The EU thread

[Valmy]

I don't really understand why Germany would ever need to station troops in Japan and vice versa but good for them I guess.

As the article says it's mostly about cutting red tape when military personnel train or participate in exercises in each other's countries.

Yeah. That is kind of funny reason for a military treaty.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Yeah. That is kind of funny reason for a military treaty.

We left Japan in kind of a weird state with respect to its military.  Germany still has a few hangups about foreign deployments as well.

[Jacob]

Denmark just had an election and the results are... muddled. Broadly speaking, the voters rejected the government across the centre, but neither the right block nor the left block can govern on their own; and the explicitly centrist Moderate party are the kingmakers. On top of the that, elements of the right block explicitly reject the Moderates framing them as enemies, and the Moderates for their part are unwilling to govern with the far right or far left.

@Sheilbh, I just read an interesting article where the writer argues there are three crises in Danish politics right now. I think it is similar to some of the things you've been talking about re: democracy in the UK and the West in general - though it manifests differently both because it's a different country (so different specifics) and due to Denmark's multiparty coalition political culture. I think the last part is particularly instructive, though, because it exposes more explicitly what tends to be the internal party political discussions of first-past-the-post political cultures.

The first crisis is the "bourgeois crisis" - it might be called "the crisis of the right" or "the conservartive crisis" in English speaking politics. In Denmark the parties to the right of centre are collectively referred to as "bourgois" (without the pejorative tone that it'd have in French or English) - it's essentially a collective term for the non-socialist parties - the Liberal, the National-Conservative, and the right Populist tendencies. And the crisis here is that they can't coalesce on a shared political project.

The second crisis is the "crisis of the middle" - the government across the centre lost support, the parties further to the left and right all grew. As a whole, the population is looking for answers to the challenges of today further out on the political wings.

The third crisis is the "crisis of the mass parties" - the old established parties built on mass participation are all receding (and therefore looking to collaborate more, potentially accelerating the decline), and a number of personality and or geographically defined parties are growing as the mass-engagement parties are losing strength.

I think this is an expression of political tendencies we are seeing all across the democratic (and post-democratic?) West. It echoes what Sheilbh has been saying about the UK. I think it also echoes what we're seeing in France and Germany to some extent (though I don't understand the politics there particularly clearly). I also thinks it's what we've seen play out in the US to some extent, though it's played out very differently there - inside the Republican and Democratic parties - due to the very different political cultures there.

The article is here and reads okay using automatic translation (with the one clarification that the party translated as "the Left" is a key constituent of the "Bourgeois" block, being the old farmer / Liberal mass party).