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).

[Sheilbh]

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.

So just on the results. I get that different electoral systems are there to do different things and sort of emphasis different elements or sources of democratic legitimacy.

But what you've described is exactly one of the reasons I am still not entirely won over by PR. The fact that the party that came fifth, that lost seats in the election is enjoying its moment in the sun because they hold the balance of power. So the larger parties will have to deal with them to work out which of their pre-election bloc members or pre-election policies that they took to the people will now be dumped. I get it is more representative but it's where I'm not sure that's the only thing that matters.

Similarly that, from that article, all the government parties lost votes and seats. They all had a bad night (though better than anticipated before Trump started threatening Greenland). Which is the other issue I always slightly have with PR - at one extreme I think of someone like Netanyahu, but at a more socially acceptable level there's Mark Rutte. He was PM of the Netherlands for 15 years - with governments ranging from one relying on Wilders for support to a grand coalition with Labour - and during that time he often had the lowest approval rating of any EU leader. But his party would consistently win around 20% of the vote and he's really, really good at coalition politics (we might be seeing some of his skills in his flattery of Trump). I always think of Tony Benn's five questions for anyone with power: what power have you got? where did you get it from? in whose interests do you exercise it? to whom are you accountable? and how can we get rid of you? And I find that PR systems can struggle with the last question an issue - again it's represpentative but I think it is less effective at communicating swing/rejection (or that power often also depends on a party leader's ability/willingness to do deals after and maintain power).

Why I think I'm probably a bit more AV than PR curious. A little more representative, still have the constituency link and, crucially, the decisive decision (even if it isn't always a majority) is with voters on election day not party leaders in negotiations afterwards.

@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).

Thanks - it is very interesting and I think you're right. I'd carve out the US because I think it's a very different system from anything in Europe, but I think these are general trends - which is why I think they have structural causes and "British" or "French" politics merely affects the way the symptoms present rather than the underlying issues.

FWIW I've mentioned it before but I think Peter Mair's Ruling the Void is fantastic on this. It's a very broad argument so difficult to summarise but I found this summary from one of the memorial lectures in his name which is really good - but his theory was that a really important factor was changes in political parties. Again this argument was basically only European because Europe had mass membership parties who organised our democracies in a way that just isn't analogous to the US (though there's some points of comparison on some points). But I think this is really key particularly across the third crisis and it goes back to the 80s when the incipient signs of this direction of travel emerge:

Ruling the void: the failings of party democracy

Let me start by briefly rehearsing the central arguments of Ruling The Void.

In an article first published in New Left Review in 2006, and later (and posthumously) developed into an unfinished book of the same name (Mair, Citation2013) Mair (Citation2006, 25) argued that a notion of democracy is emerging that is 'stripped of its popular component – democracy without a demos'. This turns on what he regarded as 'the twin processes of popular and elite withdrawal from mass electoral politics with particular focus on the transformation of political parties'. This happens as parties' key representative functions waste away: specifically, their role in integrating social groups and sub-cultures into the political system is undermined as class and religion lose their hold in contemporary European societies. At the same time, however, parties continue to retain their major 'procedural' (which is to say, governing) functions in that they are central to the recruitment of political elites, and the organization of legislative work and executives. But the scope of governmental ambition is reduced, in part because of the constraints of globalization and in part because of the self-limiting responses of politicians who seek to free themselves from certain responsibilities by hiving-off tasks to private firms or non-governmental agencies, a theme which has been expounded by others (see, for instance, Hay, Citation2007). The process of European integration is, in effect, an expression of this writ large, with the EU limiting the space of national governmental – which is to say, party governmental – autonomy.

However, while this 'de-politicization' of decision-making might limit the scope of political responsibility, it also serves to engender a sense of hopelessness about what representative politics is for: if it can't achieve anything important, then why bother with it? Not surprisingly, Mair claims that this resulted in a variety of reactions on the part of citizens – including the erosion of partisan identification, the loss of party membership, the decline of electoral turnout, the rise of electoral volatility, the emergence of anti-establishment parties, and a preference for single-issue group political participation.

