Haiti in Perpetual Crisis

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

Mehran Kamrava is Director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. A prominent scholar researching the political systems of the Middle East, in particular Iran, he also teaches comparative politics and political development.

His textbook, “Understanding Comparative Politics: A Framework for Analysis,” which I assign in one of my political science courses, explores the concept of political culture and its significance in understanding political systems.

We can apply many of his concepts to the Caribbean nation of Haiti, the western third of the island of Hispaniola, now an independent state for 220 years. Indeed, it is the second oldest nation in the western hemisphere after the United States.

Yet it remains in perpetual turmoil, a seemingly permanent failed state. The underlying assumption is that Haitians cannot manage their own affairs. The government is corrupt or ineffective or both.

But is that the whole story? History says otherwise. Even after two centuries, Haiti has rarely, if ever, been allowed to manage its own affairs.

Haiti had been a French colonial possession with perhaps the most brutal plantation system built on the enslavement of Africans. Between 1697 and 1804, French colonists brought 800,000 slaves to what was then known as Saint-Domingue to work on the vast plantations, accounting for seven percent of the entire Atlantic slave trade.

It wrested its independence from France in a revolution during the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Napoleon had tried to destroy them, but the Haitians won. He lost more troops than he did at Waterloo and withdrew.

Yet few countries got off to as inauspicious a start as Haiti. It remained surrounded by British, French, Dutch and Spanish colonies where slavery remained legal and so it was shunned by European powers.

France, reluctantly, after failing to recapture the country, finally acknowledged Haitian sovereignty. But it demanded the then enormous sum of 150 million francs in return for “losing” its colony.

The debt was not paid off in its entirety until 1947. Haiti became the first and only country where the descendants of enslaved people paid the families of their former masters for generations. Some economists called the burden imposed on Haiti “perhaps the single most odious sovereign debt in history.”

At the same time, the United States, the only other independent republic in the Americas, was wary of a free “Negro republic,” whose example might encourage rebellions by its own enslaved people. Succeeding U.S. presidents refused to recognize Haiti until 1862, when Abraham Lincoln, during the American Civil War against the slave-holding southern Confederacy, established an American Legation to the country.

Even then, Washington treated Haitian sovereignty very cavalierly. It sent the U.S. Marines to govern the country in 1915 and they remained until 1934. In some years, more of Haiti’s budget went to paying the salaries and expenses of the American officials who controlled its finances than to providing health care to the entire nation, then around two million people.

It has intervened militarily a number of times since then, for example restoring President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994, three years after he had been exiled in a coup.

In the 1950s the U.S. acquiesced in the establishment of a brutal dictatorship under the reign of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, when thousands died of disease, starvation and torture. It lasted until his death in 1971, when he was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The latter was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1986.

A succession of ineffectual leaders, often deposed by violence, followed over the next four decades. Fourteen presidents have ruled the country, some for only days, since then. Haiti has been in even greater turmoil since the assassination of the most recent president, Jovenel Moise, in 2021.

Such is the background to the gang warfare that has now broken out, reducing the state to near anarchy. Ironically, it may take Africans to help quell the violence.  A force of 1,000 Kenyan police are to be dispatched to Haiti under a directive from the United Nations to restore order.

 

Israel: Back to the Future After October 7

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Hamas’s assault on Israel last Oct. 7 was, in its brutality, more than an act of war. In its fury, the mass violence enacted against its victims brought forth memories of earlier massacres of Jews in Europe and the Middle East long before the formation of Israel. It evoked the historical word “pogrom.”

As has by now been stated many times, it was the most destructive day of mass murder of Jews since the end of the Holocaust. What is now at stake, as most Israelis understand it, is nothing less than the survival of the state itself.

After all, a simmering battle with Hezbollah in the north could rapidly escalate into an even more fearsome war. And waiting in the wings, so to speak, is a potentially nuclear-armed Iran. Israelis today feel seriously let down by their political and military leaders, less secure, and feeling far more vulnerable.

Israel’s former consul general in New York, Asaf Zamir, captured this sentiment in a January post on X, formerly Twitter: “If this war ends without it being completely safe to return to live on the border of Lebanon, and around Gaza, and if it’s impossible to return and hold festivals and events in the entire country without any fear, we lost. Not the war, the country. Want to know what the goals of the war are? These are the goals of the war. No less. Otherwise it’s over. Maybe slowly, but over.”

Israelis now wonder how such a catastrophe could have occurred in today’s Israel. Some see the problem as one that began with deep shifts in the country’s culture.

In recent years, Israelis started to convince themselves that they could live mostly normal lives. The political elite lost sight of continuities in the Israeli condition and the connection between war and national survival.

“A broad consensus emerged that the Palestinian conflict could be managed or contained, rather than solved,” observed Yeshiva University professor Neil Rogachevsky in the winter 2024 City Journal. “Whereas peace was once seen as a cherished break from constant war, it came to be seen as a norm, with war the temporary deviation.”

