Just as the past four years have been defined by the Trump presidency, these past few months have been shaped by the 2020 presidential election in America. The entire world watched with bated breath as President Trump surged to an early lead but was ultimately overtaken by absentee and mail-in votes for the Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden.
In the spirit of the times, our writers examined ballots, borders, and elections across the world, from Hong Kong to San Francisco, and from the Baltic states to Nigeria and Bolivia.
Thank you for reading The Generation, and we hope you enjoy “Ballots and Borders!”
The Generation first launched in January 2010, over a decade ago. Over the past ten years, our articles have followed world events from the outbreak of the Occupy Wall Street protests and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, to the Mexican War on Drugs, Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA surveillance, the outbreak of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, the Syrian Civil War and refugee crisis, and the advent of the Trump era.
But the Arab Spring holds a special place in The Generation’s memory.
We had just started writing when mass protests threatened the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Before regime change occurred, we argued, in keeping with the naiveté of the era, that “a plan to oust leader Muammar Gaddafi while preventing a potential coup by terrorist organizations seems a step in the right direction.” When Gaddafi was killed by opposition forces, we optimistically described the event as Libya “enter[ing] a new era,” greeted by the Libyan people in a “spirit of celebration.” We, like many other international observers during the Arab Spring, were caught up in the giddiness and seemingly endless potential of the moment.
We were even more enthused by the parallel outbreak of mass demonstrations in Mubarak’s Egypt. In 2011, we published personal narratives from an Egyptian-American immigrant student whose family proudly took part in the protests and a fourth-year student studying abroad at the American University in Cairo amidst the unrest who contemplated the potential boons and dangers of the regime transition after Mubarak’s ouster.
By 2012, we reflected more cautiously on Egypt’s unclear future. We noted that the underlying socio-economic causes of the initial unrest had been left unresolved by the change in leadership and that the ruling Military Council continued to resist a complete transition to civilian self-rule. Egypt’s street children, who had turned to the streets with their countrymen in protest of their poverty and marginalization, still suffered repression, denial of government services, and exclusion from the public sphere. Still, hope remained that Egypt’s newfound revolutionary “pride, as well as the memory of apathy, [would] sustain Egypt through a long, complicated and sometimes controversial transitional process.”
Since 2011, neither Libya nor Egypt has democratized, as many hoped that they would. Libya today is paralyzed by civil war. In Egypt, Abdel al-Sisi, who removed his predecessor Mohammad Morsi as president of Egypt by military coup in 2013, remains atop an authoritarian regime. The initial exuberance of the protesters and sympathetic Western observers has faded into cynicism.
What happened?
In Libya, Gaddafi was successfully pushed out of power by mass unrest and violence, but not by a unified political movement that could step into the power vacuum and restore a semblance of order. Armed militias, weak state institutions, and a fractured national identity did not bode well for a peaceful and orderly transition to democracy. This was especially true given the fraught political situation at the time — Gaddafi was not removed peacefully, but instead through a bloody civil war in which opposition forces received NATO backing. In the absence of a single post-Gaddafi movement or group with a wide-ranging mandate, the General National Council, the Libyan transitional government which lasted for only two years, failed to sufficiently legitimize itself and tamp down on disorder. Today, Libya is a war-torn proxy battleground for regional powers including the United State, Turkey, Russia, the UAE and Qatar, each intervening to protect their own economic and strategic interests.
Egypt’s revolution died in 2013, when Sisi’s military coup ousted Morsi and thwarted the country’s ongoing democratic transition. Morsi, Mubarak’s successor, was confronted in 2013 with mass protests accusing him of authoritarianism and Islamism, contrary to the Egyptian peoples’ desire for secular democracy. After Morsi failed to quell these protests, Sisi stepped in, removed Morsi from power, and suspended the Egyptian constitution. Why did this happen? Despite the population’s aspirations for Western-style democracy, Egypt lacked a political tradition of democracy, which severely hampered its ability to realize democratic government. Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood dominated electoral politics, which caused non-Islamists to distrust the vote. The Egyptian state was so accustomed to authoritarian governance that each successive regime similarly repressed its opposition by, for example, brutalizing peaceful protesters, harassing the media, and purging judges. Ultimately, many Egyptians became disillusioned with the promise of democracy, finding themselves angered by a political process which went through the shallow motions of democratic elections and politics but was deeply tainted by authoritarian political culture. Today, Sisi continues to rule as Egypt’s dictator.
Our writers were not wrong when they described and embodied the Arab Spring’s hope for peaceful revolution across the Middle East. Unfortunately, they had simply not yet seen events play out. Despite the initial success of the Arab revolutions, most were crushed by dictators or, after toppling one autocratic regime, saw the rise of a new autocrat or the outbreak of ruinous civil disorder. Only one country, Tunisia, managed to steer a course from dictatorship to healthy democracy.
Despite its unrealized promise, the Arab Spring was a defining moment in modern political history. Thousands of young people rose up spontaneously to demand an end to corruption and dictatorship, putting their bodies on the line in the hope of a better tomorrow. And as they marched for their rights, we were inspired by their passion and conviction.
In many ways, The Generation found its voice covering the Arab Spring. We saw firsthand that when young people speak, the world listens. And even though the world remains beset with problems, we maintain that writing about those problems is an act of optimism. Our generation isn’t resigned to the world as it is. We’re eager to make a better world real.