'In sum, parties are failing as a result of a mutual withdrawal, whereby citizens retreat into private life or more specialized and often ad hoc forms of representation, while party leaderships retreat into institutions, drawing their terms of reference ever more readily from their roles as governors or public-office holders. The traditional world of party democracy—as a zone of engagement in which citizens interacted with their political leaders—is being evacuated' (Citation2006, 33).

For Mair, this constituted the erosion of parties' representative functions, as they increasingly became focused instead on their governing roles. But he warned that 'it is not enough to be just a good governor; without some degree of representative legitimacy neither the parties themselves, nor their leaders, nor even the electoral process that allows them to be chosen, will be seen to carry sufficient weight or authority. The result will be to encourage distrust and scepticism' (Citation2006, 50).

The retreat into a world of governing institutions implied that party-voter distances had grown while inter-party distances had weakened. This amounted to an erosion – one might almost say a betrayal – of the representative function, as distinctive party identities became blurred. This is most apparent when we think of the classic mass parties which are no longer strongly rooted in social sub-cultures founded on labour movements or churches. This in turn has either led to, or been facilitated by, the growing financial dependence of parties on the state, and their regulation by national laws – reflecting their transformation into quasi-state institutions. The major parties effectively collude as informal cartels in this behaviour.

Finally, such transformation has been attended by shifts in the internal organizations of political parties, such that the parties on the ground – the memberships – have been downgraded, while the parties in elective office and government – including the leaderships – have become more powerful.

And breathe! Clearly, there is much to unpick here. I think that we can start by taking as read that the empirical evidence of popular disaffection and 'retreat from politics' is largely uncontestable. Rates of partisan identification – especially strong partisan affinity – remain far lower across the established democracies than a generation or two ago; partly as a result of this, electoral volatility has generally risen, especially since the turn of the twenty-first century; at the same time, electoral turnout has generally fallen; and party membership has been in even longer-term decline in most places. As Martin Wattenberg (Citation2000, p. 76) once put it, 'there is less of a market for the parties' product'. So, we can take these things as read, and they form the context in which I want to discuss two particular – and important – claims set out in Ruling The Void: the erosion of inter-party distances and the downgrading of party memberships.

I'd just add on Mair that I think it is interesting that he was an Irish scholar - because I think Ireland is the only European country that doesn't have at core a left-right/bourgeois-labour divide in politics. It had mass membership parties there were class elements (particularly around signifiers of class or cultural capital), but the big divide in Irish politics was the civil war and on policy issues the two parties were pretty similar, one slightly more populist, the other slightly more elitist. But I think coming from that framework and from a country where left-right divide is not the default gave him a perspective on parties and democratic politics that is more difficult in the rest of Europe.

Edit: Also thought the comments on the Moderates specifically was really interesting because I think a lot of that applies to the Lib Dems. Reform like to attack Labour, Tories and Lib Dems as "the uniparty" - I've not seen the Greens go there yet, but I think they might. And I think especially with the Lib Dems there is something to it. I've been struck by how poorly they're doing in the polls when historically they were the "none of the above" party and I think that part of it is that on most issues they basically back what Keir Starmer is doing. There are rhetorical criticisms - he should be more disobliging about Trump, or slight differences of emphasis, but fundamentally they agree (in a really striking piece of polling the group who least thought Keir Starmer should resign were Lib Dem voters ). Their main position is to be anti-Farage and increasingly anti-Green as opposing the "extremes" rather than staking out their own position very clearly.

[Norgy]

I have an old comparative politics book about European party systems, and I think it's mostly redundant. There is no PASOK, no typical Gaullist party, and little is left of voter loyalty for the old working-class parties. Of course, no mention was made of the Soviet bloc.

I have re-joined the Labour Party of Norway.

There is one problem: I no longer understand politics. I know a lot, but I don't get voter behaviour. Voters are as fickle as cats. One day they like cheese, the next, we want meat.

The alignment of parties in Northern Europe is strange. The outer left and right have both eaten quite a bit of what used to be solid social democracy or centrist voters. There was also a green wave where the old parties slept on watch.

What is happening with The Greens in the UK (and Reform), seems very reminiscent of how the party systems in the north have changed.

