Joshua Thorp finds that disability is indeed an important dimension of political identity for many disabled Americans. While disabled Americans do not appear mobilized along party lines, a sense of belonging to the disability community is associated with ideological liberalism and support for a range of social and redistributive policies. The post Does Disability Shape Political Identity? first appeared on Center for Political Studies (CPS) Blog.
In two recent Latvian cases concerning the Russian-speaking minority decided respectively in September and November 2023, the ECtHR made clear that protection of constitutional identity has now been elevated to a legitimate aim for a differential treatment under the Convention. This post explores how the protection of constitutional identity has been deployed to enable a collective punishment by association with a former occupier, and how the ECtHR's reasoning has effectively endorsed such a punishment, which is unbefitting of a liberal democratic system the ECHR aspires to represent. Until the three cases were decided, no liberal European democracy could argue without losing face that suppressing a large proportion of its population was its constitutional identity – one of the goals of its statehood. Today, this claim is seemingly kosher, marking a U-turn in the understanding of what the European human rights protection system is for minorities in Europe.
The European Parliament elections are still a year away, but political parties across the EU have already shifted to campaign mode. While the election will undoubtedly feature a wide range of views on climate change, ...
Newly implemented biometric identification systems like the MLB's "Go-Ahead Entry" may increase short-term convenience, but risk long-term privacy and data protection issues. The post National Identity Systems in the Fourth Dimension appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.
So that's it then. Earlier this week, Turkey's parliament voted to endorse Sweden's bid to join NATO. Sweden has been trying to accede to the alliance since 2022, and while all NATO members must approve before it can join, Hungary now remains the lone holdout. (Finland successfully joined NATO back in April 2023 and the Hungarian impasse over Sweden is likely to break soon too.) Yet it's the vote by Turkey that especially stands out. It shows just how bipolar NATO has become—and why so many Americans in the national-interest-first age of Donald Trump have grown skeptical of the alliance. NATO was founded in 1949 as a mutual security compact between the United States, Canada, and ten Western European countries. It came into being as a means of both pursuing a post-war consensus in Europe and countering Soviet aggression. Yet over time NATO has encroached eastward, gobbling up new nations and inching closer to the Russian border. This has led Russia to fear that NATO expansionism could threaten its own diplomatic relations and sovereignty within its global neighborhood. Meanwhile, another trend has taken hold: NATO has become "the U.S. and all the rest." The NATO charter requires member states to spend at least 2% of their GDPs on defense yet only 10 out of 31 of them do: the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Estonia. And while military buildups in Eastern Europe in response to Russian aggression are laudable, the U.S. is still far in the lead, having spent at least 3% of its GDP on defense for 21 years. Wealthy Canada spends just 1.2% of its GDP on defense. To be in NATO is thus to be under the American security umbrella. And for many members, that's an opportunity to free-ride, to allow their own defenses to deteriorate because the most powerful military in the history of the world has their back. Yet if most NATO members are thinking in cold fiscal terms, the U.S. can be far more idealistic in its approach. Countries are increasingly being inducted into NATO based less on what they can contribute than what values they espouse. So it was that in 2017, Montenegro joined NATO. Montenegro is a tiny Balkan nation with fewer people than Vermont and an armed forces of just over 2,300 active-duty members. But it was also another brick in the "pro-democracy" bloc and an opportunity to poke that dictator Vladimir Putin in the eyes. So in it went. This is why Turkey agreeing to vote Sweden into NATO is so beautifully representative. As late as 2018, Swedish defense spending hovered around 1%, and while recent investments are projected to push it above the 2% threshold, we're hardly talking about a military powerhouse here. But having Sweden in NATO is an idealistic victory and a show of unity against Russia—it's the last Scandinavian nation not on the inside. Turkey, meanwhile, is an altogether different story. Its government is authoritarian in all but name, has flirted with Islamism, and maintains strong relations with Russia. Turkey has also been a part of the alliance since 1951 when it emerged as an opponent of Soviet power. America today maintains an important airbase there with easy access to theaters in the Middle East. So Turkey stays in, largely for strategic reasons. But then that just shows what a muddle NATO has become. Because which is it? Is it an alliance of like-minded democracies that seeks to defend liberal values? Or is it a cold-eyed bloc on the Risk board meant to counter threats from the East? The latter is truer to NATO's historical purpose while the former is more representative of our post-Soviet world. It's an identity crisis that doesn't seem easily untangled. Turkey held out for months on allowing Sweden to join, complaining that the Swedes were going too easy on the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which Ankara (as well as the U.S. and EU) consider a terrorist group. Sweden helped break this impasse by cracking down on support for Kurdish terrorists back home. Yet there may be another reason why Turkey suddenly warmed to Sweden. The day after its parliament vote, President Joe Biden sent a letter to Congress demanding they approve an additional $20 billion in F-16 fighter jets for the Turkish military. Maybe that's just the price we pay for the privilege of paying for Sweden. Idealism? Realism? Either way one thing remains clear: America will always foot the bill.