This article is the third of five pieces from our summer series for 2020. The theme this summer is “Challenging Narratives.” In the coming days and weeks, The Generation will publish more articles where our writers challenge various notions to provide new and different perspectives on the debates and events shaping your world.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unparalleled in global notoriety for its controversiality, complexity, and seeming intractability. Even the term “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” itself is contested: some advocates of the Palestinian cause prefer that “Palestine/ian” come first or dispute the use of the term “conflict,” which implies a generally equal balance of power, preferring instead to focus on the word “occupation.” The geopolitics of Israel and Palestine are probably unique in the sense that they provoke unparalleled intensity of rhetoric and emotion from Western observers, including those who identify as Jewish/Israeli or Arab/Palestinian, and those with no clear personal stake in the conflict’s outcome.
In light of this, it goes without saying that that this essay is in no way intended as an all-encompassing or definitive statement on the conflict, the content or validity of competing Israeli and Palestinian narratives, or an ideal resolution. Instead, it is a response to the proliferation of simplistic, one-sided, and often factually misguided opinions. In that spirit, let’s challenge some narratives.
Broadly speaking, two historic and political narratives — Palestinian and Zionist — have solidified in opposition to each other, and the gulf of understanding between these two narratives presents a serious obstacle both to the chances of Israeli-Palestinian peace and to the complete understanding of the dispute by international observers. I will present each narrative on the conflict, discuss important weaknesses of both, and provide a synthesis.
The Palestinian Narrative
What I will, for the sake of argument, refer to as the “Palestinian narrative,” is as follows: Zionism, the ideology which advocated pre-1948 for the establishment of a Jewish state in the Palestine region and post-1948 for the maintenance and support of the existing Jewish state of Israel, was not a national liberation movement but a settler-colonial movement. This narrative, drawing heavily on the academic tradition of anti/post-colonialism, argues that because Zionism was advocated primarily by European Jewish intellectuals whose families had not lived in the Middle East for centuries and was effectuated by the mass migration of largely European Jews to the Palestine region, the dynamic was one of European colonialism.
Also important to advocates of this theory was the support of Western countries in the establishment and defense of Israel following the Second World War, which is used as evidence of Western imperialist collaboration, the colonialist views of prominent Zionist thinkers, and the fact that many of these prominent Zionists explicitly conceived of their state building project as a colonial one.
Because the final goal of settler colonialism is total territorial domination and the complete replacement of the indigenous people, critics argue that Israel is an inherently expansionist and genocidal entity whose telos is the utter destruction of native Palestinians. Accordingly, the state of Israel in its current form — as an explicitly Jewish state in Palestine — is considered to be racist, colonialist, and illegitimate.
Article 22 of the Palestinian National Charter, adopted by the Palestine National Council in July 1968, reads: ‘Zionism is a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress.”
The Zionist Narrative
The “Zionist narrative” provides a different account of history. Zionists (including the vast majority of Jews today) argue that the Jewish people are not European interlopers but in fact a diasporic indigenous ethno-religious group derived from ancient Judeans who lived and worshipped in Judea, modern-day Palestine, before forced expulsions by the Assyrian, Babylonian, Hellenic, and Roman Empires. Zionists point to the central role of Jerusalem and Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, in Jewish culture and theology before and after expulsions in antiquity.
Although Ashkenazi Jews, those of Central and Eastern European diasporic descent, were the primary architects of Zionism, modern day Zionists point out that not all Jews have this European background. For example, Mizrahi Jews, those whose families remained in the Middle East after the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE and many of whose families were expelled during expulsions and evacuations from Arab-majority countries after 1948, today constitute slightly over half of Israel’s population.
The Zionist narrative rejects the notion that Zionism and Israel are colonial in nature, arguing that Israeli Jews are equally indigenous to the region, that Zionism is a national liberation movement pursuing justified self-determination, and that Israel is a pluralistic, liberal democracy whose 20% minority of Arab citizens enjoy full political and legal rights.
The Israeli Proclamation of Independence justifies the establishment of Israel by specific appeal to asserted Jewish indigeneity, beginning, “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.”
Key issues of dispute
There are many points of tension between the Palestinian and Zionist narratives of the conflict, but here are two important questions for which different sides present different answers.
First, are the Jews indigenous to the Palestine region, and if so, does that indigeneity create a right to a Jewish state in Palestine? And second, is it true that the Zionist project was and/or is colonial in nature, and what are the consequences of either determination?
While both of these questions may seem highly abstract and retrospective, their repercussions on the conflict are profound. As long as the parties in the Israel-Palestine conflict hold firmly to drastically different accounts of history, they cannot easily reach consensus on what constitutes present reality. And with that kind of epistemic gap, a lasting peace settlement is essentially impossible.
The Indigeneity Question
The question of Jewish indigeneity is, like all of the fundamental questions underlying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, deeply contested. The status of indigenity is generally understood to apply to people who self-identify as members of groups which can claim historical continuity with a given territory prior to colonial or settler contact, who can be classified as having distinct religious, cultural, social, and linguistic practices, and who self-identify as indigenous.
In many ways, this definition fits the Jewish people, who, despite enforced diaspora, claim religious, linguistic, ancestral, and genetic ties to the land of Israel and have a distinct culture. Indeed, an argument can be made that Jews, having lived outside of Judea as persecuted minorities in European, Middle Eastern, African, and Asian nations for centuries, can lay claim to the term indigenous. And, the imperial domination of the Levant by Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Arab Caliphs, Crusaders (briefly), Ottoman Turks, and the British Mandate for Palestine parallels the imperial and colonial oppression of other, unambiguously indigenous peoples.
