Repatriation-Patronage

European Diary, 23.9.2020: The EU Commission makes a new attempt to coordinate the asylum policies of the different member states. In view of the attitude of some states, this already borders on the courage of desperation. The German Broadcast Deutsche Welle reports undaunted: “The fire in the refugee camp Moria and the inhumane conditions on Lesbos give the debate ‘new momentum’ EU officials in Brussels say. The head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has announced that the old system, also known as “Dublin rules”, is to be replaced by something new. An obligation for EU states to accept refugees or asylum seekers will probably not be included, because many member states would simply refuse to do so.

Meanwhile, Germany has already relativized its new figure of 1500 a little bit. This figure does not only refer to people from Moria, but also from various other Greek islands. There the same inhuman conditions prevail that led to the explosion on Lesbos anyhow. But at least this new allowance remains an additional admission to those 150 children and teenagers from Moria, as announced earlier. France is also taking in 150 people, Italy 300. The Netherlands on the other hand is cheating. They announced the admission of 100 people from Moria – and reduce their UN contingent by this number. This is a smart way to lie to yourself and the world. Finland is taking in 12 young people. Well then.

But the EU Commission now wants to talk about a new “migration pact”. The old Dublin system is to be overcome, announces EU Commissioner Schinas, reports Deutsche Welle: “In the future the member states could choose whether they want to accept asylum seekers or rather help with the repatriation and deportation of rejected asylum seekers. Commission President von der Leyen follows suit. This system should be obligatory. States like Hungary, Poland (or Austria), which do not participate in the reception of refugees, should then organize their repatriation in the future. And in doing so they should adhere to all international regulations. Something for which these increasingly authoritarian and illiberally governed states are generally well known. But the EU Commission has now apparently switched to sarcasm, too, and calls its new proposal “repatriation sponsorships”, or “patronage”. No, looking at the calendar does not clear this up either. Today is not April 1.

Cofag yourself

European Diary, 24.9.2020: Minister of Finance Gernot Blümel takes the chance. The Viennese election campaign is more important anyway than the emergency aid for the suffering economy. And since the distribution of this aid is not very smooth anyway, it is good to have a scapegoat for it: Brussels.

And the EU Commission would have every reason to put the stick in Austria’s craw more clearly than it does. At the moment, constructions are flourishing that promote corruption – or at least “friendly services” – in an almost systematic manner.

Instead of regulating the disbursement of 15 billion in aid money for companies through the tax office, and thus under public control by parliament and the Court of Auditors, the federal government has set up a “Covid-19 Financing Agency” as a limited liability company. Cofag is intended to support the ailing economy with fixed cost subsidies and bridging guarantees and is financially positioned accordingly by the federal government. “In accordance with § 6a para. 2 ABBAG Act, the Federal Government will equip COFAG in such a way that it is in a position to provide capital and liquidity support measures assigned to it under § 2 para. 2 no. 7 ABBAG Act up to a maximum amount of 15 billion Euro and to meet its financial obligations”. The advantage of this construction is obvious: a GesmbH is after all not obliged to provide information to parliament.

Florian Scheuba has a biting comment on this in the newspaper Standard: “Not only members of the opposition can thus no longer annoy with annoying questions such as ‘Who gets how much tax money and why?’ Applicants can also save themselves the request for justification as to why their auxiliary request is rejected, because Cofag advisory board members are bound to secrecy. Is the Court of Auditors the last hope? No, because even its requests for accompanying control can be rejected by the agency with a hearty ‘Cofag yourself’. Here, then, an opaque darkroom is being created for future wrangling. The latest events surrounding an 800,000 Euro contract between Cofag and a PR agency, which was initially kept secret, provide an idea of how dark it will be. “The money does not flow into our own PR, but rather into the support of our homepage or the answering of media questions,” says Cofag Managing Director Bernhard Perner.

Let’s see how many media inquiries there will be – in view of the well-known critical press landscape in Austria.

The tale of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”

European Diary, 28.9.2020: Do you know this joke? Mayer, a Viennese Jew,  wants to travel. At the train station in Vienna, already on the platform, he realizes that he still has to go to the toilet. He asks around: “Excuse me, can you tell me, are you anti-Semitic?” “Me? Well, that’s an insinuation. I love the Jews.” “Okay, You obviously can’t help me.” And he turns to the next one: “Excuse me, are you anti-Semitic?” “Well, really, not at all. I love Israel, such a wonderful country, fighting against those…” “Let it go.” And again he turns to the next one. “Please, can you tell me, are you anti-Semitic?” “How not! Of course, Jews rule everywhere, even the weather…” “Thank you, you are at least honest. Can you watch my suitcase for a minute?”

