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A thread to talk about news and politics affecting Europe as a whole, rather than just politics within specific European countries.

If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines before posting here.

As with other OTC threads, off-topic posts may be thumped or edited by the moderators.

    Original first post 
Spinned off from the British Politics Thread. Basically a thread where we talk about news and politics that affect Europe as a whole rather than certain countries in it.

Anyway BBC News section for Europe Based news.

Edited by Mrph1 on Jan 9th 2024 at 3:24:05 PM

3of4 Just a harmless giant from a foreign land. from Five Seconds in the Future. Since: Jan, 2010 Relationship Status: GAR for Archer
Just a harmless giant from a foreign land.
#1876: Jul 4th 2015 at 1:56:46 PM

Germany's AfD Party Leader kicked out

Well, that's what you get for scoring votes by flirting with the right-wing populists you Moron.

With any luck he goes through with his threats of starting *another* party and taking "his" part of the old party with him, dooming both into the same non-importance as the MLPD and the Animal Rights Party. His Af D did enough damage.

"You can reply to this Message!"
Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#1877: Jul 4th 2015 at 2:18:40 PM

Looks like the new leader is even crazier on immigration though.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
3of4 Just a harmless giant from a foreign land. from Five Seconds in the Future. Since: Jan, 2010 Relationship Status: GAR for Archer
Just a harmless giant from a foreign land.
#1878: Jul 4th 2015 at 2:40:11 PM

Oh she is. She's from the PEGIDA bunch. But my strong hope is that that causes the party to split, and on its own each faction is probably nowhere near enough to be more than a nuisance long term.

We have a whole bunch of small parties that are like that and I fondly hope the Afd will soon end upon them.

Divide and Conquer done by themselves.

edited 4th Jul '15 2:40:32 PM by 3of4

"You can reply to this Message!"
DrunkenNordmann from Exile Since: May, 2015
#1879: Jul 4th 2015 at 11:26:33 PM

[up] Looks like the AfD is now firmly on the road to irrelevance. There's a good chance that many party members who supported Lucke will now leave the AfD.

edited 4th Jul '15 11:27:40 PM by DrunkenNordmann

We learn from history that we do not learn from history
PotatoesRock Since: Oct, 2012
#1880: Jul 5th 2015 at 4:09:42 PM

(EquiBlog) Arthur Goldhammer: Weekend Reading: The Old Continent Creaks:

Austerity and the failures of the technocratic elite have created the current populist backlash. France’s experience is instructive—and, possibly, ominous:

What’s the matter with Europe? Wherever one looks these days, there are signs of deep trouble. Economic growth has stagnated. Deflation threatens. Unemployment is rampant in many member states of the European Union. Support for the former mainstream parties of the center-right and center-left is waning. Populist parties of the far right and far left are on the rise. Anti-Islamic movements such as PEGIDA in Germany have attracted worrisome support, while in France the xenophobic National Front has topped all other parties in recent polls. Terrorist attacks by native-born citizens in Paris and Copenhagen have raised fears that the social fabric has irreparably deteriorated—fears compounded by the flight of several thousand young Europeans to join the Islamic State in Syria. And to top it all off, Ukraine has been racked by civil war and threatened with disintegration since Russian-backed separatists rejected the rule of the government in Kiev…

Doesn't give a straight overview, but it's probably also best to step back and think about what's been going on since 2008.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#1881: Jul 5th 2015 at 4:12:14 PM

It's really pretty plain to see. With its current neocon-neolib leadership, Europe is fucked up the ass.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
DrunkenNordmann from Exile Since: May, 2015
#1882: Jul 5th 2015 at 10:54:25 PM

[up] Problem is: With what do we replace this leadership? Political opposition is either non-existant, nearly identical to our current ruling parties or comes from the far right.

We learn from history that we do not learn from history
Greenmantle V from Greater Wessex, Britannia Since: Feb, 2010 Relationship Status: Hiding
V
#1883: Jul 5th 2015 at 11:17:05 PM

[up] Or far left. And neither of those are friendly to the EU.

Then again, the full article is an interesting read. Substantial quotes follow:

In the starkest possible way, France exemplifies the unintended political consequences of the economic choices made by Europe’s architects, Delors foremost among them

All of these men shared Delors’s vision of a more tightly integrated Europe, bound together by a single market and a single currency, as social democracy’s best defense against globalization. The Delorian philosophy is nicely encapsulated in a sentence from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard: ‘Everything must change so that everything can stay the same.’ The judgment of the 1980s—an accurate one, I think—was that the price of preserving the social-democratic welfare state was the wholehearted embrace of this ‘leopardian’ approach to economic governance. ‘Leopardism’ is radically conservative: radical in its means, by extending the social-democratic compromise with capital into the realm of finance, but conservative in its ultimate goal, which is to preserve welfare capitalism from the ravages of globalization.