However, the issue is more complex. Converts to the Jewish faith are considered full members of the Jewish people, and qualifying converts to Judaism can also claim Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return and emigrate, even if they have no Jewish ancestry at all, a fact which complicates the traditional indigenity paradigm. Moreover, a majority of Jews in late 19th and early 20th centuries were not living in modern-day Israel, but mostly scattered across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Most of their ancestors had not set foot in the Levant for over two thousand years. Can indigenity expire over the centuries? Certainly, when European Jews emigrated en masse in the 20th century, many Palestinians interpreted the new arrivals not as long-estranged neighbors but as Western interlopers. This raises the question: is indigenity required for a state to be legitimate? Can a state founded on colonialism — as some consider Israel to be — ever be considered as legitimate and recognized as having authentic ties and rights to its land?
If, however, we accept the argument that Jews are indigenous to Judea, then does this suggest a right to self-determination, and thus to a Jewish state? Article III of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples reads, “Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” Self-determination, being the capacity and right of a group of people to exercise independent sovereignty and political decision-making, would suggest a right to a state.
The Colonialism Question
Early intellectuals of the Zionist movement were open about their vision for a colonial project in Palestine. Theodore Herzl, founder of modern Zionism and the Zionist Organization in the late 19th century, corresponded with English colonialist Cecil Rhodes, inviting him to partake in the colonial establishment of a Jewish state. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, theorist of Revisionist Zionism, argued that the Jewish state should come about not through the carefully-courted endorsements of European powers, but by mass immigration of Jews to Palestine to establish a power base and force the issue. Jabotinsky wrote in 1923, “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”
However, the question is more complicated than these quotes might suggest. For one, the paradigm of settler colonialism has traditionally been applied to European countries who exported their residents to other continents like Africa in the hope of enriching and strengthening the host colonial nation, establishing dominance over new territory, and displacing and replacing indigenous peoples. The Zionist project, while in some respects arguably colonial, was not an attempt by a foreign state to occupy and consume indigenous land, because there was no Jewish state at all prior to the establishment of Israel. In fact, the most consequential wave of Jewish emigration to Palestine immediately preceding Israeli statehood was that of European Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors, many of whom migrated from displaced persons camps. It is thus difficult to describe the immediate circumstances of Israel’s founding in 1948, as opposed to the political writings of Zionist leaders in prior decades, as some sort of pre-meditated Western endeavor. Indeed, the United Kingdom’s policy with respect to Jewish emigration and Zionism, as expressed in the 1939 White Paper issued by the Chamberlain Government at the urging of Arab Palestinian leaders and in fear of Arab revolts, had been to severely restrict Jewish emigration, condition future Jewish statehood on Arab approval, and tamp down on the purchase of Palestinian land by Jews. Unfortunately, while this policy may have preserved political stability in Palestine on the eve of World War II, it also had the side effect of denying Jews from escaping Europe in the 1940s a safe haven.
Further, depending on one’s views of the indigeneity of Jews to the Levant, the colonialism debate raises the question as to whether or not a group of people indigenous to a land can subsequently colonize it, or whether their return and reestablishment of sovereignty should instead be characterized as a national liberation movement. Critics of Israel might find a parallel example of indigenous repatriation as colonization in Liberia, which began as a settlement founded by the American Colonization Society (ACS). The ACS sought to voluntarily “repatriate” free African Americans to Africa in the first half of the 19th century and was successful in sending tens of thousands of freedmen to what is now the nation of Liberia. However, Liberia developed quickly into a very unequal society, in which Liberians of American descent, known as Americo-Liberians, ironically established a politically and economically dominant planter class and ruled over the “native” Liberians. This example differs from Israel, however, in that there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Eretz Yisrael since the earliest days of Jewish people, and in that Jews have ties to that specific region, whereas ancestors of Americo-Liberian colonists were not from Liberia specifically but the African continent generally.
In recent decades, the military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and growth of Jewish settlements, both unauthorized and government subsidized, into the West Bank has been understandably interpreted as expansionist and even colonial in nature, bolstering the claims of those who characterize Israel in its entirety — both within and beyond its internationally-recognized borders — as a colonial entity. Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promised but not delivered de jure annexation of much of the West Bank was similarly described by critics as colonial Zionism’s inexorable next bite into Palestinian land.
Synthesis
So, the Palestinian narrative of Israel as a totally foreign settler colonial state is undermined by Jewish claims to indigeniety and mismatches between the settler colonial model and the facts of the conflict’s history. And, the Zionist narrative of Israel as an exceptionalist national liberation project is challenged by the unmistakably colonial elements of Zionism’s intellectual history as well as Israel’s prolonged occupation and creeping de facto annexation of land theoretically reserved for a future Palestinian state.
In early July, leading liberal Zionist Peter Beinart, a longtime defender of a two-state solution, declared that he no longer believed that two states were feasible, instead suggesting a single state or two-in-one federation to ensure full political equality for Palestinians. Others have rejected this suggestion, arguing that a single state governing two groups with incredibly deep historical grievances and, assuming that a single state would provide a full right-of-return for Jews and Palestinians alike, a substantial Palestinian majority and Jewish minority would lead only to worsened conflict.
