Mon petit coeur de Français saigne que ce débat ait lieu outre-Atlantique, mais c'est le prix à payer d'être une nation vassale : zéro vie intellectuelle.
Edouard Husson dans Atlantico :
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Il aura fallu attendre que les Américains le disent ...
La révolution part du coeur de la forteresse libérale : Dani Rodrik, titulaire d'une chaire dotée par la Fondation Henry Ford et consacrée à l'économie politique internationale, président de la International Economic Association, construit depuis plusieurs années une thèse qui va à l'encontre de la pensée dominante : l'Etat-Nation est indispensable au bon fonctionnement, sur le long terme, de l'économie de marché et de la mondialisation. On trouvera une bonne synthèse de ses analyses dans un article de vulgarisation que l'auteur a publié récemment et intitulé "Pourquoi les Etats-nations sont une bonne chose".
Retenons quelques idées fortes :
1. Le marché ne peut pas se donner à lui-même ses propres règles.
2. l'Etat national est le plus à même de fixer le cadre de l'économie de marché : il a fait ses preuves pour le démarrage des économies industrielles et il reste aujourd'hui un instrument puissant.
3. L'économie mondialisée, en démantelant ou en court-circuitant l'Etat-nation s'est privée d'un moteur profond de la croissance : la compétition entre des systèmes qui ont chacun leur cohérence, héritée de l'histoire, pour accueillir l'investissement, cultiver l'innovation, stimuler le commerce et développer la consommation.
Quelques remarques, tout d'abord, sur notre capacité collective à ne pas entendre le débat d'idées tel qu'il peut se dérouler ailleurs. Dani Rodrik n'en est pas à sa première formulation. Les éditions La Découverte avaient fait paraître à la fin des années 2000 un ouvrage de Dani Rodrik intitulé "Nations et mondialisation", qui avait relativement peu attiré l'attention. Pourtant le livre impliquait une possible réponse à la crise mondiale qui venait de commencer. Si les équipes de Nicolas Sarkozy avaient été un peu curieuses, elles auraient trouvé dans l'ouvrage un moyen élégant de surmonter la contradiction inhérente au sarkozysme : l'impossibilité de rendre la priorité aux intérêts des Français dans le système de l'Union Européenne tel qu'il a évolué depuis le début des années 1990.
Dani Rodrik fait souvent allusion au système de Bretton Woods, comme à un point d'équilibre entre Etats-nations et ouverture mondiale des économies. Ou plutôt, il insiste sur le fait que la mondialisation qui se mettait progressivement en marche à cette époque fonctionnait très bien parce qu'elle s'appuyait sur les Etats-nations. Si l'on applique le raisonnement à l'Europe, cela revient à penser que le Marché Commun était infiniment plus efficace, dans son fonctionnement, que l'Europe de Maastricht. C'est retrouver un constat fait par tous les historiens : la dynamique du capitalisme européen est née de la concurrence entre les Etats-nations qui émergent à partir de la fin du Moyen-Age. Le système de Maastricht est à l'opposé parce qu'il impose à dix-huit pays d'adopter un système monétaire qui est le fruit d'un équilibre très particulier, celui de la société allemande.
Relisons brièvement l'histoire économique et politique des quarante dernières années et nous verrons que d'autres chemins étaient possibles :
- En 1971, Richard Nixon casse le système de Bretton Woods en mettant fin à la convertibilité du dollar en or. Il était probablement impossible de rassembler une coalition d'Etats prêts à ramener Washington à la table de négociation d'un nouveau Bretton Woods. En revanche, il fallait en tirer la conclusion que le contrôle de la monnaie et de la politique de change pour une nation était essentiel dans un monde où les Etats-Unis tendaient à imposer leurs règles monétaires. Or c'est exactement le contraire qu'ont initié Valéry Giscard d'Estaing et Raymond Barre: ils se sont ralliés aux règles monétaires allemandes, les plus opposées à la conception américaine de la monnaie. La RFA a fait le choix, depuis quarante ans, d'une stabilité monétaire absolue (théoriquement) dans un monde de changes flottants ; elle n'a pu se permettre cette incongruité que parce qu'elle n'a pas eu pendant longtemps de salaire minimum ; et puis, surtout, parce que le reste de son environnement européen a accepté de renoncer à la flexibilité monétaire. Ce faisant, l'Europe a perdu une de ses forces : la compétition entre des systèmes à la fois proches et différents, qui tiraient la croissance vers le haut grâce à l'intensification du commerce entre eux.
- Le thatchérisme n'est pas du tout ce que l'on dit. Pour la "Dame de Fer", il n'y avait pas de capitalisme efficace possible en dehors de l'Etat-nation. Peut-être étonnerait-on Dani Rodrik en ressortant certains discours de Margaret Thatcher, dans lesquels celle-ci insiste sur le fait que le marché ne fonctionne pas sans un certain nombre de règles fixées par l'Etat. Le modèle qu'elle avait en tête était celui d'une économie touours plus ouverte, certes mais où les Etats-nations s'entendaient pour réguler les forces du marché. La Dame de Fer voulait avoir le droit chez elle de privatiser autant qu'elle le voulait. Mais elle ne voulait pas forcément imposer son modèle aux autres. Elle réclamait l'établissement de règles simples et d'accords équitables entre nations. En 1990, elle proposa à François Mitterrand que la France et la Grande-Bretagne veillent ensemble à ce que l'absoption par l'Allemagne de l'Ouest de l'ancienne RDA ne crée pas de déséquilibres pour la bonne marche de la Communauté Européenne. Mitterrand, non seulement, ne saisit pas la main tendue mais il bascula du côté allemand, plongeant notre pays dans un inévitable alignement sur des règles que nous n'avions pas choisies. Margaret Thatcher, isolée, fut mise en minorité dans son propre parti, où l'on avait tendance, de plus en plus, à détacher les enjeux du marché de l'Etat-nation. S'amorça une séquence qui vient de se terminer avec le vote du Brexit. On a toutes les raisons de penser que la France, mais aussi l'Europe, seraient aujourd'hui plus prospères si François Mitterrand avait choisi Margaret Thatcher plutôt qu'Helmut Kohl.
