By Arno Tausch · Tuesday, April 14, 2020  The global fallout from the miserable phytosanitary conditions at the Huanan Market in Wuhan, China, will change the fortunes of the twenty-first century. The countries at the center of the global economy, especially the eurozone, are now heading not only toward being at the receiving end of the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918–20, but also toward the abyss of an unprecedented economic recession. Amidst all this, in March 2020, the core of the European Union’s neoliberal fiscal policy framework, the Maastricht criteria, were put out of action. But what will follow next?
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has already called, with good reason, for special “corona bonds” to help EU states finance desperately needed health spending and economic rescue programs. With 20,465 coronavirus deaths as of April 14, 2020, Italy has ample reason to call for such “corona bonds.” The same applies to the other most seriously affected EU countries, Spain (18,056 deaths) and France (14,967 deaths). The idea is also welcomed by a growing number of leading global economists—but not by Austrian Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, one of the European leaders whose country and whose banks, like those of Germany and the Netherlands, were among the absolute winners in the eurozone redistribution of wealth since the 2008 crisis, to the detriment of the European South. Kurz, in many ways now the absolute trendsetter of center-right politics in Europe (at the pace that Germany’s Angela Merkel, by her perennial indecisiveness, leaves an ever bigger vacuum), was very quick to refer the suffering in Italy back to the same old European Stability Mechanism (ESM) that already caused so much stagnation in the European South since 2008.
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By Arno Tausch · Friday, May 17, 2019 The summer of 2015 may prove to have been a decisive moment in European and global history. The dramatic arrival of hundreds of thousands of people during a relatively short period of time, traveling via the Balkans and Hungary and toward Austria, Germany, Sweden, and other high-income European countries, will be forever remembered by those who witnessed these events as they unfolded. The swift arrival of 1.3 million asylum seekers, predominantly young men from the hotspots of global conflicts, like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, took the political systems of several European countries, and the European Union itself, by surprise.
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By Arno Tausch · Tuesday, May 14, 2019 The following think-piece by an active participant in the European public discussion on immigration policy, written well before the European parliamentary elections of May 29, 2019, is understood as a contribution to the European and international political debate and not (so much) as a “pure” scholarly article. It begins with a stark prognosis: the earthquake-like outcome of these elections will strengthen the far-right political parties all over Europe, dramatically weakening the European center and left, and breaking down the “welcome culture” initiated by German chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous statement of late summer 2015—”We can do this” (“Wir schaffen das”)—which signaled a temporary and short-lived “air superiority” for multiculturalism, cultural pluralism, and the welcoming of masses of refugees from the Middle East and North. One of the main reasons for the predictable decline of the Left on the European continent is, in my opinion, its inability to find credible solutions to the problems of immigration and integration.
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By Arno Tausch · Monday, September 25, 2017 This article summarizes a forthcoming analysis by the author under the tile Islamism, Arab Spring and the Future of Democracy: Developing a World Values Perspective, under contract at Springer Publishers, N.Y.
Sixteen years ago, on a bright and beautiful September morning in New York, Islamist terror against the West reached a new stage. The attacks, which began at 8:46 local time, killed 2,996 victims.
To equate “Muslims” with terrorism is unjust—just recall the heroic example of the Jordanian Air Force pilot Muath Safi Yousef Al-Kasasbeh, who, on January 3, 2015, was burnt alive by ISIS after his F-16 crashed during an operation across ISIS territory. He, too, was a believing Muslim and a Jordanian patriot. “Muslims” today also include the 9 percent of the Arab population who, according to data from the ACRPS Institute in Qatar, advocate the diplomatic recognition of Israel, despite the prevailing climate of anti-Israeli hysteria.
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By Arno Tausch · Wednesday, April 19, 2017 This article develops new empirical perspectives on the growing gender policy and gender role clash of civilizations now looming ahead in Western countries. The very same European governments that welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants from countries with what the Muslim feminist Ziba Mir-Hosseini called “compulsory dress codes, gender segregation, and the revival of cruel punishments and outdated patriarchal and tribal models of social relations,” are untiringly promoting gender mainstreaming, which is now a top priority for European Union policymakers. Western feminism is at a turning point. Will it share with large sections of the green and left political currents in the West the cowardly silence about the threat of Islamist totalitarianism and terrorism, or will it develop solidarity with Muslim feminism?
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By Arno Tausch · Monday, February 20, 2017 Europe’s effectiveness in combatting terrorism has been diagnosed many times as being very low. There is increasing solid evidence about the devastating nature of global Islamist terrorism and its thousands of victims each month, from Nigeria to Southeast Asia and also, increasingly, in Europe. A recent survey by the French daily Le Monde revealed that in Europe alone, there have been 2,239 victims of terrorist attacks since 2001. Increasingly, global terrorism is not only a political problem; it also has become a global public health problem, despite certain tendencies among Western social scientists to portray global terrorism as a relatively rare phenomenon.
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