Austria’s “Integration Minister” Susanne Raab loves it, Germany’s AfD loves it, Viktor Orbán loves it, Identitarians love it, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz loves it, the German CSU loves it, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and Martin Engelberg love it: the “Christian-Jewish Occident”. HC Strache even loves the “Christian-Jewish-Aramaic heritage”. But hardly anyone is interested in that anymore.

I don’t remember exactly when the Jewish-Christian dialogue, that began in the 1950s under the impression of the Shoah – and the critical reflection among Christians – was taken up by the slogan of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”.

In Germany, this was already being talked about more and more often in the late 1990s. The Enlightenment and the Greek heritage were also frequently invoked. The only thing missing in this talking was Islam. As if it had not been Islamic philosophers in the Middle Ages who had a decisive contribution to Europe’s rediscovering of its Greek heritage in the Middle Ages. One could not avoid the impression that this void in public identity rhetoric was the only real thing about this discourse.

In 2010 the slogan of “Christian-Jewish Occident” also arrived in Vienna. Martin Engelberg, editor of a “Jewish” magazine and now a conservative (that is – in Austria – for the time being right wing populist) member of the Parliament and “Israel expert” of the Chancellor, invoked the “Judeo-Christian heritage” and the notion of a “common Jewish-Christian community of values” (after 1000 years of Christian persecution of Jews). And he warned against Muslim immigrants.

In the meantime, talk of “imported anti-Semitism” has become commonplace and serves not at least as justification for racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic asylum and migration policies.

And it serves as a distraction from everything that does not fit into this world view of essentialist identities. The greatest danger for Jews in Austria and Europe in fact still emanates from right-wing extremists, even if many Islamists make a successful effort to learn from them. Even in the everyday life of the middle classes and bourgeois circles, the so-called middle of society, Jews still have to listen to cultivated resentment about Jewish influence on this or that.

More than ever before, the most intimate friends of Israeli politics – from Victor Orbán and Matteo Salvini to Marie le Pen, to the right-wing populists of the Netherlands, Belgium, and most Eastern European countries – are always capable of rough-caliber anti-Semitic rides. That is in effect, when it is not about Israel, the Jews in the Middle East, who, as vanguard of the “Occident,” are expected do the dirty work for Europe and the United States, and are supposed to receive the blows for it.

Jews all over the world instead defend their right to live in open societies, in which it is not ethnicity or religion that decides whether one enjoys civil, political or social rights.

Thus, as a Jew, one has to deal with the fact that Israel, of all countries, as a “Jewish state” is now being misused by the nationalists of this world as a justification for their own racism, and is happy to be used.

And thus one now is faced with a strange constellation of ardent anti-Semites and fanatical “friends” of Israel: more and more often the same people.

The “fight against anti-Semitism”, which the current Austrian government has written in full in its program, and even more so the commitment to Israel as a “Jewish state”, is in reality not directed against anti-Semitism at all, but against everything that can be interpreted as “too far-reaching” criticism of Israel. Is it Austria actually that decide whether Israel defines itself in terms of ethnic-religious or secular pluralism?

In the name of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”, this naturally affects not only Muslims, who – like Christian fundamentalists – get stirred up to the “fight for Jerusalem”, but at least as often it is directed against Jews, i.e. the “right ones”. Cosmopolitan Jewish Intellectuals, or even critically minded Israelis. Orbán has demonstrated this most vividly. Advised by his friend Benjamin Netanyahu, he cemented his power with a campaign against the “Jewish world conspiracy” of George Soros, who would try to flood Europe with Muslim immigrants.

In Germany, one can observe the beneficial activity of a state sponsored “commissioner against anti-Semitism” for quite some time. In the meantime, he denounces so-called “left-wing liberal” critics of his politics (most of them Jewish and Israeli intellectuals) as latently violent “anti-Semites”. We will certainly get such specialists in Austria soon.

“An Aura of Ghosts”

European Diary, 11.9.2020: Thousands of refugees from the Moria camp on Lesbos are now living on the streets in the dirt. Germany and France, and several other European countries want to take in 400 children and young people. Austria is willing to send some blankets and tents. The day before yesterday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Schallenberg added his very own tone to the Austrian concert of shame.

