Europe’s Last Dictator Steps Into the Unknown

During last weekend’s parliamentary elections in Belarus — a country of just under ten million people that Swedish economist Anders Aslund once described as a “Soviet theme park” — two opposition politicians were elected to the lower house for the first time in more than a decade. This minuscule opposition gain may appear insignificant, but it points to deeper, though incremental, changes.

Leaked documents reveal secretive influence of corporate cash on politics

The pervasive influence of corporate cash in the democratic process, and the extraordinary lengths to which politicians, lobbyists and even judges go to solicit money, are laid bare in sealed court documents leaked to the Guardian.

 Wisconsin governor Scott Walker holds up a dollar bill while speaking at the American Legislative Exchange Council in 2015. Photograph: Denis Poroy/AP

The John Doe files amount to 1,500 pages of largely unseen material gathered in evidence by prosecutors investigating alleged irregularities in political fundraising. Last year the Wisconsin supreme court ordered that all the documents should be destroyed, though a set survived that has now been obtained by the news organisation.

India’s ‘Rexit’: central bank uncertainty raises risk

Key messages

• India is a significant player in the global financial system, given its large and liquid markets. It is a concern at the present moment of global uncertainty because its macroeconomic policy leadership is in transition.

• Outgoing Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Rajan had started to address key challenges, such as inflation and non-performing loans in the Indian banking system. But there is more to do.

This is How the Liberal World Order Ends

In 1967, Britain unexpectedly announced the end of what, for decades, had been a genuinely global foreign policy. In response to the depreciation of the pound sterling, expensive decolonization campaigns, and the evolving attitudes of the baby boomer generation, Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Labor government abruptly announced that his government would change course, prioritizing welfare over warfare. That would include withdrawal from all bases “East of Suez.” In response, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk complained that he “could not believe that free aspirin and false teeth were more important than Britain’s role in the world.” But the danger of such a patrician attitude to foreign policy — one that views domestic considerations as illegitimate — is that, over time, foreign policy can become seriously disconnected from the priorities of the electorate.

NO, SPAIN IS NOT 'DIFFERENT': IT TOO NEEDS A GRAND COALITION

With the rising of new parties, Spain’s two-party system has collapsed. But the surge of Catalan nationalism requires an agreement between all political forces to secure constitutional reform.

Podemos unleash generational thirst for change in Spain

Spanish elections will stay in history for many reasons. One of the most notable one is the fall of bipartisanship that prevailed all the way through the post-Franco era. The second one is the exquisite performance of left-wing Podemos, stepping in for the first time in national elections, reaching 20,6% and securing 69 seats.  ​

A New Era For Canadian Oil And Gas, For Better Or Worse

Canadian voters kicked out the conservative government in the October 19 election, a party that had been in power for a decade. Polls had predicted a slight lead for the Liberal Party, but in a surprise result, the Liberals actually won a majority of seats in parliament and will form a majority government. Most analysts had expected the Liberal Party would have had to form a coalition government, but many voters appeared to strategically vote for the frontrunner in order to ensure a loss for the conservatives. The new government of Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau will almost certainly be much less friendly to the oil and gas industry in Canada, though to what extent remains uncertain. Trudeau opposes Enbridge’s (NYSE: ENB) Northern Gateway Pipeline, but also backs TransCanada’s (NYSE: TRP) Keystone XL Pipeline – the latter of which could be blocked by the U.S. government. More will be known in the coming weeks. However, one clear promise from Trudeau was his plan to engage in deficit spending to goose the economy through higher investments in infrastructure.

Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us

 'We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited.' Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others.

Labour leadership: Jeremy Corbyn elected with huge mandate

Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the British Labour party, in a stunning first-round victory that dwarfed even the mandate for Tony Blair in 1994.

He won with nearly 59.5% of first-preference votes, beating rivals Andy Burnham, who trailed on 19%, and Yvette Cooper who received 17%. The “Blairite” candidate Liz Kendall came last on 4.5%.

Destruction—and I’m Leaving The Party

Dear Sigmar Gabriel,

I’ve been a member of the SPD since the age of 13. As you’ll know, that is not supposed to happen: You have to be 14 to sign up. But I was so impatient for Helmut Kohl’s conservative government to come to an end, and admired the history of social democracy so much, that I begged the comrades in Munich until they said: “You could always make a little mistake and write that you were born in 1981 rather than in 1982.”

Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) (Reuters/Thomas Peter)

Since then I’ve often had my disagreements with the SPD. But I never regretted being a member. Until now.

Beyond Propaganda

This essay is adapted from the first in a series of publications by the Legatum Institute’s Transitions Forum on the politics of information in the 21st century.

Pity the poor propagandist! Back in the 20th century, it was a lot easier to control an authoritarian country’s hearts and minds. All domestic media could be directed out of a government office. Foreign media could be jammed. Borders were sealed, and your population couldn’t witness the successes of a rival system. You had a clear narrative with at least a theoretically enticing vision of social justice or national superiority, one strong enough to fend off the seductions of liberal democracy and capitalism. Anyone who disagreed could be isolated, silenced, and suppressed.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: We're Headed for Oligarchy

Robert Solow on powerful families’ threat to democratic institutions.

Rebecca J. Rosen

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Medici rule. Those were the days. (Wikimedia Commons) 

 

In a recent interview at the Economic Policy Institute, Nobel Prize-Winning economist and MIT professor Robert Solow riffed on the political effects of increasing inequality and concentration of wealth at the very top. "If that kind of concentration of wealth continues, then we get to be more and more an oligarchical country, a country that's run from the top," he said.