- Dani Rodrick a beaucoup travaillé sur la Turquie dans l'économie internationale. Il est évidemment sensible au fait que les pays dits émergents, tirent leur force d'un modèle national au sein duquel le marché peut se déployer. A des degrés différents, en tenant compte de leur histoire et de leur équilibre social, les BRICS et bien d'autres pays sont en train de changer le visage de la mondialisation : ils la rendent polycentrique. Si l'on suit le raisonnement de Rodrick sur les vertus de la compétitions entre les variantes du capitalisme que mettent en place les Etats-nations, le monde devrait être plus prospère dans les décennies qui viennent si l'Occident n'entrave pas l'émergence de sociétés ouvertes en Asie et en Afrique.
Quand on regarde de plus près, en même temps, la Grande-Bretagne, après Margaret Thatcher, a largement gardé un point d'équilibre national : elle n'est pas entré dans l'euro; elle a su rendre à Londres un rôle de capitale financière internationale. Dans ce cadre-là, le Brexit est beaucoup moins dramatique que ce qu'on voudrait nous faire croire : il s'agit largement, pour les Britanniques, de tirer les leçons d'une phase de la mondialisation où la désindustrialisation a atteint un point critique et les inégalités sociales sont devenues insupportables. Les Britanniques n'entendent pas renoncer au commerce mondial, au contraire, mais ils veulent ajuster les règles, retrouver un équilibre social. L'élection de Donald Trump, que cela plaise ou non, envoie un message du même type. Au lieu de nous fixer sur les hésitations de Theresa May ou les outrances de Donald Trump, il nous faudrait prendre conscience qu'un débat en profondeur est lancé dans les sociétés anglophones sur l'absence de contrepoids démocratiques et étatiques suffisants aux marchés tels qu'ils fonctionnent aujourd'hui. C'est dans cet environnement en train de se modifier que des voix comme celles de Dani Rodrick, modérées, raisonnables mais sans concession du point de vue de l'analyse scientifique, peuvent rencontrer une audience croissante.
La France de 2017, celle qui a élu Emmanuel Macron, est obsédée par le "modèle allemand" et seulement superficiellement amie de la Grande-Bretagne et des Etats-Unis. Alors qu'il faudrait faire le contraire : nous inspirer largement des débats d'outre-Atlantique et revenir à une Europe des Etats-nations dans laquelle l'Allemagne n'est qu'un pays parmi d'autres.
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Affichage des articles dont le libellé est frontières souveraines. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est frontières souveraines. Afficher tous les articles
dimanche, octobre 08, 2017
jeudi, septembre 14, 2017
Peter Hitchens fait l'éloge des frontières
Je suis trop fainéant pour écrire ce soir. Je cite.
IN PRAISE OF BORDERS by Peter Hitchens October 2017
Borders are a substitute used by less fortunate lands for the sea and the mountains behind which happier countries shelter. No great civilization has grown and endured except behind the shield of ocean, mountain, or desert.
How different Poland’s history would be if it had a few dozen miles of deep salt water between it and its neighbors. How much trouble might be saved if Israel were an island. Countries with cliffs and churning, white-flecked seas for borders tend not to be partitioned or carted off into captivity, especially if they have the sense to build navies.
It is considered impolite to mention it these days, but Britain’s defiance of Hitler in 1940 owed more to the Channel and the North Sea than it did to the RAF. Salt water was our ultimate weapon, and our sensible respect for it made us hesitate, to Stalin’s fury, to launch any invasion against Hitler’s coastline. D-Day was a very near thing, even with the vast resources, the careful preparation, the brilliant deception. If the weather forecasters had gotten it wrong, the invasion fleet would have been scattered and the Red Army would have liberated Paris sometime in 1946, before driving on to the English Channel to ponder the future. At least it would have stopped there.
People in free countries should be more in love with the sea, more sympathetic to those who don’t have it. I grew up in a Britain where every road ended at the sea. In fact, the sea lay just beyond the bottom of our garden in the Portsmouth suburb where we lived, endlessly reassuring especially when (as was usually so) it was rough or hidden by fog. As a naval family, we always remembered Lord St. Vincent’s witty promise to Parliament while Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Army gazed out toward England from the hills above Boulogne in France: “I do not say they cannot come,” St. Vincent creaked. “I only say they cannot come by sea.” Honorable members obediently laughed. For the British Navy controlled every square inch of those gray waters, and gaze as they might toward the coast of England from the parade grounds of Boulogne, the French could not cross them.
