Whither the West?

Tag: europe

  • Why are European Farmers so Angry

    The Global Context of the Continental Uproar

    Farmers are special in a lot of ways. They receive enormous amounts of subsidies from governments in a way that no other industry does. In most industries, free trade agreements prevent member governments from giving government subsidies to their industries; these would be unfair advantages that defeat the purposes of trade agreements. However, agriculture is by and large exempt from these free trade agreements. Why? A lot of food is easily freezable, cannable, refrigerable, processable and shippable around the world, and if we had a world with fully free trade, imported food from Far-Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and South Asia would be far cheaper than domestic production, and the agricultural production of wealthy countries would go the way of the textile production of wealthy countries – i.e., it would be uncompetitively expensive except as niche and artisan purchases, and soon there would be very few farmers or agricultural production in wealthy countries.

    And this is really bad PR, and, potentially, bad policy. Why? Countries like to be able to say that they can feed themselves. If the voting public in some countries got wind that their government approved a policy that made their country completely dependent on foreign imports to get fed, they would burn down the halls of power (though many wealth countries with high populations and low arable land area, like Japan or the Netherlands, have been deeply dependent on food imports for decades – and microstates like Singapore are completely dependent on exports for basically everything, one reason why small states are historically big proponents of free trade: they just can’t aren’t big enough for self-sufficiency to be a realistic goal).

    But like I said, it’s not just bad PR, it’s also potentially bad policy. The Pandemic years were a wake-up call to many countries that it might not be a bad idea to make sure one’s supply chains were robust and that one’s stocks of essential goods were secure. The world witnessed (despite efforts at censorship) starvation in a modern wealthy city (Shanghai and other Chinese Cities) when draconian covid lockdowns strained supply chains to their breaking point. It has long been military policy of many countries like the US to ensure that their agricultural production would allow the country to feed itself in the event of a trade-destroying war, and this makes a lot of sense because the US could realistically defeat any conventional enemy in conventional war but if faced with domestic starvation would be crippled.

    There’s also the pure PR power of farmers that makes them punch far above their weight in cultural and political discourse: except for the bluest of bluebloods, we all have farmers in our very recent ancestry, and until the 19th century most people in most countries were farmers.

    Farmers are widely seen as embodying superhuman amounts of grit and humility, a winning personality combination in many countries. For all these reasons and more, their political clout is outsized.

    Thus, many wealthy countries have gone out of their way to subsidize their agricultural sectors and keep farming productive and competitive – and farmers quiet. However, it has become increasingly apparent to policymakers that their treatment of farmers is potentially anti-environmental (https://whitherthewest.substack.com/p/the-danger-of-eating-locally) and inegalitarian. I’ll address each of these points in turn. Regarding the environment, farming can be highly polluting – not just via fertilizers and pesticides, but by outdated farm equipment; as an aside, I once heard a French farmer’s solution to a badger on his land was to pour gasoline into its burrow.

    Regarding equality, remember how I said that wealthy countries want to keep agriculture out of free trade agreements so that they don’t get overwhelmed with cheaper products from Latin America, Africa, Far-East Europe and South Asia? Well, Latin America, Africa, Far-East Europe and South Asia are rather unhappy about that – agriculture is often their comparative advantage, and they find it deeply unfair that the things wealthy countries produce (manufactured goods) are subject to reduced tariffs, but the things they produce efficiently (agriculture and forest products) are magically kept out by tariffs for “nAtiOnAl sEcUrItY ReASons”.

    This brings us to today. Many on the left side of the political spectrum in the EU are aware of these two issues (environment and inequality) and are pushing for changes that would not benefit the EU agricultural sector but would privilege environment and global social justice – reductions in subsidies, enforced environmental protections, and ongoing free trade negotiations with Mercosur (a Latin American trade bloc). With the latest push for the Green New Deal in Europe, farmers around the continent decided to see how much heft they had in the European political machinery. And it turns out, they have quite a bit, seeing as after only a few days of protest they secured key concessions from the French government – an exemption from the diesel subsidy phaseout, and continued “No” from France on negotiations with Mercosur. And European far right groups are linking arms with farmers, pushing for increased emphasis on sovereignty and territoriality against the “hegemonic” imposition of EU rules.

    The upcoming European Elections will decide a lot of this – will the right’s courting of farmers work, or will Europeans tire of the antics before June rolls around – but to some extent the battle is already lost. The fact that left-environmentalism seems to see agriculture as fair game means that the PR armor of farmers has already been breached, and more reforms in the direction of both environment and global equality are likely to come in the future.

  • Vespertine Dreams

    The Bible begins in the Garden of Eden which has become a moral allegory for millions. Plato famously invented the continent of Atlantis to demonstrate his ideas. Thomas Moore had his Utopia. Philosophers throughout the ages have invented States of Nature, various Paradises, their fictional worlds in which they posited ideal systems and via which they constructed their worldviews.

    The fictional world via which I most shaped my worldview was Star Trek.

    Growing up, I was undoubtedly deeply influenced by the vision laid out in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the corresponding films, in which Humanity had reached what is known as a post-scarcity society: a level of technological productivity in which all needs can be provided for and competition – be it economic or military – was rendered unnecessary. Along with this economic abundance came a democratic-socialist system of sociopolitical organization, with sufficient welfare systems and healthcare, and in which scientific advancement was undertaken not for private profit but for the collective good.

    I took this vision as my own ideal of what the future of humanity should look like. However, this was obviously a fiction, very greatly divorced from the way the world worked today. The questions that arose, therefore, were: in what ways was this vision achievable? In what ways would it have to be altered?

    More specifically, this is a society in which some of the ideas of Western society are taken to an extreme: science and logic are given pride of place, religion has all but disappeared save for private affairs, all individuals are subject to rule of law, and people of all races and genders are treated as equals. Though many people may see these institutions as the logical termination of our current “scarcity” era of human history, it is important not to become trapped in a teleological fallacy. These values are not universal ideals. These ideals are the hallmark of Western Civilization.

    Western ideas of liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist, or Orthodox culture” (Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations”, 1993, p. 40).

    As I understood it, the vision presented in Star Trek was closest to being achieved, in the early 21st century, in the European Union. In the EU, war had been all but abandoned as a tool of national policy. Religion was kept far from politics

    For me, a young liberal growing up in Bush-era middle America, this idea of Europe offered me a vision of society free from everything I hated about the United States: its self-exaltation, its bellicose policies, the rampant capitalism, the overbearing influence of religion on national life.

    As I grew up, however, I began to see that Europe was sleepwalking off a cliff. Western Civilization was not alone in the world, and it had no unchallenged right to lead the future of humanity. The philosophical changes that had led to a softening of military policies and an embrace of comfortable social policies in Europe had blunted any desire to carry a torch or wave the banner of a civilization. The projection of civilizational ideals abroad meant little if not backed with the ability to project civilizational force abroad. Though Europe was closest to achieving the Trekian dream, the road it had followed was a dead-end given geopolitical realities.