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read this profile of Theodor Meron!

Shachar Pinsker, writing in New Lines [[link removed]], has a moving profile of Theodor Meron. Meron was born in Poland; as a child, he survived the Holocaust. He spent four years in a concentration camp and was liberated at the age of 15. Most of his family had been killed. As a younger adult, he was a diplomat and even ambassador representing the state of Israel.

This year, Meron participated in a panel of experts to help analyze evidence and advise International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan on how to proceed against Israeli leaders and Hamas leaders, and what war crimes and crimes against humanity to charge them with.

As Pinsker puts it, “One of the most interesting questions about Meron is how his experience and understanding of the Holocaust shaped his career in international law and affected both his scholarship and the evolution of his worldview.” And Pinsker traces the arc of Meron’s life and work and how his views evolved. Pinsker stresses, “The lesson Meron took from the genocide that killed his family and stole his childhood is not that the Holocaust was a tragedy only for the Jewish people but for humanity.”

British Ball

Imogen West-Knights reports [[link removed]] for The Dial on the experience of watching a Major League Baseball game in London.

The MLB brought the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox to play in London in 2019. Since the pandemic, it’s been an annual tradition. West-Knights asks whether the MLB is doing this to “allow those of us in Britain to revel in the joys of the ball game? In part. But it’s also about money, naturally, and ensuring the future of the sport.”

West-Knights writes about some of what makes the experience unique: fans sitting with their rivals, being able to use the restroom without worrying about missing anything, the amount of entertainment that has nothing to do with the actual sport (West-Knights cites “Sweet Caroline” as an example). As one person with whom West-Knights spoke said: the reason baseball hasn’t taken off year round is its “Americanness,” but the reason it’s fun for one weekend is its “Americanness,” too. As the author put it: “It does seem that the Brits in the crowd are having a sort of theme park Americana experience. They are wearing the shirts, they are buying the hot dogs, they are fist-bumping American strangers and saying words like ‘dawg.’” And Americans, for their part, get to buy a Pimms cup.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Hungarian Hijinks

The Hungarian presidency of the European Union has begun — and it’s begun with a scandal. Szabolcs Panyi reports [[link removed]]for VSquare that Hungary did not inform its EU allies and partners that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban planned to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

European allies were kept in the dark: “There was no prior communication with the foreign ministries of EU member states or the current senior EU leadership. Major non-EU NATO allies like the United States and the United Kingdom were also not officially informed.” However, senior NATO leaders apparently did know about the visit. This apparently dismayed EU allies, who felt this behavior violated norms.

Some have also suggested that there are backchannel communications with former US President Donald Trump and his team, and one “source connected to the Hungarian government also confirmed to VSquare that Orbán is trying to position himself as an intermediary between anti-Ukrainian US. Republicans and Russia.” Panyi reports that lower level talks are already occurring, pointing to a private event on the sidelines of the NATO summit at the Heritage Foundation, a pro-Trump think tank in Washington, DC.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Workers of the World … Vote?

How have the ideological and electoral changes that social democratic parties have undergone impacted the parties’ relationships with trade unions where personal ties are concerned? That is the question before Mario T. Taschwer, Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, and Verena Reidinger in their new paper [[link removed]], “Social democracy transformed? Party change and union ties,” published this month in the Western European Politics journal.

The relationship between union and party “goes beyond a purely instrumental logic. They share deep historical roots that continue to shape their relationship today,” the authors write. And working class votes were the most important electoral constituency for social democratic parties from their founding. But the authors hypothesized that, as the parties become more economically centrist and relied less on working class votes (which they assert has indeed happened over the past decades), the parties appoint fewer union-linked ministers — but that institutions that exist to stabilize party-union relations should “moderate these effects.”

Such appointments are but one potential linkage between parties and interest groups, and can, the authors write, be understood as “informal organizational ties at the individual level” in the absence of formal requirements or political mandates for such appointments.

The authors considered ministerial appointments with three caveats: that they were sorting through data using the premise that these were political appointments as the appointers in their view generally remain firmly partisan; that “the party actors who appoint ministers typically need to balance multiple demands and concerns, including regional and factional representation”; and that the party parliamentary group is an important pipeline to appointments, meaning a significant union presence among party legislators might be worth noting, but cross-national data on legislators’ union membership doesn’t exist.

Looking at data from 2,600 ministerial appointments in Western Europe in 16 different countries from 1960 to 2014, the authors found no direct changes between party ideology and trade unionist appointments. As they write, “Between the 1960s and the 2010s, the proportion of social democratic ministers with trade union ties almost halved from 30 to 16%. Yet, despite a temporal coincidence of this trend with substantial electoral and ideological change, we find no direct association between trade unionist appointments and party ideology or party electorates.”

But where institutional stabilizers are weaker, electoral change was correlated with appointment patterns. The authors conclude that only when the institutional context does not favor the party-union relationship — that is, in the absence of stabilizers like union density — do such parties weaken ties to unions in response to the shift to the middle class.

The authors believe that their work deepens understanding of the relationship between parties and unions and makes clearer the importance of institutional contexts for party-union stability. They feel it also has implications “for understanding political elite recruitment and its (potential) effect on policy outputs.”

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Nicholas Lokker argued [[link removed]] that the European Union and NATO need to “communicate a coherent vision for reaching a sustainable peace that would allow Kyiv to gain membership.” Ahead of NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington, DC, Lokker articulated that the alliance’s “lukewarm embrace” of Ukraine is a mistake, since membership is essential to the country’s victory over Russia’s all-out invasion. The West, Lokker said, “owes it” to Ukraine to overcome its own lack of clarity and show Kyiv how it can “unambiguously” become a part of the Western community of nations and fulfill aspirations of Euro-Atlantic integration.

Jason Strother wrote [[link removed]] that climate change could retrigger trauma for people in Sri Lanka. Though the civil war ended over 15 years ago, the “psychological toll” has never been fully addressed, and emergencies caused by climate change can retrigger trauma, particularly for the most vulnerable. Women, for example, are more likely to be exposed to physical and sexual violence during evacuations. And worsening weather will lead to displacement, which could be felt even more severely by those who have previously lived through traumatic events — particularly given the country’s lack of emergency infrastructure and warning system.

Daniel Ofman reported [[link removed]] on how one Russian athlete feels about competing as a “neutral” figure in the Paris Olympics. Though some have called for Russian and Belarusian athletes to be totally banned from competing because of Russia’s war in Ukraine, as of now, those approved by an International Olympic Committee Review panel will be eligible, albeit not under their own flag. “The original purpose of the Olympics was to unite people, to allow us to forget about problems, any differences in worldview, religion, race, or nationality, everything,” Tamara Dronova told Ofman. Others countered that politics are inherent to sports in an arena like the Olympics.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

The French soccer players are most pleased [[link removed]].

Cheer up, Kafka [[link removed]].

Contraction faction, rise up [[link removed]].

Eat cheese in the darkness [[link removed]].

Up all night for a good reason [[link removed]].

Well, can anyone [[link removed]]?

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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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