Come August, however, Israel suspended plans for annexation of the West Bank in exchange for the normalization of diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates, followed swiftly by normalization with Bahrain. Despite the objections of Palestinians, it appears that Arab states are abandoning the “Arab consensus” that resolution of the Palestinian question be a prerequesite for diplomatic ties with Israel.
There is no panacea for the conflict, but whatever form peace takes when and if it finally arrives, it will depend on the ability of Israelis and Palestinians to appreciate the complexities of their own national narratives and consider the alternative narrative with empathy and respect. Unless each group can acknowledge the other’s national story and claim to the contested territory, there can be no peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
This article originally appeared in The Generation Spring 2020 print edition. The theme for this edition is “Youth Voices.” A link to our online version of the print publication can be found here: https://www.flipsnack.com/thegen/the-generation-spring-2020.html
Americans generally assume that racism is dying a generational death, and that its last vestiges can be found in an older, more backwards demographic.1 The youth, it is generally thought, are more tolerant than their elders and may even be the generation to achieve full racial harmony and equality in the United States. Indeed, recent research indicates that young people in the United States today are quantifiably less likely to hold racially prejudiced attitudes than those surveyed in prior years.2
However, since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, hate crimes targeting racial minorities have become substantially more frequent across the United States. Between 2016 and 2017 alone, the FBI reported a sharp 17% spike in total hate crimes, including a 37% increase in crimes targeting Jews and a 16% increase in crimes targeting African-Amerians.3 This report came only two weeks after the deadly shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, in which 11 congregants were gunned down.
A January 2018 study by University of Alabama economist Griffin Sims Edwards and Loyola University law professor Stephen Rusher found strong empirical evidence that the election of Donald Trump increased the number of subsequent hate crimes motivated by white supremacy, validating what other commenters had referred to as the ‘Trump Effect.’4
Based on this information, one might reasonably draw the conclusion that recent perpetrators of ‘Trump Effect’ hate crimes skew older. Robert Bowers, the shooter who killed 11 Jews in Pittsburgh, was solidly middle-aged at 46 years old. (October 2018)
But that’s not the whole story.
Brenton Tarrant, an Australian man who live-streamed on Facebook Live as he murdered 51 and wounded 49 worshipping Muslims during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was only 28 years old.5 Tarrant had previously remarked that he viewed Trump as a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”6 (March 2019)
John Timothy Earnest, who shot and killed Lori Gilbert-Kaye in Chabad of Poway on the last day of Passover 2019, was only 19 years old. Earnest was no fan of the Trump administration, calling the president as “Zionist, Jew-loving, anti-White, [and] traitorous,” echoing Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bower’s disdainful characterization of Trump as a Jewish puppet.7 (April 2019)
Patrick Crusius, who drove from 10 hours from Allen, Texas to El Paso in order to specifically target Hispanics and subsequently murdered 22 people in a Walmart, was only 22 years old.8 Though a Trump supporter, Crusius explicitly clarified in his manifesto that his prejudices predated Trump’s involvement in politics.9 (August 2019)
Stephan B., a 27 year old German, failed to gain entrance to a synagogue in Halle, Germany on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and instead shot and killed a nearby woman and a man in a kebab shop.10 (October 2019)
Clearly, violent white supremacism is not the sole-province of over-30s. In fact, relatively young white men across the Western world seem to be picking up assault rifles and murdering ethnic and religious minorities with relative frequency. Although the shooters’ views on Trump vary wildly, with some portraying him as a savior of embattled American whites and others as a race traitor under the influence of a global Jewish cabal, there is much similarity between their worldviews and methods.
Bowers, Tarrant, Earnest, Crusius, and the as-yet anonymous Stephan B. were all clearly motivated by a virulent identification with whiteness and a belief that violence was necessary and justified to guard against an invasion of non-whites and Muslims orchestrated by Jews. Indeed, many of the later shooters intentionally referenced the manifestos and actions of their predecessors.
Earnest (Poway) cited Bowers (Pittsburgh) and Tarrant (Christchurch) as explicit inspirations for his own shooting. Tarrant (Christchurch) was the first to livestream his shooting to a live audience using Facebook Live, and was later imitated by Stephan B. (Halle) on gaming livestream platform Twitch. Crusius (El Paso) explicitly claimed inspiration from Tarrant’s (Christchurch) actions in a manifesto posted to controversial message board 8Chan.
By reading each manifesto, one can see the gradual evolution of a sort of white nationalist terrorist canon, with increasingly complex self-referential citations and behaviors. The sheer number of shooters, necessitating parentheticals to explain who murdered who and in which city, is incredibly disturbing. Even more concerning is the high likelihood that, eventually, another white man under the age of 30 will soon write a manifesto in which the above names are mentioned, copy certain elements of previous shootings (perhaps a third livestream), and in some way innovate on the established theme.
But if the phenomenon of white supremacist mass shootings is novel, the foundational references that they cite aren’t.