Jovial as always, in chosen words, he confirms to interviewer Armin Wolff on Austrian TV that the misery on the Greek islands has its purpose: deterrence. And he says that this is something that we do not want to change in the future either. “It is precisely this calm and objectivity” that gives his appearance, as Irene Brickner writes in the Standard, an “aura of the ghostly and unspeakable”. He talks like a good-humored, nice, friendly gentleman who is completely at peace with himself. But he talks about hostage-taking, child abuse, coercion, and bodily injury resulting in death. Just about those things with which he and his colleagues are currently inscribing themselves in the history of violence in Europe. Armin Wolff had no chance to break open this “armour of official mentality and refugee deterrence”, said Brickner. Meanwhile, other European politicians are slowly bursting their collars. Germany’s conservative Minister of the Interior Seehofer “is surprised”. Jan Asselborn, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, is speaking plainly: “The whole of Europe has been taken in by Kurz’ talk that all that is needed is to close the borders so that the refugee problem can be solved.” Even the Kronen-Zeitung thinks that this is now going too far. And it quotes the Austrian chancellor with downright disgust: “Why are the children on the Greek islands closer to us than those in Venezuela?” A telling question…

Angel of History

European Diary, 26.9.2020: 80 years ago today Walter Benjamin took his own life in Port Bou on the border between France and Spain. He was fleeing from the Nazis, had already crossed the border – and feared being sent back to occupied France by the Spanish border guards.

A few months earlier, in May 1940, he had written to his friend Stephan Lackner in Paris:

„One wonders whether history is not in the process of forging a witty synthesis of two Nietzschean terms, namely that of the good European and that of the last man. This could result in the last European. We all struggle not to become one.“

Benjamin’s last significant text, his theses on the concept of history, saved Hannah Arendt for posterity. Since August, a sculpture by Günther Blenke has been commemorating his “Angel of History” in Hohenems, in front of the former Gasthaus Engelburg at the intersection of the former Judengasse and Christengasse. Inspired by the piece of a burnt tree into which lightning has struck.

Installation of the sculpture in Hohenems byGünther Blenke, August 8, 2020. Photo: Julie Walser

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940:

“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. ”

Thanks to Günther Blenke – and Franz Sauer, who recovered the fragment of the burnt tree in the forest..

Günther Blenke, Franz Sauer and the “Angel of History”. Photo: Julie Walser

The Parliament Rehearses the Uprising

European Diary, 7.9.2020: The EU is facing a serious “power struggle”. The European Parliament, the only European institution with European democratic legitimacy, does not want to bow to the dictates of the heads of government. The 750 billion euro economic stimulus package to curb the consequences of the Corona pandemic, which the EU Commission negotiated in July, was under bad luck right from the start: the agreement of the Commission majority with the stingy four, then five EU states around Austria and the Netherlands was bought at the expense of massive cuts in the EU budget elsewhere.
The EU parliamentarians of many factions do not want to resign themselves to this. For example, the “EU4Health” program of all things, which is intended to protect against cross-border health risks and make affordable medicines more readily available, is to be cut from 9.4 billion to 1.7 billion euros. Joint programs for research, education, climate protection and digitization are also to be cut. And so the scope for cross-border cooperation will be restricted rather than expanded. MEPs from the Greens, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and also the conservative People’s Party from various countries are quite prepared to make use of Parliament’s right of veto. The Green MEP Rasmus Andresen brings into play the possibility of passing only the aid package, but not the budget in this form, in order to increase the pressure now in the other direction. This includes including in the budget execution more serious sanctions against those member states that violate constitutional standards. The EU parliamentarians also demand that the EU’s own revenues should finally be increased seriously, through an effective plastic tax, through digital taxes or the taxation of cross-border profits of the technology giants.
The EU Parliament and Commission still have difficult negotiations ahead of them. The need of the EU Parliament to be pushed around by the “thrifty” heads of government is ending. Even the “turquoise” MPs from Austria have not shown much enthusiasm in the past about the anti-European line of their own Austrian government. But it remains to be seen whether the words of Othmar Karas, for example, will be followed by actions.

“Help on the spot”

European Diary, 25.9.2020: Austrian television reports from Lesbos. Late hour. Afterwards one cannot sleep well.

