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Jean-Claude Juncker And The Catalan Crisis
- 04.12.2017
In politics, appearances can be deceiving. What seems like a local dispute—such as the debate over Catalonia’s constitutional status—may actually stem from deeper issues, like how the European Union is governed. Sometimes, a politician known for scandals within the EU may unexpectedly influence the future of Catalan autonomy.
One such figure is Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission since 2014 and a vocal critic of Catalan independence. His political journey is far from ordinary. Juncker served as Prime Minister of Luxembourg from 1995 to 2013, making him the longest-serving European prime minister in modern democratic times. He also held the role of Luxembourg’s Finance Minister from 1989 to 2013. Remarkably, he managed both top-level government positions for years, shaping Luxembourg’s economic and political path for nearly two decades
Jean-Claude Juncker, one of the most vocal critics of Catalan autonomy, has served as President of the European Commission since 2014. Before taking this role, he built one of the most unusual careers in modern European politics. From 1995 to 2013, he was Prime Minister of Luxembourg, making him the longest-serving European prime minister in democratic times. Even more impressively, he held the post of Luxembourg’s Finance Minister from 1989 to 2013—serving both roles simultaneously for nearly two decades.
Between 2005 and 2013, Juncker also chaired the Eurogroup, an influential forum of Eurozone finance ministers. In 2006, he added yet another position to his portfolio: President of the European Council. At one point, he held four major roles at once. Known for his tireless work ethic, Juncker remains a central figure in the European bureaucracy—although his style is famously informal.
Despite his accomplishments, Juncker has attracted controversy. He has been accused of appearing drunk at international meetings and behaving in ways considered highly undiplomatic. Incidents include slapping a fellow leader, calling one “fat,” kissing another’s bald head, and referring to Hungary’s elected prime minister as a “dictator.” Such behavior might seem shocking—especially from a Luxembourger, a nationality often associated with politeness and restraint.
So why is this tolerated? Juncker’s combination of political experience, institutional influence, and personal charm may explain why he remains a powerful figure in European affairs, despite his unconventional conduct.
Jean-Claude Juncker has been repeatedly involved in scandals. He resigned as Prime Minister of Luxembourg after a scandal revealed that Luxembourg’s intelligence services had wiretapped the Grand Duke. Later, during his tenure as finance minister, a tax haven controversy emerged. European companies relocated to Luxembourg, reducing their corporate taxes to as low as 1%, despite having little real connection to the country.
Juncker belongs to the Christian Social People’s Party (CSV), Luxembourg’s dominant political party since World War II. Luxembourg politics have a curious pattern: former CSV Prime Ministers who lose office or face disgrace often become President of the European Commission. Remarkably, the combined tenure of CSV ex-Prime Ministers as Commission Presidents far exceeds that of all other non-Luxembourgish Presidents combined.
On the Catalan nationalist issue, Juncker has taken firm stances, though his position evolved. On 14 September 2017, he stated that the European Union would respect the outcome of Catalonia’s independence referendum scheduled for 1 October 2017. However, he added that Catalonia would need to apply to rejoin the EU as a separate member state a position widely seen as reasonable.
By 13 October 2017, Jean-Claude Juncker had reversed his stance on Catalonia. He declared that Catalonia absolutely must not become independent. Juncker argued that the European Union would become too difficult to govern if it consisted of many small countries. This claim sounds hollow coming from the former Prime Minister of the EU’s smallest member state, Luxembourg, which has a population of barely 400,000. In contrast, Catalonia’s population approaches 8 million—a far more credible candidate for EU membership by Juncker’s standards.
Luxembourg boasts the highest GDP per capita in the EU, likely because it is the largest tax haven in Europe. This status is largely attributed to Juncker’s controversial role in establishing Luxembourg as a center for European tax avoidance. Despite this, his opposition to Catalan autonomy appears hypocritical.
On 26 October 2017, Juncker denied that the Spanish state committed human rights abuses in Catalonia, despite videos showing paramilitary police under Madrid’s control beating voters and confiscating ballot boxes. He ignored the imprisonment without charge of peaceful democratic politicians by Madrid-controlled courts linked to a party with fascist roots in Francisco Franco’s regime. On 10 November, Juncker described Catalan nationalism as “poison.” By 19 November, he openly supported Madrid in the autonomy dispute, endorsing the crackdown on peaceful democrats and voter suppression. He urged voters to support Rajoy’s proxy parties in the 21 December 2017 Catalan regional elections.
It is essential to investigate why Juncker’s views shifted so drastically and what influences shaped his opinions.
Under Jean-Claude Juncker’s presidency, the European Commission has funded Ciudadanos, a relatively new Catalan political party opposing independence, one that Juncker now supports. Additionally, Commission funds have been directed to a management consultancy claiming expertise in public administration reform. This firm played a role in drafting a controversial 2013 report commissioned by Spain’s Ministry of Economy. The report advocated restructuring Catalonia’s public administration to reduce regional autonomy powers in favor of Madrid. Notably, the report was initially commissioned under Juncker’s predecessor, Jacques Santer, who also served as Luxembourg’s CSV Prime Minister for eleven years before resigning amid a corruption scandal.
It may surprise many that European Commission funds support political parties and politically sensitive constitutional reforms within member states. This is especially striking given Juncker’s repeated claims that the Catalan crisis is a domestic Spanish matter, with no legitimate EU role. Yet, the EU has clearly involved itself by funding a party with a firm stance against Catalan independence and backing policy documents aimed at curtailing Catalonia’s constitutional autonomy.
These funds have been channeled through the European Regional Development Fund, managed by the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG-REGIO), which falls under Juncker’s portfolio. Officially, the fund’s mission is to promote development across Europe’s regions, facilitating subsidies from wealthier to poorer areas. Its less contentious achievements include financing infrastructure projects such as motorways connecting remote communities.
The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) is enormous. Although precise figures are difficult to verify due to the European Commission’s opaque accounting, estimates suggest the ERDF accounts for about one-third of the EU’s overall budget. Spain receives roughly €6 billion annually from this fund—an amount comparable to the entire budget of Spain’s Ministry of Economy, which manages the ERDF funds domestically through regional agencies. The Ministry’s role appears largely focused on administering these European funds.
Marc Lemaître, the European Commission’s Director-General responsible for the ERDF, hails from Luxembourg. His political career with the Christian Social People’s Party (CSV)—though never formally a member—is closely linked to that of Jean-Claude Juncker.
Luis de Guindos, Spain’s Minister of Economy, is a close personal friend and political ally of Juncker, both within the Eurogroup and beyond. De Guindos is the only Minister of Economy to serve under current Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the Partido Popular, a party with Francoist roots. Notably, this ministry did not exist under Rajoy’s Socialist predecessor, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose government took a comparatively pro-Catalan stance and negotiated a new constitutional regime for Catalonia in 2006—later dismantled by Rajoy and Spain’s Constitutional Court, dominated by judges aligned with his party.
Following the 2010 Constitutional Court decision against Catalonia, Rajoy rose to power in the 2011 Spanish general election. Support from Rajoy’s Partido Popular was crucial in securing Juncker’s election as President of the European Commission during the 2013 European Parliament vote. De Guindos joined Juncker and Ciudadanos’ leader Albert Rivera at the secretive 2017 Bilderberg meeting. Juncker supported De Guindos as a candidate to lead the Eurogroup after his own resignation, but other EU member states opposed the move. De Guindos has also faced allegations of maladministration scandals.
The diversion of EU funds for political purposes in Catalonia appears to follow a complex route. The Spanish Ministry of Economy funds an organization called Comunidad de Trabajo de los Pirineos (CTP), which translates to “Working Community of the Pyrenees.” Despite its grand name, CTP is an obscure NGO that falsely claims to represent regional government agencies in France, Spain, and Andorra. This claim is questionable since Andorra is not a member of the European Union.
In reality, CTP functions as an implementing agency for distributing European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) monies on behalf of Spain’s Ministry of Economy, without any clear additional purpose. Interestingly, CTP’s registered office is located in a historical tower in Jaca, northern Spain. This tower operates solely as a museum and attracts tourists interested in the Spanish fascist era due to its association with Francisco Franco’s regime.
CTP channels funds to another entity known as POCTEFA (Programa INTERREG V-A España-Francia-Andorra). The legal status of POCTEFA is similarly ambiguous. It claims to be an EU institution, but cannot be one since Andorra is outside the EU. POCTEFA’s website lacks a physical address, and its phone numbers match those of CTP. Its main apparent function is to add an extra layer of opacity to the trail of funds originating from the EU Regional Development Fund.
POCTEFA channels substantial grants to a public-sector management consultancy called Daleph—a name derived from ancient Biblical Hebrew meaning “Revenge by the Sword,” which may evoke imagery linked to Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. At least one Daleph director has known ties to the Franco family. The firm claims offices in Madrid, Barcelona, and Jerez de la Frontera, a small city in southwestern Spain.
There are questions about Daleph’s connections to Ciudadanos, the Catalan political party opposing independence but acting as a proxy for Mariano Rajoy’s Partido Popular in Catalonia. Ciudadanos holds electoral importance because Partido Popular remains deeply unpopular in the region. The party does not publish detailed financial accounts, nor does it disclose staff numbers or salaries. Notably, Ciudadanos leader Albert Rivera lives a luxury lifestyle that contrasts with leading a modest minority party.
Inés Arrimadas, Ciudadanos’ youthful de facto leader, was born in Jerez de la Frontera and worked at Daleph for six years. Her father served as an anti-regionalist politician during Franco’s regime. Albert Rivera, the party’s de jure leader and a figurehead, has appeared nude in campaign materials and accompanied De Guindos and Juncker to the secretive Bilderberg meeting. Ciudadanos partly originated from a tiny local group called Ciudadanos de Sanlúcar de Barrameda (CIS), led by a low-profile politician linked to Rajoy’s Partido Popular and its Franco-era predecessor. This politician became a key anti-regionalist figure in southwestern Spain’s provincial politics. Sanlúcar lies near Jerez. Daleph was also involved in authoring the 2013 Spanish Ministry of Economy report, which recommended reforms to reduce Catalan autonomy by returning powers to Madrid.
The EU funds POCTEFA grants to Daleph through an obscure bank that shares senior executives with the consultancy. These grants amount to many millions of euros and far exceed other POCTEFA awards. Although labeled as funding for arts and culture, supporting a for-profit management consultancy engaged in constitutionally sensitive public-sector restructuring is neither art nor culture. Likewise, financing a political party violates EU law restricting political use of Commission funds.
Another notable POCTEFA recipient is the University of Navarra, Spain’s top private university run by Opus Dei, an organization known for its opaque legal structure. Luis de Guindos, Spain’s Minister of Economy, holds a senior position within Opus Dei.
This situation amounts to corruption. Having studied electoral systems in divided societies, I recognize this as a clear scheme of electoral manipulation. Fully uncovering the details and assigning moral and legal responsibility to those involved will require a thorough judicial inquiry. Unfortunately, the Spanish legal system has historically struggled with investigating large-scale state corruption, as shown by the Gürtel and Bárcenas scandals. Nevertheless, such an independent inquiry is essential—both in Madrid and Brussels—given the many troubling signs in this case.
If Juncker’s European Commission has indeed funded partisan politics in Catalonia, his political stance on the Catalan autonomy movement and upcoming regional elections becomes more understandable. As overseer of EU funding mechanisms, Juncker is responsible for ensuring that institutions like the European Regional Development Fund do not interfere illegitimately in democratic processes. The fund’s operation through Luis de Guindos’s Spanish Ministry of Economy, effectively acting as a personal fiefdom, may explain Juncker’s abrupt shift on the Catalan issue. Regardless, the European Union must refrain from misusing taxpayer funds to influence elections within member states.
On 21 December 2017, Catalonia held regional elections. Among the choices was Ciudadanos, a party closely tied to these controversies. The people of Catalonia faced a crucial decision about how to exercise their vote. The corruption should be addressed afterward. For now, Catalonia deserves a fair election where its citizens can vote freely and with a clear conscience.
Catalonia: Why Should You Vote?
- 22.11.2017
The international media is being fed a steady stream of misinformation about the political preferences of the Catalan people. One persistent falsehood claims that the Catalan autonomy movement represents only a small minority.
This narrative stems largely from Madrid’s use of the remnants of the discredited London media consultancy Bell Pottinger, hired to spread anti-Catalan stories in English and German-language media. With far greater financial resources than Barcelona, Madrid’s media strategy has been disturbingly effective. Bell Pottinger was previously found guilty of inciting racially motivated violence in post-Apartheid South Africa—yet Madrid continues to collaborate with the firm.
