John Feffer has a fine piece today at Foreign Policy in Focus on European divorces -- the Ukraine and Scotland -- and the revival of NATO (thank you Vladimir Putin!). Heres a long passage from it. Tom Europe is full of unhappy families, and they are all different. The divorce proceedings taking place in Ukraine today are violent. But elsewhere, the respective partners are considering more amicable partings of the ways. Scotland, for instance, offers an entirely different version of divorce, European-style. Later this month, Scots will go to the polls to vote on a referendum on whether to stay in the United Kingdom or not. Over the summer, it looked as though voters would easily defeat the measure and Scotland would remain more-or-less happily married to England and Wales. At the beginning of August, public opinion polls indicated that the vote would be 61 percent against independence and 39 percent in favor. The most recent polling shows a considerable narrowing of the margin, with the “yes to divorce” vote rising to 47 percent and the “no” faction dropping by the same percentage. However amicable the divorce might be, if it goes through, the consequences will be messy, and I’m not just talking about scratching out the Scottish part of the Union Jack. For instance, London will have to figure out a new place to locate its Trident nuclear submarines, whichcurrently hang out at the Scottish port of Gare Loch. Apparently, it would take nearly a decade for the UK to build another facility for the Tridents, and it would cost more money than it’s worth to maintain the deterrence. So, a vote for Scottish independence becomes a de facto vote for nuclear abolition, a happy consequence of the divorce proceedings. Other concerns are less felicitous, such as the question of EU membership. If Scottish voters back independence, the new country would no longer be part of the European Union. After that, however, the situation gets murky. If the EU invokes Article 49 of the Treaties of the European Union, Scotland will have to apply just like Serbia or Turkey, and readmission might take years. Or the EU could opt for Article 48, which would initiate an “amendment” process that might get Scotland in through the back door in a matter of months. But wait—it gets even murkier. It turns out, paradoxically, that Scotland is far more pro-EU than the rest of the UK. So, if Scotland goes independent, rump UK might very well take the opportunity to do what the right-wing UK Independence Party has been urging all along: give Brussels the middle finger. And then there are the economic implications of Scottish independence. Scotland is considerably more left-wing than the rest of the UK. If it leaves, what remains will be little more than Thatcherism warmed over. As The Guardian has lamented, the independence debate reveals that “it’s become impossible to express opposition to free market economics via the main Westminster parties.” Note to the British Left: step up your game or your Scottish comrades will abandon you to the wolves. Whichever way the vote goes, however, it has been a model of democratic procedure—unlike the referendum in Crimea last March, which took place in an atmosphere of intimidation and fear. Indeed, the Crimeans never really had an option of independence. Divorce wasn’t on the ballot—only a shotgun marriage to Russia. Park Geun-Hye, the unattached president of South Korea, likes to say that she is married to her nation. Perhaps that’s the real reason why Putin jettisoned Lyudmila—so he could take Crimea to the altar (cue the Percy Sledge wedding song: When a Man Loves a Peninsula). Scotland and Ukraine will be on minds of the heads of state of NATO countries when they meet in Wales this week. It’s already been called the most important NATO summit since the fall of the Berlin Wall. After all, up until recently, NATO was having its own family problems. The mission in Afghanistan was a costly fiasco and introduced numerous divisions into the alliance. The intervention in Libya not only left that country in chaos but revealed the enormous gap in capabilities among members. And despite U.S. entreaties, alliance members are not even meeting their budgetary obligation of spending 2 percent of GDP on their militaries, which suggests considerable differences in threat perception. Then the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out, and the 65-year-old NATO started to get frisky again. Indeed, NATO ministers should give an award to Vladimir Putin. After all, the Russian leader has given the alliance more collective purpose than it’s had in years. johnfeffer/divorce-european-style/
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 15:07:35 +0000
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