No Good Options for Greece

Looks like the Attic economy is going to have to dial up the IMF for some scratch, since the French and Germans are no longer interested in a bailout. The problem with the H St. option is that actually  increases the likelihood that the country will default because of the Fund's strict repayment standards. Given the intense protests that have already shaken the country, even more forceful austerity measures could lead to something far more serious. Good summary here.

Jumping Ship

Good summary of tensions in Europe from WaPo. If any of the countries mentioned (Spain, Greece, or Portugal) leaves the Eurozone, one can expect a massive wave of Euroskepticism to sweep over the continent.

Fallout from the French Regional Elections

The Left has triumphed in France's regional elections over the weekend. While turnout was at an all-time low, it is still a significant indictment of Sarkozy's agenda three years into his Presidency. While his administration has weathered the economic crisis fairly well, there has been a shortage of tangible achievements. He has also been hampered by self-inflected distractions, like the national identity debate and his attempt to put his son in charge of the country's most important economic development zone. Yet one should not necessarily view the results as a ringing endorsement of the Left, which is still facing a crisis of leadership, and Sarkozy will still be favored to win a second term in 2012.

The BBC has a good roundup of the results and their significance.

The Pat Buchanan of France?

Gérard Longuet, majority leader in the French Senate, let one slip yesterday when he rejected the nomination of a French official of North African descent to head the High Authority Against Discrimination and For Equality, saying he was not "of traditional French descent." As offensive as the comments of our own majority leader regarding the president's skin tone were, these comments are of a different order of magnitude and cut straight to the core of the debate over national identity that has gripped the country.

The full quote was this: "It is better that the head be of traditional French descent, someone who will feel a greater burden to welcome all of our compatriots. Examples would be natives of Brittany and Lorraine -- who are mostly of Italian or Moroccan descent -- who struggle to open themselves up to outsiders. If you make only a symbolic nomination, someone actually from the outside, you risk endangering the mission."   

Somewhere in there, you can make out the point he is trying to make: that since it is "traditional" French who struggle most with integration, naming someone from a "traditional" background would do most to evoke their sympathies. The irony, of course, is that by excluding the nominee, Malek Boutih -- a former head of SOS Racisme and a functionary in the Socialist Party who was born in France -- from the "corps francais traditionnel" (the term he actually used), he is preempting the very mission he is ostensibly attempting to defend.

Reaction has been strong and swift, with one anti-discrimination association declaring "the return of psychologically repressed racism," while others have accused him of attempting to advance the UMP's efforts to to siphon off votes from the Front national. 

Ultimately this will amount to a mini-crisis, with no serious long-term implications--indeed, none of the coverage of the incident was among LeMonde's top 10 most viewed stories this morning. But each new incident like this further widens the trust gap between France's minority and majority populations.

Roger Cohen on the Post-Western World

One in which Europe is now seriously behind the eight ball (though I'm not quite sure Obama qualifies as "not Western").

"Gone, Solid Gone."

European Press Jumps on Report Documenting American Extremism

Both The Guardian and Le Monde ran breathless stories in the past week on the Southern Poverty Law Center's recent report on extremist activity in the US. The non-profit civil rights organization says that
the number of extremist or right-wing patriot groups surged from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009. In a population of over 300 million, that is still a tiny minority. The study has received little press in America -- The Times did not cover it, and the The Washington Post ran wire copy, in all likelihood because the phenomenon of the rise in extremist groups has already been well covered by both papers.

The report is actually interesting not in how it documents the explosion in extremist groups, unhelpfully defined as "common-law courts, publishers, ministries and citizens' groups" and espousing any number of ideologies. Rather, the report is instructive in its breakdown of the geographic distribution of these groups. Here's their map:

Click to Zoom In

Blue state New Jersey has 44 groups, more than any other Southern red state in the south except Texas and Florida. Swing states Ohio and Pennsylvania have more than Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The flavors of these extremist groups will vary by region, but the map points to a phenomenon of anti- government/immigrant/tax sentiment divided equally among red and blue states and across political boundaries. We can see this reflected in the demographics of the two individuals who recently attacked the IRS and the Pentagon: the former was a failed businessman who grew up in Harrisburg and lived in Austin, the latter grew up in California and studied physics.

It is certainly troubling that more of these groups are emerging -- and emerging all over-- even if their overall numbers remain small. From the European perspective, though, taking the broad strokes painted by the Center's study at face value will only serve to reinforce cliches that a majority of Americans somehow demonstrate a propensity toward wingnutism.

 

Greener Grass in Milwaukee

 Does America need its own Malraux to save the arts? 

LeMonde previews an art exhibition at the Inova contemporary art museum in Milwaukee that was produced using money from a French program called FRAC, short for Fonds régionaux d'art contemporain. The exhibit, "Spatial City," features installations inspired by Utopian Franco-Hungarian artist Yona Friedman that examine the tensions inherent in planned, idealized architecture. The exhibit itself has gotten mixed reviews, but the LeMonde preview illustrates the challenges of providing subsidies for the arts. The FRAC fund is a state-sponsored effort to showcase mostly French artists' work in other countries. In France, the reporter says, the FRAC has been criticized (unfairly, in the reporter's and my opinion), as another instance of heavy-handed, state-sponsored meddling in creative expression, the kind that became notorious when André Malraux was culture minister under Charles De Gaulle in the 1960s. As the reporter points out, this contrasts sharply with the situation in the U.S., where art is almost exclusively funded through private foundations and businesses, and where the inherent instability in this arrangement is frequently lamented. Given the especially acute peril in which arts funding in the U.S. currently finds itself, Americans will undoubtedly welcome this and any other state-subsidized art exhibit, even if the state in question is an ocean away. As for the French -- habitually insecure as they are about their culture's declining value in the world -- they can take pride in the fact that their art is still in demand outside the Hexagon, even if it comes stamped with La Marianne.