Collectively, the manifestos frequently allude to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, named after the 2011 book by French white nationalist Renaud Camus, which alleges a concerted effort by Jews to force immigration of non-whites into majority-white countries so as to effectuate a gradual “white genocide” by demographic change.11
Camus, in turn has cited as inspiration British MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 “River of Blood” speech criticizing mass immigration and 1973 French dystopian fiction novel Le Camp des Saints [The Camp of the Saints], which depicts an apocalyptic flood of immigrants from the Global South into Europe and happens to be one of Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s favorite and most frequently referenced books.12 Other allusions to 1930s British, fascist politician Oswald Mosley, Adolf Hitler, lone-wolf Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, and others underline both a pervasive European influence, especially that of Europe’s 20th century far-right, in the ideology of American white supremacism and the deep historical roots of the racial hatreds that post-2016 shooters proclaim.
So, if their ideas are decades old, why are young white nationalists killing now?
A growing network of self-described “identitarian” (read: neo-Nazi) organizations like Patriot Front, American Vanguard, and Identity Evropa, recently rebranded as the American Identity Movement, are actively recruiting young people, especially by distributing propaganda and recruitment information on university campuses.13 In fact, college campuses, despite their association with liberal and left-wing politics, have become targets for white nationalist organizations seeking new members. According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 868 documented incidents of white nationalist flyering on American college campuses in 2018, and 672 incidents in the first five months of 2019.14 White supremacist flyering on campuses increased 77% from the 2016-2017 school year to 2017-2018, and 7% from 2017-2018 to 2018-2019. White supremacists have targeted California campuses including UC Davis15 and UC San Diego16 by posting flyers, disrupting lectures, and even threatening faculty.
At least one major white supremacist organization of the 2010s – the Traditionalist Worker’s Party – was born on a university campus: at Towson University in 2013. Initially formed as a “White Student Union”17 by student Matthew Heimbach, the TWP gained notoriety for its participation in the deadly “Unite the Right” Protest and was arguably a top-ten organization in the United States until Heimbach was arrested and disgraced for assaulting his wife and father-in-law, also his spokesman, after he was confronted for having slept with his mother-in-law.18
It is also important to not understate the radicalizing effects of YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing website, on young white men across the world.19 Until very recently, YouTube’s algorithm tended to suggest successive videos of increasing political extremism to continue to hold its viewers’ attention and maximize revenue made by showing them as many advertisements as possible.20
For instance, consider the case of an average American teenage boy who mostly likes to watch Youtube videos of people playing and discussing video games that he enjoys. Suppose that he watches videos on the “Gamergate” controversy in 2014, which was an extremely toxic internet debate about the role of progressive social movements like feminism in the gaming community and attempts made on Youtube to critique popular video games from feminist or racial justice perspectives.21 He is told, over and over again, that liberals and feminists are threatening his harmless gaming hobby and, perhaps, American society and culture as a whole.
Very soon, this imagined teenage boy is watching videos made by self-described anti-feminists and laughing at compilations of overemotional ‘social justice warriors’ screaming at smug speakers on college campuses. From there, he is suggested videos by mainstream conservative YouTubers like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, and then videos by edgier commentators like Steven Crowder and Milo Yiannapolous, and then videos by Stefan Molyneux, Richard Spencer, and Laura Southern, all of whom promote white nationalist ideas.
It is very simple, in other words, for young people to innocently stumble into a “radicalization pipeline” of increasingly fringe and reactionary views just by watching Youtube’s suggested videos. The internet’s pervasive influence on the new generation of white supremacists is undeniable. Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter, included in his manifesto ironic references to common internet memes and a call for readers to “subscribe to Pewdiepie,”22 an extremely popular YouTuber named Felix Kjellberg (best known for his video gaming videos), who has been accused of trafficking in racism for comedic purposes.23
There are no easy solutions to this new epidemic of historically-minded but Internet-savvy millenials committing acts of terrorism in the name of white supremacy. YouTube has begun the process of removing some explicitly white nationalist videos, though a vast majority still remain.24 While this may limit young people’s exposure to the most contemporary of racist media personalities, this will not erase the long history their movement draws from. As any brief visit to the YouTube comments section will demonstrate, there are still thousands of people who idealize Oswald Moseley and his British Union of Fascists, insist that Adolf Hitler was the wronged party in the Second World War, and gleefully celebrate physical violence against leftists, minorities, and women. Any effective effort to confront this newest iteration of a centuries-old tradition of bigotry must first confront misinformation and miseducation about the historical legacy it claims.
E N D N O T E S :
1 Leah Donella. “Will Racism End When Old Bigots Die.” NPR, January 14, 2017. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/01/14/505266448/will-racism-end-when-old-bigots-die.
2 Tessa E. S. Charlesworth and Mahzarin R. Banaji. “Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes: I. Long-Term Change and Stability From 2007 to 2016.” Physiological Science, January 3, 2019. Accessed November 2017, 2019, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797618813087.
3 Michael Balsamo. “FBI report shows 17 percent spike in hate crimes in 2017.” Associated Press, November 13, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.apnews.com/E5e7bb22f8474408becd2fcdc67f284e.
4 Griffin Sims Edwards and Stephen Rushin. “The Effect of President Trump’s Election on Hate Crimes.” Social Science Research Network, January 18, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3102652.
5 “Police with the latest information on the mosque shootings.” Radio New Zealand, March 17, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/384896/police-with-the-latest-information-on-the-mosque-shootings.
6 Kristen Gelineau and John Gambrell. “New Zealand mosque shooter is a white nationalist who hates immigrants, documents and video reveal.” Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-mosque-killer-white-supremacy-20190315-story.html.