I have published a series of English-language articles explaining that, regardless of one’s views on Catalonia’s independence, Catalonia’s residents deserve the right to express their opinions at the ballot box. Likewise, democratically elected Catalan politicians have the right to peacefully pursue the mandates given to them by their voters.
Attempts to block access to my articles through illegal hacking have backfired. Thanks to advanced information technology measures I implemented, more readers than ever before have accessed and shared my work.
There is only one method to defeat the power of money to influence elections. Everybody must vote. It is very difficult for money to stop people from voting. The Police can be hired to remove ballot boxes. People can be threatened. But the elections on December 21 have been ordered by the government in Madrid. Rajoy wanted those elections much later. But officials in the European Union firmly told him “no”. The international community will be watching these elections. They will scrutinised from abroad more than any election since the death of Francisco Franco. And they should be.
I have spent my career organising and observing elections in divided societies. I will personally ensure that this election is fair and that the voting papers deposited in ballot boxes are counted correctly. I will do everything possible to ensure that no ballot boxes disappear and nobody is intimidated. If any wrongdoings occur, I will ensure that these facts become known in the international community and by the English-speaking and German-speaking media.
I am a foreigner undertaking these efforts because I care about democracy in Spain and I care about the future of Catalonia. In return, I ask that you vote. I am taking risks. I have two young children. I ask you to take risks too. Europe needs you to do this. Europe will be destroyed if the fourth-largest economy in the Eurozone engages in electoral fraud.
I have undertaken a detailed study of every election in Catalonia since the region’s first democratic elections in 1981. The electoral system uses a four-constituency D’Hondt method proportional representation closed party-list. D’Hondt was a European election specialist whose work has always been supported by the European Union. The D’Hondt method is fair. It means that everybody gets a voice. The composition of the Catalan Parliament after December 21 will reflect the genuine preferences of the voters. But for the system to work, people must vote. The voter turnout must be as high as possible. You must vote.
Please exercise your human right. Please exercise your right to vote on December 21. Catalonia needs you to do this. Spain needs you to do this. Europe needs you to do this. We must not turn back time. We must protect the achievements of the last 42 years.
Catalonia suppressed
- 09.11.2017
The Catalan crisis is the Spanish crisis. It is the European crisis. It is the return of the face of authoritarianism within the heart of Europe. It is more than just a shame that short-sighted political interests, such as maintaining Mr Juncker in office or promoting a right-leaning Spanish European Finance Minister mired in allegations of wrongdoing, take precedence over speaking up for the founding principles of the European Union. Betrayal of the ideals of Monnet and Adenauer places the entire European project at risk, and in far graver a way than the 2016 British vote to leave.
One principal axiom of the modern European political order is that people should be free to pursue peaceful political activity without fear of violence or harm by the state. This precept was advanced by the architects of the European Economic Community, Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer. After two devastating world wars initiated in Europe, the notion of politics as a peaceful pursuit unencumbered by risk of state violence became central to a new European vision of political order. Centuries of contested European borders, cultures, nations and conflict would be forsaken. There was to be a true European revolution in ideas.
The perennial problems of conflict between nations and peoples had plagued the European continent at least as far back as 1337. This year represented the start of the Hundred Years’ War. The traditional solutions to such European conflicts had been military. Uncountable millions had died by the sword over the centuries. The Treaty of Rome, establishing the European Economic Community in 1957, was intended to be different. It was the product of idealism. By creating a free market in trade and ideas across nations, and in entrenching liberal democratic principles across Europe, the prospect of state violence in pursuit of political goals was to be permanently suppressed. In its place, a culture of human rights and political freedom would flourish.
Catalonia’s attempt to declare independence in October 2017 was fortified by a controversial referendum. This represented the first time in the relatively short history of the European Union that one of Europe’s many sovereignty disputes had reached the stage of a declaration of independence within the EU’s boundaries. Recent events in Catalonia are unique because they have been peaceful on the part of the secessionists. Whereas in Northern Ireland and the Basque region of Spain separatist movements employed periodic violence, the Catalan independence movement utilised democratic and nonviolent means. Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of Catalan independence from Spain, the fact that exclusively peaceable methods have been employed in its pursuit must be applauded.
This raises two questions. The first is why the Spanish state sought initially to use force to prevent the Catalan independence referendum on 1 October 2017. Then Spain used criminal law in pursuit of political goals, including incarceration of democratically elected politicians, in response to the declaration of independence on 27 October 2017. The second question is why European Union institutions have been so quiet, barely criticising the Spanish government for acting in grave contradiction with the European ideal of peaceful resolution of political disputes. Why then is the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, so outspoken an advocate of Madrid’s infallibility?
Perhaps idealistic to a fault, the Catalans imagined that the institutions of the European Union would intervene to mediate in the current Spanish constitutional crisis. Brussels would surely implore the Spanish state to negotiate a solution to the Catalan conundrum, rather than use coercion. The Catalans have been wrong until now. The EU projects itself as a set of institutions premised upon principles, including upholding democracy and human rights. Nevertheless the Union has become sclerotic since the idealistic era of its forbearers Monnet and Adenauer. Now it persists as a bureaucracy subject to rawer political power relations. The EU’s current senior officials hold office at the sufferance of coalitions of national governments.
The most senior politicians in the European Union traverse the interests of swing members of European political coalitions at their peril. With France leaning left and Germany leaning right, the British now mostly irrelevant, the Italians in chaos and Poland self-absorbed, the Spanish government is the most important such swing member in both the European Parliament and the European Council. This problem is compounded by the fact that the European Union is relatively deaf to the voices of its citizens, because its senior officials are not subject to meaningful suffrage. In Brussels, this is known as the democratic deficit.
Juncker declared unconditional opposition to Catalan independence on the basis that if new states were allowed to emerge within the European Union then, in his words, we would have 98 member states rather than 28. His mathematics is hard to follow. Even by the most generous arithmetic, there are nowhere near 70 secessionist movements within the EU. He was making it up. Juncker has been silent about Spanish police brutality to prevent voting. He has been silent about incarceration of Catalonian politicians without trial (or even charge) for inchoate political crimes such as sedition and rebellion where no acts of violence or even incitement have been alleged.
Juncker attended the University of Salamanca, a government institution publicly funded by Madrid, to receive an honorary doctorate on 2 November 2017. This took place in the midst of the Catalan crisis. It was a curious time to receive a degree. The honour was bestowed upon Juncker just as the Spanish courts were imprisoning peaceful Catalan politicians without charge. Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy attended Juncker’s ceremony, taking time out from the crisis to travel to Salamanca and congratulate his friend.
Juncker was the first elected President of the European Commission, chosen by the European Parliament in May 2014 with a bare plurality of the votes (29%). The support of Rajoy’s Partido Popular in the European Parliament, one of the largest members of the European People’s Party centre-right parliamentary caucus, was essential to secure Juncker’s election. Juncker moved to his new post having been the President of Eurogroup. This organisation is secretive and few people know that it exists, still less what it does. Eurogroup is an informal but powerful meeting of the Eurozone’s finance ministers, responsible for imposing fiscal discipline upon errant Eurozone members.
A prime candidate for such sanctions should be Spain, with its huge public debt. As President of Eurogoup, Juncker blocked penalties against Spain. Rajoy’s government returned the favour, emerging as a key supporter of Juncker in the European Parliament for his new position as President of the European Commission. The Greeks were not so lucky at the hands of Eurogroup, but they have far fewer seats in the European Parliament and only a quarter of the MEP’s who are members of the EPP caucus compared to Spain’s Partido Popular.
Juncker’s successor as the head of Eurogroup was the sometime Labour Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem. It appears that Dijsselbloem decided to stand for a second term as President of Eurogroup in 2015 principally to oppose (and defeat) Luis de Guindos, the Spanish Minister of Economy. De Guindos is Rajoy’s close ally, and was the preferred candidate of Juncker and Merkel. Now De Guindos is being touted by the right-leaning Brussels coalition as the first European Finance Minister, a post whose responsibilities will approximate to those of the President of Eurogroup but with a greater degree of authority. Rajoy is a key ally of Juncker, Merkel and the centre-right group in EU politics.
This may explain why Brussels has been so muted in its criticisms of Madrid’s police brutality and judicial overreach. The right-leaning bureaucracy currently in power in Brussels relies upon Rajoy’s support for its tenuous grip on power. Juncker’s principal opponent for election as President of the European Commission was Martin Schulz. Schulz is a German Social Democrat and Merkel’s principal domestic political opponent. Rajoy is in large part responsible for keeping both Juncker and Merkel in office, by keeping Schulz out of office. Without Rajoy’s support for Juncker, the President of the European Commission would have been the left-leaning Schulz. The entire composition and ideology of the European Commission would likely now be dramatically different. Moreover Schulz might have used his position as President of the European Commission to fight the German federal elections in September 2017 in which Merkel ultimately beat Schulz by a solid margin.
Despite being the EU’s intimate ally in matters of politics and finance, Rajoy and De Guindos have unenviable reputations. The Bárcenas affair is a notorious Spanish political corruption scandal uncovered in 2013. It involved revelation of a series of parallel accounts for the Partido Popular by the party’s sometime treasurer. These accounts showed details of alleged cash payments to politicians, including some €250,000 to Rajoy. It was linked to the Gürtel scandal. This is an even worse network of Spanish corruption accusations involving the grant of bogus public works contracts to fund the Partido Popular. The common theme in both scandals is Prime Minister Rajoy’s Partido Popular.
The Gürtel affair has been estimated as involving theft of some €120 million from the Spanish taxpayer. Although the scandal was exposed in 2009, to date nobody has been convicted of anything. De Guindos himself was implicated in a cronyism scandal when he tried to appoint José Manuel Soria, a Partido Popular Minister of Industry under Rajoy, as Executive Director of the World Bank shortly after Soria was forced to resign due to exposure of his business activities. These business activities were run through offshore entities simultaneously with Soria holding incompatible ministerial appointment. Again nobody has been convicted.
The internationally admired Spanish investigative Judge Baltasar Garzón was investigating the Gürtel scandal. While doing so he was suspended twice, consecutively and for different strange reasons. One of the reasons was that he was being over-zealous in investigating wrongdoing on the part of Partido Popular officials holding office during the Franco dictatorship. Garzón’s suspensions, hugely controversial, excluded one of the few Spanish Judges known for his independence, from Spain’s largest ever corruption case.
While Spain’s judiciary asserts its political independence from government, European institutions themselves harbour vocal doubts. The Council of Europe is the leading international oversight body for European human rights with representation from all European countries. It Is responsible for operation of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The Council has reported grave concerns about political impartiality within the Spanish legal system. The central allegation reported about the Spanish judiciary is domination of the Spanish legal system by the Partido Popular.
Rajoy, leader of the Partido Popular, is determined to suppress the Catalan regional autonomy movement using legal tools. Despite compelling evidence having emerged of Rajoy’s corruption amidst the documents revealed in the Bárcenas affair, Rajoy remains not just at liberty but continuing to occupy the most powerful political office in the land. By contrast Catalan politicians languish in prison, removed from office by Rajoy’s decree (sanctioned by the Spanish Senate, itself dominated by the Partido Popular). It is hard to understand how these contrasting events are consistent with the Spanish government’s assertions that its courts are independent and the rule of law is upheld in Madrid.
The list of legal abuses perpetuated by the Spanish state against the Catalan autonomy movement is legion. On 28 October 2017 Prime Minister Rajoy dismissed the entire Catalan government and all of its elected MP’s, including those who played no part in the independence movement. This is undemocratic. It does not matter what purported legal or political basis there is for such an act. Removing elected politicians en masse for pursuing the agenda they were elected to pursue is grossly improper in modern Europe.
Soon thereafter, the Madrid Prosecutor opened an investigation into the medieval crime of sedition. This in itself is concerning. In the United Kingdom, the Sedition Act 1661 criminalised describing the King as a “heretic or Papist” or “declaring that the Long Parliament [a Republican Assembly] had not been dissolved”. The crime of sedition was an instrument for repressing controversial political speech in the aftermath of the English Civil War. The legislation prescribed a penalty of death. In the United States various statutes have prescribed crimes of sedition for publishing “false, scandalous or malicious writing” about the President or the US Congress, or for “spreading false news of the American army or navy”.
