A New Career in A New Town

In late October, I was on my way to a second-round job interview, coming up from the Metro, when I received a voicemail message that I had been selected for one of the research assistant positions at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Brussels. I had gotten my application in just before the deadline a week prior, and was thinking about my interview, so it took me by surprise, but it was definitely great news. It probably didn't help me at the interview, but because I didn't get that job I didn't have a tough decision to make. I would be moving to Europe, for the fourth time, to live in a fifth European city and fourth European country - one that I had never before visited, but which as the capital of the EU is a place that I was sure I would like to work and live in at some point in my life.

After what feels like a long wait, I arrived in Belgium on Saturday, enjoying time with friends, frites, beer, and Art Nouveau architecture in Ixelles. I'm also learning French on the fly, grocery stores and cafes are not a bad place to learn. Today I walked many miles through the city, picking up keys for my apartment and exploring for another five hours. The center has its charms, the morning light on the Grande Place was beautiful, but I also liked seeing the EU's government buildings, which are in the neighborhood to which I will be moving in several days, the European Commission's Berlaymont Building will greet me as I enter and leave the Schuman Metro stop on my way too and from work. A giant banner on the building welcomes Estonia into the Eurozone. Yes the timing is terrible, but as the Estonians point out, the kroon was tied to the Euro anyways with a peg from the beginning. Before I left Maryland, I searched for my Deutschmarks and Austrian schillings from a 2001 trip to Munich so as to add my 10 kroon note to the collection of historic currencies, but they appear to have escaped somewhere.

I arrive in Belgium as the current issue of The New Yorker features an article by Ian Buruma entitled "Le Divorce." A few years ago Buruma wrote an excellent and pithy book explaining the story of the Netherlands and Islam over the previous few years, starring the late Pim Fortuyn, the late Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as Geert Wilders had not yet taken the stage. (Incidentally, as I wandered into the European complex today, I noticed two offices in a parliament office building displayed posters for Wilders' party). The new article is even more pithy at five pages, and explains the background and dangers to the current state of Belgium - without a government for more than six months for the second time in four years. The impression you get is that Brussels is the last Belgian city - the rest is Flemish or Walloonian, and the capital is what is holding this relatively young (180 years) Western European country together. The condition of the country is on my mind, and I'll have more to say about this after more travel and observation.

I would link to the story, which is worth reading, except it's only accessible to New Yorker subscribers. So here are two quotes from it - an unflattering but wonderfully evocative description of one of Wallonia's largest cities, which gives a hint of why an independent Wallonia might not be such a fun place, and the conclusion of the piece:

"Charleroi is now a dilapidated, sooty town of boarded-up stores and broken glass in the streets, of strip joints, cheap Turkish kebab places, Eastern European gangsters, and middle-aged prostitutes strung out on heroin."

"... as Europe's bloody history shows, once nations, or empires, or unions fall apart, violence often follows. Bart De Wever, apparently the most benign of European nationalists, is leading his country to the brink of disintegration. A nation collapsing in the center of Europe would not bode well for the fragile state of the European Union. But then De Wever, as a historian, would be well aware of Belgium as the stage of shattered European dreams. Only ten miles from his office lies a town called Waterloo."

George Friedman's Geopolitical Journey

I've been following along for the past few weeks as George Friedman, the founder of STRATFOR and author of The Next 100 Years (which forecasts the wars and rise and fall of great powers over the next 100 years based on geopolitics), traveled through Turkey, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland and wrote about it. I find geopolitical thinking fascinating. Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard is the best book I know on the topic, thought it's more than a decade old, but Friedman and STRATFOR do good work too. Like me, he spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about the fascinating German-Russian relationship and how it is critical for Europe (and many argue for America as well). I don't agree with all of Friedman's forecasts (in his book he sees Japan,Turkey and Poland joining the US as the dominant powers of the 21st Century because China and Russia will collapse), but his Geopolitical Journey is definitely a good think and you can read it in bits and pieces, so here are links:

• Part 1: The Traveler
• Part 2: Borderlands
• Part 3: Romania
• Part 4: Moldova
• Part 5: Turkey
• Part 6: Ukraine
• Part 7: Poland
• Part 8: Returning Home

Embassies of Berlin

I spent about 24 hours in Berlin on Saturday and Sunday morning, a break at the end of 72-hour business trip (it was supposed to be 96 hours, with more than 3 hours in Berlin before I took a train to the Rhein, but my flight to New York was delayed and I missed my connection). And when I ran across this, I reverted to my old habit of photographing embassies. Yes, that is the Embassy of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, we don't have one of those in Washington. It is unsurprisingly on the eastern side of where the Berlin Wall used to run. I discovered the large Czech embassy (and wondered if it was a renovated Warsaw Pact leftover or a new building) nearby. I resisted going overboard and only photographed two of the embassies in Germany's capital, however.

Unter den Linden, the great avenue of Berlin, runs from the Brandenburger Tor (the city gate where Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down the wall) on past Humboldt University towards the Museuminsel and Alexanderplatz. Called Mitte (it means "middle"), the area was the showpiece of the East German capital and I've enjoyed watching it change since my first visit to Berlin in 2003, when I lived there for a month (this was my fourth return). Near the Tor is a Starbucks just 100 meters into the former communist country, like a monument to capitalism. But about 200 m further on, a whole block is dominated by the Russians: their embassy and a large Aeroflot office (featuring their logo, a hammer and sickle with wings).

The Museuminsel, an island in the Spree, is named for the museums at its north end but also features the Berliner Dom and the now empty Schlossplatz, where the Palace of the Republic stood after the war-devastated Schloss (palace) of Prussia's rulers was torn down by the East Germans. Berlin tore down the Communist showpiece after 2006, when I last saw it, and is now rebuilding the Schloss, except that the city is broke. I read at an information booth about how Berlin had "lost its heart" when the Schloss was destroyed. I don't agree, Berlin has as much heart as any city I know. The Palace of the Republic had an asbestos problem, but the reasons for tearing it down go beyond that, obviously, although the decision was controversial. At a Fulbright event in Berlin in 2006 I asked a politician about preserving the historical and architectural legacy of the DDR such as the Palace of the Republic and Alexanderplatz. She chose to answer only about Alexanderplatz. I donated a euro to the building of the Schloss anyway, the open space is sort of nice, but I would like to see the finished project on a subsequent trip to Berlin someday.

Back at the Tor, a stone's throw from the Reichstag, there is a square called Pariser Platz. The French embassy stands on the square, but it was named in honor of the capture of Napoleon's Paris in 1814, not the embassy. The new US Embassy is also here on the square, and it makes me proud - it is the type of friendly-looking public embassy in the heart of a city which should be our model, when too often we built fortresses, even in the capitals of countries which are our friends. It was about 17 degrees Fahrenheit, but the gate at night was beautiful, with a Weihnachtsbaum as well as a giant menorah lit-up for the fifth night of Hanukkah. The scene (and thoughts of my next cup of Gluhwein) warmed me. Germany is an especially fascinating place right now, I can't wait to go back.

The Quiet American

Hey everyone. I'm going to try to make this site more bloggy rather than just posting lengthy analyses of international relations and such that I write myself and don't bother to try to get published. I just returned from a trip to Germany and have a few posts in mind.

Firstly, you may have noticed my list of books I'm reading and good books I've read recently on the sidebar. Yesterday, while traveling from Berlin to Washington via New York, I read Graham Greene's The Quiet American in its entirety, except the first chapter which I had read over coffee at the hostel in Berlin. I've read a few Greene novels, loved The End of the Affair, liked Our Man in Havana, was a little disappointed by Orient Express. But The Quiet American may be my new favorite novel. It's a bitter critique of America's Wilsonian foreign policy, a very perceptive novel about Vietnam (published in 1955!), delves thoughtfully into the themes of innocence, responsibility, and religion (particularly Roman Catholicism) as Greene does in so many of his novels, and it's a damn good story. I recommend it to you all. I'll probably wait a few months so see how Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser act it out in the film from a few years ago.

Also, my Bowdoin friend Conor Williams won the Washington Post's America's Next Top Pundit contest, so you should check out his blog. Congrats, Conor!

Thoughts on the election results

As a political junkie, I of course have thoughts on the election, so here are some of them.

Personality mattered, but more in the negative sense than the positive sense. Voters in right-leaning districts were happy to choose generic conservative Republicans, in some cases tossing out long-tenured centrist Democrats, in countless House races, in a few Senate races in purple/light blue states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and even Illinois, in the governor's races. But the real Tea Party crazies running for the Senate got swept in purple and blue states - Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Ken Buck in Colorado, and as long as 90% of the people who tried to vote for Lisa Murkowski could approximate the spelling of her name, Joe Miller in Alaska, they all went down. Candidates who stayed on message preaching fiscal conservatism outperformed culture warriors. Rand Paul is the biggest real Tea Party winner, while some deep red states have new deep red senators like Utah's Mike Lee. Thanks, Sarah, for helping us keep the Senate blue.

The biggest star born tonight was probably Marco Rubio, the most polished hybrid old GOP/ Tea Party winner. There's a chance he could be the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2012 (help carry Florida and Hispanics), also that he could lead the ticket in 2016 or 2020. The new governor of Florida was one of the biggest disaster of the election (other than the cumulative effect, or the swing of the House). He's a crook. Indeed, the GOP cleaned up in the three most important swing states in the country: Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida.

A huge class of new freshmen in joining the Senate. But it could have been bigger. The Senate was the brighter side of the night for the Democrats, and not just because it didn't change hands. Only two Democratic incumbents lost, when several more (Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray) had been significantly threatened. The other four pick-ups were in open seats. Losing Illinois and Pennsylvania hurts, but Alexi Giannoulias was a weak candidate and Mark Kirk isn't an extremist. The Illinois governor's race is a nailbiter, but Pat Quinn is still winning it for the Democrats. Pennsylvania was for me the most disappointing Senate result. One wonders if Arlen Specter would have been able to keep his seat if he could get a party to nominate him, but I actually doubt it, and tip my hat to Joe Sestak's tough campaign. I also doubt Pat Toomey will be reelected in 2016, but that is a long six years away.

The Senate of the 111th Congress began losing members before it even began, with Barack Obama and Joe Biden moving to the White House. Hillary Clinton and Ken Salazar joined them in the administration with Cabinet jobs. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, the Senate's longest serving members, died in 2009 and 2010. One Republican, Mel Martinez, joined the early departed, to become a lobbyist. Out of the seven replacements, five are now gone. The two who tried for election in their own right, Kirsten Gillibrand and Michael Bennet, both managed to win, Bennet in a real cliffhanger. So Gillibrand and Bennet and Republican Scott Brown, who snatched the 60th Democratic seat in January, lead the 16 new Senators who will be sworn in between now and early January.

16 is a big number but 12 of them were running in open seats in the primaries, 14 in open seats in November after party-switcher Specter and not-ultraconservative-enough Bob Bennett were knocked off by challengers. A few more incumbents would have gone down if they'd run. But it was first the removal of Democratic stars to the executive branch and the great beyond and second retirement that have vastly changed the Senate, more than the political wave.

So the cumulative effect is a change of 19 from one general election to the other, irrespective of dates of resignations, deaths, swearing ins etc. (Hillary Clinton and Al Franken never served together for example, but they were both elected members of the 111th Congress).

Gone from elected Senate (19): Obama (D-IL), Biden (D-DE), Clinton (D-NY), Salazar (D-CO), Kennedy (D-MA), Martinez (R-FL), Byrd (D-WV), Bayh (D-IN), Bond (R-MO), Brownback (R-KS), Bunning (R-KY), Dodd (D-CT), Dorgan (D-ND), Gregg (D-NH), Voinovich (R-OH), Bennett (R-UT), Specter (R/D-PA), Feingold (D-WI), Lincoln (D-AR)

Interim replacements already gone (5): Burris (D-IL), Kaufman (D-DE), Kirk (D-MA), LeMieux (R-FL), Goodwin (D-WV)

New to elected Senate (19): Gillibrand (D-NY), Bennet (D-CO), Brown (R-MA), Ayotte (R-NH), Boozman (R-AR), Blumenthal (D-CT), Blunt (R-MO), Coats (R-IN), Coons (D-DE), Hoeven (R-ND), Johnson (R-WI), Kirk (R-IL), Lee (R-UT), Manchin (D-WV), Moran (R-KS), Paul (R-KY), Portman (R-OH), Rubio (R-FL), Toomey (R-PA)

Latvian Voters Endorse Austerity, Balk At Russian Option

On New Year's Day 2011, the troubled eurozone will add its 17th member, the EU's fourth smallest country, Estonia. Like the other Baltic States, Estonia saw the rapid growth experienced since EU accession in 2004 turn to a painful rapid contraction by late 2008. But the country's macroeconomic fundamentals were pretty good, better than those of most countries in "old Europe," and despite the dampened enthusiasm for expansion of the eurozone caused by the Greek and Irish and Spanish and Portuguese problems, the EU several months ago certified that Estonia will drop the kroon and join the euro.

The Estonians' neighbors in Latvia must be jealous. Home to the Baltics' largest city, Riga, which saw a big real estate bubble pop, Latvia is one of the countries hit hardest worldwide by the crisis - perhaps second to Iceland - with an 4.2% contraction in 2008 and 18% contraction in 2009. Riots in January 2009 dubbed the "Penguin Revolution" (yes, the namesake of my blog), led to the collapse of the government that ushered in the economic crisis - the second government to fall in the crisis, after Iceland's. Since then, the country, blessed by the EU and IMF, has engaged in very tough spending cuts to maintain its peg to the euro, with the aim of joining the common currency as soon as possible, hopefully in 2014 or 2015. It was somewhat of a surprise to international observers that despite the pain in Latvia, Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis's center-right austerity government was reelected on October 2.

At this point it looks like the Bank of Latvia will be able to maintain the tight peg, having successfully fought off speculators last year. Though the economy has continued to contract a little more (2.3%) this year, it is expected to return to growth (of 3%) next year (Economist Intelligence Unit estimates). But Latvia's austerity measures were extraordinary. The country underwent an internal devaluation of spending cuts and tax increases. Because of the EU context and the threat of contagion in Eastern Europe and of non-performing loans in neighbors like Sweden if the exchange rate peg was dropped, the IMF gave a highly unusual approval to these measures. Government workers who were not laid off had to work longer hours for lower wages. The painful measures have a political cost - the largest member of the governing coalition (but not the prime minister's party), the People's Party, exited the coalition in March for this reason. But Latvia's voters have now endorsed the measures by reelecting Dombrovskis's government. Why? It's likely a combination of pragmatic acceptance of the government's six-year-plan to reach the safety of the euro, and of Russophobia.

Latvia's population is approximately 35% ethnic Russian, the legacy of centuries of rule from Tsarist St. Petersburg or Soviet Moscow, with but two decades of independence between World Wars I and II. Latvia may have a less anti-Russian reputation than Estonia or Lithuania, but its post-Soviet governments have still been dominated by center-right nationalist parties who guided the country into the EU and NATO and established strong language laws to ensure a Latvian character to the newly independent state. The strongest opposition party for the past several years, Harmony Centre, is a center-left party led and backed by the country's ethnic Russian citizens. Though it is not a single-issue party and is backed by many ethnic Latvians, it does aim to increase the use of Russian in education and administration and improve civil rights for Russian speakers. Harmony Centre won the Riga mayoral election in July 2009. The party won 29 seats of the 100 seats in the parliament last week, coming in second to the 33 of Mr. Dombrovskis's Unity coalition, which is unlikely to seek to bring Harmony Centre into government.

Latvia has a potential to profit from being one of Moscow's closer partners within the EU, given the large presence of Russian speakers there, infrastructure links and ice-free Baltic ports not far from the Russian border. The October elections seem to show that even in tough economic times, this is not the route Latvians want to take. That or they are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and do not want to risk losing progress made towards the euro by an economic U-turn.

Europe's Far Right and the Tea Party

After elections last weekend, Sweden has become the latest European country with a parliament featuring a anti-immigration, anti-Islam far-right party. Like the Netherlands, home of the unabashedly anti-Muslim Geert Wilders, who is the closest thing the European far-right has to a transnational star, Sweden has enjoyed a reputation as a paragon of tolerance and and liberalism. The far-right is still weak in Sweden relative to in many other European countries, but it is rising in popularity and speaks to xenophobic fears among the Swedish people. As La Stampa points out, Sweden is indicative of a growing problem in Europe - and in the West overall - which the global economic downturn has naturally accelerated. Centrist leaders like Nicolas Sarkozy have fended off the political right by trying to attract its voters, as in the recent deportations of Roma to Romania. Such nationalist and xenophobic actions, as EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding expressed, betray European values and summon the ghosts of a dark past.

Aside from expressing worrisome intolerance among European populations, such electoral results as Sweden's can make governing difficult. With the Swedish Democrats reaching about 5.7% of the vote and entering the Riksdag, they hold the balance of power between the two tradition center-right and center-left blocks. In order to remain prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt will need support from the Greens. The entry of a new extremist, populist party unacceptable as a partner to the others has led to near-political-paralysis in other European parliamentary states. Wilders' Freedom Party won 24 of 150 seats in the Dutch elections in June and the country has still not been able to form a government. In Germany, the 2005 success of the Left Party, which has roots in the East German Communist Party, led to the awkward grand coalition government between the two largest parties. In another solution, the Danish People's Party, still seen as too toxic for a formal coalition government but the third-largest political force in Denmark, has informally supported minority governments of the center-right in exchange for concessions on its issues, principally immigration.

The rise of the right has real costs. Immigration to Denmark has become all but impossible. The French Roma policy is discriminatory as well as expensive and without much purpose, as the EU ensures freedom of movement and many Roma deported from France say they will soon return. Anti-foreigner measures undermine the moral authority that Europe pretends to and indeed requires on the global stage in order to fight climate change, prosecute war crimes, etc.

While Sarkozy, Hungary's Viktor Orban, and Slovakia's former prime minister Robert Fico have thrown bones to the far right to gain support from its voters (indeed, Fico's popularity among the nationalists cannibalized his smaller coalition partners and led to him losing his job when one of them didn't make it into parliament in this year's elections), Germany's Angela Merkel has refused to pander to the right, governing as a true moderate (her stance against Turkish EU membership is conservative, but perhaps the most widely shared position across the European right, and does reflect the center of European opinion as few countries' populations favor enlargement). But some worry that in doing so she is leaving an opening for the development of a far-right force in German politics. Erika Steinbach, the head of a group of Germans with ancestry in modern-day Poland, left the Christian Democratic leadership structure after her latest in a long series of insensitive comments that angered Poles. Steinbach warns that an opening is being left on the right. Meanwhile a book by a Bundesbanker Thilo Sarrazin (who was driven out of his job after its publication) entitled "Germany Does Away With Itself" labels immigrant Muslims seeking generous social benefits in Germany as genetically inferior. The New York Times notes that all that may now be missing for the rise of a far-right party in Germany is a charismatic leader willing to unite the nationalist and anti-immigrant strands and take the heat of the inevitable Nazi comparisons.

The United States is protected from extremism by its rigid two-party structure, which requires candidates to tack to the center when they face moderate electorates in November. Indeed, this is one of the major pluses of the often frustrating limited options of a bipartisan system. But extremists can win elections, and some fairly radical Tea Party candidates are probably headed to the United States Senate in January - from purple (Colorado, Nevada) and maybe blue (Delaware) states as well as red (Kentucky, Alaska, Utah) ones. Sarah Palin has a very real chance of winning the Republican nomination for the presidency, and possibly even the office itself if the economy stays bad.

The rise of the Tea Party is an interesting development, a real conservative street movement which is purging the GOP for idealogical purity through elections, eviscerating the party's already weakened moderate wing. Like the European nationalists cursing the EU and Brussels, they wrap themselves in the flag and rail against the capital, which they see as remote. They worship the Constitution and the Founding Fathers, although giving them a one-sided reading. As George Washington and Alexander Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow points out, both the father of the country and his most trusted aide believed in a strong federal government, and the Constitution of 1787 strengthened the federal government because the previous set-up of a national government under the Articles of Confederation had been to weak to act in a coherent fashion. And the American Revolution was not against taxation per se, but against taxation without representation. The only district in the continental United States that currently lives under this condition is the District of Columbia, so perhaps it is its citizens which should be flooding the public spaces of state capitals across the nation in protest.

The primary argument of the Tea Party is a radical economic one - taxes and the national debt and deficit must all be slashed as soon and as much as possible, and we should do this by drastically cutting government services, including eliminating the Department of Education, scrapping unemployment benefits, etc. I believe this is disastrously bad policy and unrealistic, but it is not inherently racist, despite the fact that it would harm minorities even more than whites. Less government has more appeal to rural residents than urban residents for natural reasons: they see fewer services, don't like to pay for them, and pride themselves on their independence (with notable exceptions of farm subsidies, and the limited system of socialized medicine i.e. Medicare which America has already enjoyed for decades).

But there is a significant xenophobic element to the conservative Tea Party movement as well. The fears of older, white, rural (and suburban) Americans that their country is becoming more diverse and that they are losing political power were displayed when the right defeated President Bush's centrist immigration reform in 2007. More recently, they have been exposed by hysterical conspiracy theories over President Obama's exotic background and left-of-center politics, fanned by Fox News and mainstream politicians such as Palin, Newt Gingrich (who embraced Dinesh D'Souza's ridiculous theories about "the roots of Obama's anger"), and some who actually currently hold elected office like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. And fear of Islam has led to fury over a Muslim community center planned for an old Burlington Coat Factory building in Lower Manhattan, and a Florida preacher's threat to burn the Quran on 9/11 has already led to more protest-related deaths in places like Afghanistan and Kashmir than the preacher has souls in his flock, and undermined the security of the United States.

America continues to make social progress - we have elected a black president, and his successor could well be a woman or a Mormon. The GOP, long embarrassingly undiverse, features rising politicians like Cuban-American Marco Rubio and Indian-American Nikki Haley in the South. But the use of code language against Obama is at best cynical and dangerous, anger against Islam and the Muslim world is counterproductive to our national security, and the populist conservative approach to immigration costs the country and, given demographic trends, will cost the Republican Party in the near future if it does not evolve.

It remains to be seen whether the Tea Party can achieve its goals beyond winning (and losing) some elections. Judging by the national Republican Party's new Pledge to America, the new GOP is really the same as the old GOP (though many conservative commentators have blasted the stale ideas of the pledge, and if Palin and her allies win control of the party, perhaps we might see something new): the American right in of the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s. In Europe on the right, this isn't the case. The postwar consensus of social protection and European integration continues to splinter, slowly.