This Side Of The Blue: 2 November 2022
This Side Of The Blue: 2 November 2022
This week's newsletter featuring global election anxiety, Putin tearing at Western fissures, and Copenhagen's bikes. Plus the UN investigates family courts. And this week's essential reading and audio
Election Anxiety
I’ve always loved elections, and not only those that I am able to vote in. I enjoy understanding different legislative structures, voting systems and party systems. Give me an election anywhere in the world and I’ll follow it with keen interest. This is not just due to curiosity, but a recognition that regardless how small a country is, every election has important consequences. Every piece of the jigsaw is important to the overall picture of the world. Due to the ease of transnational communication and the global nature of news, election results in countries that may not seem to be influential can still impact your own local politics.
Yet following elections at the moment is less enjoyable and more stressful. Recent elections like in Sweden, Israel and Brazil have been significant to the continued spread of radical reactionary politics, and in Brazil’s case important to the health of the planet. While the result in Brazils’ presidential election may have been the preferable one given the two choices, an interview from May in Time Magazine reveals that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is still someone mired in Russian propaganda and the instinctive anti-Americanism that much progressive politics cannot overcome. Democracy in Brazil may be safer in his hands, but the defence of democracy globally may not have any great Brazilian contribution.
What is creating this election stress is that elections now matter. Obviously the policies of different governments have always generated winners and losers and positive and negative outcomes, but until recently broad ideas about mutual benefit have held. Changes of government haven’t felt like serious threats. But politics is no longer about policy. It has become about identity – the competition for power between insular groups. This gives politics an existential feel, especially due to the dominance of negative group identities - people who orientate themselves by who they hate.
This is leading political parties and the public to become suspicious of the equitable rules of democracy – fearing that a level playing field is too big a risk to take. Election-watching is now less about a curious understanding of the world, and more an anxious sense of guardianship towards a vital institution.
Putin Addresses His Idiots
Last week Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think tank that is an arm of Russia’s propaganda efforts – attempting to give some kind of intellectual legitimacy to Putin’s brutal worldview. Putin's speech was framed by a contradictory perspective common to bullies who believe themselves to be victims – that the West was in terminal decline and the West is also thoroughly dominant and can’t be allowed to set the rules of international engagement.
Putin’s speech was curious because of who he sought to address. It wasn’t those attending the conference– there is no point talking to people who are going to agree with you regardless of what you say – nor was it aimed at the Western international affairs elites who usually keep a keen eye on such events. Instead Putin was using the speech to do what his troll farms have been doing for some time – inflame internal divisions within the West through ramping up its internal culture wars – raging against “gay-pride parades” and “cancel culture.”
Putin understands that major fissures have opened up particularly in the United States that are quite easy for him to exploit. Cultural warriors are often so consumed with their hatred of perceived internal enemies that they lose sight of actual external ones. Or, as Putin has discovered, they find common cause with them. For many Extremely Online radicals, Putin can be a heroic figure standing up to the evil empire of the United States or a champion of “conservative” values that the United States and the broader West has apparently abandoned. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine also has distinct emotional meanings depending on which kind of paranoid, conspiratorial, fever-swamp dominates their feeds.
For Putin what people actually believe is really quite irrelevant. What matters is the fervour of beliefs and whether these beliefs are creating suspicion and hostility towards institutions in the US and the broader West. A Republican Party that now embraces much of this fervour is a clown car of useful idiots that the Soviet Union could only dream of.
Copenhagen Riding High
Since July I’ve been based in a town in Sweden’s southern Skåne region. This has afforded me the ease of travelling around northern and eastern Europe, and as I did Friday last week, make a day-trip to Copenhagen. Despite a significant body of water separating the two countries, Sweden and Denmark’s rail networks are integrated due to the Öresund Bridge (Øresund in Danish) – which opened in 2000 and is the longest dual road and rail bridge in Europe. The bridge allows the Skåne regional train operator to consider Copenhagen a local destination. This is obviously fascinating to an Australian given the effort and expense required for us to visit other countries.
Aside from the abundance of corflutes lining the city streets due to Tuesday’s election, the first thing that is noticeable about Copenhagen is the bikes. It is not only a city where riding a bike is often an individual’s primary mode of transport – the city boasts 675,000 bicycles to just 120,000 cars – but it is also a city whose infrastructure not only accommodates this, but privileges it. Even still, it takes some time to develop a “bike awareness” – knowing that wherever you walk there is likely to be multiple bikes in your vicinity.