These French Socialist modernizers entertained a rather ambivalent relationship with democracy. As rigorously selected products of France’s elite civil service training system, they thought of themselves (in the words of the best-known French technocrat of an earlier generation, François Bloch-Lainé) as a ‘priesthood’ with a ‘vocation of public service.’ They were used to the style of governance fostered by France’s semi-presidential system, which bestows unique prerogatives on administrative elites, who persist in influential posts even as governments change. At the ENA, future administrators (colloquially and not necessarily affectionately referred to as énarques) are taught to privilege the longue durée over the vicissitudes of electoral and parliamentary politics—the mere froth of l’événémentiel, as the French say, as if to suggest that statesmen appropriately concerned with the long run of history need not concern themselves unduly with the everyday travails of their fellow citizens. The training of énarques instills hardheaded pragmatism, together with superb confidence in their subtle acuity at divining the persistent ‘general interest’ beyond the vagaries of the popular will.

Many Europeans will tell you that the problems of the European Union stem from a ‘democratic deficit,’ or a lack of citizen input into the decision-making process. But the ENA-trained technocrat would argue that this diagnosis gets the problem precisely backward: The problem with the European Union is a democratic surfeit at the national level, granting volatile electorates too much influence over policies that can succeed only if pursued with the requisite patience, to be ratified by voters only occasionally, and at moments judged opportune by the technicians. In France, wariness of the popular will has long been deeply ingrained in elite thinking. Le peuple, aka les classes dangereuses, thrive best when nudged in the direction of their ‘self-interest properly understood,’ as Tocqueville put it.

These mental habits of French administrators have left their mark on governance at the European level, where French influence, strongly represented from the beginning in the person of Jean Monnet, was extended into the transformative period of 1980 to 2000 by Delors and his young acolytes. Scholars such as Philip Nord and Mark Blyth have shown how the technocratic reformism of the 1930s—exemplified by Walter Lippmann in the United States, the nonconformists in France, and the ordoliberals in Germany—was perpetuated in postwar political thinking in many places, but most of all in the European Union, where technocratically managed capitalism is more at home than in any national polity. Technocratic paternalism was second nature to the Christian Socialist Delors, who knew that the liberation of capital he believed necessary to save the welfare state would not likely prove to be a winning electoral formula for the Socialist Party, which still, even after the forced-march ‘modernization’ of the Mitterrand years, continued to harbor a substantial anti-capitalist faction. In the run-up to 1995 presidential election, Delors briefly considered running for president of France himself but concluded that, even if elected, he would lack a majority in the National Assembly to carry out the reforms he thought necessary. He nevertheless continued to believe that the program could be shepherded to successful completion if the political battles were fought in the administrative or technocratic arena, as he had been doing at the European Commission for years, rather than at the ballot box. In any case, the EU was a theater better suited to his talents and temperament.

What lessons does the French case hold for the future of the European Union? In a formal sense, the governing institutions of the EU resemble those of France. Both have an all-powerful executive: the president of the republic in the case of France, the European Council in the case of the EU. In both cases the will of the executive is implemented through entrenched technocratic hierarchies: the ministries of the French administration and the directorates of the European Commission, respectively. In both, the relatively limited role of the legislature means that groups opposed to the policies favored by the executive feel that they are deprived of a voice and that the only way to change policy is to replace the executive. In France, this structure increases the stakes and heightens the drama of each presidential election. At the EU level, where the executive is a council comprising the heads of member-state governments, the absence of any simple electoral route to changing the policy preferences of this multi-headed executive is a constant irritant to national electorates. As long as things go reasonably well, the European governance structure enjoys what political scientists call ‘output legitimacy,’ meaning simply that citizens are content because the union is producing results they can live with. But when things don’t go well, the EU executive lacks not only output legitimacy but also ‘input legitimacy,’ because it is hard for citizens to understand how their votes to choose their own national leaders translate into policy at the European level, where policy is decided behind closed doors by the members of the council, whose votes are weighted so that some national leaders count more than others.