If a country has no sea, it must come up with a substitute. And that substitute is the guarded border. As a safe Englishman, I have never resented or decried these odd and often expensive structures. I can quite see why people want them. I can, alas, even envisage borders growing up in our own islands, where old nations are seeking to be reborn. There are worse things we might face. I have always thought that the French Maginot Line, now a derided ruin like the Great Wall of China, was rather sensible, its only fault being that it was unfinished, a major failing in any wall. I have helicoptered above much of the length of Israel’s frontier with the “occupied territories,” and indeed climbed through a rather feeble section of it in the Jerusalem suburbs, and I see the sense in it. No doubt it is often unjust, and it was much better for everyone when there was friendliness across the line and thousands of Arabs used to travel peacefully and easily to work in Israel. But the barrier is a reasonable response to the nasty tactic of sending suicide bombers into Israeli towns, as is shown by the fact that it has much diminished these horrible attacks. My only worry is that it cannot possibly be sustained. Walls, unlike oceans, require ceaseless maintenance and repair, and must be manned night and day by alert and disciplined guardians. Otherwise they become relics.
Israel is an interesting case. Turn eastward and you can, with some persistence, cross into officially friendly Jordan, just over the surprisingly feeble and narrow river of that name. This gateway is supposed to be part of the “New Middle East,” an absurdly optimistic concept dreamt up by the late Shimon Peres and based on the idea that Muslim Arabs would stop hating Israel if it made concessions to them. Very few people take the sort-of-bus service that runs from Tel Aviv to Amman, via Beit She’an—and no wonder. The Jordan River crossing on a Sunday evening is one of the loneliest places I have ever been, the sort of spot where you can hear yourself breathing, and the border officials hugely outnumber the travelers. The only other sound is the squeak of Israeli drivers unscrewing Hebrew license plates from their cars and substituting Arabic ones. This is an essential safety measure in Jordan, where the “Anti-Normalization League” campaigns ceaselessly against any concession to Zionism. Despite the country’s official moderation, it would not be a good idea to be identified as an Israeli on the country roads which wind down toward Amman. I saw no Jordanians crossing into the Zionist entity bent on pleasure or business. Normality is not just a fiction but an absurdity. Mr. Peres’s “New Middle East” is a phantasm, like the Arab Spring. The place only exists for propaganda purposes. In truth, the Jordan Valley remains a place of unalterable tension, and it is a pity that the river is not deep and wide, as the song says it is.
Travel up beyond the Sea of Galilee, past blasted concrete buildings and abandoned fortifications from the bitter war of 1973, and into the Golan Heights, where you will find a more honest frontier that is wholly dead and sealed, like a tomb. There is no pretense of friendship or normality here. Even so, when I asked an Israeli Army officer if he felt threatened, he remarked that it was one of the quietest places anywhere on his troubled country’s disputed edges. President Assad’s ruthless despotism left no doubt about who was responsible for any missiles or armed groups which came across it. “If anything bad comes across, we have a return address,” he pointed out, with quiet menace. This is why many Israelis will be glad if and when Mr. Assad regains full control. A reliable tyranny on the far side of the barbed wire is far more reassuring and desirable than anarchy or the Arab Spring.
Why, then, do so many speak darkly of borders as unnecessary and undesirable? Enthusiasts for “free movement of peoples,” the type who can be found in revolutionary Marxist sects and in the offices of liberal capitalist organs such as The Economist, claim to believe that the absolute equality of all humans is violated by the idea of frontiers. The Bolsheviks believed that humanity is infinitely malleable and that class and education determine changeable human nature. The economic liberals simply think that open borders bring greater general prosperity by keeping labor costs down. In most cases, such people live remotely from the areas most directly affected by the large-scale migration they say they support.
In practice, they will take a slightly different view if too many people act according to their vision. The open borders of much of the European Union have been at least partly closed again in recent years, following Chancellor Angela Merkel’s utopian decision to welcome thousands of undocumented Middle Eastern migrants (some of whom may actually have been refugees from the Syrian war, but many of whom were economically motivated, as The Economist would want them to be). Sweden, once a country of relaxed liberalism, has found its politics bitterly transformed after trying to apply those beautiful beliefs in practice. The decision of several E.U. navies to offer a ferry service across the Mediterranean for migrants from Africa caused a similar revulsion from this idealism. Suddenly, France began patrolling its borders with Italy for the first time in years.
Even on those who in general accept their usefulness, borders have a paradoxical effect. Precisely because they guard us from straying into a different culture, we long to do so. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice clambering through the looking glass, we yearn to know what is beyond the wire, and what lies on the other side of the mysterious wooded hills that are visible but not reachable. Sometimes it is just a wish to know what is beyond that door or down that corridor. Not being allowed to go somewhere or know something, as we have known since the Garden of Eden, can be the greatest temptation of all.
I felt this most powerfully—the mad instinct for crossing into the unknown—when at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, an exhilarating spot which (after many years of effort) I have now viewed from both sides. My first visit was from the South, in a press party accompanying Margaret Thatcher. All around was the peace of an unpolluted animal and bird sanctuary, thanks to the absence of man. Both sides competed by flying enormous flags of their rival nations, flags so huge that they ripped themselves to pieces in high winds. Just to the north, beyond the so-called “Bridge of No Return,” across which prisoners of war and the crew of the captured USS Pueblo had been released by the Communists, sat a fake village from whose empty concrete buildings eerie music drifted, supposedly demonstrating the happiness of its nonexistent inhabitants. I am not sure whom this was supposed to fool.
Strangest of all was that, for a few hundred yards, there was no fence. A line of scrubbed paving stones marked the border, once the most emphatic and angry contact between the two rival worlds of the Cold War. On one side, political and religious liberty, prosperity, rationality stretched onward and outwards. On the other, a vast dark planet of censorship, people shrieking slogans, parades, lies, and privation continued all the way to the middle of Germany. Now it is less of an ideological border—just a puzzling, dispiriting relic of a dead conflict, which nobody can find a way of dismantling.