Over time, the once mutually reinforcing sense of danger and purpose grew dimmer in Israel, even though the basic realities of the country hadn’t really changed. Now everything will be different.

“Israel’s holiday from history is over. And the country will have to rediscover the single-minded attention to security that typified its early days. Israel will have to steel itself, again, to living on potentially near-permanent war footing,” suggested Rogachevsky.

The support for the “two-state” idea has been based on the assumption that even in a withdrawal to the 1967 borders, Israel will be able to defend its sovereignty and security. Its proponents have argued that the military will always be able to ensure Israel’s security even after withdrawals. This optimistic reading is now in doubt.

The perceived strength of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) led them to believe that the military will always be able to repeat its great achievements, such as that of the six-day June 1967 war. But that was a war between armies. Even the far bloodier 1973 war was fought by soldiers, and not within Israel’s borders. Today things are different.

On Oct. 7, the special security fence in the Gaza Strip did not prevent war and did not even delay Hamas’s rapid attack. The decision-making process of the Israeli government to launch a counteroffensive was difficult and lasted weeks. Nor did it take very long for international public opinion to shift, and soon the perceived legitimacy for Israel’s counterattack evaporated even among its friends.

Israeli “hawks” now think the war needs a decisive and indisputable victory. Deterrence will not be restored if the narrative emerges that Israel had not achieved its goals after so many troops were deployed.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, in a BESA Perspectives Paper published Jan. 8, is very pessimistic on the prospects of peace.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and other militia are postmodern military organizations. “They don’t need an air force, a navy, or artillery, and yet they are creating an enormous strategic threat,” he explained. He considers the two-state solution unworkable, and a West Bank Palestinian state a danger.

 “With the shocking force of an earthquake, a cultural concept that had its roots planted in the dream of peace, and in the illusion that the State of Israel could aspire to become a kind of Denmark, disintegrated completely.

“Despite all our faith in the IDF and its capabilities, there is not now, and there will not be, an option to defend the State of Israel along the coastal strip. This fact must be brought to broad national consensus and placed at the center of the Israeli security perception.”

Hacohen met Tablet journalist Armin Rosen in Tel Aviv in mid-February and reiterated his concerns. “A Palestinian state is a threat much more serious to the existence of Israel than the nuclear bomb in Iran,” he maintained. “And if Israel will not struggle against this idea, we are just opening the door for the fatal end of Israel.” For such people, Oct. 7 was a truly major zeitgeist shift.

 

A Right-Wing Surge in Europe?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

A report released Jan. 24 by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) confirmed what other polls have suggested: far-right parties will make big inroads in the European Union parliamentary elections this coming June, when 400 million people across the EU are eligible to send 720 MEPs to Brussels.

Polls have suggested that a backlash against immigration, LGBTQ rights, abortion, and support for Ukraine is unfolding across the continent. The right-wing surge in the polls seems bigger and bolder, with one predicting the nationalist right and far right could pick up nearly a quarter of the seats and roll back left and centre-left parties.

“We’re going to see a really significant shift to the right,” according to Simon Hix, a professor of comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, referring to the June elections. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) bloc and the Identity and Democracy (ID) bloc could together arguably become the major grouping in the European parliament.

Hix forecast that the far-right ID grouping, which includes Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and the German far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), will gain 40 seats in June. This would give them 98 lawmakers, vaulting them from their current sixth place into the third place currently occupied by the Liberals.

Then, if the current fifth largest grouping, the 67-member right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, the home of Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) and Italy’s ruling Brothers of Italy parties, also grows by some 18 seats, as Hix predicts, it could become the fourth largest group, surpassing both the Greens and the liberals.

Add the 12 members of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party, who are politically homeless, and the ECR and ID together could muster 25 per cent of the seats in the next European Parliament.

Orban has for years dreamed of building an illiberal bloc that could redirect the EU, and he has appeared to be excited by the signs of growing support for nationalists and the far right across the EU.

Such a rise in right wing representation could make the Parliamentary approval process for people like center-right leaning European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who runs the bloc’s executive arm and is rumored to be seeking another term, a difficult one.

The European Parliament always has blocked members of the far-right from holding any influential positions, such as chairing committees, involvement in negotiations or sitting in the bureau of top MEPs which deals with the institution’s internal affairs and its two billion Euro annual budget.

“The risk of an ungovernable Europe is pretty real,” Stéphane Séjourné, the new French foreign minister, who leads the centrist Renew Europe group of MEPs, warned.” “If the populist parties ever manage to have a blocking minority in the European parliament, the risk is that it will be very difficult to compose a majority.”

Hans Kundnani, author of a book called Eurowhiteness, who has written about the possibility of a far-right EU, said: “The far right can win without winning if what happens is the center-right takes on all of their rhetoric and their policies, especially on these questions about their policies, about identity, and immigration and Islam.”