[Sheilbh]

I agree with that - and I think my argument has always been that Farage's parties (and now the Greens) were Europeanising British politics. That so much of our discourse looks for explanations or analysis in positive or negative exceptionalisms (our island story or the Empire and imperial nostalgia explaining voting patterns in Grimsby) or the US, which is the obsession of Britain's political class (the most important fact in Britain's present is that America speaks English). Actually I think the answer is in our neighbours - our politics, the breakdowns, the structural problems look very similar to Benelux, Northern European countries, Germany, France - we are West European country that is fairly West European. Each of those, including the UK, have some little local flavour but the fundamentals are similar.

Having said all that there's two slightly contradictory ideas I've been wondering about recently.

One which was provoked by a column in the Times is actually that perhaps America is relevant in this. My argument aboe is pretty commonplace now in theory - in reality British journalists are still obsessed with DC, read the NYT, take Robert Caro books as their beach reads and don't speak or read any other languages so we have a million and one pieces on what Labour can learn from Zohran Mamdani But his point was the story of European style multi-party politics and voter volatility is true but perhaps only superficially. Unlike the US the problem in Europe is arguably de-polarisation - the attachments to political parties are gone, there is no "base" anymore for ayone and voters swing wildly (I think we do see this in the US and Canada too - reading Naomi Klein's Doppelganger which is great and she talks about this diagonalism of political constellations right now).

But - to Jake's point of multi-party politics perhaps making explicit what is implicit within the parties in the US - if you lift the hood, this journalist argued that actually within that multi-party framework we are looking more American. If you look at the polling there's about a 50/50 breakdown between a broad left-right blocs. Tories + Reform on one side, Labour + Greens, and possibly nationalists and Lib Dems on the other (though as in the article on the Moderates - I'm not sure the Lib Dems could work with Reform or Greens formally). On every issue where there is a divide those two blocs have different views and those blocs are radicalising, what's more there is a "repulsion" factor where each bloc basically thinks the other is what's really wrong with their country. It plays out differently in Europe because of multi-party politics but I wonder if it is that different?

The other more sketchy idea I have is basically whether in Europe we're just seeing a slow-moving, continental Tagentopoli. I always think there's a back to the future element of Italian politics especially in the 90s in that it sort of got to the future first because the post-Cold War/End of History moment lasted for about a week before it all collapsed. They did a speed run through Europe's recent past - external constraints, technocratic governments, corruption scandals, regionalist parties emerging (I see Umberto Bossi died last week), populist, personalist politicians and a sort of "media democracy" where it's just a product you watch on TV.

But I wonder if part of it is also that structural fact. Italy was both at a European and Atlantic level at the periphery of the core - I think that's now Europe's position with the rise of China and Atlantic indifference of the US. We are a semi-peripheral space right now, Europe is not an agent but an object that is being acted upon by other, external powers. But also I'm cynical about conspiracy theories - except in Italy because they are literally all true in post-war Italy And I feel slightly similar now. I disagree with conspiracy theories but I think it is more challenging when you have various European ex-leaders (and some current) on the payroll of various autocratic regimes or dodgy tech billionaires and the Epstein files of business, political, scientific leaders chilling out with a nonce etc (my argument would still be that I don't think any of these indicate a conspiracy but rather a class interest and class consciousness for our political class). And where those things led to in Italy was Tagentopoli and I think there are similarities with what's happening in Europe (I also think something similar happened in post-Wall Eatern European democracies - again semi-periphalised, no party roots, corruption).

[The Minsky Moment]

so we have a million and one pieces on what Labour can learn from Zohran Mamdani

But what can Reform learn from Curtis Sliwa?  Farage might be PM by now if he just could have placed decently in a hot dog eating contest.

[Sheilbh]

What can Sir Ed Davey learn from former Governor Andrew Cuo...oh God. Oh no!

[Tonitrus]

so we have a million and one pieces on what Labour can learn from Zohran Mamdani

But what can Reform learn from Curtis Sliwa? Farage might be PM by now if he just could have placed decently in a hot dog eating contest.

That they need more cats?