Much as people are said to be tempted to hurl themselves off cliffs and tall buildings, I was gripped with a crazy desire to dash across into the North, and wondered if members of the Communist delegation, close and clearly visible on the other side, were troubled by the same folly. Years later, I knew they must have been. For I traveled down from Pyongyang, through the North’s fortifications and propaganda lectures, and found myself ten feet from where I had been twenty years before, with nothing between me and the South but air—but such air, fizzing and crackling with danger. Is there anything more savage than hostility between peoples divided by civil war? Enemy nations do not even begin to contrive the pseudo-moral excuses which people of the same nation dream up for killing and hating each other. Yet still I longed to make that foolish, fatal dash, just because it was there.
I used to get a similar feeling near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. I now feel privileged that I saw Berlin many times in the days of the Wall, and penetrated through it at Friedrichstrasse Station to emerge in a place so different from its Western twin that it is still hard to believe it was so. Technically, it was only a political division. But East Berlin smelled different, had different colors, somehow a different light in the sky. The posture of the people was different. Above all, the purpose of everyday things in the Communist world was tinged with a second, less everyday purpose. I learned from my first voyages into this zone that this was the great distinguishing feature. Shops, opera houses, trains, museums, war memorials, newspapers all possessed a greater ideological purpose which completely transformed them, but which I was not allowed to know in full. It always seemed a small miracle when I succeeded in buying a meal, making a journey, or obtaining information. I felt I hadn’t really been meant to do any of these things. When I got back to the West, its obliging simplicity began to seem unsatisfactory. Where was the challenge?
Even if we could somehow construct a world where borders were not necessary for peace and security, could we really be happy without them? There is a joy in crossing from one place into another that we are robbed of by any effort to make all places one. I cannot be the only person who has developed an active joy in obtaining and using hard-to-get visas. People used to complain about Communist border checks. I didn’t. I positively liked these Ludmillas and Nastyas with their frazzled, bleached hair under severe peaked caps, glaring at my documents with patriotic zeal. Generally, they didn’t actually take that long, and it was possible, sometimes, to get the faintest ghost of a smile out of some of them before they whacked the entry or exit stamp (always in lurid green ink) onto my passport. Nowadays the Russian border officials are positively chatty. One rather beautiful passport checker in Moscow recently asked me, “Do you think Russia will ever be a normal country?” and creased up when I shot back, “I hope not!”
There is the Schengen Agreement’s abolition of European borders. If I can stroll unchecked (as I have) from Strasbourg in France to Kehl in Germany, or from Aachen in Germany to Vaals in the Netherlands, so can anyone else. What, then, is the point of my machine-readable, ultra-secure United Kingdom passport, obtained through severe bureaucracy? It goes deeper. When we study the dismal history of the European 1930s, isn’t Germany’s scorn for the borders of her neighbors one of the most striking things in the newsreels and the photographs? Grinning soldiers smash or sweep through the border posts of conquered or absorbed nations, tossing aside the striped poles that symbolized independence, the quiet existence of another way of doing things, a different language, a different coinage, and a different law. Didn’t we fight World War II at least partly to put those borders back, and allow those small nations to live once again undisturbed as they wished?
Yet all those borders once brushed aside by German tanks are now vanished. Travel down from Berlin to Prague, or Berlin to Brussels or Amsterdam or Vienna, on Europe’s swift new trains, and nobody will ask for your papers. I jolly well think they should. This isn’t just because untold numbers of migrants, having crossed the Mediterranean or the straits between Turkey and the Greek islands, are now roaming a borderless Europe. People are entitled to live differently if they want to. It makes them happy and proud. A world without differences would be a world without any true character or any true freedom, since the planet is far too big a community for people to be effectively unselfish in it. Without borders, we would dwell in a global parking lot. A reasonable love of where you live, its customs, landscape, language, and humor, is the basis for all other communal loves.
So I have never really seen why Donald Trump likes the idea of a proper border between the U.S. and Mexico. He doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of person who has that generous affection for the small, the local, and the particular which is the foundation of proper patriotism. But never mind. It is a good idea, if only for the following reason: How can the U.S. reasonably ask people such as me, from law-governed, civilized nations, who have no plans to stay, to submit to fingerprint checks and intrusive questioning at airports, if it simultaneously allows countless persons from who-knows-where to walk straight into the country, vanish for years—and then apply for and be granted citizenship on the grounds that it is too much trouble to do anything else? If you want to have a country, you have to decide who can come into it. If you don’t, won’t, or can’t, it’s not a proper country. President Trump, build up that wall!
Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday.
IN PRAISE OF BORDERS by Peter Hitchens October 2017
Borders are a substitute used by less fortunate lands for the sea and the mountains behind which happier countries shelter. No great civilization has grown and endured except behind the shield of ocean, mountain, or desert.
How different Poland’s history would be if it had a few dozen miles of deep salt water between it and its neighbors. How much trouble might be saved if Israel were an island. Countries with cliffs and churning, white-flecked seas for borders tend not to be partitioned or carted off into captivity, especially if they have the sense to build navies.
It is considered impolite to mention it these days, but Britain’s defiance of Hitler in 1940 owed more to the Channel and the North Sea than it did to the RAF. Salt water was our ultimate weapon, and our sensible respect for it made us hesitate, to Stalin’s fury, to launch any invasion against Hitler’s coastline. D-Day was a very near thing, even with the vast resources, the careful preparation, the brilliant deception. If the weather forecasters had gotten it wrong, the invasion fleet would have been scattered and the Red Army would have liberated Paris sometime in 1946, before driving on to the English Channel to ponder the future. At least it would have stopped there.