The nation’s best paid bouncer, Austrian Minister of the Interior Karl Nehammer lands on Greek territory with the fattest plane he could rent from the Russians. He brings along some 55 tons of “relief supplies” and police officers. He stands wide-legged in front of the camera and speaks of “help on the spot”. We already know this. And he now also makes it very clear what he means by that.

It’s not about helping the people who have been imprisoned on the island for months, some of them for years. It’s about helping the Greek governement to continue to treat them badly, as a deterrent. With the Austrian tents a new camp is to be built, seven kilometers away, far from any other settlement, even more controllable, even more deterrent than Moria already was. But at least for the beginning a bit more orderly and clean. Until the press is gone and the people can be left alone again in the dirt, which will settle down by itself in the fall.

The people who are now forced into the new camp with “gentle pressure”, as they say, have to drag their few possessions, strapped on pallets, boxes or boards, along the road for miles and miles to the new camp. The children just pull the smaller boxes, the adults the big ones. These pictures, too, will not be forgotten so quickly. At least now we know how Austria sees “help on the spot”.

That which prevents us from sleeping should indeed look and feel exactly like this. As an Austrian (Greek, Hungarian…) politician you have to bring along a pathological sadism to do your job.

Meanwhile, the provincial governor of the islands explains to the Austrian journalists, how one views the situation in Lesbos: “We thank Austria for its efforts, but we would have had our own tents, we wouldn’t have needed this help at all.” What they are still waiting for on the islands is that Europe will finally distribute the refugees among the member states. Well, the Greek government could of course take them to the mainland, but on this issue the Greek government and the European coalition of the unwilling are in agreement.

Chancellor Kurz has been calling for such camps on Greek islands for years. And Austria’s former Minister of the Interior, Mr. Kickl of the right extremist FPÖ, who was so talented in creating new language, also had an inventive name for them: “Concentrating Camps”. Just say that Austria and many other EU countries have learned nothing from history.

Postscript on September 30, 2020: Today the news report the dry fact, that the “55 tons of supply” never arrived on Lesbos, but were stored somewhere in Greece on the mainland. The Greek government does not know what to do with the 400 tents Mr. Nehammer brought along last week. As they said before: “Tents we have…”

The Gate to Hell

European Diary, 9.9.2020: Today completely without countenance and diplomacy. Naked and stunned. The Moria camp no longer exists. A major fire has destroyed the refugee camp on Lesbos, where thousands of people have been imprisoned for years as hostages of European politics. For several months 13,000 people have been living there in shelters that can accommodate only a fraction of them. Under inhuman conditions, hopelessly overcrowded, without sanitation, poorly kept alive by NGOs and the United Nations, which in return have to face insults from the criminals who rule us today. Austria pays something for the guarding of these people by the Greek police.

13.000 people, among them children, sick people, were kept there like cattle, as a deterrent against all those who possibly still believed in Europe’s “values” (be it moral, be it material).

For months NGOs have been warning that at some point Corona will break out in the camp. Largely isolated from the rest of the world, Moria was spared from Corona for a while. But a week ago there was the first serious case and numerous infections. Fear spread, of infections and even more so of the “quarantine”, because nobody is allowed to leave the camp anymore. Nevertheless, some managed to flee to the surrounding hills. The refugees are even more afraid of being shipped to newly planned, hermetic prison camps somewhere on Lesbos or Chios, and of losing the rest of their self-determination and dignity.

As a result, clashes broke out between different groups of refugees. At some point, the accumulated desperation of many months of hopelessness and torture turned into sheer panic.

The populists of Europe finally managed to explode the situation. The camp burned down. There are countless potential dangers in the shelters crammed with people. But there is talk of arson, and nobody would be surprised. If you have no other choice, the last resort is to set fire to the roof over your prison cell.

Austria’s Minister of the Interior uses the catastrophe for further agitation: “Migrants who are prepared to use violence have no right to asylum in Europe.” This makes one fear the worst. The cynicism of the last months and years is probably followed by even worse cynicism. This is the bare contempt for humanity. How can such a person still look at himself in the mirror in the morning? But perhaps the Nehammers and Kurz and how they are all called have taken down their mirrors in the meantime.