The benefits of this bike culture and the infrastructure to support it are not just environmental. Denmark estimates that it saves around US $380 million annually in healthcare costs due to having a highly active population. This extends to greater productivity as well, with an estimated 50,000 less sick days taken each year. There is also a significant soft power advantage for Denmark. In Melbourne the new separated bike lanes that have been installed over the past decade are referred to as “Copenhagen lanes.” Although becoming a bike-centric city also relies on a density that most Australian cities unfortunately do not have.
Call For Inputs - Custody Cases, Violence Against Women and Violence Against Children
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
Over the past few years I have taken a keen interest in the behaviour of family courts worldwide. This may seem outside of my usual field, but I would argue that how our justice systems treat women and children is the true reflection of what kind of societies we inhabit. And at the moment we are collectively failing in the most astonishing ways.
Globally, the Family Court has become a bizarro world where abuse is often rewarded and love is punished. Far too often mothers who report child abuse end up having custody removed from themselves and the children placed with violent fathers.
One of the main reasons for this is a concept called “parental alienation” or “parental alienation syndrome” - that was invented by an American psychiatrist called Richard Gardner in the early-1980s as legal tactic for men accused of child sexual abuse. Gardner’s “theory” (or ruse as it actually is) was to claim that rather than being abused children were actually being manipulated by their mothers to hate their fathers. The “syndrome” has repeatedly failed to meet the standards of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Despite having no professional credibility the concept has nonetheless taken root in family courts throughout the world. It has now become the favoured tactic for men accused of any form of domestic abuse.
It is successful because at its core is the assumption that lack of normalised contact with a father is more damaging to a child than any violence that father could commit. The concept is successful even though it fails to meet evidentiary standards because it provides a useful justification for a preconceived socio-political ideal. The “pro-contact” obsession of these courts means that their suspicion is immediately directed towards any mother who seeks to prioritise her child’s safety.
So the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls seeking to create a report on how this concept is being used to manipulate custody proceedings is massively positive development. A thorough report should allow the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to set some guidelines for countries to be able to root out this dangerous ruse from their family justice systems. And hopefully governments and justice systems will realise they have a moral obligation take these guidelines seriously.
This Week’s Essential Reading and Listening
China’s Economy Is Rotting From The Head
Daron Acemoglu - Project Syndicate
For a while, Xi, his entourage, and even many outside experts believed that the economy could still flourish under conditions of tightening central control, censorship, indoctrination, and repression. Again, many looked to AI as an unprecedentedly powerful tool for monitoring and controlling society.
Yet there is mounting evidence to suggest that Xi and advisers misread the situation, and that China is poised to pay a hefty economic price for the regime’s intensifying control. Following sweeping regulatory crackdowns on Alibaba, Tencent, and others in 2021, Chinese companies are increasingly focused on remaining in the political authorities’ good graces, rather than on innovating.
China’s Growing Attempts To Influence U.S Politics
Joshua Kurlantzick - Council Of Foreign Relations
“China is increasingly copying Russian tactics, including using fake profiles to foster online anger among Americans about issues that divide via race and class, such as the activities of groups focused on social justice or the expansion of gun rights. The Freedom House report said that since 2019, “thousands of fake [Chinese] accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were detected and shuttered for inauthentic behaviour [targeting the United States].” Such activities, it said, included manipulating discourse about events within China, the reputations of U.S.-based critics of the Chinese Communist Party, COVID-19, and U.S. political divisions.
In September, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, revealed that it had found and removed a China-based operation to target users of its platforms with content about the U.S. midterms. The following month, Google said it caught Beijing using trolling and other tactics in an attempt to divide Americans ahead of the elections.”
Audrey Tang - Digital Minister, Taiwan (Audio)
HARDtalk, BBC World Service
Audrey Tang has been advancing the idea of “radical transparency” into the way Taiwan interacts with both its citizens and the world. A crucial arm of Taiwan’s defence against China’s disinformation, and part of its “Warm Power” initiative to build international goodwill and support.
Iran’s Women On The Frontlines
Zoe Marks, Fatemeh Haghighatjoo & Erica Chenoweth - Foreign Affairs.
“Movements in which women play a prominent role tend to attract much larger numbers of participants. On average, they are about seven times as large as movements that sideline women—and larger movements are more likely to succeed…Movements with large numbers of female participants also tend to be perceived as more legitimate in the eyes of observers, who often respond to the symbolic power of grandmothers and schoolgirls protesting bravely.