People in free countries should be more in love with the sea, more sympathetic to those who don’t have it. I grew up in a Britain where every road ended at the sea. In fact, the sea lay just beyond the bottom of our garden in the Portsmouth suburb where we lived, endlessly reassuring especially when (as was usually so) it was rough or hidden by fog. As a naval family, we always remembered Lord St. Vincent’s witty promise to Parliament while Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Army gazed out toward England from the hills above Boulogne in France: “I do not say they cannot come,” St. Vincent creaked. “I only say they cannot come by sea.” Honorable members obediently laughed. For the British Navy controlled every square inch of those gray waters, and gaze as they might toward the coast of England from the parade grounds of Boulogne, the French could not cross them.
If a country has no sea, it must come up with a substitute. And that substitute is the guarded border. As a safe Englishman, I have never resented or decried these odd and often expensive structures. I can quite see why people want them. I can, alas, even envisage borders growing up in our own islands, where old nations are seeking to be reborn. There are worse things we might face. I have always thought that the French Maginot Line, now a derided ruin like the Great Wall of China, was rather sensible, its only fault being that it was unfinished, a major failing in any wall. I have helicoptered above much of the length of Israel’s frontier with the “occupied territories,” and indeed climbed through a rather feeble section of it in the Jerusalem suburbs, and I see the sense in it. No doubt it is often unjust, and it was much better for everyone when there was friendliness across the line and thousands of Arabs used to travel peacefully and easily to work in Israel. But the barrier is a reasonable response to the nasty tactic of sending suicide bombers into Israeli towns, as is shown by the fact that it has much diminished these horrible attacks. My only worry is that it cannot possibly be sustained. Walls, unlike oceans, require ceaseless maintenance and repair, and must be manned night and day by alert and disciplined guardians. Otherwise they become relics.
Israel is an interesting case. Turn eastward and you can, with some persistence, cross into officially friendly Jordan, just over the surprisingly feeble and narrow river of that name. This gateway is supposed to be part of the “New Middle East,” an absurdly optimistic concept dreamt up by the late Shimon Peres and based on the idea that Muslim Arabs would stop hating Israel if it made concessions to them. Very few people take the sort-of-bus service that runs from Tel Aviv to Amman, via Beit She’an—and no wonder. The Jordan River crossing on a Sunday evening is one of the loneliest places I have ever been, the sort of spot where you can hear yourself breathing, and the border officials hugely outnumber the travelers. The only other sound is the squeak of Israeli drivers unscrewing Hebrew license plates from their cars and substituting Arabic ones. This is an essential safety measure in Jordan, where the “Anti-Normalization League” campaigns ceaselessly against any concession to Zionism. Despite the country’s official moderation, it would not be a good idea to be identified as an Israeli on the country roads which wind down toward Amman. I saw no Jordanians crossing into the Zionist entity bent on pleasure or business. Normality is not just a fiction but an absurdity. Mr. Peres’s “New Middle East” is a phantasm, like the Arab Spring. The place only exists for propaganda purposes. In truth, the Jordan Valley remains a place of unalterable tension, and it is a pity that the river is not deep and wide, as the song says it is.
Travel up beyond the Sea of Galilee, past blasted concrete buildings and abandoned fortifications from the bitter war of 1973, and into the Golan Heights, where you will find a more honest frontier that is wholly dead and sealed, like a tomb. There is no pretense of friendship or normality here. Even so, when I asked an Israeli Army officer if he felt threatened, he remarked that it was one of the quietest places anywhere on his troubled country’s disputed edges. President Assad’s ruthless despotism left no doubt about who was responsible for any missiles or armed groups which came across it. “If anything bad comes across, we have a return address,” he pointed out, with quiet menace. This is why many Israelis will be glad if and when Mr. Assad regains full control. A reliable tyranny on the far side of the barbed wire is far more reassuring and desirable than anarchy or the Arab Spring.
Why, then, do so many speak darkly of borders as unnecessary and undesirable? Enthusiasts for “free movement of peoples,” the type who can be found in revolutionary Marxist sects and in the offices of liberal capitalist organs such as The Economist, claim to believe that the absolute equality of all humans is violated by the idea of frontiers. The Bolsheviks believed that humanity is infinitely malleable and that class and education determine changeable human nature. The economic liberals simply think that open borders bring greater general prosperity by keeping labor costs down. In most cases, such people live remotely from the areas most directly affected by the large-scale migration they say they support.
In practice, they will take a slightly different view if too many people act according to their vision. The open borders of much of the European Union have been at least partly closed again in recent years, following Chancellor Angela Merkel’s utopian decision to welcome thousands of undocumented Middle Eastern migrants (some of whom may actually have been refugees from the Syrian war, but many of whom were economically motivated, as The Economist would want them to be). Sweden, once a country of relaxed liberalism, has found its politics bitterly transformed after trying to apply those beautiful beliefs in practice. The decision of several E.U. navies to offer a ferry service across the Mediterranean for migrants from Africa caused a similar revulsion from this idealism. Suddenly, France began patrolling its borders with Italy for the first time in years.
Even on those who in general accept their usefulness, borders have a paradoxical effect. Precisely because they guard us from straying into a different culture, we long to do so. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice clambering through the looking glass, we yearn to know what is beyond the wire, and what lies on the other side of the mysterious wooded hills that are visible but not reachable. Sometimes it is just a wish to know what is beyond that door or down that corridor. Not being allowed to go somewhere or know something, as we have known since the Garden of Eden, can be the greatest temptation of all.
