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| Europe |
| Strong Growth in non-Leftist Parties in Europe |
| 2005-02-12 |
| ...From the Freedom Party in Austria to the National Front in France to the Republicans in Germany, Europe's far right has made a comeback in recent years, largely on the strength of anti-immigration feelings sharpened to a fear of Islam. That fear is fed by threats of terrorism, rising crime rates among Muslim youth and mounting cultural clashes with the Continent's growing Islamic communities. But nowhere has the right's revival been as swift or as strong as in Belgium's Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, where support for Mr. Dewinter's Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, has surged from 10 percent of the electorate in 1999 to nearly a quarter today. Vlaams Belang is now the strongest party in Flanders, with support from a third of the voters in Antwerp, the region's largest city. Many people worry that the appeal of antiIslamic politics will continue to spread as Europe's Muslim population grows. "What they all have in common is that they use the issue of immigration and Islam to motivate and mobilize frustrated people," said Marco Martiniello, a political scientist at the University of Liege in the French-speaking part of Belgium. "In Flanders all attempts to counter the march of the Vlaams Belang have had no results, or limited results, and no one really knows what to do." Fear of Islam's transforming presence is so strong that even many members of Antwerp's sizable Jewish community now support Mr. Dewinter's party, even though its founders included men who sympathized and collaborated with the Nazis during World War II... NYT bias included free of charge. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #15 which the EU is generally seen to enhance Seen by whom? By pretty much everyone, both those who hate it and those who love it. Those who hate it from the left oppose it because it promotes free market and competition across national borders. Even those who hate it from the fiscal right don't want to destroy it altogether, they simply want to reduce it back to a "common market" "free trade area" zone, acknowledging that those are positive characteristics of it. Added level of bureaucracy? I don't need a visa, or even a passport to travel elsewhere in the Schengen area, and I don't need either a living permit or a working permit to dwell and work anywhere in the EU -- capital, services and people move freely. Those seem to me to be vastly *reduced* levels of bureaucracy, and vastly *less* interference by the state. |
| Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2005-02-13 12:02:54 AM |
| #14 Thanks, Phil. I've gotten confused here, in part because we're using the same terms with very different meanings. Moving to the right, yes, and possibly a good thing... but the European "Right" is not the same as the US "Right". |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-02-12 11:15:19 PM |
| #13 As someone who has regulary attacked Aris in the past, I find I mostly agree with him on this issue. The EU has its faults but its a coalition of still largely sovereign democracies figuring out how address transnational issues. The UN its not (i.e. its not corrupt and incompetetent). Otherwise its political centre of gravity is to the Left of the USA but subject to similar political/social forces and the I think the substance of the article is correct. Europe is moving to the Right for the same reasons the USA and Australia have moved to the right. And that IMO is good news. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-02-12 11:03:03 PM |
| #12 which the EU is generally seen to enhance Seen by whom? I have a great difficulty believing that a new layer of bureaucracy would somehow increase freedom. "The State is not your friend." |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-02-12 10:48:50 PM |
| #11 "Parties that endorse Marxist ideas and ideology are Marxist parties, whether or not they call themselves such" If you label everything remotely social-democratic as "Marxist", then this discussion is meaningless. Marxism is a specific ideology. Marxists mostly oppose private property and generally seek to nationalize industries, per the plan Marx described in the communist manifesto. Marxists don't see capitalistic competition as a useful tool, they see it as anathema. And Marxists oppose the EU and the Constitution, given how it describes free competition and free market both as objectives to be achieved. Your definitions seem to describe "Conservative" instead of "right-wing", being all about the status-quo and about nationalism, and talking little to nothing about either economical freedom (which the EU is generally seen to enhance, and hence the bitter hatred of a large portion of the Left towards it) or about personal liberties (which the EU is also generally seen to enhance or atleast not hurt, hence the general support to the EU by the most liberal parties). I agree with you on one thing -- right-wingers that care more about national sovereignty than about fiscal freedom (being chauvinistically right-wing instead of free-marketeers), will usually tend to oppose the EU. |
| Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2005-02-12 10:38:00 PM |
| #10 Aris, please take a moment and read Bush's Inaugural Address as if it were given by an Anarchist. It works surprisingly well. Regarding drugs and prostitution, the "War on Drugs" is primarily targeted at the economic activity rather than use. Prostitution is legal in Nevada. Both are currently being debated. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-02-12 10:36:45 PM |
| #9 "By US standards they're all Statist, Marxist or Stalinist." And yet, for a supposedly statist place to live, it's European Netherlands that allows drugs and prostitution, and it's the United States that uses the state's mechanism to crack down on such "freedom and individualism". Other than that, I understand your point that the United States is to the right of Europe. But calling EU a "leftist cause" or "an abomination to the right" is still an absurdity. |
| Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2005-02-12 10:21:52 PM |