7 Seth J. Frantzman. “Anti-Trump antisemitism: The link between Pittsburgh and Poway.” The Jerusalem Post, April 28, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/
Israel-News/Anti-Trump-antisemitism-The-link-between-Pittsburgh-and-Poway-588071.
8 Vanessa Romo. “El Paso Walmart Shooting Suspect Pleads Not Guilty.” National Public Radio, October 10, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/769013051/El-paso-walmart-shooting-suspect-pleads-not-guilty.
9 Tim Arango, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, and Katie Benner. “Minutes Before El Paso Killing, Hate-Filled Manifesto Appears Online.” The New York Times, August 3, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/u s/patrick-crusius-el-paso-shooter-manifesto.html.
10 Thomas Escritt and Stephan Schepers. “Gunman kills two in livestreamed attack at German synagogue.” Reuters, October 9, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-shooting/gunman-kills-two-in-livestreamed-attack-at-german-synagogue-idUSKBN1WO1AT.
11 Lauretta Charltone. “What is the Great Replacement?” The New York Times, August 6, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/us/politics/grand-replacement-explainer.html.
12 Nina Burleigh. “The Bannon Canon: Books Favored By The Trump Adviser.” Newsweek, March 23, 2017. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/bannon-canon-books-trump-adviser-572835.
13 Nate Heygi. “White Nationalist Groups Increase Recruiting and Propaganda Across the West.” National Public Radio, March 19, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/03/19/704586335/white-nationalist-groups-increase-recruiting-and-propaganda-across-the-west.
14 Kristin Lam. “Recruiting hate: White supremacist propaganda rises for third straight year on college campuses, ADL says.” USA Today, June 27, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/27/white-supremacist-recruiting-rise-college-campuses-report/1590886001/.
15 Colleen Shalby. “White supremacy group’s fliers plastered across UC Davis campus.” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-25/white-supremacy-group-fliers-uc-davis-campus.
16 Gabe Schneider. “White Supremacist UCSD Student Disrupts Lecture.” The Triton, January 29, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, http://triton.news/2018/01/white-supremacist-student-disrupts-lecture/.
17 “White Student Union.” VICE News, December 25, 2013. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/znqpye/white-student-union.
18 Kelly Weill.”Neo-Nazi Group Implodes Over Love Triangle Turned Trailer Brawl.” The Daily Beast, March 14, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/matthew-heimbachs-traditional-workers-party-implodes-over-love-triangle-turned-trailer-brawl.
19 Kevin Roose. “The Making Of A Youtube Radical.” The New York Times, June 8, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html.
20 EJ Dickson. “Study Shows How ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Is a Gateway to the Far Right.” Rolling Stone, August 28, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/youtube-far-right-radicalization-study-877061/.
21 Jay Hathaway. “What is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks.” Gawker, October 10, 2014. Accessed November 17, 2019,https://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and-why-an-explainer-for-non-geeks-1642909080.
22 Aja Romano. “How the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto used memes to spread hate.” Vox, March 16, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/16/18266930/christchurch-shooter-manifesto-memes-subscribe-to-pewdiepie.
23 Aja Romano. “YouTube’s most popular user amplified anti-Semitic rhetoric. Again.” Vox, December 13, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18136253/Pewdiepie-vs-tseries-links-to-white-supremacist-alt-right-redpill.
24 Elizabeth Dwoskin. “YouTube will remove more white supremacist and hoax videos, a more aggressive stance on hate speech.” The Washington Post, June 5, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019,https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/05/youtube-will-remove-more-white-supremacist-hoax-videos-greater-hate-speech-effort/.
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global health crisis. Governments worldwide are struggling to restrain the spread of the novel coronavirus, hoping to “flatten the curve” and avoid a surge of patients needing hospitalization which could overwhelm limited hospital beds and medical supplies. Faced with this challenge, many governments are reaching for greater authority over the movement of their citizens, imposing forced quarantines and border closures, activating emergency powers, and ramping up surveillance. While these measures may be effective as short-term countermeasures against the coronavirus, it is undeniable that, compared to only a few months ago, governments are exerting a far greater degree of control over the everyday lives of people.
Nationalists and xenophobes have taken to blaming the pandemic on foreigners, ethnic and religious minorities, and globalization. These reactionary sentiments have the potential to interact dangerously with governments that are increasingly comfortable with exercising authoritarian emergency powers. If the coronavirus is not successfully managed and millions fall sick and die, it has the potential to traumatize the world, radically reshape global politics, and transform the relationships between citizens and governments.
This worst-case scenario, which I call “pandemic fascism,” is the synthesis of medical authoritarianism, a reactionary fear of the foreign, and the collective trauma of a deadly global pandemic.
Unprecedented Border Closures
Countries across the globe are implementing travel restrictions, limiting the ability of their own citizens to move freely and some cutting off entirely from the outside world. These border closures and internal travel restrictions are on an unprecedented scale.
Canada, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Greece, Romania, Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Saudia Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, Oman, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Australia, and New Zealand have closed their borders to all foreign nationals.
Hundreds of other countries including the United States have put in place less draconian measures like requiring mandatory quarantine periods for foreign visitors and returning citizens. For example, China, Nepal, Madagascar, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Jamaica, Rwanda, Singapore, South Korea, Uruguay, Chile, and Israel have all mandated that those entering the country from abroad remain in quarantine for 14 days.
Other nations have chosen instead to selectively bar travelers from other countries. Jordan, for instance, barred entry from neighboring Israel, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, before adding France, Germany, and Spain to the list.