“Symbolic politics”

European Diary, 12.9.2020: The Austrian chancellor posts a video message. This has the undeniable advantage for him that he no longer has to put up with uncomfortable questions from rebellious journalists. Lying is even easier that way.
After all, more refugees cannot come here every year, he says. But in fact they have been getting fewer and fewer for years. In 2019 there were as few asylum applications as hardly ever since 2000.
Once again he reiterates his refusal to accept unaccompanied children or anyone else from the destroyed camp Moria. And in doing so he demonstrates a stubborn version of “morality”. “This inhuman system of 2015, I cannot reconcile with my conscience.” What “system” is he talking about? What conscience?
Instead, he says, “help is given on the spot, so that a decent supply is guaranteed.”
In the meantime, one had the opportunity to do this for years. And Austria has not lifted a finger. Because the conditions in Moria were supposed to serve as a deterrent, and therefore could not be inhumane enough. The demand for more humanitarian commitment on the part of Austria “on the ground” has so far interested Sebastian Kurz only in rhetoric, both as Foreign Minister and even more so as Federal Chancellor. Almost nothing has happened. Now he is calling for a “holistic approach”. What does he mean by this? He rejects “symbolic politics”, by which he obviously means the modest (shameful?) attempts by Germany, France and some other European states (including Switzerland) to free at least a few hundred children from the inferno on Lesbos.
This is the same man who looks dutifully serious at commemoration ceremonies for the victims of the Shoah when the Talmud is quoted: “Whoever saves a human life saves the whole world.”
I don’t know if that is really true either. But every child rescued from the chaos on Lesbos will at least feel that way.
Thousands of refugees are still camping out in the open. But even for Salzburg’s Governor Haslauer, the 13,000 refugees are just a collective arsonist and blackmailer who set fire to his house “so that (his) neighbor(s) will have to take him in”. And who therefore should not be helped.
This sick logic is currently widespread not only in Austria’s government, but above all in social networks. Does it still make sense to argue against it in any way? With such helpless sentences like:
Most of the people there didn’t set fire to anything at all, only a few of them did. And wasn’t it customary in Austria to rescue children from a house, even if one of the inhabitants of the house was perhaps an arsonist? But the people in Moria did not live in a “house” anyhow, but were locked into a camp against their will. And they were “kept” there under conditions that everyone knew would eventually lead to an explosion of despair. In the end, Corona came to the camp and the naked panic broke out.
How will people even talk to each other when such simple truths no longer matter? But that is exactly the point. There is no point in talking to each other here. That’s why there is a video message.

Hungary’s enemy?

European Diary, 13.9.2020: Hungary’s Prime Minister Orban and the country’s media, now largely controlled by him, are apparently worried that with the aged George Soros they could at some point lose their favorite enemy, the Jewish world conspiracy to flood Europe with Muslim migrants. The Central European University Orban has also successfully expelled from Budapest (to Vienna), at least its regular teaching activities.

Now Orban has discovered the conspirator behind the conspirator, the Austrian migration expert and pro-European activist Gerald Knaus.

His small think tank ESI (European Stability Initiative) critically observes corruption and anti-democratic tendencies in many European countries, restrictions of press freedom or the treatment of minorities. And of course also the worrying developments in Hungary.

The major Hungarian daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet now dedicates an entire six-part series of reports to Gerald Knaus, beginning on the front page with a portrait of Gerald Knaus and George Soros side by side. And colorful infographics that reveal their secret power and network. An unprecedented hate campaign.

The facts are quite banal. Gerald Knaus was one of those who in 2015 advised German and European policy-makers to reach an agreement with Turkey on the support of refugees on Turkish soil, but who at the same time repeatedly called for a fundamental examination of the causes of flight, especially the situation in Africa, in order to offer people a legal, but also controllable way to migrate to Europe, instead of just “offering” the illegal (and very often letal) trafficking routes to them. Gerald Knaus has also repeatedly and sharply criticized the way the EU deals with refugees on its own periphery, not least on the Greek islands. He has now dedicated a book to his observations and political advice, which will be published in October (“Which borders do we need?”) and which he will present in November in Hohenems and Vienna, among other places.

Whether the Hungarian campaign is connected with the fact that Knaus is currently (all the more so because of the events in Moria) again a sought-after interview partner in Germany and Austria, or whether the concerted media action of Viktor Orban’s vassals was prepared for this hunt anyway? You need to know Hungarian to penetrate this jungle of hate speech.

Even the Hungarian television was involved in the smear campaign: On september 12th HIR TV dedicated an own TV discussion to Gerald Knaus, with four sinister “experts” discussing how to fight “Hungary’s enemy” for an hour.

“Peace treaty”?

