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The European Union is, for better or worse, the most ambitious experiment in human history in institutionalized multinational cooperation. Its success depends on the willingness of its members to abide by its rules.
In recent years, the populist-nationalist governments of former Communist bloc members Hungary and Poland have flouted some of those rules in order to boost their own popularity with citizens suspicious of the EU's liberal values on issues like immigration and minority rights. In response, the EU has scolded these "illiberal" governments and threatened forceful action – so far without much effect.
The fight between EU institutions and Poland and Hungary has escalated.
In Poland, the latest battle is over judicial authority. According to EU treaties, all union members are subject to EU laws and the final authority of the European Court of Justice. But Poland's constitutional court ruled last week that Poland's constitution trumps EU law, a direct challenge to the basis of EU membership.
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has faced off with the EU over press freedom and minority rights. The latest row began when Hungary's parliament passed legislation that bans the display to minors of products that depict or promote homosexuality or gender transformation themes. The government says the law protects kids and Hungary's family values, while the European Commission says it undermines values of tolerance and individual freedom enshrined in European law.
In the past, picking fights with the EU has boosted the popularity of both Orbán and Poland's Law and Justice Party-led government, headed by Jaroslaw Kaczyński, by playing on the anger that social conservatives feel toward liberal elites in Brussels. That's the main reason these governments tend to welcome fights with the EU.
They also know that, no matter how frustrated EU officials become with challenges from Warsaw and Budapest, the EU can't kick them out. Ejection requires a unanimous vote of all 27 EU members. To protect their own interests, Poland would veto such a move against Hungary, and Hungary would do the same for Poland.
But… there are three main reasons to believe that this time it's different.
First, it appears EU officials have had enough. Poland's court ruling is too direct a challenge to EU rules to ignore, and Hungary's government has been picking fights with Brussels for years.
Second, the European leader most instrumental in persuading EU institutions to go easy on Poland and Hungary is now leaving the stage. Germany's Angela Merkel will soon be out of power, and the country's likely incoming center-left coalition government will be much less sympathetic to rule-of-law challenges from its Eastern neighbors.
Third, Brussels has a powerful new weapon. The European Commission can withhold large amounts of much-needed COVID recovery funds until these two governments prove they respect EU rules. That's 36 billion euros ($41.7 billion) for Poland and 7.2 billion euros for smaller Hungary. The Commission is already signaling that Poland and Hungary will have to offer serious and specific concessions before checks are cut. Initial disbursements have already been delayed.
The Polish and Hungarian governments have limited leverage to fight back. Opinion polls show that strong majorities in both countries favor continued EU membership — and both governments have acknowledged as much. In Poland, the court rulings sent hundreds of thousands of pro-EU Poles into the streets in protest.
And Hungary's Orbán faces a tough fight for re-election next year against a united opposition that has labelled the race a choice of "Orbán or Europe."
Both governments need only look toward the Czech Republic, where a surprise election result last weekend leaves euroskeptic, anti-immigration populist Andrej Babiš on the verge of losing power.
These fights will drag on into next year. But this time, Brussels may finally be fighting to win.
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Ian Bremmer is joined on GZERO World by artificial intelligence scientists Kai-fu Lee, who recently wrote about how AI will change the world over the next two decades, precisely to talk about AI's future. After this week's Facebook debacle, how can we align interest to regulate AI-driven algorithms? Will AI steal all our jobs? And what should we do to learn from AI to improve our lives before it gets smarter than us?
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Is a robot coming for your job? Kai-fu Lee explains AI
US elections officials have always persuaded losing candidates that they've, ahem, lost. Now it's worse because there's a new paradigm, according to former DHS and Election Assistance Commission official Matt Masterson, policy fellow with the Stanford Internet Observatory. Candidates that won't accept defeat regardless of the margin or evidence of fraud, he says, are undermining trust in the system — and election officials are ill-equipped to deal with this problem.