A strong executive deaf to dissenting voices, reinforced by a consensus of technocrats, and unchecked by a broadly representative legislature is a recipe for populist opposition. As we have seen, the populist backlash in France, led by the right-wing FN, has lately been gaining strength and now represents approximately 25 percent of the electorate. Yet most observers agree that Marine Le Pen will not be able to surmount the obstacle posed by France’s two-round presidential voting to become the country’s next president in 2017. Elsewhere in Europe, however, where austerity-induced hardship is greater than in France, the populist backlash against technocratic rule may well lead to changes in government. This has already happened in Greece, where Syriza, at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the FN, captured 36 percent of the vote in January’s parliamentary election and was able to form a coalition government. In Spain, Podemos, another left-populist party, has attained levels close to the two mainstream parties in recent polls. In these cases it is easy to blame the populist turn on the EU’s insistence on austerity. But strong right-wing populist parties exist not only in France but also in the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, and Sweden, where austerity has not been as prominent an issue, and where unemployment is nowhere near the dramatic levels it has reached in Greece and Spain. The key issue for populist parties in the north of Europe is not economic policy but immigration. Hence, populist protest is unlikely to change the position of the European Council on austerity, since the populists themselves divide along north-south lines.

edited 5th Jul '15 11:57:35 PM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On
JackOLantern1337 Shameful Display from The Most Miserable Province in the Russian Empir Since: Aug, 2014 Relationship Status: 700 wives and 300 concubines
Shameful Display
#1884: Jul 6th 2015 at 5:51:42 AM

[up] I fail to see how wanting to preserve Capitalism is "radically conservative." Also, by the time of the 1970's, weren't most of the welfare states on the verge of collapse? They may not have had to go the whole other way, but surely continuing with the policies they already had was out of the question. Still, it is an interesting read.

edited 6th Jul '15 5:55:45 AM by JackOLantern1337

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#1885: Jul 6th 2015 at 6:20:13 AM

Also, by the time of the 1970's, weren't most of the welfare states on the verge of collapse?

No, but a treatment of this topic more properly belongs in the Economics thread. Let us say that many people opportunistically conflated a mishandled adverse supply shock (the oil crisis and stagflation) with the "defeat" of Keynesianism.

Oddly, I know we already discussed this — with you, even, so why do you keep asking the question in this fashion? It is indisputably true that in the 70s, the political headwinds shifted in favor of neoconservatism due to a number of factors, among them some perceived economic failings. If there is one thing we ought to have learned about neoconservatism over the past forty years, however, it's that it's based on a number of strongly believed lies, and any lie, told often enough and loudly enough, becomes the truth.

The problem in Europe, as I see it looking in from outside, is that social liberalism has become such an underlying assumption that people stop noticing when it gets slowly dismantled — there are no reputable political institutions dedicated to preserving it. "We can't afford all this social welfare" has become What Everybody Knows. The voices of rational economic policy need to find a way to organize and make themselves heard without being co-opted by the neo-liberal mainstream or being turned into a radical leftist party.

When you figure out how to do that, let us know across the pond.

edited 6th Jul '15 6:33:03 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
JackOLantern1337 Shameful Display from The Most Miserable Province in the Russian Empir Since: Aug, 2014 Relationship Status: 700 wives and 300 concubines
Shameful Display
#1886: Jul 6th 2015 at 6:44:43 AM

[up] I'm not talking about Keysianism,which was the subject of our previous and very enlightening conversations, but about the welfare state, for example, could Briton have afforded to maintain it's nationalized industries in the long term without some kind of reform? I'm not saying they had to dow hat Thatcher did, but was the system of welfare put into place in Europe after the 2nd World War sustainable. I'm just asking questions.

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#1887: Jul 6th 2015 at 6:48:06 AM

There is no reason why it should not have been. Even in recent times, the ability to weather the 2008 crisis among European economies was strongly correlated with the strength of each nation's social welfare spending, because social welfare insulates against demand shocks.

edited 6th Jul '15 7:03:01 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
JackOLantern1337 Shameful Display from The Most Miserable Province in the Russian Empir Since: Aug, 2014 Relationship Status: 700 wives and 300 concubines
Shameful Display
#1888: Jul 11th 2015 at 6:43:04 AM

The lessons of Serbrenica are being forgotten Apparently the Republic os Spraskia is trying to secede from Bosnia. Nato should have wiped that thing out when it had the chance.

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.
Quag15 Since: Mar, 2012
#1889: Jul 11th 2015 at 6:56:25 AM

Republic os Spraskia

Republika Srpska.