I felt this most powerfully—the mad instinct for crossing into the unknown—when at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, an exhilarating spot which (after many years of effort) I have now viewed from both sides. My first visit was from the South, in a press party accompanying Margaret Thatcher. All around was the peace of an unpolluted animal and bird sanctuary, thanks to the absence of man. Both sides competed by flying enormous flags of their rival nations, flags so huge that they ripped themselves to pieces in high winds. Just to the north, beyond the so-called “Bridge of No Return,” across which prisoners of war and the crew of the captured USS Pueblo had been released by the Communists, sat a fake village from whose empty concrete buildings eerie music drifted, supposedly demonstrating the happiness of its nonexistent inhabitants. I am not sure whom this was supposed to fool.
Strangest of all was that, for a few hundred yards, there was no fence. A line of scrubbed paving stones marked the border, once the most emphatic and angry contact between the two rival worlds of the Cold War. On one side, political and religious liberty, prosperity, rationality stretched onward and outwards. On the other, a vast dark planet of censorship, people shrieking slogans, parades, lies, and privation continued all the way to the middle of Germany. Now it is less of an ideological border—just a puzzling, dispiriting relic of a dead conflict, which nobody can find a way of dismantling.
Much as people are said to be tempted to hurl themselves off cliffs and tall buildings, I was gripped with a crazy desire to dash across into the North, and wondered if members of the Communist delegation, close and clearly visible on the other side, were troubled by the same folly. Years later, I knew they must have been. For I traveled down from Pyongyang, through the North’s fortifications and propaganda lectures, and found myself ten feet from where I had been twenty years before, with nothing between me and the South but air—but such air, fizzing and crackling with danger. Is there anything more savage than hostility between peoples divided by civil war? Enemy nations do not even begin to contrive the pseudo-moral excuses which people of the same nation dream up for killing and hating each other. Yet still I longed to make that foolish, fatal dash, just because it was there.
I used to get a similar feeling near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. I now feel privileged that I saw Berlin many times in the days of the Wall, and penetrated through it at Friedrichstrasse Station to emerge in a place so different from its Western twin that it is still hard to believe it was so. Technically, it was only a political division. But East Berlin smelled different, had different colors, somehow a different light in the sky. The posture of the people was different. Above all, the purpose of everyday things in the Communist world was tinged with a second, less everyday purpose. I learned from my first voyages into this zone that this was the great distinguishing feature. Shops, opera houses, trains, museums, war memorials, newspapers all possessed a greater ideological purpose which completely transformed them, but which I was not allowed to know in full. It always seemed a small miracle when I succeeded in buying a meal, making a journey, or obtaining information. I felt I hadn’t really been meant to do any of these things. When I got back to the West, its obliging simplicity began to seem unsatisfactory. Where was the challenge?
Even if we could somehow construct a world where borders were not necessary for peace and security, could we really be happy without them? There is a joy in crossing from one place into another that we are robbed of by any effort to make all places one. I cannot be the only person who has developed an active joy in obtaining and using hard-to-get visas. People used to complain about Communist border checks. I didn’t. I positively liked these Ludmillas and Nastyas with their frazzled, bleached hair under severe peaked caps, glaring at my documents with patriotic zeal. Generally, they didn’t actually take that long, and it was possible, sometimes, to get the faintest ghost of a smile out of some of them before they whacked the entry or exit stamp (always in lurid green ink) onto my passport. Nowadays the Russian border officials are positively chatty. One rather beautiful passport checker in Moscow recently asked me, “Do you think Russia will ever be a normal country?” and creased up when I shot back, “I hope not!”
There is the Schengen Agreement’s abolition of European borders. If I can stroll unchecked (as I have) from Strasbourg in France to Kehl in Germany, or from Aachen in Germany to Vaals in the Netherlands, so can anyone else. What, then, is the point of my machine-readable, ultra-secure United Kingdom passport, obtained through severe bureaucracy? It goes deeper. When we study the dismal history of the European 1930s, isn’t Germany’s scorn for the borders of her neighbors one of the most striking things in the newsreels and the photographs? Grinning soldiers smash or sweep through the border posts of conquered or absorbed nations, tossing aside the striped poles that symbolized independence, the quiet existence of another way of doing things, a different language, a different coinage, and a different law. Didn’t we fight World War II at least partly to put those borders back, and allow those small nations to live once again undisturbed as they wished?
Yet all those borders once brushed aside by German tanks are now vanished. Travel down from Berlin to Prague, or Berlin to Brussels or Amsterdam or Vienna, on Europe’s swift new trains, and nobody will ask for your papers. I jolly well think they should. This isn’t just because untold numbers of migrants, having crossed the Mediterranean or the straits between Turkey and the Greek islands, are now roaming a borderless Europe. People are entitled to live differently if they want to. It makes them happy and proud. A world without differences would be a world without any true character or any true freedom, since the planet is far too big a community for people to be effectively unselfish in it. Without borders, we would dwell in a global parking lot. A reasonable love of where you live, its customs, landscape, language, and humor, is the basis for all other communal loves.
