Tag Archives: Foreign Policy

The German Election Result and What It Says About Europe

By tmess2 | Published October 3, 2021

Last Sunday, Germany held elections for the lower house of its parliament.  Given the mixed-member system that Germany uses, German elections are not immediately conclusive.  The results merely set the terms for the negotiations that will follow over the shape of the government.  But the election results do reflect the changes in Europe over the last 50 years.

The short version of the results is that the Social Democratic Party (the junior partner in the current government) made significant gains at the expense of the Christian Democratic/Social Union (the senior partner in the current government) and is now the largest party in parliament (206 seats vs. 196 seats).  The Green Party made significant gains to move from sixth place to third place (now at 118 seats).  The Free Democrats gained some seats but due to the big gains by the Greens stayed in fourth place (now at 92 seats).  The Alternative for Germany fell from third place to fifth place dropping eleven seats (now at 83 seats).  Finally, the Left lost about half of its seats to drop from fifth place to sixth place (now at 39 seats).  While the numbers have shifted, the essential facts of political life remain the same.  The only potential two-party majority is a grand union between the “Union” and the Social Democrats and a three-party coalition that features only one of the two largest party would require both the Greens and the Free Democrats (as the Left and the Alternative for the reasons noted below are not preferred options).

Hopping into the wayback machine, however, todays results would be unrecognizable to the German voter who voted in the 1980 election.  Back in 1980, West Germany was primarily three parties — the Union, the Social Democrats, and the Free Democrats.  At that time, the Free Democrats were essentially the balance in the center between the Union and the Social Democrats.  The Free Democrats had the power to decide who would form the government and used that power to keep either of the other two parties from shifting to far from center.  Over the 1980s, prior to unification, the Green Party formed and rivaled the Free Democrats for third party status. Continue Reading...

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Brexit — Referendums and Legislation

By tmess2 | Published April 1, 2019

Over the past several months, like many outside the United Kingdom, I have observed the chaos that has been the process of negotiating and ratifying the terms of the agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union over the terms of the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union (a.k.a. Brexit).  While it is easy as an outsider to have my own opinions about what is in the best interest of the U.K. and the rest of the world in terms of the ultimate outcome, the subject of this post is mostly about what lessons that we can draw from this chaos for our own politics.

The first lesson of Brexit is the difference between the Brexit referendum and the typical referendum in the U.S.  In the U.S., a referendum is typically a vote on a legislative-type proposal.  In other words, we are being asked to approve (or reject) a specific statute or constitutional provision or tax or bond.  By contrast, the Brexit referendum were about two concepts — staying in the European Union or leaving the European Union with the terms of continued membership or departure to be defined at a later date.  While there are always problems with voting on a specific proposal (no proposal is ever perfect and a referendum is essentially a take-it-or-leave-it vote in which you can’t just approve the good parts), a vote on a concept leaves it to the future to put meat on the idea. 

The U.K. is now dealing with the problem of defining what Brexit really means.  And that requires reading the tea leaves of what the slim majority that supported Brexit really wanted.  And, in such circumstances, the final version may differ significantly from what voters thought they were approving in the original referendum. Continue Reading...

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A New Foreign Policy??

By tmess2 | Published December 11, 2016

For Democrats and, especially for those progressives who voted for third party candidates or stayed home, the last four weeks have been a reminder that there are significant differences between the policies of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.  The nominees to fill many cabinet positions are people who are either clueless about their responsibilities (Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development) or actually hostile to significant parts of the core responsibilities of their departments (EPA, Labor, Justice, Interior, Education, Health and Human Services).   The past eight years might not have been perfect for the progressive agenda and Secretary Clinton might not have been pushing as much of the progressive agenda as some would have wanted, but it is clear that the Trump Administration will be working to reverse not just the last eight years, but much of the past fifty to eighty years.

While the nominees for most positions so far seem to be the dream team of the far right, the current rumors for Secretary of State represent a nightmare for even Republicans.  Since World War II, the two parties have shared a common basic foreign policy.  For both parties, the original foreign policy was to contain communism and to promote stability by means of adding even more countries to regional defense agreements.   Within each of the two parties, there was a disagreement about how much we should emphasize promoting human rights and democracy as opposed to seeking to stabilize government willing to work with us on our overall goal of defeating the Soviet Union.

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