Women’s involvement in mass movements also allows activists to gain access to social levers of change that women influence within their families and communities, where they can draw on different networks and norms than those dominated by men. For instance, in families and communities, women are often able to make moral claims and wield social power in ways that shape the behaviour and attitudes of those around them. As a result, gender-inclusive protest movements are often better at chipping away at the loyalties of regime elites, empowering reformers, and sidelining hard-liners as a conflict intensifies.”
Advancing The Women, Peace And Security Agenda In The Pacific
Heather Wrathall & Melissa Conley Tyler - The Strategist
“Putting the Boe Declaration into practice means implementing a human security approach that reaches out to subnational and non-state groups, women’s groups and youth groups to help create peaceful and cohesive societies. This includes supporting feminist approaches and highlighting the perspectives of women in decision-making through programs such as Pacific Women Lead that are led and staffed by Pacific women. A shared feminist foreign policy agenda should be developed for the region that centres on Indigenous people, approaches and worldviews; recognises the gendered drivers of insecurity; and applies locally owned solutions. Other imperatives are social inclusion— in particular, acknowledging the large youth populations in the Pacific and the need to respond to their economic and political imperatives—and a focus on the impact of extractive industry on human security.”
It’s Time To Rethink What ‘Feminist Foreign Policy’ Means
Marie Berry, Hilary Matfess & Farida Nabourema - World Politics Review
“The Swedish government’s retreat from its commitment to feminist foreign policy comes at a particularly fraught time for women’s rights and feminist movements around the world. In Afghanistan, the Taliban government’s reimposition of draconian regulations on women and girls has been described as “gender apartheid.” Egregious reports of sexual violence have emerged from the wars in Ukraine and Ethiopia, and armed groups—including state military forces—are at least partially responsible. The rise of far-right regimes in countries such as Italy and the rollback of women’s rights in places like the United States suggest the urgent need to advance a political framework that emphasises the wellbeing of marginalised communities and a commitment to equality as a policy end in and of itself.”
Campaign Against Sex-Selection in India (Audio)
Witness History, BBC World Service
“Over the last 50 years an estimated 46 million girls have been aborted in India. The cultural preference for boys and the development of pre-natal sex determination tests like ultrasound in the 1980s, meant an increase in the number of girls being aborted.
Activist Manisha Gupte describes how she campaigned, as part of the feminist movement, against sex-selective abortion - including the use of sit-ins and rallies - eventually raising enough awareness to bring about a national law in 1994 - the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act.”
Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Michael Kofman - Foreign Affairs
“Even if Ukraine and its Western backers are wildly successful, however, Russia will remain a challenge for European security. Russia’s war, at its core, is an imperialist endeavour rooted in the still unfolding collapse of the Soviet Union. As some historians rightly point out, the dissolution of the Soviet Union is best thought of as a process that in many ways is still going on rather than as a discrete historical event; the war in Ukraine is just the latest in a series of conflicts that have accompanied this process. It is optimistic to assume that this war is the dying gasp of Russian imperialism or that Russia, even under a different leader, will quickly abandon revanchism to become a stakeholder in European security.”
The Dark Heart Of The Republican Party
Tom Nichols - The Atlantic
“Sadistic glee in harming others is a sin (at least in my faith). But it is also a social cancer, a rot that can spread quickly and kill the spirit of democracy. If all attempts at reason and all offers of friendship fail, the rest of us should shun those whose dark hearts encourage them to revel in such poison. Unfortunately, millions of our fellow citizens seem poised to vote many such people into power. The darkness is spreading.”
Where Will This Political Violence Lead? Look To The 1850s
Joshua Zietz - Politico
“Pundits like to take refuge in the saccharine refrain, “this is not who we are,” but historically, this is exactly who we are. Political violence is an endemic feature of American political history. It was foundational to the overthrow of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the maintenance of Jim Crow for decades after.
But today’s events bear uncanny resemblance to an earlier decade — the 1850s, when Southern Democrats, the conservatives of their day, unleashed a torrent of violence against their opponents. It was a decade when an angry and entrenched minority used force to thwart the will of a growing majority, often with the knowing support and even participation of prominent elected officials.
That’s the familiar part of the story. The less appreciated angle is how that growing majority eventually came to accept the proposition that force was a necessary part of politics.”
A Powerful Theory Of Why The Far Right Is Thriving Across The Globe (Audio)
The Ezra Klein Show - New York Times
Klein’s guest is Pippa Norris is a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
“[Discussion centres on] what Norris calls the “silent revolution in cultural values” that has occurred across advanced democracies in recent decades, why the best predictor of support for populist parties is the generation people were born into, why the “transgressive aesthetic” of leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro is so central to their appeal, how demographic and cultural “tipping points” have produced conservative backlashes across the globe, the difference between “demand-side” and “supply-side” theories of populist uprising, the role that economic anxiety and insecurity play in fuelling right-wing backlashes, why delivering economic benefits might not be enough for mainstream leaders to stave off populist challenges and more.”