So I have never really seen why Donald Trump likes the idea of a proper border between the U.S. and Mexico. He doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of person who has that generous affection for the small, the local, and the particular which is the foundation of proper patriotism. But never mind. It is a good idea, if only for the following reason: How can the U.S. reasonably ask people such as me, from law-governed, civilized nations, who have no plans to stay, to submit to fingerprint checks and intrusive questioning at airports, if it simultaneously allows countless persons from who-knows-where to walk straight into the country, vanish for years—and then apply for and be granted citizenship on the grounds that it is too much trouble to do anything else? If you want to have a country, you have to decide who can come into it. If you don’t, won’t, or can’t, it’s not a proper country. President Trump, build up that wall!
Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday.
vendredi, septembre 09, 2016
La souveraineté est l'identité en action
Élève Zemmour, pas d'identité sans souveraineté
N'ayant pas lu le dernier livre d'Eric Zemmour, je ne peux dire si cette critique est juste. En revanche, l'idée liant souveraineté et identité est fondamentale. La souveraineté, c'est l'identité en action. La souveraineté est l'expression politique de l'identité nationale.
Une entité nationale ne peut agir souverainement que si elle a un être collectif, une identité. Réciproquement, une identité nationale ne peut être préservée et entretenue que par la souveraineté.
C'est pourquoi les politiciens qui nous parlent à longueur de journées d'identité tout en abandonnant des pans entiers de souveraineté nous paraissent se foutre de notre gueule.
Un politicien qui ferait une campagne entière sur l'identité nationale mais réintégrerait la France sous le commandement de l'OTAN et signerait un traité européiste à Lisbonne se paierait notre fiole. Heureusement, cela n'arrive jamais.
Il ne faut pas écouter ce que les politiciens disent, les mots ne coûtent pas cher. Il faut regarder ce qu'ils font. Et il faut juger tout ce qu'ils font avec une métrique simple : est-ce que cela renforce la souveraineté et l'indépendance de la France ?
En raisonnant ainsi, il est facile d'expliquer le sentiment des Français que leurs dirigeants sont des minables, des moins-que-rien, et, pour les plus lucides, des traîtres.
N'ayant pas lu le dernier livre d'Eric Zemmour, je ne peux dire si cette critique est juste. En revanche, l'idée liant souveraineté et identité est fondamentale. La souveraineté, c'est l'identité en action. La souveraineté est l'expression politique de l'identité nationale.
Une entité nationale ne peut agir souverainement que si elle a un être collectif, une identité. Réciproquement, une identité nationale ne peut être préservée et entretenue que par la souveraineté.
C'est pourquoi les politiciens qui nous parlent à longueur de journées d'identité tout en abandonnant des pans entiers de souveraineté nous paraissent se foutre de notre gueule.
Un politicien qui ferait une campagne entière sur l'identité nationale mais réintégrerait la France sous le commandement de l'OTAN et signerait un traité européiste à Lisbonne se paierait notre fiole. Heureusement, cela n'arrive jamais.
Il ne faut pas écouter ce que les politiciens disent, les mots ne coûtent pas cher. Il faut regarder ce qu'ils font. Et il faut juger tout ce qu'ils font avec une métrique simple : est-ce que cela renforce la souveraineté et l'indépendance de la France ?
En raisonnant ainsi, il est facile d'expliquer le sentiment des Français que leurs dirigeants sont des minables, des moins-que-rien, et, pour les plus lucides, des traîtres.
vendredi, septembre 04, 2015
Bébé mort : Sydney confortée dans sa politique
Comme quoi on peut avoir diverses interprétations d'un événement. Vous ne serez pas étonnés que je penche pour l'interprétation australienne.
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Bébé mort : Sydney confortée dans sa politique
Les images insoutenables d'un enfant syrien mort noyé rappellent la nécessité de mettre fin aux activités des bateaux des passeurs et confortent la politique d'immigration extrêmement restrictive de Canberra, a déclaré aujourd'hui le Premier ministre australien. Les photographies du corps d'Aylan Kurdi, âgé de trois ans, échoué sur une plage turque au moment où l'Europe est confrontée à la plus grave crise migratoire depuis la Seconde guerre mondiale illustrent le caractère «malfaisant» du trafic d'être humains, a déclaré Tony Abbott à la presse.
Après son arrivée au pouvoir en septembre 2013, son gouvernement conservateur avait organisé par l'intermédiaire de l'armée le refoulement systématique des bateaux de migrants qui arrivent dans ses eaux. «C'est une photographie absolument déchirante que (...) pas un seul parent ne peut voir sans se sentir dévasté», a dit le chef du gouvernement. «Je sais qu'il y a de l'intérêt pour la politique mise en place par l'Australie parce que si on met fin à l'activité des trafiquants, alors forcément il n'y a plus de décès en mer. La chose la plus humaine à faire à moyen et long terme c'est d'anéantir ce trafic malfaisant». La politique australienne comporte deux volets. Les bâtiments de la marine interceptent les bateaux transportant des migrants et les renvoient vers leur point de transit, souvent vers l'Indonésie.
Les migrants qui parviennent à gagner les rives de l'Australie sont placés dans des camps de rétention sur l'île de Manus, en Papouasie-Nouvelle Guinée, ou sur l'île de Nauru, dans l'océan Pacifique.
Même si leur demande d'asile est considérée comme légitime après instruction de leur dossier, Canberra ne les autorise pas à s'installer en Australie [cette phrase est une remarquable désinformation de l'AFP, prise en flagrant délit]. La seule option qui s'offre à eux est le retour dans leur pays, la vie dans les camps de rétention dans les îles ou au Cambodge, pays pauvre avec lequel l'Australie a conclu un accord. L'Australie dit que cette politique est un succès dans la mesure où aucun bateau n'est arrivé depuis un an et qu'aucun décès en mer n'a été signalé. Vingt bateaux transportant 633 migrants ont été refoulés depuis 2013. Les défenseurs des droits de l'Homme qualifient de «désastre» le placement des réfugiés en camps de rétention, citant les nombreux abus qui y seraient commis.
