidarity Divided helps in presenting the question, but no one today has a good answer.

Fletcher and Gapasin call for a new kind of unionism. “The current framework of U.S. trade unionism is so fundamentally flawed,” they say, “that a new framework is needed. With that new framework will inevitably come new organizational structures, but forging new structures without defining the moment and defining the framework would simply create new problems.” Arguing that the kind of structural proposals that led eventually to the Change to Win Federation is meaningless without a change in political direction, they call for discarding the body of ideas that guides unions today. They condemn business union efforts to reduce every problem to a question of pragmatic organizing tactics, while essentially seeking a strategic partnership with corporations and the government.

“We call this new unionism social justice solidarity,” Fletcher and Gapasin say, and contrast it with “pragmatic solidarity,” which sees alliances only in terms of what they can offer to help unions win immediate battles. Using as examples the anti-apartheid movement, the solidarity movement with Central America, and even the broad opposition to Wal-Mart, they declare that “social justice solidarity begins with an important assumption — that unions are workers’ organizations engaged in class struggle (whether they like it or not) rather than corporations.”

It is unfair to expect the authors to come up with quick solutions to such deeply rooted problems, so many years in the making. And, absent the kind of discussion they urge, any suggestions for a new direction are going to sound very general. Their most important contribution is to raise the questions. The labor movement is full of intelligent activists, most with a deep loyalty to their class and a real commitment to social change. Any change in direction depends on their willingness to call for a much deeper discussion that can look for answers.

There are no experts here. There are no leaders with quick fixes. It is time for us all to take responsibility for the future of our own movement. As the pair state in conclusion, “the U.S. union movement must become part of a new labor movement. To do so, unions must move left; they have no alternative.”

Solidarity Divided is a critical contribution to that effort.

David Bacon