In recent years, political debate in many European countries and across the Atlantic has been characterised by the rise of populism, appeals to identity politics and frequent recourse to political myths. The post Populism, Identity Politics and Political Discourse in Europe appeared first on Crossroads Europe.
Its become almost cliche to say that we are now somehow living in an age of identity politics. Controversies ostensibly belonging to that term seem to be piling up at a ferocious rate. Whether it be to do with toxic masculinity in online gaming communities, the tearing down of confederate statues in southern American states, the campaign access to transgender bathrooms, the failure of Hillary Clinton's election campaign to recognize that gender is not a category that excludes the working class, or the right to freedom of speech of members of the so-called 'intellectual dark web,' it seems we're just awash with this intense and rapidly proliferating series of disputes over how we regulate speech and symbolic acts, in the public sphere. Clearly, we do think these debates are important — after all, as any politically-active user on Twitter and Facebook will tell you — we can spend vast amounts of time in arguments about these issues. And we continue to engage in them, even tho they don't seem to change anyone's minds (and reports suggest they are actually not very good for our mental health!).
But how did we get here? What made us suddenly so aware of identity, and why do we feel the need to argue about it? Is there anything redeeming about identity politics, and how — or to what extent — should the left be engaging in it? To discuss these questions and more, our guest for this episode is Marie Moran. Marie is a lecturer in Equality Studies at the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, in UCD, in Dublin, and she has a piece in the latest issue of Historical Materialism, called 'Identity and Identity Politics'. Based on some pretty compelling research, she lays out an argument in the piece that identity is actually a very new concept in the analysis of social life, and that we need to exercise much greater care in our approach to distinguishing what it is, and what isn't.
As you'll hear in the interview, Marie isn't necessarily opposed to identity politics. Not by any means. But she does believe that we may have taken a wrong turn in our grasp of its political significance. Thus, while we might find it hard not to be put off by the toxicity of today's "call out culture," Moran would remind us that the Black Power Movements who first embraced the concept of identity in the 1960s, did not have an essentializing approach to it. That is, that they didn't see their struggle to secure recognition for their groups in the public sphere as an end in itself (EDIT: Marie has since written me an email asking me to clarify that her position is that identity is "invariably" essentializing "and by definition does" essentialize. I hope the listener/reader will understand my point here, however, which is to follow Marie's own argument that not all identity struggles are carried out for the sake of identity, only). So, this is going to be one of the big topics in the interview you're about to hear — what it means to essentialize identity, and the linkages between today's identity mania, and capitalism's culture of self. Towards the end, we get into a good discussion of the similarities and differences between Marie's approach to the topic, and those presented by Asad Haider in his new book, 'Mistaken Identity' (we posted on this, last week). There's been a lot of controversy about the book online, but I think you'll find Marie's take to be pretty thoughtful.
On a final note, I just want to apologize for the poor audio quality in this interview — due to unforeseen circumstances, we ended up having to record this interview in Skype. I've done my best to clean it up, but you'll definitely hear some echo on the line. Its a shame, but stick with us - this is a really fascinating interview. Marie is a very careful and precise scholar. And I think you'll agree that she's making an important contribution to this debate.