The criminal code of the German Democratic Republic enshrined the crime of Volksverhetzung, seditious incitement of the masses against the state. This provision of the criminal code was used by the feared East German State Security Service (the Staatssicherheitsdienst, colloquially known as the Stasi) to arrest and detain people indefinitely without charge in obscure prisons where they were often held for years without trial.
Sedition is a crime of voicing opposition to the political status quo. It is an embarrassment and a scandal that any country in modern Europe is entertaining a prosecution upon this basis. The European Union prides itself upon having overcome communist tyranny and replacing communism’s cruelties with liberal democratic values. Now the EU, at its highest level, finds itself acquiescing in the use of equivalent methods by the Spanish state.
The Madrid Prosecutor summoned the dismissed Catalan government ministers for interrogation in the course of this unusual investigation. Those ministers unfortunate enough to attend the court hearing were not asked questions of substance. Instead they were all summarily sent to prison. The complaint is not merely that they were detained without trial and conviction. Rather they were incarcerated without charge. They have not been accused of anything. There is no publicly presented evidence of anything they have done wrong. They were ordered to be held in prison pending an investigation. This investigation might continue indefinitely and might never come to a conclusion, as with the Gürtel affair. Catalan politicians are convicted of nothing, accused of nothing, with no publicly presented evidence against them. They are now locked up indefinitely. They have done nothing violent. Nobody has suggested they are corrupt. They have been imprisoned for pursuing a peaceful political agenda that they were elected to pursue.
Madrid replies that democracy must proceed within the law. But this statement elides one statement that is obviously true with another that is obviously false. The obvious truth is that without stable rule of law, democracy cannot function. The police cannot use violence and the power of arrest against people exercising peaceful democratic mandates. The state cannot use its power, unchecked by laws on freedom of speech, to take over public broadcasting channels, as Madrid has done in Catalonia. This hinders free expression of political opinions. Democracy becomes a sham. The democracy of Spain becomes the democracy of Zimbabwe.
The falsehood inherent in Madrid’s position is to suggest that the state is entitled to use the instruments of law – police, the courts and prisons – against people wishing to express their democratic political views. It is wrong to suggest that unjust and cruel laws can properly be used to force democrats into silence, lest they be arrested and imprisoned. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “an unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so”. Gandhi continues to observe that “the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence”. So it is with the Catalan cause. It does not matter whether or not one supports the goal of Catalan independence. One should support the rights of Catalan people to pursue different causes peacefully, without being subject to state violence. This is a cornerstone of European civilisation.
European law places primacy upon freedom of speech, exercise of democratic rights and self-determination of peoples. European law overrides Spanish domestic and constitutional law. This is a legal truism. That is why Spain’s appeal to domestic constitutional law, as a justification for the legal measures it is taking to suppress the Catalan independence movement, is unpersuasive. Constitutions are mutable documents, that must develop over time as a compromise between different peoples and different interests within a single legal jurisdiction. They must find room for the expression of peaceful democratic will. Given the want of legal space shown by the Spanish state to Catalan aspirations for political, economic and cultural autonomy, it is a testament to the Catalan autonomy movement that it has remained peaceful in the face of government violence. Let us pray that this continues.
The legal fictions engaged in by the Spanish state to suppress Catalan regional politics are implausible even by Spanish domestic standards. Nothing in the Spanish constitution forbids the people of a region from holding a referendum upon a constitutional issue. Nothing in Spanish law says that the Police are authorised to use violence to stop people from voting. The Police only properly wield authority to enforce criminal law. Their legitimate powers do not extend to seizing ballot boxes or attacking voters. That is because operating a ballot box, or voting, is not a crime. There is nothing in Spanish law that says otherwise. In societies based upon the rule of law, the role of the Police is not to enforce constitutional principles that may be subject to a variety of interpretations. It is to prevent crime. Nobody in the Catalan autonomy movement has been committing crimes by colourable contemporary European standards. Sedition is not a crime. It is legal fiction, a tool of state repression long abolished by civilised nations.
The falsehood inherent in Madrid’s position is to suggest that the state is entitled to use the instruments of law – police, the courts and prisons – against people wishing to express their democratic political views. It is wrong to suggest that unjust and cruel laws can properly be used to force democrats into silence, lest they be arrested and imprisoned. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “an unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so”. Gandhi continues to observe that “the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence”. So it is with the Catalan cause. It does not matter whether or not one supports the goal of Catalan independence. One should support the rights of Catalan people to pursue different causes peacefully, without being subject to state violence. This is a cornerstone of European civilisation.
European law places primacy upon freedom of speech, exercise of democratic rights and self-determination of peoples. European law overrides Spanish domestic and constitutional law. This is a legal truism. That is why Spain’s appeal to domestic constitutional law, as a justification for the legal measures it is taking to suppress the Catalan independence movement, is unpersuasive. Constitutions are mutable documents, that must develop over time as a compromise between different peoples and different interests within a single legal jurisdiction. They must find room for the expression of peaceful democratic will. Given the want of legal space shown by the Spanish state to Catalan aspirations for political, economic and cultural autonomy, it is a testament to the Catalan autonomy movement that it has remained peaceful in the face of government violence. Let us pray that this continues.
The legal fictions engaged in by the Spanish state to suppress Catalan regional politics are implausible even by Spanish domestic standards. Nothing in the Spanish constitution forbids the people of a region from holding a referendum upon a constitutional issue. Nothing in Spanish law says that the Police are authorised to use violence to stop people from voting. The Police only properly wield authority to enforce criminal law. Their legitimate powers do not extend to seizing ballot boxes or attacking voters. That is because operating a ballot box, or voting, is not a crime. There is nothing in Spanish law that says otherwise. In societies based upon the rule of law, the role of the Police is not to enforce constitutional principles that may be subject to a variety of interpretations. It is to prevent crime. Nobody in the Catalan autonomy movement has been committing crimes by colourable contemporary European standards. Sedition is not a crime. It is legal fiction, a tool of state repression long abolished by civilised nations.
European politicians are bound as a matter of fidelity to the founding principles of the European Union, to support the supremacy of European law and a liberal democratic political order in all EU member states. Permitting people to vote, and to participate in democratic political activity, is part of European law. This overrides improper Spanish criminal offences such as sedition.
It is more than just a shame that short-sighted political interests, such as maintaining Mr Juncker in office or promoting a right-leaning Spanish European Finance Minister mired in allegations of wrongdoing, take precedence over speaking up for the founding principles of the European Union. Betrayal of the ideals of Monnet and Adenauer places the entire European project at risk, and in far graver away than the 2016 British vote to leave. The departure of the United Kingdom, if it happens, is mostly an economic problem. It disrupts the free trade upon which the citizens of the Union depend for their livelihoods.
Spain must not revert to legal tyranny of a kind periodically found within the darkest corners of Europe before the architects of the European project constructed the Treaty of Rome. If it does, then the principal ideological pillar of the European Union, as a confederation of nations based upon the rule of law and respect for common human rights, is swept away. If Spain can do this, then so can any other member state. The moral authority of the European Union in promoting common legal standards is undermined, and the Union will thereafter surely collapse.
We the peoples of Europe must speak up against the legal improprieties taking place at the behest of the Spanish state in Catalonia. The word fascism is often over-used to describe disagreeable authoritarian governments, and virtually no modern government now willingly describes themselves in such terms. But this is a case in which the word would not properly be misused. Joseph de Maistre, the intellectual progenitor of the ideology, in 1819 published an influential tract that developed the notion that a legal system should be used to develop authoritarian control over a population so that nationalist sentiments could be propagated and opposition towards them suppressed.
Mussolini associated his political movement with the fascia littorio, a bundle of rods tied around an axe that represented the legal authority of the Italian magistrate to impose order through the use of law as an instrument of repression. The use of imprisonment and police violence against peaceful democratic politicians, and the employment of historically barbaric criminal offenses designed to persecute peaceful voices against official government policy, are some of the axiomatic components of historical fascist philosophy. Now they are tools used by the Eurozone’s fourth-largest economy against Catalan politicians.
This is unfortunate given Spain’s recent history. Spain was perhaps the only country in Europe in which the fascist movement was not decisively defeated. Instead it just gradually faded away, as its sole leader Francisco Franco died in office. His heirs realized that a movement based upon such a philosophy could not continue to exist in the modern Europe that had emerged since the end of the Second World War. Franco had applied to join the European Economic Community in 1962, but every single member voted against it. West Germany and France were particularly adamant in their refusal to permit a state with fascist political traits to join the European community of liberal democratic nations. After gradual reforms after Franco’s death, Spain was eventually permitted entry in 1986. Spain was perceived as developing in the right direction towards liberal democracy, despite its failed fascist coups d’état in 1981 and 1982.
The apparent gradual demise of fascism in Spain concealed a fundamental rift in Spanish politics. This is between authoritarianism and republicanism, and it remains to this day. In this respect, Catalonia has always been firmly on the Republican side. That is why Franco’s regime suppressed the Catalan autonomy movement so ferociously. The first Prime Minister of post-Franco’s Spain was also the founder of the Partido Popular. As Rajoy’s predecessor and formerly Franco’s Interior Minister, he was responsible for state repression under Spain’s fascist rule. This is why the Partido Popular has remained unpopular in Catalonia. And that is why Rajoy presumably feels, at least as a matter of Spanish domestic politics, that he can use the force of the state to suppress Catalan political aspirations. He has few Catalan votes to lose.
Catalan Independence
- 02.11.2017
On the evening of Friday, 27 October 2017, Catalonia declared independence from Spain. The legality of this move is contested. Spanish domestic law and international law may be in conflict on the issue. Irrespective, the independence movement has been peaceful. On Monday, 30 October 2017, the Spanish judicial authorities summoned a number of pro-independence Catalan parliamentarians for questioning in a Madrid Court on Thursday, 2 November 2017. They were reported as being investigated for the medieval crimes of sedition and rebellion. Nobody outside totalitarian regimes is charged with such crimes in the early twenty-first century.
The defendants were also ordered to pay in excess of EUR 6.2 million, in a legally mysterious bond, before appearing at Court. This was an impossible demand. 1 November 2017 was a public holiday, All Saints Day, across Spain and Catalonia. The banks were closed. The logistics of wiring such a sum between demand on 30 October and appearance in Court on the morning of 2 November, even if funds were available, was virtually impossible. Catalan parliamentarians cannot afford such a sum, with salaries of only a few thousand Euros a month. There is legal lunacy afoot.
Nevertheless a number of Catalan parliamentarians decided to travel to Madrid on the evening of 1 November 2017, to face the strange charges against them. They did this notwithstanding a real prospect that because they could not pay the bond demanded, they would be imprisoned. Their names should be mentioned. They are Lluís Corominas, Lluís Guinó, Anna Simó, Ramona Barrufet and Joan Josep Nuet. By the time of reading, these peaceful politicians may be imprisoned without having been tried or convicted of anything. If so, they will join two other Catalan political figures, the former head of Catalan’s local police force Josep Lluís Trapero; and Jordi Cuixart, the President of Omnium Cultural, a pro-independence NGO, already incarcerated in October 2017 upon charges of sedition.
Peaceful politicians fighting for democratic causes who risk or suffer imprisonment are heroes for the freedoms Europe fought for in the 1930’s and 1940’s. That holds even if we may not agree with the political goals they support. These people have families and loved ones. The state acts as a tyrant when it incarcerates peaceful politicians for striving for political goals adverse to the central government’s agenda, and tears apart those people’s families because they have peacefully pursued their beliefs.
Whatever one thinks of the merits of the cause the Catalan parliamentarians represent, they were democratically elected and they have expressly renounced violence. No modern system of European democracy that aligns itself with contemporary principles of human rights should compel peaceful politicians to suffer such hardships. They should not be exposed to prosecution or internment for political crimes in respect of which no element of violence need be alleged for conviction.
Matthew Parish is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, an international lawyer based in Geneva, Switzerland, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Leicester. He formerly served as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia and Herzegovina and has published two books and over 200 articles on ethnic and civil conflict.
Sequestering Catalonia
- 27.10.2017
It now seems depressingly likely that Spain heads into a long-term low-level conflict with one of its most prosperous regions, doing damage to the economy of Catalonia, the reputation of Barcelona amongst foreign visitors and the political and legal systems of Spain. A series of tit-for-tat events will ensue. There may be parallel parliaments and governments; parallel elections; incensed protestors; occasional acts of violence; political uncertainty; flight of capital; controversies over the use of legal process to enforce the writ of central government; examples of how weak Madrid looks when it cannot enforce its injunctions; and more.