European Diary, 15.9.2020: Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the Foreign Minister of Bahrain Dr. Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayan signed a so-called “peace treaty” this afternoon in Washington in the presence of Donald Trump. Masks are not worn. The White House still does not want to bother with such things like Corona.

The signing was preceded until the last hours by cabbals between the Israeli governing parties on the question of who may sign the treaty at all. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is under indictment, needed permission from the foreign minister of the rival party Kahol Lavan.

The wording of the “peace agreement” – between three states that are not even at war with each other – remains a mystery. So far only rumors about its content have been spread. What is clear, however, is that the treaty apparently clears the way for a number of major weapons deals, including the delivery of American F-35 fighter jets to the UAE, which significantly enhance its strategic role on the Gulf.

Allegedly the treaty would also open the way to a “two-state solution”. But what the Trump administration understands by such a “two-state solution”, Israelis and Palestinians, as well as the astonished global public, already experienced last year: a patchwork of Bantustans under Israeli control. So a first class funeral. The fact that the Arab monarchs in the Gulf region do not even rhetorically care about any “peace solutions” or the interests of the Palestinians is basically not a new insight.

The annexation of large parts of the occupied West Bank, especially along the Jordan River, and with it the final and definitive rejection of any “Palestinian state”, has, of course, been postponed for the time being, and not only for the sake of better optics. This postponement is entirely in line with current Israeli interests in not shifting the so-called “status quo” too quickly in the direction of a violent “one-state solution” – without reconciliation with the Arab population and without their having equal rights. For, as is well known, there are a great many problems lurking along this path.

Even if Netanyahu has to promise this step again and again to his radical right-wing partners in order to secure their decisive election support.

Behind the new pact are not least of all common security interests, by which is meant not least the retention of power by absolutist rule in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Behind the scenes, this cooperation between Israelis, Americans, some Gulf states and also some Palestinians, such as the former “security chief” of Fatah Mohammed Dahlan, has been going on for years, and has long since become no secret.

Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, sees in the absolute monarchy of the Emirates a “progressive democracy”. What conclusions this allows for his own understanding of Israel as a democracy is also no longer a secret.

One of the few real surprises is rather how much some people are blinded by this coup, with which both Netanyahu and Trump want to distract from the catastrophic consequences of their policies for their own people. Israel is now in lockdown again starting Friday. The paragon of pandemic control has become the leader into crisis. The US should also be back in lockdown by now, up to 1000 people still die every day in the richest “greatest” country in the world.

But European newspapers such as the NZZ are undauntedly celebrating the agreement between Israel and the UAE as a historic step towards “peace”. Nevertheless, the Israeli soccer club Beitar, traditionally associated with the right-wing populist parties and proud to be the only Israeli professional club that has never fielded an Arab player, is now negotiating with new investors: a group of sheikhs from the Arab Emirates. Even Jewish right-wing radicals know (as an old German pop song details): “because only the sheikh is really rich”.  


Brexit 2.0

European Diary, 14.9.2020: The British House of Commons decides on the unilateral termination of the Brexit Treaty requested by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as part of the so-called “Single Market Act”. The fact that both British laws and international law are thereby broken seems to be of no concern not only to the Brexit Government but also to the majority of the House of Commons. The main argument is the indeed precarious status that Northern Ireland will receive in the new set of rules that Johnson whipped through parliament as a big deal not even a year ago. In a customs union with Ireland and the EU – and a customs border with the rest of the British Kingdom. At least when the negotiations for a comprehensive free trade agreement between the UK and the EU are in trouble. His predecessors John Major and Tony Blair are now “horrified”, but the exit-drunk majority doesn’t care anyway.
Once again, it is clear what price the Brexiteers are apparently willing to pay for their nationalist revolt against European unification. The laboriously achieved, yet precarious state of peace in Northern Ireland is now in danger of being deliberately sacrificed. The fact that Johnson likes to play with fire is well known. But most of his tories now follow him like lemmings. All it takes is a few absurd conspiracy theories that are becoming increasingly popular among right-wing populist leaders: the EU is planning a “food blockade” between Northern Ireland and the rest of the Kingdom.
The Brexiteers grotesquely overestimate Britain’s possibilities to play itself up as an international economic and trading power outside the EU under the protectorate of the USA. This will take its revenge when it is already too late. As it stands, in the next few years Britain will be less concerned with its great, in reality rather ailing economy than with the centrifugal forces that Brexit releases, from Northern Ireland to Scotland, and eventually in London. To which the answer is likely to be nothing more than nationalistic furor.