Elections Don't Matter, Institutions Do

Many years ago, I visited Four Corners in the American Southwest. This is a small stone monument on a polished metal platform where four states meet. You can walk around the monument in the space of a few seconds and stand in four states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. People lined up to do this and have their pictures taken by excited relatives. To walk around the monument is indeed a thrill, because each of these four states has a richly developed tradition and identity that gives these borders real meaning. And yet no passports or customs police are required to go from one state to the other.

Well, of course that's true, they're only states, not countries, you might say. But the fact that my observation is a dull commonplace doesn't make it any less amazing. To be sure, it makes it more amazing. For as the late Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington once remarked, the genius of the American system lies less in its democracy per se than in its institutions. The federal and state system featuring 50 separate identities and bureaucracies, each with definitive land borders -- that nevertheless do not conflict with each other -- is unique in political history. And this is not to mention the thousands of counties and municipalities in America with their own sovereign jurisdictions. Many of the countries I have covered as a reporter in the troubled and war-torn developing world would be envious of such an original institutional arrangement for governing an entire continent.

What is a Dictator?

What is a dictator, or an authoritarian? I'll bet you think you know. But perhaps you don't. Sure, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong were dictators. So were Saddam Hussein and both Hafez and Bashar al Assad. But in many cases the situation is not that simple and stark. In many cases the reality -- and the morality -- of the situation is far more complex.

Deng Xiaoping was a dictator, right? After all, he was the Communist Party boss of China from 1978 to 1992. He was not elected. He ruled through fear. He approved the massacre of protesters at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. But he also led China in the direction of a market economy that raised the standard of living and the degree of personal freedoms for more people in a shorter period of time than perhaps ever before in recorded economic history. For that achievement, one could arguably rate Deng as one of the greatest men of the 20th century, on par with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Russia After Putin: Inherent Leadership Struggles

Editor's Note: This is the first part of a three-part series on Russia's leadership after President Vladimir Putin eventually leaves office. Part 1 revisits Putin's rise to power; Part 2 will examine Russia's demographics, energy sector and Putin's political changes; and Part 3 will explore whether the political systems Putin has built will survive him.

Russia has undergone a series of fundamental changes over the past year, with more changes on the horizon. Russia's economic model based on energy is being tested, the country's social and demographic make-up is shifting, and its political elites are aging. All this has led the Kremlin to begin asking how the country should be led once its unifying leader, Vladimir Putin, is gone. Already, a restructuring of the political elite is taking place, and hints of succession plans have emerged. Historically, Russia has been plagued by the dilemma of trying to create a succession plan following a strong and autocratic leader. The question now is whether Putin can set a system in place for his own passing out of the Russian leadership (whenever the time may be) without destabilizing the system as a whole.

Moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani wins Iran’s presidential vote

Iranians took a step toward ending their country’s isolation by voting overwhelmingly in weekend presidential elections for a moderate reformer who promised a clean break from policies that put Iran on a collision course with the West.

View Photo Gallery — Iran elects its next president: Four years after contested ballot results led to months of unrest here,Iranians across the region are choosing from among six presidential contenders to succeed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Millions of Iranians jammed polling stations across the country to hand a stunning victory to Hassan Rouhani, a Shiite cleric who campaigned on a pledge of “reconciliation and peace.” Rouhani, who had been considered a dark horse, blew past a slate of conservative candidates to win the presidency in the first round of voting, upsetting conventional wisdom and delivering an unmistakable rebuke to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The far right in Greece and the theory of the two extremes

The far right in Greece has become completely independent from the right, and is turning into a loose canon against New Democracy rather than SYRIZA or the other parties of the centre-left.

Golden Dawn MP Panayiotis Iliopoulos, and other Golden Dawn members, are expelled from the Greek Parliament for shouting abusive language at Syriza MPs. Demotix/Panayiotis Tzamaros. All rights reserved.

 OTHON ANASTASAKIS

The rise of the far right in Greece is becoming a grave issue and is putting the country back on front pages - this time with Golden Dawn being reported as ”the mother of all far right movements in Europe”.

In North Korea, the state-run news agency is the weapon of choice

North Korea has kept this region on edge in recent weeks primarily by using its weapon of choice in times of warmongering: the state-run news agency.

The massive wire service, known as the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), serves as the primary mouthpiece for the North’s authoritarian government, lauding upticks in factory production, documenting the arrival of floral baskets for the ruling Kims and occasionally warning about possible nuclear strikes on neighbors.

Anarchy and Hegemony

Everyone loves equality: equality of races, of ethnic groups, of sexual orientations, and so on. The problem is, however, that in geopolitics equality usually does not work very well. For centuries Europe had a rough equality between major states that is often referred to as the balance-of-power system. And that led to frequent wars. East Asia, by contrast, from the 14th to the early 19th centuries, had its relations ordered by a tribute system in which China was roughly dominant. The result, according to political scientist David C. Kang of the University of Southern California, was a generally more peaceful climate in Asia than in Europe.

The fact is that domination of one sort or another, tyrannical or not, has a better chance of preventing the outbreak of war than a system in which no one is really in charge; where no one is the top dog, so to speak. That is why Columbia University's Kenneth Waltz, arguably America's pre-eminent realist, says that the opposite of "anarchy" is not stability, but "hierarchy."

Iraqis begin counting votes from 1st provincial elections after US troop withdrawal

Iraqis have begun counting votes from the first provincial elections since the last U.S. troops withdrew in December 2011.

Hundreds of ballot boxes stood in counting centers Sunday. Employees of Iraq’s independent electoral commission went through the ballot sheets under supervision of political party representatives.