Spain’s relationship with its wayward province of Catalonia is the source of Europe’s most serious recent constitutional crisis. After a chaotic referendum held by Catalonia’s regional government on 1 October 2017, opposed as illegal by Madrid and unsuccessfully suppressed by Spain’s national police, the Catalan government declared independence on 10 October 2017. But simultaneously the Catalan authorities stated that they would be suspending the effects of independence pending negotiations with the Spanish central government that everybody knew would not take place. Madrid subsequently refused to engage in dialogue, demanding that Catalonia publicly renounce even the idea of independence.
When the Catalan government again called for discussions, the Spanish government declared its intention to invoke a hitherto obscure provision of its Constitution. This legal power was included only at the instance of Falangist military elements in the delicately negotiated post-Franco 1978 Spanish democratic political settlement. Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, copied from the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, seemingly permits the central government to revoke the autonomy of a region. At the time of writing, the Spanish government is threatening to dismiss all Catalan government ministers; replace them with officials appointed by Madrid; circumscribe the powers of the Catalan parliament; and hold premature elections within six months. Three of the largest parties in the parliament in Madrid support this approach, as apparently does the Spanish King. The majority of Catalonia’s elected representatives, even those opposed to Catalan independence, do not.
One cannot help wondering why anybody thought that invocation of Article 155 might be a good idea, save as a perilously risky mechanism for removing Catalonia’s pro-independence leader Charles Puidgemont. Even assuming that the Spanish courts uphold a pro-government construction of an obscurely worded legal provision (as they undoubtedly will), the use of an unprecedented legal power to rein in a regional independence movement will inevitably appear draconian. Any process of negotiation or dialogue would presumably be more attractive. Madrid says there is nothing to negotiate: the Spanish constitution does not permit secession of a rebellious province. Central law enforcement authorities are also using or threatening prosecution for a series of inchoate political crimes under Spain’s criminal code, such as sedition and rebellion, against peaceful political leaders. One might fear that Spain is reverting to a legal tyranny characteristic of the country’s pre-democratic era.
The Spanish Constitution has recently been interpreted by the country’s judiciary to prohibit regional secessionist political acts, even where, as in Catalonia, those actions are peaceful and in pursuit of a democratic mandate. But the argument that Catalan independence is foreclosed by Spanish law is not politically attractive. If there is no democratic mechanism by which Catalans can express their desire for further autonomy or independence from Madrid, then the law has the effect of suppressing democratic desires.
This conclusion holds true for all Catalans, whether or not they favour independence. Until recently, polls indicated that a majority of Catalans did not, although a majority did want a referendum on the issue so that it might be resolved one way or the other. Alienation of Catalan democratic instincts through the application of legal instruments that make no room for voting on an issue of fundamental importance may recently have tipped a majority of Catalans in favour of independence. If so, then that was a needless and harmful outcome. If one desires to preserve the unity of Spain, then the use of heavy-handed legal instruments that so alienate a regional population as to cause the majority of them to want to leave the country, when previously they did not, is surely indicative of clumsy authoritarianism.
Moreover it is not clear how any decisions of Madrid’s central government under Article 155 that interfere with Catalonia’s self-governing status can be enforced as a practical matter unless Puidgemont resigns voluntarily. Although an estimated 4,000 additional national police officers have remained in Catalonia since their failed attempt to prevent the 1 October 2017 referendum, these reinforcements managed to prevent voting in perhaps only 5% of polling stations. Are they really up to the job of throwing politicians and civil servants out of their offices and suspending the work of the Catalan parliament, as has been threatened? One can only imagine the scenes that are shortly to emerge on the international media network, if the Police really attempt to do such things. If they do not, then the Catalan government will presumably continue working notwithstanding its having been ostensibly dismissed. Madrid will look impotent. Neither outcome is attractive.
Already Madrid has said it will rely upon Catalan local police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, to arrest Puidgemont if he affirms the Catalan declaration of independence. The Spanish Chief Prosecutor has threatened to take the Mossos under national control if they do not comply with his orders. It is unclear how the Prosecutor would enforce this threat either. The Mossos refused to use force to prevent people from voting on 1 October 2017. Their loyalty to the central government is therefore doubtful.
Arresting, charging and imprisoning Catalan politicians with miscellaneous crimes in respect of peaceful political activities would surely carry a heavy price for the Spanish central government. Otherwise the President of Catalonia would already have been arrested. The risks of uncontrollable civil disturbance and international censure are presumably what is deterring Madrid from undertaking such a move so far. The centrally-controlled courts have already imprisoned two political activists, resulting in huge demonstrations in Barcelona. Madrid could have arrested more politicians, but has not done so.
Common sense would dictate a dialogue between the Spanish central government and Catalan representatives. Spain is gripped by what is arguably Spain’s most serious political crisis since the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. Secessionist movements are often unwelcome. But dialogue, compromise and the resolution of differences using democratic mechanisms are always more attractive than the alternative. In the United Kingdom, the refusal by London to acknowledge the grievances of Northern Irish Catholics precipitated three decades of ethno-nationalist conflict until a negotiated solution was reached.
Spain is aware of this from its experiences of handling Basque separatism that generated over fifty years of armed conflict. The Scottish separatist movement was managed using devolution and democratic ballot: independence was peacefully averted, and Scotland has a distinctive constitutional status befitting the wishes of its residents. The aspirations of the various constituent regions of Yugoslavia for independence were managed using force; contested referenda led to violence. Managing separatism by state-sponsored violence does not have a good track record of success.
Spain is a young democracy, barely 40 years old, that has revealed authoritarian propensities and the immaturity of its institutions and politicians in managing regional aspirations for Catalan autonomy and independence. The European Union has failed Spain, by not promoting a negotiation process between the disputing parties. Any process involving dialogue and negotiation is more attractive in response to a secessionist movement than obduracy. Although the Spanish government may not have harboured the wisdom to date to understand this, the EU should have done. Rather than provide unqualified support for Spanish legal rigidity, the EU might have encouraged the Spanish central government to initiate a negotiation process.
Brussels did not do this because the prospect of new states emerging within the Union is a problem the European Union has not had to deal with before. An unresponsive and undemocratic bureaucracy composed of officials from a variety of different legal and political cultures, the EU has rarely shown itself able to adapt quickly to new challenges. The consistent message from Brussels is that the EU does not want countries within its borders to divide. National jurisdictional boundaries are apparently sacrosanct (save when they are not, as the prospect of Scottish independence, and the realities of Balkan fissures, were accepted by the EU).
Therefore Madrid’s political blunders in Catalonia were overlooked by Brussels in the name of respecting national sovereignty. This held even when Madrid used force to encroach upon European human rights norms such as democratic voting, and the actions of the Spanish police were the subject of international condemnation. But state secession is a problem that cannot be ignored. It has always happened through history. A supra-national institution such as the EU needs a framework to address this problem when it takes place within Europe.
The failures by both Spain and Brussels to respond to the Catalan independence movement through a negotiated and conciliatory process will now have predictable consequences. Civil war is unlikely. The Spanish have had enough of this in their twentieth-century history. The Catalan independence movement is peaceful. Madrid seems to be aware that there is only so much state-sponsored violence against pacifist politicians that international public opinion can tolerate. The Catalan affair is doing massive damage to Spain’s international reputation, and this will ultimately translate into economic harm. Tourists do not want to travel to conflict zones any more than banks and manufacturers want to locate their operations in them.
None of this is good for Spain or for Catalonia. None of it is good for the European Union either. As the crisis becomes chronic, international or independent mediation will become inevitable. The Catalan independence movement will be reinforced, its political leaders increasingly viewed as heroes, martyrs or demons depending upon the perspective of the observer. The Catalan crisis will become a long-term source of instability and resentment. Even if the conflict mostly avoids violence, Spain’s body politic will be damaged.
How did things get this way? The short answer is that Spain’s Partido Popular, now dominant in Madrid, has little representation in Catalonia and its leaders have shown insufficient foresight to appreciate that in the long term, suppressing Catalan aspirations for autonomy threatens damage to the entire Spanish state. Short-term political advantage for a struggling minority government, in appearing to adopt a firm response to Catalan independence is attractive to many other Spaniards, has proven too easy a political opportunity, just as has pursuit of simple-minded independence by Catalan politicians. Since Spain’s economic malaise began in 2008, these relatively simple political formulae have proven attractive. Spain’s young democracy has suffered a setback as a result. This may be a protean example of the mechanism by which economic decline gives rise to political extremism.
Reflection on the Catalan conundrum
- 09.10.2017
Whether or not the Spanish state missteps further in an attempted occupation of Catalonia, the political geography of Spain now seems destined to be permanently transformed. The international community, and in particular the European Union, must support all Spaniards in ensuring that this process takes place with minimum political and economic damage to the Euro zone’s fourth-largest member.
On 1 October 2017 the Generalitat, the government of the autonomous province of Catalonia in northeastern Spain, held a referendum of its citizens upon whether they wanted to the region to become an independent state. It was not the first time such a vote had been held. A similar referendum had been held in November 2014, but it had not acquired nearly so much international attention.
The distinguishing feature of the October 2017 referendum was the determination by Spain’s central government to prevent it from taking place by every means at its disposal. The Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy declared the referendum illegal. His political party, the Partido Popular that presides over a minority government in Spain’s parliament the Cortes Generales, applied to the Spanish courts to obtain injunctions prohibiting the referendum on the basis of prima facie unclear constitutional provisions declaring the “indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation”. Such a legal rule says nothing about the fundamental human right of citizens in a democracy to vote.
Spain’s central government then sent national paramilitary police in riot gear to Catalonia in an attempt physically to prevent the referendum from happening. The measures these forces undertook included confiscation of ballot boxes; occupation of Google’s local offices hoping to stop voters finding polling stations using the internet; dragging female voters out of polling stations by their hair; beating elderly and unarmed people; firing potentially lethal plastic bullets into crowds; arresting public officials involved in the ballot; physical confrontations with the local Catalan Police (the Mossos d’Esquadra) who mostly declined to cooperate; smashing the doors and windows of polling stations with axes; charging crowds; seizing ballot papers; and more. The greater part of 1,000 people were reported injured as a result of national police actions. Normally the national police have no role in Catalonia; the Mossos have de facto exclusive jurisdiction. The Catalans perceived an occupying force.
These scenes were beamed around the world by international journalists. Yet the attempt by the central Spanish government to prevent the referendum from proceeding was mostly ineffective. Despite an estimated 9,000 national police officers being deployed with instructions to stop voting, it was reported that only 92 of some 2,315 designated polling stations in a region of some 7.5 million people were closed as a result. Although Police raided the polling station at which the Catalan President Carles Puigdemont was expected to vote, he escaped the raid by evading a Police helicopter through switching cars under a bridge and voting at a different polling station. The organisers of the referendum were innovative and determined.
The brutality of these events captured the attention of the international media in a way the 2014 referendum never did, despite lawsuits initiated by the Spanish central government that led to the principal politician organising the earlier referendum, Artur Mass, being disqualified by a Court from politics for two years. In public statements subsequently made by the Prime Minister and the King of Spain in response to the 2017 referendum, no regret, sympathy or compassion was offered to the Catalan people. Rather the steadfast position was consistently adopted that the constitution prohibited any referendum and the national police, including their militarised wing, had acted properly in seeking to prevent the ballot by using violence against unarmed civilians. Nevertheless the vote took place. Some 2.2 million people, amounting to more than 42% of the electoral population of Catalonia, were said to have participated. The “yes” vote was reported to be over 90%.
These events beg the question why the Spanish central government acted as it did. At least two alternative courses of action were open. One was mostly to ignore the referendum, as in 2014, thereby relegating it to political insignificance and defusing its international impact. The other would have been to welcome the referendum and participate with a view to winning it, as was the successful approach of the British central government in the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. The latter course might have been particularly attractive given that opinion polls suggest a clear majority of Catalans then preferred allegiance to Spain. The Spanish government adopted neither of these courses. Instead it relied upon constitutional provisions that are less than a paradigm of clarity to obtain court orders of dubious logic that mandated the use of state force to prevent democratic process. Now the head of the Mossos is under investigation by a Judge in Madrid for the medieval crime of sedition, for failing to instruct his officers to participate in this exercise with sufficient vigour.