Medical Surveillance
Although systems of national security surveillance already exist, states are rapidly expanding their abilities to monitor individuals in every waking moment, log their movements, and archive the most intimate details of their lives.
In China, an already pervasive surveillance system is growing to meet the threat of COVID-19. Police officers are donning ‘smart helmets’ equipped with cameras capable of facial recognition and measuring the body temperature of passers-by within a range of five meters. GPS tracking and ubiquitous facial recognition cameras log the movements of citizens, allowing for those who unwittingly come near confirmed coronavirus carriers to be automatically notified. Access to buildings can be restricted if a security camera observes that an entrant has a fever.
Israel implemented a controversial mass surveillance program operated by the Shin Bet security service to track the cell phone location and personal data of persons suspected to be infected and diagnosed with coronavirus, empowering the Health Ministry to send text messages notifying anybody who came into contact with them to self-quarantine. While both legal and arguably justified in the service of public health, this new system of medical surveillance received criticism from privacy advocates. Avner Pinchuk of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel argued that “the danger of COVID-19 is not only the virus itself, but the fear that as part of the efforts to overcome the danger, we will also lose our basic values as a free and democratic society.”
South Korea has used surveillance camera footage, smartphone location data, and even records of credit card purchases to backtrace the movements of coronavirus patients, determine who they were in contact with, and reconstruct chains of transmission.
People under total lockdown in Lombardy, Italy are under location surveillance by the provincial government to ensure that they obey the stay-at-home order and limit their time outside. Lombardy vice president Fabrizio Sala claimed on March 17th that phone location data provided by cell companies showed that 40% of Lombardians were still moving too much.
Blaming the Foreign
Government officials and private individuals are also taking part in the longstanding tradition of blaming foreigners and immigrants for disease. Instead of taking ownership of their crisis management (or lack thereof) leaders are dodging responsibility for failures of public health policy, advancing nationalist policies by using vulnerable groups as scapegoats.
President Donald Trump has taken to calling the coronavirus the “Chinese Virus” amidst a spate of racist attacks on Asian-Americans, and tweeted that the global spread of the coronavirus would be prevented by the completion of his signature wall on the border with Mexico. Sheriff David Clarke, a frequent guest on Fox News, speaker at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and high-profile Trump surrogate suggested that George Soros, a frequently-employed Jewish boogeyman for the far-right, was behind the spread of the coronavirus. Media and political figures in Turkey have claimed that coronavirus is a Zionist plot orchestrated by the state of Israel. Two spokesmen for the Chinese Foreign Ministry insinuated that the virus was brought to China by the United States military and did not, as scientists have concluded, originate in a wet market for wild animal meat in Wuhan.
In each case, blame for the pandemic is not directed towards the virus itself, insufficient public health policies, or overburdened health care systems, but towards alleged foreign threats and traditionally stigmatized groups.
Pandemic Fascism: America First Bruins
On March 25th this year, a new student organization at UCLA named America First Bruins made its social media debut with a joint resolution signed by the Bruin Republicans and five other College Republicans chapters. Alleging that the “Wuhan Virus” is spread by the “continued importation of refugees, guest workers, and foreign students,” the statement calls for President Trump to suspend refugee resettlement, the issuance of F-1 student visas, and the H-1B visa lottery while completing the southern border wall and deploying military assets to seal the northern border with Canada.
America First Bruins is an openly fascist club. I mean this in the truest sense of the word and without hyperbole. The header on its Twitter profile reads, in stylized vaporwave text, “Communists aren’t people.” The club cites Nicholas Fuentes, a holocaust denier, as inspiration. On the subject of ICE raids during the coronavirus pandemic, the club president tweeted “Can ICE just cough on illegals or something?” On the subject of Harvey Weinsein’s 23 year prison sentence for sex crimes, he tweeted “This is proof that women are literal children and should not have full rights.” Responding to the claim that accusing Ben Shapiro, an American Jew, of “dual loyalty” to Israel is antisemitic, he responded: “Jews have no loyalty to Israel? HAH!”
The fact that America First Bruins debuted and the Bruin Republicans openly embraced fascism for the first time amidst the coronavirus pandemic is not a coincidence. The emergency and the nationalist sentiments it produces are fertile ground for fascist organizing. This unprecedented shift in the political culture of the UCLA campus should be understood as a microcosm of an emerging far-right in the politics of American youth, emboldened by the cultural impact of COVID-19.
Fascism and Public Health
Broadly speaking, fascism is an ultranationalist and totalitarian political philosophy which imagines a mythic national rebirth from a state of degeneration, moral decay, and foreign subversion. In fascist rhetoric of the 20th century, foreigners and minorities were often characterized not just as undesirables or political subversives, but as parasites and vectors of disease infecting the body politic.
The German Nationalist Socialist Party, for example, often described Jews as parasites who both leeched off of German society and physically corrupted the German race through miscengination and moral degradation. In this way, previous fascists frequently conflated public health, the body politic, and an ideal of societal purity.
President Trump, importantly, has also used the rhetoric of public health as a way to attack immigrants and marginalized groups. As a candidate for president in 2015, he accused undocumented Mexican immigrants of bringing “tremendous infectious disease” across the border as justification for a border wall and widespread deportations.