Maximilian Krah, an AfD leader, hopes this comes to pass. “I want to break out of the cordon sanitaire, and I want to use the opportunities of this Parliament in a constructive way,” he said, referring to the firewall principle under which democratic parties agree not to cooperate with anti-democratic forces. “I’m not here to destroy.”

Why are so many millions of Europeans in the working and lower-middle classes, the larger part of whom had historically voted for parties of the Left, now giving their vote to the New Right?

The parties they now support used to disagree on whether to support leaving the EU, Brexit-style, or staying to fight. Now, they’ve coalesced around two key issues: the strengthening of the borders to keep out those fleeing the Global South, and opposing the Green energy transition.

Working-class concerns rest first and foremost on their opposition to mass immigration. Indeed, the support the far-right parties have received is due to their taking this position, even as the traditional parties of the Left and moderate Right continued to broadly support the free flow of labour and generous refugee programmes.

Even Switzerland, though not an EU member, worries about this, as it is in the Schengen Area -- countries that have officially abolished border controls at their mutual borders. The conservative Swiss People’s Party announced that a petition to ensure the country’s population does not exceed 10 million before 2050 crossed the 100,000-signature threshold needed to initiate a nationwide referendum in record time.

The far right’s gains in June could prompt some EU member states to adhere more closely to foreign policy decisions which could negatively impact financial and military backing to Ukraine.

All over Europe, we see a coming together of the centre right and the far right on questions around identity and immigration. Until recently, such a thing would have seemed remote. But the EU itself has increasingly come to see itself as defending an imperiled European civilization. And if the European right has developed one shared concern, this is it.

 

Right Gains Ground in Europe

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In 2024, far right parties in Europe may win elections in both Austria and Belgium, while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) leads the polls in France and the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) is running a strong second in Germany.

Even French President Emmanuel Macron is said to believe that it will be Le Pen who will occupy the Elysée Palace after presidential elections in 2027. In Germany, the AfD continues its climb, and the barrier around mainstream collaboration with the party is likely to be breached this year.

And, if 2023 closed with the surprise victory of Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV) in the Netherlands, the year ahead promises more of the same. The Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) is likely to win the parliamentary election in the autumn.

In Belgium, which holds parliamentary elections in June, the New Right Flemish Interest (VB) currently seems likely to win Flanders, the larger and richer of the country’s two regions. Both it and its closest rival, the New Flemish Alliance(N-VA), seek independence from Belgium to form a separate Flemish state. The symbolism of the rise of the New Right, in the state which hosts the European Union’s own capital, cannot be missed.

In all of the 27 nations which constitute the EU, at least one new or far-Right party is now active. In several (Finland, Italy, Slovakia, Sweden), they form part of a coalition government of the Right. In three (Hungary, Italy, Slovakia), they lead the government.

Alice Weidel, the AfD’s leader since 2022, maintains her party wants to reform EU institutions to curb the power of the European Commission and address what she sees as a democratic deficit. “If a reform isn't possible, if we fail to rebuild the sovereignty of the EU member states, we should let the people decide, just as Britain did,” she said.

Why are so many millions of Europeans in the working and lower-middle classes, the larger part of whom had historically voted for parties of the Left, now giving their vote to the New Right?

The parties they now support used to disagree on whether to support leaving the EU, Brexit-style, or staying to fight. Now, they’ve coalesced around two key issues: the strengthening of the borders to keep out those fleeing the Global South, and opposing the Green energy transition.

A report from the Centre for American Progress released last December, “The Nexus Between Green Backlash and Democratic Backsliding in Europe,” highlights recent instances where rising far-right populism, threats to democracy, and growing resistance to climate policies have intersected in Europe.

It concludes that European far-right groups “frame environmental policies as elitist while stoking economic anxiety and nationalism, which erodes trust in democratic institutions and further distracts from genuine environmental concerns.”

If the right-wing populist parties come into government, they will use their power to hinder the institutions that are meant to accelerate the energy transition, according to Mahir Yazar, a researcher at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transition at the University of Bergen in Norway. “Populist far-right parties portray fossil fuel phase-out as a threat to traditional family values, regional identity, and national sovereignty.”

But working-class concerns rest first and foremost on their opposition to mass immigration. Indeed, the support the far-right parties have received is due to their taking this position, even as the traditional parties of Left and moderate Right continued to broadly support the free flow of labour and generous refugee programmes.

Even Switzerland, though not an EU member, worries about this, as it is in the Schengen Area -- countries that have officially abolished border controls at their mutual borders. The conservative Swiss People’s Party (SVP) announced that a petition to ensure the country’s population does not exceed 10 million before 2050 has crossed the 100,000-signature threshold needed to initiate a nationwide referendum in record time.

All over Europe, we see a coming together of the centre right and the far right on questions around identity and immigration. Until recently, such a thing would have seemed remote. But the EU itself has increasingly come to see itself as defending an imperiled European civilization. And if the European right has developed one shared concern, this is it.