| #8 Parties that endorse Marxist ideas and ideology are Marxist parties, whether or not they call themselves such. They are noteworthy in their belief of the "blanket solution" to complex problems and the inability to see failure in their programs, despite numerous and repeated examples of failure. Moderate and Conservative parties are known for their pragmatism and realism, almost always preferring the status quo to any philosophy-based change in government policy. Parties of the Right reject changes in policy that have failed, and those changes that have to some extent succeeded and are status quo, but are philosophically wrong to their point of view. So, for example, a Marxist party would want to cede governmental authority to an internationalist regime they felt was also Marxist in orientation; a Moderate or Conservative party might want to do the same, seeing it as a natural evolution of the status quo, and believing that eventually the regime would become less Marxist and more Moderate or Conservative. But the Right parties would be adamant in neither wanting to cede power *and* to eventually withdrawing entirely from what they see as an unneccesary usurpation of national sovereignty. This makes the Right parties into almost "anti-radicals", embracing the policy of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it, and if someone is trying to fix it, make them stop." |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-02-12 10:06:06 PM |
| #7 Aris, Anonymoose was describing it in US terms. By US standards they're all Statist, Marxist or Stalinist. By European standards, Republicans are a mixture of Anarcho-Capitalists, religious Capitalists, Individualists and Objectivists. Democrats would be center-right to center-left. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-02-12 9:44:14 PM |
| #6 No "rightist" party, or "conservative" party, would ever embrace a welfare state, or the EU, the elimination of a self-defense military, National Health Care, or other purely leftist concerns that are an abomination to the right. They are an "abomination to the right", according to whom? You? I had a good laugh especially when you labelled the EU as such an abomination for the so-called "right" -- ofcourse it's usually (not always) the opposite, that it has been supported by mainstream right-wing parties and opposed (or much more critically supported) by left-wing ones. Most of the rhetorical attacks on the EU (or the Constitution) in the actual continent happen from the left for example. When the Socialists in France had a vote over the European Constitution, it was the left-wing of the party that opposed it IIRC, and the moderate centrist side that supported it. On the other hand the right-wing party of Chirac didn't even need to put it in a referendum among its members because it had such a high level of support there. That's (with some noteworthy exceptions) typically the reaction throughout the continent. (Malta which was half-and-half divided on EU membership, had the right-wing party support membership, and the left-wing party oppose it, and so and so on) If the definition of which are right-wing parties and which aren't isn't defined by either the status quo nor by the actual *center* of the political debate, then what the hell do you think it should be defined for? In all fairness, parties like Labour, in Britain, and the SDU in Germany, should be called "radical left" parties, because their ideas are so far removed from what the status quo once was, just a decade or two ago And if you name *those* parties "radical left", then what would you call the actually Marxist parties? This is insanity. |
| Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2005-02-12 8:02:22 PM |
| #5 Aris: not so ludicrous. Catagorizing parties like the Tories in England and the German CDU as "rightist" is the real stretch. In fact, they are centrist to liberal. No "rightist" party, or "conservative" party, would ever embrace a welfare state, or the EU, the elimination of a self-defense military, National Health Care, or other purely leftist concerns that are an abomination to the right. The true "rightist" party in the US, the Republicans, stubbornly resisted such things, and systematically dismantled them when possible. So that is why I called the European parties "non-Leftist" parties rather than "far-right" parties. In all fairness, parties like Labour, in Britain, and the SDU in Germany, should be called "radical left" parties, because their ideas are so far removed from what the status quo once was, just a decade or two ago. The "far-right" parties, as the NYT or European radical left would call them, are just a reaction to the violent leftward movement Europe has taken in recent years. Hearkening back to the status quo of the 1980s is hardly what I would call "wanting a return to fascism", however. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-02-12 6:57:49 PM |
| #4 Continuing my thoughts.. there seems to be a fundamental assumption by the EUrophiles that the levers of power within the EU will remain beyond the reach of these people. I believe this is a bad assumption. It strikes me as fundamentally unwise to build levers of power you would not want your opponents to control. Societies shift. Cultures shift. There is a natural pendulum. If you try to stop the pendulum, it will swing in unpredictable and possibly even terrible ways. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-02-12 6:54:11 PM |
| #3 I fear we're looking at the Weimar Union. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-02-12 6:16:00 PM |
| #2 "The right in Europe will always be equated with Hitlerism and Fascism." Such equation seems to be what some American right-wingers are doing, given the ludicrous translation here of "far-right" into "non-Leftist". The growth of such nice little beasties like Lepen or Heider translated by you, Anonymouse, as "growth of non-Leftist parties"? Cheers for unwitting fascist apologia. |
| Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2005-02-12 6:08:50 PM |
| #1 Europe is over. Time for the US to turn East. Enough of trying to accommodate the ankle biting European leftist/socialist dominated political system. Europe's pastime is criticizing the US while the smell of it's rot fills the nostrils of everyone. The Transnational Socialist hope to infect us with their deadly disease before they collapse under Sharia law and Islamic domination. The right in Europe will always be equated with Hitlerism and Fascism . Many times it's even true. It's the natural reaction to the domination of politics of the Socialists and Communist Greens. I expect the EU to slide into the drain in what remains of my lifetime. There is nothing the EU can do. It will never react as it needs to. I will just accommodate the in inevitable. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2005-02-12 5:46:05 PM |