“The war in Ukraine has given NATO a new dynamic, but its conclusion will only raise more questions. For now, the old allies are back together with a sense of transatlantic solidarity unseen since the aftermath of September 2001. This is no small feat when considering where the alliance was just a year and a […] The post NATO’s Post-Ukraine War Identity Still A Question appeared first on International Republican Institute.
This week, the International Monetary Fund published a blog post and a working paper that show the contributions of profits, wages, and import prices to the recent inflationary spiral in the Euro area. While the authors note that their analysis represents an "accounting identity [which] does not allow for causal interpretation," it has nevertheless reopened media debate on the "greedflation" theory – the idea that corporate profiteering is responsible for the post‐Covid inflation spike across the world. At least four mainstream media outlets have published articles that attribute causal interpretation to the greedflation hypothesis, using the IMF's materials as their basis (see these articles from MarketWatch, Huffington Post, Guardian, and Telegraph). The problem with the greedflation theory is that it is not an explanation for inflation. It is the result of an accounting exercise that simply breaks down inflation into its constituent components. It does not, and cannot, offer an explanation as to why these components are above or below their normal thresholds. Inflation is a short‐run macroeconomic variable; in that sense it is caused by shocks to the economic system that move prices away from their equilibrium values. By definition, these shocks are exogenous to the economic system and cannot be the result of greedy CEOs, scheming to take advantage of economic turmoil. Inflation has been stable for decades in most advanced economies – from the mid‐1980s till the pandemic, inflation was close to its 2% target rate. Is it reasonable to assume that corporations were greedy since Covid but were disinterested in profits at any time between 1985 and 2020? Corporate profits are determined by price markups – the degree to which firms can charge a price that is higher than their costs. Firms cannot charge arbitrary prices. Optimal prices are set based on several market factors including demand, supply, costs, expectations, etc. As such, both cases – price increases and price decreases – may result in lost profits for a firm. Increased price markups are simply evidence of firms responding to economic conditions and reoptimizing prices. To further understand the dangers of drawing causal inference from accounting exercises, look at Figure 1 below which is a reprint, from page 9 of the IMF paper itself, of the breakdown of Euro area inflation from 1971 onwards. While corporate profits have recently become a majority factor, labor costs have historically dominated the accounting of inflation, especially during the massive inflationary spikes of the 1970s. Attributing current inflation to corporate greed is just as strange as attributing those inflation episodes to greedy workers that demand over‐inflated wages. During both cases, workers and firms were responding to shocks in the economy that temporarily increased their bargaining power in the market.
Figure 1: Breakdown of Euro Area GDP Deflator Inflation into Accounting Components (Source: Hansen, et. al. 2023. Euro Area Inflation after the Pandemic and Energy Shock: Import Prices, Profits and Wages. IMF Working Paper No. 2023/131. [Link]) Back to current Euro inflation – the key task of an empirical economist is identifying which shocks contributed to both price markups by firms and inflation overall. To that end, the economist should use a structural framework that allows for interactions between various economic variables and shocks so that there may be some causal implications. A seminal paper from 2003 already provides a benchmark analysis that researchers could replicate or extend (I employed a similar method when breaking down inflation in the US). Drawing causal inference from accounting identities only serves to obfuscate the true story of inflation and will not allow policy makers to accurately identify the facets of the economy that will contribute the most to a full recovery.
As states continue to implement digital ID systems, it is essential that they build tools in ways that inherently protect civil liberties rather than asking citizens to just trust government officials.
As you may guess from the title, this contains two or three mild spoilers from Star Wars Episode IX and multiple spoilers from other Star Wars films and books. Do that with what you will. Episode IX has been out for a week as of this writing and it has encountered mixed receptions from critics and fans alike. On the film critic aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, it is the lowest-rated film of the five new ones (even lower than Solo), but among the audience score, it is tied for first with The Force Awakens. One of the main criticisms leveled Continue reading Medals, Species, and Identity in Star Wars Episode IX→
May 20th marked the inauguration of the 8th President of the Republic of China in Taiwan, Lai Ching-te in a ceremony showcasing how Taiwan has reshaped its national narrative.