Matt Masterson made these remarks during a live Global Stage event, Infodemic: defending democracy from disinformation. Watch the full event here: https://www.gzeromedia.com/global-stage/virtual-events/disinformation-is-a-big-problem-what-can-we-do-about-it
Who's most responsible for spreading misinformation online? For Ginny Badanes, senior director for Democracy Forward at Microsoft, the problem starts with those who create it, yet ultimately governments, companies and individuals all share the burden. And she's more interested in what we can do to respond.
Ginny Badanes spoke at a live Global Stage event, Infodemic: defending democracy from disinformation. Watch the full event here: https://www.gzeromedia.com/global-stage/virtual-events/disinformation-is-a-big-problem-what-can-we-do-about-it
Is Hezbollah losing influence in Lebanon? Kim Ghattas on Lebanese divisions & unity
October 16, 2021
Some of the worst sectarian clashes since Lebanon's 15-year civil war (1975-1990) broke out in Beirut this week between supporters of Hezbollah and Amal, both Shiite political parties, and Christian, far-right Lebanese Forces. Shiite protesters were rallying against the state probe into the Beirut port blast, which occurred last year. They say authorities were singling out Shiite politicians for questioning and blame. In this video, watch Ian Bremmer's conversation with Lebanese journalist and author Kim Ghattas on GZW talking about the future of Lebanese politics and sectarianism in the county after the after the blast. It was originally published on August 19, 2020.
In Lebanon, "a majority (are) united in wanting a different future, a future that is non-sectarian, that is non-corrupt, that provides prosperity, justice, dignity for people," journalist Kim Ghattas told Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
In this interview, Ghattas discusses the opportunity that could arise from the tragedy of the Beirut explosion which killed 200 and injured thousands more. The Lebanese are "fed up" with the militant group Hezbollah, she tells Bremmer, and want to strive for a government that better resembles the diversity and cosmopolitan nature of its citizens.
Watch the GZERO World episode: Lebanon Post-Blast: Rage in the Streets of Beirut.
Some of the worst sectarian clashes since Lebanon's 15-year civil war (1975-1990) broke out in Beirut this week between supporters of Hezbollah and Amal, both Shiite political parties, and Christian, far-right Lebanese Forces. Shiite protesters were rallying against the state probe into the Beirut port blast, which occurred last year. They say authorities were singling out Shiite politicians for questioning and blame. Below is our original piece on the Beirut port explosions published on August 5, 2020.
The twin explosions at Beirut's port on Tuesday were so powerful that the aftershocks reverberated as far as the Eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, 150 miles away. The specter of fire and smoke was such that many suggested on social media that Beirut had experienced a nuclear blast.
In the days ahead, more details will come to light about why a deadly cache of materials was haphazardly stashed at a port warehouse, and why Lebanon's government failed to secure the site. So, what comes next for crisis-ridden Lebanon?
The timing could not be worse. In recent weeks, Lebanon, one of the world's most indebted countries, has spiraled into chaos after decades of economic mismanagement.
Crime is spiking as desperate Lebanese seek scarce basics like food and medicine, while others are turning to a swarming online barter economy to survive — clothes for baby formula? The deepening economic crisis recently pushed at least 500,000 children in Beirut into poverty, an aid group warned in July.
International observers, meanwhile, have questioned whether Lebanon has already breached the "failed state" threshold.
International support. So far, countries including Australia, Canada, France, Israel, Norway, Turkey and the Netherlands have offered Beirut urgent humanitarian aid in the form of generators, medical equipment and personnel, and even some cash. The EU, for its part, is sending search and rescue teams to search for survivors, while French President Emmanuel Macron will touch down in Beirut on Thursday to offer support to his country's former colony.
While immediate humanitarian support has been forthcoming — and encouraging — the aid itself is unlikely to pull Lebanon back from the brink. There are several reasons for this.
First, humanitarian aid is one thing, but financial lifelines are another. Even before the pandemic crippled the global economy, the World Bank predicted that 50 percent of Lebanese could be living below the poverty line if current trends continued. Hoping to stave off its worst economic crisis since the 15-year civil war ended in 1990, Beirut has since appealed to international creditors like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a whopping $10 billion in financial assistance, but the IMF has refused to play ball unless the Lebanese government reforms its bloated, inefficient, and corrupt public sector. So far, Beirut's power brokers have resisted.
