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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing …
read about refugees in the UK 10 years later!
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More than a million refugees came to Europe a decade ago, fleeing the Syrian civil war. Hyphen Online follows up with some who came to the United Kingdom under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme, which at first took in just 200 refugees, but later “expanded to welcome 20,000 refugees.”
Journalist Anita Bhadani spoke to a 41-year-old named Ghani Hashas, who said that he “felt like I lost everything” in coming to the United Kingdom, but has found the community of Huddersfield to be welcoming. He learned English and is studying for a teaching qualification. The resettlement program “gave me the safe passage to come to the UK. I didn’t have to cross the Channel and put myself and my family at risk,” he told Bhadani.
Hanaa Alfashtaki, a 37-year-old in Bristol, recalled her reliance on community events and charity — and how difficult COVID made an already strenuous situation. Latifa Najjar, 34, fled from Homs City to Egypt and, eventually, to Aberystwyth. Her children now speak Arabic, English, and Welsh. “Sometimes I walk by the sea, I see my friends on the way and we end up chatting for two hours. It makes me really happy,” she told Bhadani.
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Sticking to Sports. And Politics.
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In Africa Is a Country, Maher Mezahi writes of how the French national team is using the spotlight of the 2024 European football (aka soccer) championships to speak out against the French far right.
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After the French far right performed well in European Parliamentary elections earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron called snap parliamentary elections in his own country. The left formed a coalition to defeat the far-right Popular Front (Rassemblement National, or RN). As Mezahi notes, “Several founders of the RN, such as Pierre Bousquet and Roger Holeindre, had links to Nazi Germany and the OAS, a far-right French terrorist militia that advocated for the continuation of French colonization in Algeria. The party’s longtime leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was credibly accused of torture in Algeria during the war of independence.” His daughter, Marine Le Pen, may have tried to give the policies a softer look, but has nevertheless focused on immigration and citizenship.
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But, writes Mezahi, “The three greatest French footballers of all time, Michel Platini (Italian), Zinedine Zidane (Algerian), and Kylian Mbappé (Cameroonian and Algerian), are direct products of migration in three different eras.” This year, Marcus Thuram came out against the RN by name, while “Ousmane Dembele and Kylian Mbappe also both urged young people to vote in numbers but failed to name and shame the RN.” They were, of course, attacked by the RN.
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Go to the Poles
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In Notes From Poland, Daniel Tilles argues that the current Polish government needs to be subject to the same international scrutiny as its predecessor.
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Tilles begins by recalling recent history: “In 2021, in response to a surge in attempted crossings by migrants at the border with Belarus, including acts of aggression towards Polish officers, Poland’s then government created an exclusion zone along parts of the border. It banned unauthorized people, including journalists and humanitarian workers, from entering the area.” This was met with widespread international condemnation. This month, when Poland’s current government created an exclusion zone, there was no such uproar.
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“It is hard to escape the conclusion that the current government — a centrist, pro-EU coalition led by former European Council President Donald Tusk — is being held to different standards than the populist, national-conservative, eurosceptic Law and Justice (PiS) party that ruled Poland from 2015 to 2023,” Tilles writes. He warns that the same may be true with respect toward the current government and Poland’s media environment and rule of law. Tilles reminds readers, “It remains incumbent on the international community to continue to scrutinize the government’s actions, and to call out violations of democracy in exactly the same way as it would have had they been carried out by PiS.”
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Financial Responsibility?
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“Fiscal responsibility” is a common phrase. But what if, in assessing nations’ levels of fiscal responsibility, individuals thought of them not as countries, but as other individuals, applying heuristics in a way they would to a sibling or friend. That is the argument put forth by Patrick Clasen in “Treating nations like people: How responsibility attributions shape citizens’ fiscal solidarity with other EU countries,” published earlier this year in Journal of European Social Policy. “When expressing solidarity with another country,” Clasen explains, “individuals rely on cues about deservingness.”
The article brings together two lines of research: the first on EU fiscal policy and solidarity, the second on social policy attitudes and deservingness.
Clasen is careful to note that “Responsibility attributions are stereotyped, and as such, they are vague.” And more than that, “They apply to a given nationality, rather than distinguishing between decision-makers of a country on the one hand and its ordinary citizens on the other hand.”
Clasen tested responsibility attributions by taking survey data from 10 EU countries and applying logistic regression.
Clasen found that citizens in rich welfare states feel less solidarity with other countries if they feel they’re responsible for whatever crisis they find themselves in. Also, while citizens with a strong cosmopolitan European identity are more likely to express a sense of fiscal solidarity, that identity’s effect is largely independent of responsibility attributions. Citizens in poorer countries may also think that countries are poorer because of weak economic management, but they are less likely to consider responsibility attributions: they don’t lessen their expressions of solidarity.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, responsibility attributions are more relevant in higher income countries. And in those richer countries, individuals who believe “weaker” countries mismanaged economies are less likely to express solidarity.
Arguably more surprising is that “the more extensive the welfare state, the less likely citizens are to express solidarity with other countries.” Citizens in such countries have strong solidarity with one another, but at the cost of solidarity with those beyond their borders. They see European solidarity and resources for their own national welfare as being at odds. Citizens in strong welfare states evidently feel they have more to lose from extending solidarity.
The research, Clasen asserts, “contributes to our understanding of the role of deservingness attributions in European solidarity, as well as to our understanding of the role of the welfare state in solidarity.” He suggests that, in the future, researchers should spend more time studying deservingness, and also considering what shapes’ citizens ideas of other countries and other countries’ attributes and their corresponding level of deservingness. The role of the national welfare state, Clasen concludes, also deserves deeper consideration.
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Shane Burley looked at Substack’s far-right problem and examined how deep it goes. Burley’s investigation, which relied on a metric for determining what kind of accounts should be considered based on the work of “New Consensus” scholars of fascism, “found nearly 40 fascist, white supremacist, or associated far-right publications on Substack.” Burley clarified that “accounts tracked here are not just individual accounts, which are even more numerous now that Substack has added a social networking element. Instead, these are actual publishing and/or podcast operations, many of which are monetized.” Substack, Burley wrote, is the most established place that will allow them to operate, and a “new
standard” for the far-right movement.
Joseph Roche reported from Kharkiv during what was one of the deadliest weeks in months for the city, which “had not experienced such bombing since the beginning of the war.” Roche spoke to a commander of the Kharkiv fire brigade who deemed the situation “disastrous and catastrophic,” and a psychologist, who said of survivors, “Reactions can vary greatly. Some people cry, others are calm, and some become hysterical.” The city has had to learn to live with fear of bombardment, Roche explained, quoting one woman who was happy just to be able to return to taking her child to school.
Tibisay Zea wrote on the rise of baseball in Argentina, a byproduct of immigration from Venezuela. Soccer rules in the country, and few are familiar with baseball. But that’s beginning to change. As Zea explained, “Close to 8 million Venezuelans have left their country over the past decade. The vast majority of them have settled in South America, where they’ve carried on their passion for baseball — in countries where soccer dominates. About a quarter million of displaced Venezuelans now live in Argentina. Among them, talented young baseball players.” In fact, about half of the country’s baseball players are from Venezuela.
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Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin with Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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