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jeudi, septembre 03, 2015
La solution à l'invasion migratoire existe. Elle est simple et peu couteuse. Elle a été testée par les Australiens
J'en ai marre d'entendre répéter par nos bons à rien de politocards que les problèmes migratoires sont très compliqués et que c'est pour cela que nous ne faisons rien.
C'est absolument faux, le lien de causalité est inverse : c'est parce que nos politiciens ne veulent rien faire qu'ils compliquent tout.
La solution tient en trois phases, expérimentées par les Australiens :
♘ La publicité. Les moyens de communication modernes sont tels que si la France faisait une publicité décidée autour du fait qu'elle ne veut plus d'immigrés, cela se saurait vite. Voici un exemple de publicité australienne :
♘ Les demandes d'asile et d'immigration sont traitées à l'étranger. Dès que les candidats à l'immigration mettent un pied dans le pays, c'est foutu. Tous les xénophiles pathologiques paralysent les expulsions. Dans le cas français, nous pourrions sécuriser des camps à la limite des zones de guerre et en sous-traiter la gestion (contre paiement, bien entendu) aux pays frontaliers.
♘ Ceux qui tentent quand même de venir clandestinement sont repoussés sans ménagement.
Toutes ces mesures sont à la portée de la France et sont bien moins couteuses que les 25 milliards d'Euros (estimation basse) que nous coûte l'immigration tous les ans.
Si les Australiens le font, pourquoi pas nous ?
Hé bien, je vais vous expliquer pourquoi pas nous. Parce que l'opération australienne porte le nom très significatif de Frontières Souveraines et que nous n'avons cessé depuis quarante ans de céder notre souveraineté à des organismes supranationaux non-élus qui s'imposent à nous.
Je crois que les Français ont dans leur majorité envie de retrouver leur souveraineté mais que, au contraire, les politiciens, atteints d'universalisme morbide et suicidaire, feront tous pour les en empêcher.
Comme nous ne sommes plus en démocratie, j'ai bien peur que les Français perdent.
Nous vivons Le camp des Saints tous les jours.
C'est absolument faux, le lien de causalité est inverse : c'est parce que nos politiciens ne veulent rien faire qu'ils compliquent tout.
La solution tient en trois phases, expérimentées par les Australiens :
♘ La publicité. Les moyens de communication modernes sont tels que si la France faisait une publicité décidée autour du fait qu'elle ne veut plus d'immigrés, cela se saurait vite. Voici un exemple de publicité australienne :
♘ Les demandes d'asile et d'immigration sont traitées à l'étranger. Dès que les candidats à l'immigration mettent un pied dans le pays, c'est foutu. Tous les xénophiles pathologiques paralysent les expulsions. Dans le cas français, nous pourrions sécuriser des camps à la limite des zones de guerre et en sous-traiter la gestion (contre paiement, bien entendu) aux pays frontaliers.
♘ Ceux qui tentent quand même de venir clandestinement sont repoussés sans ménagement.
Toutes ces mesures sont à la portée de la France et sont bien moins couteuses que les 25 milliards d'Euros (estimation basse) que nous coûte l'immigration tous les ans.
Si les Australiens le font, pourquoi pas nous ?
Hé bien, je vais vous expliquer pourquoi pas nous. Parce que l'opération australienne porte le nom très significatif de Frontières Souveraines et que nous n'avons cessé depuis quarante ans de céder notre souveraineté à des organismes supranationaux non-élus qui s'imposent à nous.
Je crois que les Français ont dans leur majorité envie de retrouver leur souveraineté mais que, au contraire, les politiciens, atteints d'universalisme morbide et suicidaire, feront tous pour les en empêcher.
Comme nous ne sommes plus en démocratie, j'ai bien peur que les Français perdent.
Nous vivons Le camp des Saints tous les jours.
vendredi, avril 24, 2015
Frontières souveraines
Il ne faut pas surveiller les migrants, il faut les repousser.
Comme d'habitude, l'UE fait sciemment une erreur fondamentale. Il ne faut pas surveiller les migrants et encore moins accroitre les moyens de les accueillir, il faut les repousser, par la force
évidemment.
C'est le même problème qu'avec les pacifistes : on refuse, par pusillanimité, par bêtise, par lâcheté, par vice aussi (certains européistes sont lâches et bêtes, mais je crois que d'autres sont vicieux), de prendre ses responsabilités tout de suite et on se retrouve plus tard avec une catastrophe cent fois pire.
Le programme australien que nous devrions imiter de toute urgence s'appelle Frontières Souveraines, mais comme le mot «frontière» est anathème pour ces salauds d'européistes ...
Comme d'habitude, l'UE fait sciemment une erreur fondamentale. Il ne faut pas surveiller les migrants et encore moins accroitre les moyens de les accueillir, il faut les repousser, par la force
évidemment.
C'est le même problème qu'avec les pacifistes : on refuse, par pusillanimité, par bêtise, par lâcheté, par vice aussi (certains européistes sont lâches et bêtes, mais je crois que d'autres sont vicieux), de prendre ses responsabilités tout de suite et on se retrouve plus tard avec une catastrophe cent fois pire.
Le programme australien que nous devrions imiter de toute urgence s'appelle Frontières Souveraines, mais comme le mot «frontière» est anathème pour ces salauds d'européistes ...
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