It is hard for any person outside Catalonia to form a reasoned view about whether Catalans have a strong case for independence from Spain. That is for the Catalans to decide. Nevertheless Catalans have grievances. They complain of paying excessive tax revenues into central coffers. They cite frustration over a political process supposed to grant them progressive self-rule but which failed to meet their aspirations. A 2006 legislative instrument prescribing redrawn conditions of Catalan autonomy from the Spanish central government, approved by the Catalan parliament, the Spanish central parliament and the Catalan people in a referendum, was subsequently in substantial part struck down by the Spanish Constitutional Court in 2010 pursuant to a lawsuit filed by the Partido Popular. The legal procedure leading to this result was unusual and even Byzantine. It is often thought that this action of the Constitutional Court was the principal catalyst for the contemporary Catalan independence movement, which previously had never acquired majority support amongst the Catalan population.
Where regions with distinctive identities have grievances against central government within a democratic system, political compromise prescribes that those grievances be addressed. Otherwise they will fester. The Spanish government has relied upon inchoate constitutional principles to justify its hardline stance. It says that Spanish domestic law prohibits the referendum the Catalans elected to organise. Resort to such rigorous legalism cannot be a definitive solution to malleable political conflicts. Construal of domestic law to criminalise a democratic referendum was invented by the Spanish Constitutional Court, inconsistently with prevailing European democratic norms. This is precisely the Tribunal Catalans felt had let them down in 2010. Secession of territories and the emergence of new states typically takes place outside the framework of domestic law. It is frequently justified by reference to supervening principles of International law that the Spanish state has not seen fit to consider. One example is the independence of Kosovo, a controversial event that took place entirely without regard for the auspices of the laws or constitution of the Republic of Serbia but nonetheless had the support of many western democratic states that now stay mostly silent on the Catalan referendum.
Where there is democratic will to pursue a plebiscite on so fundamental an issue as the territorial and political integrity of a state, it is a scant response to say that domestic law does not permit such a vote to take place. The deployment of violence by government forces to prevent peaceful people from using the ballot box Is horrifying. It engages the norms of international human rights law. That is more important than domestic principles of territorial unity that inevitably evolve amidst changing political winds. There are no absolutes in constitutional law. The way states govern themselves changes. Legal documents cannot be pronounced immutable.
This gives rise to the question of why the Spanish government acted as it did. Authoritarianism was the least attractive option in response to the challenge of a disaffected region with acknowledged economic superiority. This was particularly so given that the Spanish government had the advantage of knowing that most Catalan citizens did not want the sovereignty the referendum proposed.
Had police violence not been engaged, it would have been a reasonable supposition that a silent majority of Catalans would have participated in the referendum and in all possibility defeated it. The acts of Madrid become increasingly bewildering viewed through any rational lens. This discomfort is compounded by the uncompromising terms of a rare speech delivered by the Spanish King shortly after the referendum, that followed the central government line without dissent. It was notable for the abject absence of regret for state violence. Catalans did not consider this conciliatory.
To understand the dynamic of the contemporary crisis in Spanish politics, it may be important to explore carefully twentieth century Spanish history so as to understand how Spain arrived at her current impasse. The Partido Popular is almost singular in its uncompromising aversion to Catalan aspirations for autonomy. That much is clear from the party’s decision to challenge the 2006 Catalan Statute of Autonomy before conservative justices of Spain’s Constitutional Court. That statute had been negotiated by a socialist government, now in retreat and opposition since Spain’s left-wing vote has been split between the Socialist Workers’ Party and the insurgent politics of Spain’s new political grouping Podemos since elections in 2015. The Catalan autonomy debate is closely linked with the vicissitudes of domestic Spanish politics. The Partido Popular is not popular in Catalonia. One inference might be that when Spanish politics swings to the right, the emphasis from Madrid coalesces around repression of desires for Catalan autonomy rather than accommodation of them.
Why might this be? Catalonia is an economic success story, and it is intuitively surprising that an economically liberal political party might not attract substantial support in one of Spain’s wealthiest areas. To understand why Catalan politics are unsympathetic to Rajoy, it may be useful to delve into a darker aspect of Spain’s recent history. The political grouping that developed into the contemporary Partido Popular was founded by a Minister of the Interior under Francisco Franco. Franco ruled Spain as a military dictator from 1939 to his death in 1975, following victory by his Falange (fascist) movement over the Republicans during Spain’s Civil War. Amongst the very last strategic corners of Spain to fall to Falangist dictatorship was Catalonia in 1939, that held out for the Republican cause until the very end. The price paid by Catalonia for its intransigence to fascism was substantial. The President of Catalonia was tortured, beaten and executed. Thousands of Catalans were murdered in retribution. The Generalitat was abolished. The Catalan language was suppressed.
The Socialist Workers Party, which claims historical lineage from the Republicans fighting against Falangism, has been more amenable to Catalonia’s aspirations for autonomy. Madrid’s use of the Guardia Civil, Spain’s military police, to foreclose peaceful voting in the 2017 referendum evokes fear in the population of Catalonia. The historical ancestors of the Guardia Civil were Franco’s feared Policia Armada, whose mandate included “repression where deemed necessary”. Historical fault lines are being redrawn.
Spain is a particularly young democracy by European standards. Her democratic experiment began gradually after Franco’s death in 1975. The country’s first post-Falangist elections took place in June 1977. There was a coup d’état attempt in support of Francoism, orchestrated by elements of the Guardia Civil, in February 1981. Spain’s much-admired first post-Franco prime minister Adolfo Suarez resigned from his party rather than let it be merged with the predecessor to the Partido Popular under his watch. It is impossible to understand contemporary Catalan angst about the current composition of the central Spanish government without acknowledging the shadows cast by Spain’s recent past.
Spain has a complex history of authoritarianism and resistance, and understanding these currents may be important in placating Catalan grievances that are driving the region’s current movement for independence. A historical analogue might be drawn with the Ten Years’ War between Spain and Cuba, Spain’s erstwhile colony, that began in 1868. Cuban aspirations for sovereignty apart from Spain were met by a Spanish crackdown leading to an extended and bloody conflict that served nobody’s interests. This collision was ultimately resolved only by US usurpation of Spain as the colonial power in Cuba in 1899. While Spain tentatively prospers as a contemporary European democracy, dogmatic strains in the country’s political culture persist. Given the quest by Catalan politicians for independence, the intransigence of the Spanish state remains of concern. Not least this obduracy might impact the tentative Basque peace settlement in the north, by which a violent insurgent group disarmed in exchange for a devolution of power to an extent not so far accorded to the Catalans.
Central government occupation of Catalonia could only be undertaken by the Spanish army, which is estimated to have a personnel strength of perhaps 75,000 but of which only a fraction are available at any one time. (Contrast this with a Mossos d’Esquadra force, presumed loyal to Catalan regional government, of almost 17,000.) The costs of occupation would be colossal: to deploy fewer than 4,000 Spanish troops on current international missions is estimated to cost almost 800 million Euros per year. The military cannot undertake bureaucratic functions. Replacing Catalonia’s sophisticated civil government structure with agents loyal to Madrid cannot be a military prerogative. Any attempt by the Spanish state to revoke Catalonia’s self-governing status in response to threats or acts of purported secession could only generate catastrophe.
Whether or not the Spanish state missteps further in an attempted occupation of Catalonia, the political geography of Spain now seems destined to be permanently transformed. The international community, and in particular the European Union, must support all Spaniards in ensuring that this process takes place with minimum political and economic damage to the Eurozone’s fourth-largest member. All those who love Spain and the Spaniards, as well as all those who wish the European Union well, must now engage with the Catalan problem. The consequences of failure to do so are too significant to overlook.
Risks of nuclear proliferation in North Korea
- 28.08.2017
The current intermittent stand-off between the United States and North Korea is somewhat sui generis, in the sense that no emerging nuclear power has ever entered into open confrontation with another far bigger nuclear super power in quite such a way as has North Korea, taunting the United States with open nuclear tests and test-firing of ballistic missiles. Given her determination to develop as a nuclear state, North Korea could have done things more discreetly and diplomatically.
That she did not is surely born of some internal political advantage that baiting America accords to the North Korean leadership. Indeed the very act of seeking to develop nuclear weapons must have an internal political dynamic. North Korea’s principal ally, China, is on her doorstep and herself is one of the world’s most heavily armed super powers with an ample nuclear arsenal more than sufficient to deter any American attack upon North Korea. North Korea does not need nuclear weapons for any realistic geopolitical purpose. North Korea cannot sensibly invaded, as there can be no war between the United States and China. This fact has kept the Korean peninsula calm since 1953.
To understand this prima facie unusual political drama, in which North Korea has threatened to fire ballistic missiles at the American territory of Guam and the United States has responded with threats of the use of overwhelming force against Pyongyang – two threats it is obvious that neither nation has the slightest intention of executing – we must turn back to the very peculiar history of the Korean War and its aftermath.
The United States has no natural strategic interest in the Korean peninsula. She was sucked into the Korean War during a period in which the ‘Domino Theory’ of communist proliferation dominated US foreign policy. Articulated by American diplomat George Kennan amongst others in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, variants upon which were also known as ‘containment’, this theory posited that development of communist states arising out of the Second World War must be resisted using all military and diplomatic means because otherwise the communist infection would extend to other states in the same region. Nations would fall like dominoes to the scurge of communism.
The Korean peninsula was ruled by Japan during World War Two, as it had been since 1910. Upon Japan’s defeat by the Allies in 1945, the Soviet Union occupied the north of the peninsula while the United States occupied the south. The north invaded the south in June 1950, whereupon the United States and later on China intervened to support the various warring sides. The conclusion of the Korean War in 1953 was partition of the peninsula upon more or less the same line of division as had been in place prior to the beginning of the war. US engagement in the war was premised upon a fear that if Korea fell in its entirety to communism, then other states in the East Asian region would be more like to do so subsequently.
Thus the United States became stuck on the Korean peninsula, and she has been there ever since. Unlike Cuba, the other forgotten communist state that lost its principal ideological allies after the end of the Cold War and hence has been obliged (gradually) to adapt, the intransigence of the North Korean leadership (like Cuba, dynastic in its principles of succession) has been fortified by the very different economic and political courses that North and South Korea have pursued since the end of the Korean War.
Mean living standards in South Korea developed since 1953 to levels exponentially higher than those in the north. This created a perpetual concern for the political stability of North Korea. The country remains impoverished. This generates a recurrent danger of revolution against one-family rule. The Kim family must therefore operate in a state of constant vigilance. Creation of the perception of an external threat is one of the most effective ways of transferring a population’s dissatisfactions away from the domestic and towards the external.
A sense of perpetual confrontation with the United States is one of the most agreeable ways to generate such a distraction. The Americans have been obligingly cooperative in reacting excessively to North Korean provocations over the years, and their obsession with working against the perceived risk of North Korean nuclear proliferation has been particularly marked.
In this context, a little US brinkmanship with Pyongyang may be appropriate at the current time, in order that attention may remain focused upon this benighted country and to keep the Kim family in check. Any such brinkmanship must be coordinated with China, North Korea’s last ostensible ally of any kind. But the broader challenge is not one for the United States at all. It is for the other countries of the region to encourage economic stimulus in North Korea, so that she might catch up with South Korea. Only once some movement in that direction has been attained will North Korea cease to become an irresoluble problem. North Korea can only enter the international community of nations if the economic blight that affects her is lifted to the extent that there is no longer constant concern about the consequences of the Pyongyang regime’s collapse.
The North Koreans already have nuclear weapons. They are never going to fire them at anyone, and nobody is going to fire nuclear weapons at them. Nuclear proliferation is the mother of all distractions for the international policy maker addressing the Korean peninsula. The far harder challenge is how to stimulate economic development in North within a reasonable time scale, of say 20-30 years, so that there might one day be a credible prospect of the two Koreas being reunited. That is a substantially more difficult problem than struggling with North Korea’s current propensity for nuclear proliferation.
Finishing Syria
- 24.08.2017
This summer, something remarkable is happening in Geneva. Behind the domestic US rhetoric of sanctions and federal investigations into the connections of the Trump administration with the Russian government, the two countries are quietly cooperating. The so-called International Syria Support Group Humanitarian Access Taskforce is an international commission co-chaired by the United States and Russia, that is meeting under the auspices of the UN in Geneva to extend the ‘safe-zones’ principle, to divide Syria into spheres of influence, and to end the Syrian Civil War.
It seems to be working. A southwestern strip of Syria, from the Israeli (Golan Heights) border up to Aleppo and including the coastal regions, will be be run by the Assad regime under the supervision of Russian military police. Rojava, the Kurdish-dominated area of northern Syria that seems likely to absorb most of the former ISIS territory, will operate under American suzerainty. The Free Syrian Army territories formerly supported by the United States seem likely to be abdicated to Turkish influence, as a reassurance to Ankara that Kurdish influence in the region proximate to Turkey’s border will not be unadulterated.
There appears to be an implicit Russian-American understanding that the influence of Iranian factions in Syria will be limited. The danger that an Iranian arc of influence from Tehran to Beirut might destabilise Lebanon and provoke the Israelis seems sufficient for the Americans to persuade the Russians to persuade the Iranians at least to keep their role discreet. Iraq’s central government, which Tehran very much wants to stabilise, still needs US support so there is an element of self-interested Iranian logic in this arrangement, at least for now. Keeping the Iranians on board may be a reason why the Americans have so far kept quiet about their prior threats to repudiate the Iran nuclear deal.
The myth of a unitary Syria will continue to be perpetuated by all sides until a semblance of stable peace has been confirmed; or until some currently engaged power without a genuine strategic interest in the country (most likely the United States) starts to lose interest. America has stopped calling for the removal of the Assad regime, that itself routinely bleats its own fantastical determination to regain control of all Syrian territory previously controlled from Damascus before 2010. Assad will stay in office for want of a credible alternative, but the Russians will wreak havoc upon the power brokers of his administration for having forcibly drawn them into such an abyss.
The Kurds will continue to speak of their plans for democratic semi-autonomous government in the confederation of Rojava, knowing that their proto-state extends into Syrian territory only with the support of the United States. Turkey will rant and rave, but her troops will sit silently in former FSA territory while the Americans support the Rojava enterprise. Syrian reconstruction will be slow, because Russia has little interest to spend the necessary funds now their military encampments upon the Mediterranean are secure; nobody else is in a position to disburse reconstruction funds effectively. Others will not trust the Russians with any such monies; and quite correctly. Russia has what she wants already.
All things considered, this is a vastly better outcome, at least upon an interim basis, than the international community’s abysmal interventions in Iraq. But it could easily unravel. All it takes is for the Americans to stop supporting the Kurds. Since when was the United States interested in a desert strip in northern Syria, essentially ethnically contested, that contains little in the way of petrochemical deposits? It is hardly a promising candidate for democratic state-building, even had Mr Trump not repudiated the concept as a tenet of US foreign policy.
If the Americans decided one day to wish the Syrian Kurds all the best, and withdraw, then a renewed conflict could easily emerge in which all the old actors might decide it is in their best interests to participate and rip Syria apart once again. The focus might well again be Al-Raqqa, the now-demolished former ISIS capital. Everyone has some colourable claim or other over it.
The reason this will not happen – if it does not – is that the Americans care about Iraq, their disfigured offspring – and the Kurds are essential to maintaining the status quo there. One might ask why the Americans care about Iraq, but the answer is surely that they cannot escape it after some fourteen years (they originally invaded in 2003) and there are sufficiently many reasonable minds in Washington, DC who know this. The Americans are in Iraq, and hence in Syria, indefinitely.
The middle eastern entanglement of Iraq and Syria seems destined to brand itself into the American foreign policy psyche in perpetuity, as far as anyone can see at the current juncture. One can only wonder whether anyone in the US administration anticipated such a thing when the order to invade Baghdad was made in March 2003.
Is Donald Trump a bad President?
- 22.08.2017
This question is asked from the perspective of educated, moderate people who harbour good will towards the United States and want to see that country succeed. Their ideological colour is not assumed, save that this essay is not written either for hard-right white supremacists who find that Mr Trump is a perhaps unique opportunity for some version of their views to find expression in the White House. Nor is it written for a sort of hard-left Democrat who might take the view that the greater the chaos and damage a Trump Presidency results in, the better this will be in pursuit of the aim of total destruction of the Republican Party such that the only credible choice of President next time around will be Bernie Sanders. Instead this is attempted as a bipartisan piece that it is hoped will be absorbed by America’s perhaps dwindling band of centrists and moderates.
Mr Trump is obviously very bad at his job, in a number of practical ways. He finds pre-scripted speeches tiresome. He is bored by ideas, preferring personalities. Loyalty is both over-valued (he is far more interested that those around him are faithful to him than that they have good ideas or are well-meaning) and under-valued (he has repeatedly fired persons who have shown loyalty to him). He has no skill in managing an administrative bureaucracy, which to be effective requires lines of reporting and discipline in conveying decisions and the policy rationales for them. A new policy cannot be announced without the media and technical teams responsible for delivering and implementing the policy being consulted upon and briefed in advance.
We saw this in the context of the farce by which Mr Trump announced a ban upon transgender people in the military by Twitter on 26 July 2017. Subject to judicial review for constitutionality, and putting aside whether this is a good policy at all (like, I suspect, most others, I have strong views about this), the US President has the power to make such a decision by way of Executive Order. But he didn’t make this decision by Executive Order. He didn’t make it at all. He just announced that he was making it on social media at an early morning hour, leaving people wondering what he was doing. If you assume that the goal of the Presidency is to do things – that is rather implied by the phrase the ‘Executive Branch’ – then the President must operate within the bureaucracy to ensure that these things get done. One can’t just say that the whole bureaucracy is a ‘swamp’ and refuse to engage with it. Otherwise nothing can be done at all.
Aside from a never-ending panoply of personnel changes, and the making of a series of more or less quixotic speeches to different audiences, it is not clear just what Mr Trump has been doing. True, Mr Trump likes to say things; and the statements of a US President can affect stock markets. But for the most part he doesn’t seem to mean what he says, or intend it to have any consequences. He likes to threaten North Korea with inchoate specifications of military attack, but he has not so far acted upon them. In the one area in which the US President can act unilaterally, foreign military engagements, Mr Trump has acted fairly cautiously. His attack upon a Syrian airfield on 7 April 2017 in retaliation for an apparent use of chemical weapons by the Syrian army was exactly proportionate to the sin, having regard to the sensitive geopolitics of then seeking to bring an end to the Syrian Civil War. Mr Trump is not apparently inclined to bomb North Korea, invade Venezuela or rescind the Iran nuclear deal. On foreign policy, he is admittedly cautious in a benign way, not initiating foreign military adventures that will generate unknown and open-ended commitments that neither he nor his advisors obviously understand. Mr Trump may have an instinct for foreign policy: act with the utmost care.
In his constitutional task of leading diplomatic dialogue within the US legislature that should cause federal laws to be passed, Mr Trump is manifestly appalling. Despite the Republicans dominating both houses of Congress, the only legislation of substance Congress seems capable of passing during his administration is a bipartisan sanctions statute with such an overwhelming majority that Mr Trump cannot veto the sanctions and which are designed to tie the hands of his otherwise pragmatic foreign policy towards Russia. For such an act to have passed, it is surely no understatement to say that many or even most federal legislators hold him in disregard.
But none of this adds up to a catastrophic Presidency. Restrained foreign policy is a virtue. It is a characteristic habit of US Presidents to engage in unbridled and foolish foreign military adventures whenever they are frustrated at home. Mr Trump is resisting this temptation so far: instead he responds to these frustrations by making some more anodyne self-affirmatory speeches and perpetuating intrigue in the White House by firing some more people. Paralysis in the legislature is arguably a good thing: while much important federal legislation is wanting, we have neither a Congress nor an Executive with the skills and capacities to improve it at the current time. Inertia may therefore not be the worst result. Although Mr Trumps says a lot of silly or even offensive things, it is not clear that this matters. For the most part it makes little difference, even if a lot of people get upset. Knowing the President’s statements and actions make no difference, other branches of government take over the duties the President has abdicated. This might be an era in which states’ rights are ascendent.
Mr Trump is a buffoon. But he does relatively little concrete damage. He mostly just blocks government. The Founding Fathers taught us that too much government can be a bad thing. So a President who stops government from doing too much may be a breath of fresh air. Alas, it just seems to be a shame that at some point Mr Trump is likely to be impeached, so much so does the Washington establishment hate him. Whether his successor will be as restrained, and potentially peaceful a leader, as Mr Trump, remains to be seen.
Impeachment of a President
- 20.08.2017
The US Constitution is an extraordinary document, capturing in a relatively modest number of words two principal concepts. The first is that government is not to be trusted; it is a danger, from which citizens must be protected through law. The second is a corollary of the first: to mitigate the risk of governmental tyranny, power must be separated between different branches of government that have distinct modes of operation.
The various arms of the bureaucracy will surely fight as a result. But, carefully managed, that is better than the alternative. The waste caused by government inefficiency through internal confrontation is a blessing in disguise, particularly when the branches that compete with one-another are tempered through different modes of democratic accountability. If there must be government, then it is better that different kinds of government each watch the other.
Any public servant in a democratic nation is bound to buy into this philosophy, by which constitutional powers are separated. It is an exercise in appreciating one’s own frailty, itself an essential humility for anyone who harbours the desire to wield power. For power is a dangerous thing. Talk of loyalty in the context of power, as Mr Trump is keen to emphasise, suggests abdication of the principle of diffusion of power. Discussion of political loyalty soon leads to autocracy. If everyone must be loyal, there can be no dissent and hence no check upon wrongful exercise of power. Exhortations of loyalty and family or personal connections overriding constitutional or legal imperatives are staging posts on the way for a prince who seeks absolute power.
There are always such princes, but a mature institutional democracy discourages them. People do not want to be ruled by such tyrants, save in the most extreme of circumstances. Democracy gives the electorate the opportunity to ensure that they are not. Extremists generally fail at the polls.
Donald Trump reminds me of an Eastern European politician. He cares little for the values of an institutional political structure within which power is shared. He cares only about loyalty: a concept which in politics entails some degree of autocracy. He is a bad American politician, because he assumes an autocratic mantle but fails to perceive that in a system based upon the separation of powers, autocratic tendencies undermine the structure that keeps all parts in check. Mr Trump’s views are often objectionable, but that alone would be tolerable. It is his determination to disregard constitutional balances that is all the more dangerous. Americans have had plenty of bad Presidents, but this President is particularly unfortunate because by the time he leaves office he may have done damage to America’s government structures that cannot easily be reversed just by replacing him with a good President.
This, at its heart, is the case for his impeachment. Mr Trump may or may not be shown to have committed crimes. But he can be shown to have wilfully disregarded constitutional principles such as the Emoluments Clause, at least in spirit. A President should not be removed through Congress’s impeachment power just because he is bad at his job. That power exists as a check by the legislature upon the executive, and it is most appropriately used when the executive does not respect the separation of powers that such a check is intended to preserve.
No constitution can be enforced solely through judicial decree. It requires the persons who are bound to uphold it to honour its spirit. The mechanism for selection of candidates for high office will, it is hoped, serve as something of a filter to ensure that only persons of adequate calibre come to hold high constitutional responsibilities. The institutions of government only work if those people can be trusted, most of the time, to abide by the constitution upon their own initiative.
Given the American record of success in constitutional government, such an electoral choice can only have been premised upon pessimism and despair. Yet the empirical record suggests that the American model is to be cherished. That renders the act of impeachment all the more important. Impeachment is the sole mechanism by which the legislature may discipline an errant executive branch. Because it does not seem, according to the jurisprudence of the US Supreme Court, that the President is susceptible to lawsuits while in office, impeachment is the only tool available to preserve the balance currently lost.
An act of impeachment in the face of an executive expressly determined to ‘drain the swamp’, i.e. undermine federal constitutional government in Washington, D.C., is essential. A check must be applied. Even if impeachment were not successful, the levelling of articles of impeachment is the sole constitutional mechanism to restrain an executive branch of this peculiar kind. One can only hope that an impeachment process might discipline the executive in the way that is surely required. That is the case for impeachment of a President.
Reflecting upon racism
- 20.08.2017
Is it racist to attend a protest in Charlottesville, on 12 August 2017, against the removal by municipal authorities of a statue of the US Civil War Confederate General Robert E. Lee? I suppose it depends why you are present at the protest, and what you do there. If you think the statue shouldn’t be removed because you admire General Lee, because he fought on the side of a war that wanted to uphold slavery; and if you think slavery was a good thing and that’s why you think his statute should stand, then your attendance at the protest is almost certainly racist.
But if you attend because you think that ripping down statues is akin to erasing history, and although General Lee was an admittedly controversial character he was not personally a moral abomination; and if you think that American history ought to acknowledge such people so that the historical errors of the American Civil War might be brought to the mind of the contemporary world, both from a sense of intrinsic respect for the past and because you believe that the past might have a lot to teach the present, then your motives for attending might not be racist.