JackOLantern1337 Shameful Display from The Most Miserable Province in the Russian Empir Since: Aug, 2014 Relationship Status: 700 wives and 300 concubines
Shameful Display
#1890: Jul 11th 2015 at 7:00:53 AM

[up] Sorry for the spelling error

Stones thrown at Serbian Prime Minister at Serbrenica massacre anniversary Oh this is so wonderful. Europe not only has to deal with the Greek debt crisis, a resurgent Russia, immigration problems, right wing nationalists in several countries(including France), ISIS related terrorist attacks, the British referendum, and anti EU sentiment in many countries, but now the Balkans are beginning to heat up again. Angela Merkel must think this is her frigen Birthday.

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.
LogoP Party Crasher from the Land of Deep Blue Since: May, 2013 Relationship Status: You can be my wingman any time
Party Crasher
#1891: Jul 11th 2015 at 7:03:35 AM

This is the Balkans. Throwing rocks at a politician ain't no heat up, it's Tuesday .

edited 11th Jul '15 7:04:10 AM by LogoP

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
Quag15 Since: Mar, 2012
#1892: Jul 11th 2015 at 7:10:40 AM

[up]More like Friday or Saturday. Tuesday is an internet Flame War on Youtube or Reddit or a Twitter statement.

edited 11th Jul '15 7:11:11 AM by Quag15

Ominae Since: Jul, 2010
#1893: Jul 11th 2015 at 7:10:53 AM

Least Moscow called Srebenida a genocide. Although Serbia is not a happy camper.

JackOLantern1337 Shameful Display from The Most Miserable Province in the Russian Empir Since: Aug, 2014 Relationship Status: 700 wives and 300 concubines
Shameful Display
#1894: Jul 11th 2015 at 7:35:21 AM

[up] It did? Than why did it veto the resolution? Politics is confusing, also I suppose it is true about it just being a normal day in the Balkans.

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.
Krieger22 Causing freakouts over sourcing since 2018 from Malaysia Since: Mar, 2014 Relationship Status: I'm in love with my car
Causing freakouts over sourcing since 2018
#1895: Jul 11th 2015 at 9:00:05 AM

[up]Not trying to lose too much goodwill, I suppose.

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot
Ogodei Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers from The front lines Since: Jan, 2011
Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers
#1896: Jul 11th 2015 at 9:05:41 AM

I don't understand how you can not phrase it as a genocide. It's not like the Armenians, where the Turks have the benefit of a 100-year gap to obscure the facts at least a little. I was alive when this happened, most of us were. Do you call it a "strategic massacre of civilians sympathetic to the enemy cause?"

JackOLantern1337 Shameful Display from The Most Miserable Province in the Russian Empir Since: Aug, 2014 Relationship Status: 700 wives and 300 concubines
Shameful Display
#1897: Jul 11th 2015 at 9:33:58 AM

[up] I believe the official position of Serbia, the republic of Sprskia is that while the actions of the Serb militias were reprehensible, everyone else was doing similar things They also point out that Croatia's atrocities during WW 2 were never called a genocide. Some also will say the Western media is biased and that this is all a plot against Serbia,or Russia depending on who's talking.

The need for the creation of a two tiered Europe

edited 11th Jul '15 10:03:26 AM by JackOLantern1337

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.
BestOf FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC! from Finland Since: Oct, 2010 Relationship Status: Falling within your bell curve
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
#1898: Jul 11th 2015 at 10:05:07 AM

The Croatian puppet regime, like all puppet regimes controlled by the Nazis, are seen as co-perpetrators of the Holocaust. To be honest I'm not sure why you'd need to name each participant separately, but in any case Croatia certainly did participate in a genocide. I doubt that anyone serious would try to deny this now.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.
JackOLantern1337 Shameful Display from The Most Miserable Province in the Russian Empir Since: Aug, 2014 Relationship Status: 700 wives and 300 concubines
Shameful Display
#1899: Jul 11th 2015 at 10:44:34 AM

[up] I don't know I'm just repeating what I've heard from some pro Serbian people.

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.
BestOf FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC! from Finland Since: Oct, 2010 Relationship Status: Falling within your bell curve
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC!
#1900: Jul 11th 2015 at 11:09:11 AM

You can tell them they're full of shit, then. Anyone who knows anything about European history knows that the Croatian puppet regime participated in the Holocaust, and that their primary victims were Serbs. (They did still kill Jews and Roma and so on, but in Yugoslavia specifically the main targets were Serbs in the areas Croatia controlled.)

Now, it's no more fair to impose a stigma from this on all Croats than it would be to pin the genocide of the '90s of all Serbs. Both crimes need to be recognised, and to the extent it's still possible those responsible brought to justice.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

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