Reformist will is key. Even if the IMF acquiesces and doles out funds to cash-strapped Lebanon, what happens when the money gets there? Lebanon's patronage-ridden public sector and corrupted politicians, many of them former warlords of sectarian groups, have mismanaged the country's economy for decades, lining their own pockets while the middle class has plunged into poverty. IMF support does not solve long-term problems such as government paralysis, poverty and social instability that, experts warn, can only be mitigated through structural reform.
The Hezbollah equation. The political clout of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite group, further complicates Lebanon's efforts to secure external funding. In 2018, the IMF pledged $11 billion to Lebanon on the condition that the government institute significant anti-corruption and economic reforms. Washington, which, along with its Gulf Arab allies, deems the group a terrorist organization, recently accused Hezbollah of obstructing reform efforts, a view tacitly supported by other international donors.
This week's tumult also comes as the country braces for a UN court's verdict on the 2005 slaying of Lebanon's former Sunni Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, set to be handed down on August 18. The outcome in the Hariri case, which inflamed sectarian tensions across Lebanon and the region, will likely implicate Hezbollah officials. This risks further complicating efforts to secure external aid, and threatens to ignite sectarian discord amongst already-despondent Lebanese.
As negotiations with the IMF stalled in recent months, a desperate Beirut turned to Beijing for economic support, but it's walking a fine line, wary of irking Washington, a longtime ally, as US-China tensions surge.
The ball is largely in Beirut's court. The government can start working towards comprehensive reform in the hopes of lifting its floundering population out of poverty. Alternatively, it can fall back on the excuse of international donors not coming through and continue with business as usual. Which will it choose?
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From $3.5 trillion to $2 trillion: Cuts to US spending bill mean less money for families
October 15, 2021
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, shares insights on US politics:
What does it actually mean to cut $1 trillion from the Democrats' $3.5 trillion social spending bill?
President Biden has proposed one of the most ambitious expansions of federal spending in recent memory. If he gets everything he wants, it would probably be the largest expansion of government since the Great Society, but he's not going to get everything he wants. Democrats have basically said they cannot do all $3.5 trillion in spending. They're probably going to end up around $2 trillion. So what gets cut? Well, we don't know yet. There's kind of two ways to go about this. They could either cut the number of programs that have been proposed, doing fewer things with more money on a permanent basis, or they could try to do more things, each program getting less money and potentially doing them on a temporary basis. So, a future Congress would have to extend it. What does this mean for you? Well, a lot of the money in here is designed to go directly to families, either in the form of cash payments, through the tax code, the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, or subsidies for things like child care, early childhood education, and community college. And if you cut these things back, it means less money is going to go out the door to the American people. It also means less tax increases to finance it. So the implications of what's being proposed could actually end up being a big deal for a lot of Americans who would qualify for benefits under these new programs.
More American law enforcement officers have died from COVID-19 than from other work-related causes. What is happening to them?
It turns out police officers really reflect the rest of society. They tend to be a little bit more conservative than the general population, and they read the same misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine that the rest of us do. So what you've seen, as you've seen in the case of other unions and other workforces that have tried to mandate vaccines and force their workers to protect themselves against the coronavirus, is some resistance on the part of police officers, who also happen to be in a dangerous line of work. There've been many stories of unionized workforces resisting vaccine mandates. The New York teachers union protested the mandate to the mayor a couple of weeks ago. There were rumors that a slowdown among Southwest pilots that happened last weekend was related to the vaccine mandates. Although those rumors have generally been unfounded, and could have more to do with the way that Southwest manages its airline fleet. However, this is a really common theme and it's going to continue to be common as individuals push back against these mandates, putting themselves at risk of catching the coronavirus.
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Is Hezbollah losing influence in Lebanon? Kim Ghattas on Lebanese divisions & unity
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October 16, 2021
From $3.5 trillion to $2 trillion: Cuts to US spending bill mean less money for families
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October 15, 2021
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