But this is where such certainties as there might be end. I do not believe that statues of General Lee ought to be torn down from public places, broadly for reasons of historical memory and through the hope that lessons from the past might moderate the present. Nevertheless, I would not attend a public protest about the matter. I would express my views in a different way. Or maybe I would acquiesce in the statue’s removal: even if I find the history lessons it embodies worthy, I understand the perspectives of others who might find the statue’s public presence offensive. If those other persons have succeeded in a democratic process in persuading municipal authorities to remove what they find to be offensive, then I would not be sure what I am protesting about. A protest in person about upholding democratic principles of history cannot but seem facile in the face of a prior and debated contemporary democratic decision that other values outweigh the principles of historical remembrance.
In short, I do not think I would have been in Charlottesville on 12 August 2017, demonstrating against the removal of a statue of General Lee, even though I don’t think that statue should have been removed.
I suspect that many if not all of the people who share the same views as I do towards General Lee statues would have been there either. Instead, I Imagine, most of the protesters in favour of keeping that statue in place were driven by racist concerns.
Why would a racist motivation cause one to demonstrate in public, whereas a non-racist affection for historical monuments probably would not cause one to do so? This is not an easy question, but it goes to the heart of the problem of racism. I think we can say two things.
Firstly, racists harbour positions driven by substantial emotional rage. While I would prefer a General Lee statue of historical significance to stay in place in central Charlottesville, I do not feel so angry about the matter that I am willing to march on the streets, don Ku Klux Klan regalia and spew vile anti-semitic comments. (What does General Lee have to do with anti-semitism? I am prepared to be contradicted, but based upon my general knowledge I think the answer is not a great deal.) A number of these demonstrations appear to be premised upon anger: and inchoate anger, if pro-white racist fury is assimilated (as it seems to have been in Charlottesville) with anti-semitic racist fury. It’s all rather illogical. Most American Jews, at least, are white. If you hate blacks and you hate Jews, you just hate people and there is no conceivable rationale behind it.
Secondly, racists with these sorts of views must somehow know they are at a moral disadvantage, if one can put it like that. They must know that their views are offensive to the greater majority of persons, and that the institutions of government will repress expressions of those views that may cause harm to other people. We have race relations laws prohibiting discrimination. Hence the sole medium for such persons of expression for their minority opinions, which the government properly makes no allowance for, is exhibitions of public demonstration.
Public demonstrations of racism are objectionable, even if a civilised society may feel obliged to tolerate them to some degree. As a white gentile, I find it obnoxious to observe people standing in public threatening violence and advocating anti-black, anti-Jewish sentiments. But my sense of offence is almost irrelevant in contrast with the sense of fear and proper indignation that blacks and Jews must surely feel when they see the same thing. In drawing the line between permitting such obnoxious displays and outlawing them, society must balance freedom of expression against the damage to social cohesiveness, the fear inculcated in minorities, and the risk of serious violence, caused by such displays.
Where anti-racist protesters gather in opposition to overt acts of racism, confrontation and even violence may inevitably result. I would never take part in an anti-racist protest; I don’t see the point. Baiting racists is almost as irrational as being one. Better to let them fade out. To the extent that racist demonstrations involve public order offences, it is a matter for law enforcement authorities. Otherwise, let them shout and go home. But not everybody thinks as I do. Some people, it seems, hate racists almost as much as racists hate blacks and Jews. They are determined to take to the streets to make it clear that public demonstrations of racism will not be tolerated.
The first thing I would say to such people is that they have a very good reason to be calm. The law is on their side. In most western democracies, and even in many other countries, racism attracts the full force of the law and is not even particularly popular as a political movement. Anti-racist demonstrators ought therefore not to rise to the bait. Moreover they are free to express in public their opposition to racism in non-confrontational circumstances, and with the full support of the law. Leave the racists to clammer around their General Lee statues. (Although poor General Lee: any casual historian of this gentleman is surely aware that he does not deserve such associations. He was a compromiser in spirit, not a Nazi.) The anti-racists, morally in the right, have so many more admirable icons that they are free to admire in peace. The National Mall in the nation’s capital is replete with them.
The Charlottesville riots resulted in an innocent person’s death. A lunatic drove his car into a group of people. A lady died. The only person to blame for that was the lunatic. Nobody can ascribe collective responsibility for that act of murder or manslaughter to either of the opposing groups. Even though I consider the moral compass of the racist demonstrators profoundly degraded in comparison to that of their opponents, I have no evidence to suggest that any of those demonstrators, other than the driver of the car, desired an outcome such as this.
None of this is to say that President Trump’s regrettably cryptic comments, indicating moral equivalence between the two sides at Charlottesville, were appropriate. Racism is objectionable, while opposition to racism is laudable. The fact that Mr Trump seems to rely upon the votes of racists for his popular support tends to infect all decent persons’ suspicions about the motives of this, the most ignominious of US Presidents, in what he says. Hardly a statesman.
But battles over racism should not be fought upon the streets, particularly when the country is governed by a President prone to embracing an unpleasant and grotesque form of far-right populism that goes against the grain of the United States’ very particular struggles to eliminate the historical legacy of sour race relations from its politics.
It is incumbent upon anti-racists – a group of people who cross the conventional Washington political divides, and are composed of decent Republicans and Democrats alike – to discourage confrontation with pro-Trump extremist minorities in the streets. Street fights play into the hands of a President who wants to demolish the system of government through institutions, and to support his rule with the threat of the mob. For racists, street fights play into the agenda of Mr Trump. For the vast majority of the rest of us, it is a temptation we must avoid if we are to limit the damage this President may otherwise do to American government by institutions.
TRANS-CAUCASIAN TRANSIT ROUTES: AN UPDATE
- 28.02.2017
The Caspian Sea region is rich in natural resources, in particular in hydrocarbons. The riparian towns and cities of the Caspian Sea and within 100km of its shores have a combined population of some six and a half million people. Nevertheless, the region is landlocked, and one of the most inaccessible places in the world. The purpose of this article is to explore the region’s infrastructure limitations and to ask what might be done to develop them.
Airports
There is only one major international airport in a riparian city to the Caspian Sea, namely Heydar Aliev International Airport in Baku. The other riparian cities with commercial airports are limited. One is Makhachkala (Russia); Uytash Airport’s international services extend to Istanbul and Aktau in Kazakhstan on the opposite side of the Caspian Sea. Turkmenbashi (Turkmenistan) also benefits from Krasnovodsk International Airport, with services to Istanbul. Narimanovo Airport in Astrakhan has services to Tehran and Istanbul. There is almost nothing else.
Airports however are not necessarily the region’s principal initial priority. Transport of cargoes will generate economic and social development, whereupon civilian airlines will multiply and these airports will surely flourish subsequently.
Roads
There are few roads of substantial significance running from any riparian city of the Caspian. The exceptions are the E50 from Makhachkala northwest to Rostov; the E119 from Makhachkala north, to Astrakhan, Volgograd and ultimately Moscow; the M37 from Turkmenbashi southeastwards, towards Ashgabat; the E119 north from Baku, to Makhachkala; the M4/M5 from Baku westwards, ultimately arriving in Tbilisi, Georgia; the E119 south from Baku, towards the Iranian border; the A27 from riparian Kazakhstan, that wends northeast through that massive country; and the A28, that heads from the same area north to Samara in the Russian Federation. None of these roads are more than two-lane highways for any significant distance.
Road transportation is not the first priority for cargo transport. The focus must be on railroads and shipping options. Roads will follow later, with the increasing urbanization of the riparian populations.
Railroads
Railheads on the Caspian Sea are limited. Baku has three services of an international or quasi-international nature. One runs north to Makhachkala and then further on into Russia and ultimately to Moscow via Astrakhan. Another runs south towards the Iranian border. A third runs northwest to Tbilisi, and is due for imminent modernisation whereupon it is expected to form the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars service running to northeastern Turkey.
Turkmenistan has a developed railway network, particularly so given her low population density. As well as a service from Turkmenbashi to Ashgabat via the railhead at Bereket (with branch lines therefrom to Uzbekistan and Mashhad in Iran), there is a railroad up to Aktau in Kazakhstan. In southwestern Turkmenistan a railway link runs to the Afghan border at Serkhetabad/Torghundi.
The infrastructure challenge facing northern Iran
Northern Iran has long suffered from infrastructural isolation. The rolling plains of the country north of Tehran become steep and their roads winding, before they drop drown dramatically towards the Caspian Sea coast. The shortest drive from Tehran to the Caspian Sea at Tschalus, some 200km, is a good four hours by car on steep roads; far slower by truck.
The development of highways or rail infrastructure in northern Iran to serve the country’s modest Caspian Sea ports is a contemporary challenge, given the comparative benefits to the Iranian central government of infrastructure investment elsewhere in the country and particularly in the southwest. There is a railway line from Tehran to Sari and Gorgan near the Caspian Sea, but these stations are not currently suitable for sophisticated multimodal operations.
Pipelines
There are a number of pipelines, and pipeline projects, in the region for Caspian Sea hydrocarbons. The Makhachkala-Novorossiysk pipeline is run by the Russian conglomerate Transneft, the largest oil pipeline operator in the world. A crude oil pipeline, this, the Northern Route Export Pipeline, has a capacity of some 5 million tonnes annually towards its Black Sea outlet and a 530mm diameter. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline likewise serves as a crude oil conduit, this time to the Turkish Black Sea.
Ocean access
A another option is transport of cargoes through the Volga-Don canal, which runs from just south of Volgograd, up the river Volga from Astrakhan, some 100km west towards the River Don whereupon there is access to the Black Sea via the Sea of Azov. This route is reliable only during the summer months, roughly from April to December. In the winter months the canal is closed and the tributary rivers are frozen or impassable by reason of ice floes. The largest ships that can traverse the canal and its tributary rivers are river-sea vessels of the so-called Volga-Don-Max-class, a relatively small cargo vessel size with a maximum length of some 140 metres, beam of 16.5 metres and draft of 3.5 metres.
These are moderate parameters, compared for example with a Panamax vessel (the maximum size that can safely pass the Panama canal) for which the equivalent figures are some 290, 37 and 12 metres respectively. Nevertheless it is estimated that between 8 and 12 million tonnes of cargo pass through the Volga-Don canal each year, of which slightly more than half is oil cargoes travelling westwards from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. Hence the Volga-Don canal route might be considered roughly as important as the Makhachkala-Novorossiysk pipeline in terms of strict volumes. But whereas the Norovossiysk pipeline transports crude, the greater bulk of petroleum cargoes travelling through the Volga-Don canal are refined products.
Other canal options
At least three additional canals have been touted to expand the capacity of the Volga-Don canal, including the shorter Volga-Don 2 (anticipated to run north of the existing canal); a “second thread” of the existing canal parallel to it; and a “Eurasia Canal”, an ambitious proposed 700 kilometre-long canal running to the south of the existing canal along the thalweg of the Kuma-Manych depression.
At the current juncture none of these ambitious projects seems likely to achieve fruition in the immediate future. Aside from anything else, they are all expensive proposals, requiring substantial capital investment in a relatively remote region. Their development cannot be excluded. But oil prices may need to rise with a reasonable medium- to long-term perspective of certainty before returns on investment make such capital-intensive projects appear attractive to financiers.
For the sustainable development of the region, and the pursuit of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals for the Caspian Sea’s people together with efficient exploitation of its resources in a way that continues to preserve the unique environment properties of the area, continued development of logistical resources remains a priority. Assuming that long-term uncertainty about hydrocarbon prices precludes the substantial investment for a new canal, the options appear to be restricted to a few choices. The remainder of this article sets out what they might be.
Railroad development programmes
One option is to continue to develop Azeri-Georgian railway network to adapt it for freight needs. The continued development of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars rail network is anticipated to reach a stage of completion during the course of 2017 such that luxury passenger sleeping cars will be able to operate on the entirety of this route. This indicates a level or rail track and infrastructure upgrade that reinforces the Baku-Tbilisi-Batumi railroad route currently existing for freight services.
There are a number of advantages to this programme. One is that both Georgia and Azerbaijan have recently invested heavily in the highest quality of railroad infrastructure. The fact that these countries are aiming towards high-speed luxury passenger services indicates the depth of financial commitment, because rail track and infrastructure investment necessary for passenger trains is always significant and it also rests upon an assumption of subsidy. Passenger trains seldom make profit, whereas freight more often does, because passengers want to get places in a hurry whereas for cargoes this is less critical. Hence commitment has been demonstrated.
Cargoes are already being transferred using existing infrastructure networks. One substantial advantage of this trans-Caucasian rail cargo route is the capacity for year-round operation. Another is the capacity to ship refined products in rail tank cars (RTC’s) as opposed only to crude cargoes through pre-existing pipelines. Initial estimates of the Baku-Batumi route, once completed, will include a cargo capacity of some 6.5 million tonnes per year, with at least one estimate indicating that annual freight capacity should be able to reach a figure of some 15 million metric tonnes per annum in the short to medium term.
Given that these cargoes transports may be predominantly refined products, with year-round service not inhibited by winter river ice-floes, they may provide substantial and healthy competition with the conventional canal route for similar cargoes. Moreover the fact that multimodal transhipment of RTC cargoes may take place in the sophisticated west Georgian port of Batumi means that restrictions to river-sea vessels, of the kind to which passage of the Volga-Don canal is confined, are absent. Batumi being on the Black Sea, any vessel capable of passage of the Bosphorus straits is an eligible recipient of the RTC cargoes delivered on existing and future freight railway networks.
It is my experience that effective freight transport using rail infrastructure is almost invariably co-aligned with two other factors that indicate appropriate commitment on the part of the part of the investing authorities. The first is a development of passenger railway networks. If a nation or enterprise is devoted to developing railways as a principal means of civilian passenger transportation, that in itself is indicative of meeting freight transport markets as well, which are easier projects in principle and typically entail an element of cross-subsidisation from freight to passenger traffic. They are signs of a developed and mature market.
Countries such as Georgia and Azerbaijan, that have displayed these commitments in unequivocal terms, can confidently be relied upon as trusted commercial partners. Azerbaijan’s commitment is demonstrated by its 2014 signature of an EUR 115 million rolling stock modernisation project with a prestigious Swiss engineering company. Tbilisi’s contribution to railroad construction is financed by a substantial Azeri investment loan. So the commitments are already demonstrated.
Secondly, where substantial and credible long-term investment in railway infrastructure does take place, the local economy reacts symbiotically and often exponentially. The most indicative example of this is the economic and cultural development of the Georgian Black Sea City of Batumi. This prior relative haven of tranquility has benefitted from exponential economic growth and a glut of luxury hotels and tourist facilities. Those tourists – and the investors that preceded them – have been attracted by the improved infrastructure potential opportunities via the financial commitments of the relevant Caucasian countries. When the future is bright, people vote with their feet: and in the right direction.
Railways are manifestly one solution. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is the other principal Black Sea route, but it barely meets Azeri requirements alone (and also accommodating through flow of a proportion of crude from the Kashagan oil field in Kazakhstan via Aktau to Baku). Moreover refined product demand, particularly from the relatively advanced Turkmenbashi Refinery, is not susceptible to carriage using this means.
A trans-Caspian gas pipeline from Turkmenbashi underneath the Caspian Sea, thereafter following the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline at least as far as Erzurum in eastern Turkey, is proposed to meet the Nabucco gas pipeline that would carry gas as far as central Europe, although it may be eclipsed by the trans-Asiatic pipeline proposed to run through Greece and Albania. In the short to medium term, it is not clear whether the political and investment determinations exist to develop further pipelines within the region; and if so, then how the shifting geopolitical imperatives will play out.
Iranian infrastructure development
Yet another stimulating option may arise from continued opening and infrastructure development in Iran, if an effective cargo transfer route may develop from Caspian Sea ports in Iran, such as Neka or Bandar Anzali, permitting reliable cargo transfer to the Persian Gulf for multimodal transfer onto larger vessels. There is an RTC-compatible railroad from Tehran to Bandar-e-Abbas, the principal port on Tehran’s southern coast; so only the Tehran-Caspian route needs completion.
Completion of this route by connecting it comprehensively with infrastructure upon the northern Iranian coast no doubt relies upon a continuing propensity for openness to Iranian investment, in turn depending upon common satisfaction with steps taken in performance of the July 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA): the “Iran Nuclear Deal”. Much of this depends upon geopolitics. The infrastructure investment required for Iran to become a viable cross-country route for Caspian Sea hydrocarbons depends upon investor confidence that the JCPOA is here to stay. It also requires institutional development on behalf of the Iranian government to sustain confidence on the part of international and domestic investors.
All these things have been said, and the economic logic is compelling. Iran and the Caspian region have a potentially thriving market in crude-refined swaps, given Iran’s abundance of crude, the proximity of the Turkmenbashi refinery in the Caspian Sea, and the Islamic Republic’s paucity of domestic refinery capacity compared to its in-principle crude output capacities.
Conclusions
The opportunities for synergy and cooperation in the Caspian Sea region are profound. It is the role of multilateral organizations to serve as shuttle diplomats in achieving collective economic benefits for the region. International organizations may also serve a valuable function in initiating confidence-building measures, including the maintenance of credible commitments, so that inevitably temporary political convergences can be overcome in the common interests of the region as a whole. This will ever further increase the wealth of the region; cement political friendships that persist throughout all adversities; advance the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to support the welfare of all people of the region; and promote and enhance the political stability and economic flourishing that the region has already become known for.
Opportunities exist in abundance. We only need to grasp them. Multilateral cooperation and engagement will surely serve to render these objectives common to all civilized nations and engender all parties’ wholehearted support and unfettered cooperation.
UPDATES ON THE SITUATION IN UKRAINE
- 20.02,2017
This weekend just past has produced three little-reported updates upon the situation in the Ukraine. Firstly, Russia and Ukraine have agreed, on the sidelines of the February 2017 Munich Security Conference, to quell what appears to have been low-intensity fighting in the frontline town of Avdiivka just north of Donetsk. Formally this has been expressed as a renewed commitment by all parties to comply with the principles of the Minsk-II agreement on cessation of hostilities in eastern Ukraine.
But there seems little doubt that the object of the most recent accord was to prevent the Avdiivka conflict from developing in any more serious a direction than it had done to date. I have already written about the recent violence in Avdiivka. A common expression of intention to de-escalate the conflict there is of course good news and a relief to the inhabitants of that region.
Somewhat more intriguingly, the Russian Federation has announced that it will recognise passports of the break-away Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and other documents issued by the de facto governments of these regions. Perhaps importantly, this includes recognition of vehicle licence plates. Although there has been some coverage of this event in the western media, and it has been met with outcry in the Ukrainian press, an accurate narrative of this decision and the reasons for it has proven difficult to find. It is therefore with some satisfaction that I have found an English translation of the Russian Presidential decree in question.
As a passing anecdote, I was intrigued to discover that it appears possible for foreigners to obtain a Donetsk People’s Republic passport, in particular if one is a Finnish journalist. In the no-doubt carefully considered words of that individual, at least as reported by the DONI Donbas News Agency, an English-language news agency based in Donetsk and of which he is Director:
It’s a great honour to receive this rare and new document. As a new citizen of the new people’s republic, I hope to give an example for people in all countries, ruled by multinational western power, that the hope is still here, freedom and truth is worth of fighting for, and in free people’s republics everything is possible. It’s all about trust, and I thank our respected leader, Alexander Zakharchenko [DPR Prime Minister], for giving me and all of us the opportunity to do our best for the better future, peace and prosperity.
It might be that in voluntarily adopting his new citizenship, this individual of Scandinavian origin has thereby explicitly or implicitly vowed to uphold the principles of the Constitution of the Donetsk People’s Republic, including those captured in Article 31.3 thereof, to the effect that “[a]ny forms of perverted union between people of the same sex are not acknowledged and will be prosecuted”. These are admittedly principles different from the philosophy encapsulated in the constitution of Finland.
The Russian President’s decree itself, recognising DPR and LPR official documentation, is notable principally for its brevity. But from its face at least, the purpose of the decree seems to be addressed at resolving the plight of effectively stateless persons who live in the DPR or LPR territories and, for whatever reason, cannot obtain or renew either Ukrainian or Russian passports and therefore might experience problems travelling to Russia; and/or cannot renew their car registration documents and thereby experience equivalent problems. The decree is expressed to be a temporary measure pending resolution of the political uncertainties in that region.
One might think it rather odd for an authority to issue a passport when no country in the world recognises it as an independent state: including either of Russia or Ukraine. Nevertheless I have seen this before. Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity inside Bosnia and Herzegovina, issued its own passports in the late 1990’s even though no other country, including Bosnia and Herzegovina’s central authorities or the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (what is now the twin independent nations of Serbia or Montenegro), recognised the territory as an independent state.
Indeed Republika Srpska’s own authorities did not explicitly assert that they were an independent state either. In my experience it was a practical, not an ideological matter. The hungry and war-wary do not usually care much for the ideological affiliation of the logo on their travel documents: such frivolous motivations tend to be the preserve of the rich. Rather the people living in the separatist territory had no travel documents once their Yugoslav passports expired. Such authorities as there were therefore issued their own travel documents on an ad interim basis.
The Bosnian Croats were rather more ingenious, setting up ad hoc consulates on Bosnian territory that at one point would hand out a Croatian passport to virtually anyone who swore allegiance to the Catholic Faith. Eventually the problem was solved by agreement upon common national Bosnian identity documents to be issued easily to persons living on both sides of the contested post-war front line, although it took a lot of pushing. Thus did the Republika Sprska passports rapidly disappear. (Incidentally, if anyone reading this still has an old RS passport, I would be delighted if they would email me with a photo of its front page. I would post the picture on this blog.)
This sort of elementary confidence-building measure is important. Ensuring that everyone in the aftermath of a civil conflict situation can obtain valid travel and vehicle registration documents from at least some internationally recognised country helps bring sense, moderation and pragmatism to all sides and lays the groundwork for future gradual implementation of peace building measures.
The third news story of significance relating to Ukraine over the weekend just past is that a Ukrainian opposition politician has passed to President Trump, via an unorthodox backchannel, his own personal plan for resolving the situation in Ukraine. I have a strong suspicion as to the some of the possible contents of this plan. The basic outlines of a solution, at least to the Donbas conflict, are now being widely discussed amongst international policymakers and there is even an inchoate sense of consensus being formed.
Not everyone is happy with the rough and ready agreement taking shape. But the most compelling argument against the dissenters on either side is that peoples’ suffering should be brought to a conclusion to the greatest extent possible notwithstanding points of ideological debate. That usually involves complaints of ideological discomfort on both sides. Nevertheless if everyone is ideologically unhappy to some degree, then in my experience the proposed resolution is often about right.
Backchannel diplomacy is common in the context of civil conflicts, particularly where front channel diplomacy has come to a block through grandstanding on the part of one or more interested parties. What I find confusing, however, is why in this instance the backchannel diplomacy has itself been the subject of grandstanding. If the New York Times is to be believed, virtually everyone involved in this secretive communication has given a media statement about it. Why? This seems to defeat the very purpose of what one is trying to achieve in quiet diplomacy.
There may be some mischief here that relates to US domestic politics. There is a bandwagon currently undertaking a circuit in Washington DC, in which different people want to participate in a political programme to show that the US President or those close to him have or had inappropriately close contacts with the government of the Russian Federation. The apparently voluntary disclosure of a project of quiet diplomacy which, by its nature, ought not to be disclosed, might be part of this project. If so, then it reinforces my intuition that a final resolution of the situation in Ukraine cannot be achieved until Washingtonian politics have reached a period of more substantial calm. We may, alas, have to be patient before a final resolution of the situation in Ukraine can be achieved.
Matthew Parish publishes statement on the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Ankara
- 19th December 2016
Please click here to read the article.
Matthew Parish to deliver lecture at Saint-Petersburg Institute of Foreign Relations, Economics and Law at conference on International Law and Globalization in December 2016
- 8th December 2016
Listen to Mark Butcher interviewing Matthew Parish on World Radio Switzerland on the new Trump presidency and the UN
- 22nd November 2016
Please click here to listen to the interview
Matthew Parish provides interview with Radio Algerie about the new UNSG (in French)
- 21st October 2016
Please click here to read the press release
Matthew Parish gives an interview to Tribune de Geneve about his vision for the future of the United Nations in Geneva
- 17th October 2016
Interview with Matthew Parish on World Radio Switzerland on the appointment of the new UNSG
- 6th October 2016
Matthew Parish discusses the appointment of Antonio Guterres, the former PM of Portugal, as the new UNSG and what this will mean for Geneva