Summer Travel Plans

As the last couple posts have indicated, I'm in Europe!  So let me fill you in on my summer travel plans to Europe and the USA, just in case you want to hang out and I'm there.

May 5-7: Strasbourg, France
May 7-9: Erfurt, Germany
May 9-12: Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic
May ?-18: Berlin, Germany
May 19: New Jersey
May 20-22: St. Louis
May 22-26: Illinois
May 26-31: DC
May 31-June 2: Portland
June 3-28: SF
June 28-July 6: New York
July 7-11: ??
July 11-18: Oxford, UK
July 18-20: Naples, Italy
July 20-26: Salou, Spain
July 26-Aug 7: Bumming around Europe

Some of this is for conferences and lectures, but some of it is just me hanging out in neat places.  

Greece: Nazis Bad, Tsipras Good!

Obviously the Golden Dawn party doing well in Greece is not what you want.  Their logo is at right, and it may remind you of something.

But the Greek election result still seems pretty good to me.  Nothing I've read indicates that Golden Dawn is going to end up in a governing coalition, and the bigger news is that the anti-austerity left wing Syriza party came in second.  Their leader, Alexis Tsipras, sounds good enough to me: “The crisis isn’t just Greek, it’s European,” he said on April 22. “There will either be a collective, sustainable and fair European solution to the public debt issue or it will collectively fall apart."

If Tsipras and the other anti-austerity parties can form a coalition government, and the newly elected Hollande is willing to push for greater accommodation of countries on the Eurozone periphery, maybe we'll end up with enough political pressure to move Eurozone policymakers in an anti-austerity direction. In light of this, there's room for Golden Dawn's success to actually be a positive thing.  If you like European political integration and you don't like Nazis (I take it that this is the stance of EU policymakers) you might be willing to make deals with a left-wing Greek coalition that keeps the Nazis from rising any further.

A Socialist Party

After Hollande's victory in French elections, young folk of Strasbourg gathered in the town square to celebrate. It's a conservative area, so there aren't that many of them. But they were dancing and playing music and climbing a statue and having a good time.

Strasbourg And The European Ending

Right now I'm in Strasbourg, France.  The semester has ended in Singapore, and I'm on the road as I usually am at these times, with a few lectures and a conference ahead of me in Germany and the Czech Republic.

Strasbourg is in Alsace, a region that France and Germany were fighting over for most of the last few centuries.  That's made it a good symbolic site for monuments to recent European cooperation and the hope for world peace.  The building depicted here is the European Parliament.

I'm generally optimistic about the future of humanity, and the history of Western Europe over the last 60 years is the kind of story that supports optimism.  Nations that had been slaughtering each other for centuries in horrific ethnic, religious, and nationalistic conflicts have managed to put aside their differences and achieve a high level of material prosperity through cooperation.  There are serious economic problems in Europe at present, but the possibility of millions of people killing each other in a Europe-centered World War is so far off the table that nobody even thinks about it.  And there's really no force to lead us backwards -- the economic incentives support positive-sum international cooperation rather than negative-sum military conflict.  That the last century started so horribly and ended so well for Europe is a nearly unfathomable human achievement.

I don't think that the Israelis and the Palestinians or the Hutus and the Tutsis or the Hindus and Muslims are going to be at each other's throats for the rest of human history.  Establishing the preconditions for peace will be hard -- it took centuries for things to fall into place for France, England, and Germany.  But I'm optimistic that as long as humanity doesn't completely wreck itself through global nuclear war or extreme climate change or some other planetary catastrophe, all the peoples of the world will find their way to a European ending.  

After Lugar

Jonathan Bernstein writes:

it's looking more and more as if Dick Lugar is toast. If it does cost Republicans the seat -- unlikely in my view, but certainly possible -- it does make you wonder if there's any point at which they might start rethinking their strategies, no? 

I'd be surprised if any serious rethinking came out of a defeat in Indiana.  In 2010, Republicans lost very winnable Senate races in Nevada and Colorado as well as near-certain victory in Delaware because their primary voters nominated extreme and sometimes flaky candidates when electable moderates were available.  If there was a serious internal rethinking in the GOP about nominating extreme Senate candidates after that, I didn't see it.  And it didn't seem to reach Indiana.

I guess it's a little different because those were open seat races while Lugar is an long-serving Senator, but I don't think that's really going to weigh heavily on anyone's mind.  There aren't that many moderates left in the GOP who would drive a freakout over this (if there were, Lugar would be coasting to victory) and while sitting Senators probably don't like the effects of this dynamic on their job security, being the first to speak out against it would put them in greater primary-election peril, so they'll keep their mouths shut.

As an institution, the Republican Party has decided to sacrifice a few Senate seats in the name of ideological purity.  I'm pretty happy about this, because I like it when they lose Senate seats.  The price is that you get a more extreme Senate Republican Party, but it's not like the so-called moderates were doing all that much for us anyway.