The Rising Tide Of Global Sadness
David Brooks – New York Times
“Misery influences politics. James Carville famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But that’s too narrow. Often it’s human flourishing, stupid, including community cohesion, a sense of being respected, social connection. George Ward of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has argued that subjective measures of well-being are more predictive of some election outcomes than economic measures. Measures of well-being dropped in Tunisia and Egypt before the Arab uprisings. Well-being dropped in Britain before the Brexit vote. Counties in the United States that saw the largest gain in voting Republican for president between the 2012 election and Donald Trump’s election in 2016 were also the counties where people rated their lives the worst.”
Rule Of Law Continues Five-Year Decline, But Bright Spots Emerge
Ted Piccone – Brookings Institution
“Global trends toward and away from rules-based and rights-respecting governance are increasingly matching up with the fault lines of intensifying geopolitical competition around the globe. The multipolar world at our doorstep is not only messy, volatile, and insecure; it also raises existential questions of how power is shared and human dignity is protected. To prevent the next big titanic clash, the United States, Europe, and its other like-minded allies will need smart strategies both to shore up their own performance as open and just societies and to defend vigorously those values abroad.”
Every European Country Should Have A Minister Of Civil Defence
Elisabeth Braw – Politico
“Civil defence begins with you and me. What should we do if there’s a crisis or a war?”
That is, indeed, the question, and it’s been made even more urgent by the fact that grey zone aggression — aggression below the threshold of armed military violence — is increasing. There’s disinformation and cyber intrusion, of course, but grey zone aggression isn’t limited to these avenues — it’s whatever the aggressor can think up: sabotaging infrastructure, weaponising migrants, targeting Western companies as proxies for their home governments, or drones suddenly scouting out Norwegian infrastructure.”
“Hinge Moments” In History: How Change Happens (Audio)
Ideas – CBC Radio
A new podcast series that looks at five years — 1600, 1789, 1833, 1913 and 1947 — each of which signified new beginnings in politics, science, human rights, and which illuminate the obvious, and the not-so-obvious, forces that continue to shape our world.
The Decline of the Liberal Empire In Canada
Jeffery Simpson – Globe and Mail
“For much of the 20th century, the Liberals were the world’s most successful democratic party, winning more elections and staying in power longer than any other. They were “Canada’s natural governing party.” And yet, the Liberals retained power in the last election with the smallest share of the popular vote for a “winning” party in Canadian history.
At the provincial level, the Liberals are in desperate shape. They govern only one province in Canada: Newfoundland and Labrador. [Various conservative parties] are in power in the other Atlantic Canada provinces [and all provinces bar British Columbia]. The once-mighty Liberal Party of Quebec is now a rump largely confined to non-francophone ridings. In Ontario, the party finished third in the last two provincial elections. The Liberals’ standing on the Prairies is so weak that one might paraphrase what prime minister John Diefenbaker once said of his Progressive Conservatives in that region: The only laws protecting Liberals are the game laws. In British Columbia, although there is a “Liberal Party” as the Official Opposition, that party is an unwieldy coalition of people who dislike the New Democrats more than they like each other.”
The Cult Of Putin In Serbia Reflects A Nation That Has Still Not Dealt With Its Past
Tomislav Marković – The Guardian
“Lauding Russia’s criminal aggression against a sovereign country may seem strange to the uninformed. But for those of us who live in the heart of darkness, a country whose heroes are Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, we expect nothing better. Those who still believe conspiracy theories about the 1994 massacre in Sarajevo’s Markale that it was staged and the dismembered corpses were actually dummies, will easily believe similar propaganda about the massacres of civilians in Bucha. If media hyenas can deride the victims of the Srebrenica genocide on primetime TV, why would they grieve for the victims of Putin’s crimes?”
Megalopolis: How Coastal West Africa Will Shape The Coming Century
Howard French – The Guardian
“There is one place above all that should be seen as the centre of this urban transformation. It is a stretch of coastal west Africa that begins in the west with Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, and extends 600 miles east – passing through the countries of Ghana, Togo and Benin – before finally arriving at Lagos. Recently, this has come to be seen by many experts as the world’s most rapidly urbanising region, a “megalopolis” in the making – that is, a large and densely clustered group of metropolitan centres.”
This week’s playlist is themed: Instinct and Knowledge: