Austria's Choice

Today, there is to be a general election in Austria. Thanks to the actions of Angela Merkel two years ago, the conclusion of the election in this neighbouring country to Germany was clear before voting began. The overwhelming majority of Austrians agree that there are now too many Muslims in the country, that the strain they have put on the social assistance and housing and education and health systems is unacceptable; and that no further significant immigration - however desperate the plight of people claiming to be 'refugees' might be - should be permitted. The government that will emerge from the election will be a coalition with a more right-wing structure than any since the re-unification of Austria [after allied occupation] in 1956. The two stand-out policy positions that it is expected to adopt are to seal the frontiers of the EU against immigrants, and to review and restrict access to the social security and related systems.

Neigbouring Hungary has had a government with policies designed to minimise immigration from outside the EU for several years: access to that country is very heavily controlled, with high wire fences and a strong presence of border guards. To the south-west of the Hungarian frontier is Austria's border with Italy, which has already been 'strengthened' to limit the onward passage of any of the tens of thousands of economic migrants who reach Italy by sea every year. No doubt that border will further be toughened: but there will also be sympathy for the Italians in their situation of receiving the migrants, which is resulting in right-wing politicians rising through 'populist' movements there, too.

There will be resistance in Austria to any attempt by Germany to impose any quota of Muslim [or, indeed, any other category of] immigrants on any EU country. It is widely expected that Austria will adhere to, and may even join, the 'Visigrad' group of countries [Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary] that have 'ganged up' to resist pressure from Germany and France. Thus there is already the making of a very powerful subset of the EU that will simply decline to go along with aspects of the settlement that the USA imposed on 'liberated' Europe after 1945. The Liberal Consensus to which Roosevelt and Truman, Churchill and deGaulle subscribed is fading fast.

The right-wing AfD in Germany has gained seats in the Bundestag, sufficient in number to harass whatever coalition government Mrs Merkel may be able to cobble together. France has a completely unproved president; and there are huge questions as to whether his parliamentary majority and constitutional authority will be enough to overcome the inertia of the trade unions, farmers and other vested interests. It has been noted above that Italy has strong and growing right-wing parties, and the legacy of Fascism is ceasing to be seen as an embarrassment. Those countries in north and west Europe that have a couple of centuries of constitutional government [Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Luxembourg; plus non-EU-member Norway] have all seen some emergence of minority anti-migrant movements. The three Baltic States [Estonia Latvia and Lithuania] have no significant problem with Muslim immigrants; they have suffered, to varying degrees, net emigration to the more affluent west of the EU.

The Balkan EU members, and aspirants to membership, want to prove their democratic credentials; but they have limited resources to accommodate immigrants [balanced by limited means of keeping them out]. They will sympathise with [and envy] the countries to the north that have the means and the will to seal their borders to a significant extent.

Thus the European Union that is harassed by the Brexit issue is a very different political and emotional structure than it was at the beginning of 2015: the year in which Cowardy Cameron launched the Referendum as an election pledge. It is quickly becoming an entity about which any true democrat would have serious questions. Britain is so beset by a useless government that it has not yet faced up to the point: but there is a growing doubt as to whether we would wish to join, if that was the issue before us.

Trump Trumped?

At seven o'clock this morning I saw from my window in Bakewell what was perhaps the most perfect rainbow I have ever seen. The colours were brilliant, the bow was complete and behind it the rain clouds were dissipating quickly. From my radio I heard comment on the departure of Steve Bannon from the White House: and it would have been easy to take the atmospheric phenomenon in the English East Midlands as a portent of better times to come in the District of Columbia. But to ascribe to natural events, whether it be the positioning of stars in the zodiac or a trick of the light in the Peak District, as an indication of the future trend of events in politics, in society or in one's private life is to abdicate responsibility. The management of one's conduct in the circumstances where one is placed in life is the sole responsibility of the individual; and the people who went out last evening in Barcelona to oppose immigrants [especially Muslim immigrants], and the contrarians who went to oppose them, were each responsible for being there however far they may have participated in mob behaviour if things had become any more stressful.

Similarly, the events in Virginia earlier in the week showed divergences in people's reactions to circumstances; and the President of the United States [possibly with Mr Bannon's advice] made a major mess of responding to it. It is possible to read President Trump's reaction as a perfectly comprehensible determination not to endorse the 'left', who show an increasing tendency to violence and intolerance. The president now has a huge task of deciding what he means, then of saying it consistently. The removal of Mr Bannon should help, at least a little, in this process. Mr Bannon appears to have an obsession with war. In the last couple of days he has argued that the spat with North Korea over nuclear weapons is a sideshow; which has distracted the president and the media from the 'real war' that is the trading relations of the two dominating economies. It is more important that Bannon should be whisked off the official stage if he is correct in his assessment than if he is wrong: incendiary utterance [written or spoken] can be hugely damaging in the resolution of a matter of such complexity as US-China trade relations, which will take decades to resolve satisfactorily.

Bannon has said that he will now feel free to wage war against the president's enemies. He will surely find that as the president is managed into moderation 'the president' [or, at least, the presidency] will become the target for more and more opposition and abuse from Mr Bannon's shrinking cohort of ultramontane conservatives.

The question has now become explicit: can Mr Trump be controlled so that he can be made to appear as a more intelligent and sensitive person than he has displayed over the years? I call to mind the image of Woodrow Wilson, a two-term president who had redrawn the map of Europe but failed to get the US Congress to agree to the treaties that created the League of Nations, who spent his last months in the White House as a shriveled shadow 'managed' by his wife. The image of Trump constrained by a kitchen cabinet, and thus protected from impeachment and not allowed to resign, is intriguing perhaps my rainbow was a portent, after all?