The veneer of public health concerns allows fascists to pursue their policy goals of discrimination, exclusion, and genocide without openly admitting that hatred is their motivation. Border closures, travel bans, and immigration restrictions are far more politically viable if ostensibly justified by medical necessity. As a result, fascists like the America First Bruins capitalize eagerly on legitimate anxieties about disease transmission in order to demonize minority groups and expand the national government’s emergency powers.
Looking Forward
Now that we’ve laid out the theoretical elements of pandemic fascism — xenophobia and authoritarianism in the name of public health — it is necessary to ask whether or not this actually represents a serious threat. I believe it does.
In March, Politico reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had furtively requested that Congress grant it emergency powers, including the ability to petition a judge to detain someone indefinitely during a declared national emergency. More borders are shut, more emergency powers activated, and more people under tighter surveillance by governments than ever before. Historically, periods of crisis have enabled strongmen and demagogues to play on the public’s fears, seize unprecedented authority under the guise of responding to the emergency, and consolidate their power into permanent and oppressive regimes.
While the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates strong government responses, including restrictions on travel, immigration, and some proactive surveillance, these measures must be balanced with respect for privacy and a serious understanding that, once the outbreak is managed, governments will cede their emergency powers and the balance of power between citizen and state will return to relative normalcy. And, most importantly, people must continue to point out and shame those who weaponize fear of a virus into hatred of minoritized people. If fear is allowed to fester into hate, then the danger of pandemic fascism that lasts long after the spread of COVID-19 has ended may become a reality.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC, came under fire in recent weeks from U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar in a series of tweets and public comments about the organization, which she described as demanding “allegiance to a foreign country.”1 Despite harsh blowback from the Anti-Defamation League,2 the House of Representatives3, and the American Jewish community, Omar succeeded in reigniting a debate about AIPAC’s role in U.S. politics and whether or not it unfairly dominates the American conversation over the Israel-Palestine conflict.
What the renewed fight over AIPAC mostly missed is the fact that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, despite being the most well-known pro-Israel lobbying organization in the U.S., primarily derives its membership and donor dollars not from the Jewish community, but from American born-again evangelical Christians.4 In fact, the American Evangelical community is in large part the driving force between the Trump administration’s foreign policy with respect to Israel and Palestine and has steadfastly advocated for an approach to the Middle East consistent with certain apocalyptic interpretations of the New Testament. This lobby, its biblical perspective, and its influence on American foreign policy currently represent a major impediment to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
During a March 22nd interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed his belief that Donald Trump might be chosen by God to protect Israel from Iran.5 Asked to draw a comparison between the Book of Esther, in which the heroic Queen Esther saves the Jewish people from a genocide in Persia, and contemporary geopolitics, Secretary Pompeo said “As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible [. . .] I am confident that the Lord is at work here.” 6
Pompeo’s views are largely representative of the broader American Evangelical population, which is generally sympathetic to an ideology known as Christian Zionism.7 Christian Zionism, a hard-line pro-Israel stance, holds that the return of the Jewish people to Israel is a prerequisite for the Rapture and return of Jesus Christ. Once the State of Israel controls all of Eretz Yisrael, the Biblically-defined geographic area of the Holy Land, it is believed, the prophecies outlined in the Book of Revelations will come to pass.
Among these prophecies, perhaps ironically, is the destruction of two-thirds of the nation of Israel. The remaining one-third of Jewish survivors will, according to the Bible, repent at Jesus’s return and accept him as their savior. Christian Zionists, especially the most extreme, quote Zechariah 13:8: “In the whole land, declares the Lord, two-thirds will be struck down and perish; yet one-third will be left in it.” 8
According to the Pew Research Center, 72% of Americans Evangelicals believe that God expressly gave the land of Israel to the Jews and 63% believe that Israel “fulfills the biblical prophecy about Jesus’ second coming.”9 Trump, who secured 81% of the Evangelical vote in 2016 and maintains a 69% approval10 rating among Evangelicals, has intentionally courted this voting bloc both on the Israel question and other domestic red-meat issues like the “war on Christmas,”11 school prayer,12 and abortion.13 Since self-described “born again” or Evangelical Christians represent approximately 41%14 of the U.S.’s population compared to the 2.2%15 of Americans identifying as Jewish, the Evangelical community ironically wields more influence in American politics with respect to the Jewish State than American Jews.
President Trump’s recent decision to recognize Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, formerly a part of Syria, delighted American-Christian commentators, who had previously “celebrated last year’s move of the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as a key development in fulfilling biblical prophecy.”16 But it would be a mistake to assume that Christian Zionism is limited only to the voting public.
Pompeo’s characterization of President Trump as a divinely-appointed savior of the Jewish people exposed the extent to which he views or is willing to present tensions in the Middle East through a scriptural lens.
Vice President Pence, also an Evangelical, stated in 2002 during his first term in Congress that his “support for Israel stems largely from personal faith,” including the Biblical passage in which God tells Adam “those who bless you, I will bless, and those who curse you, I will curse.”17 It goes without saying that American foreign policy in the Middle East must allow for more nuance.
The application of doomsday theology to an already precarious political situation exacerbates the difficulty of establishing peace in the disputed region. For example, American-Christian organizations have in recent years poured money into the construction of Jewish settlements in Area C of the contested West Bank.18 Because the Fourth Geneva Convention bans the transfer – in or out – of population into a militarily occupied region, the flow of Jewish settlers out of Israel proper and into West Bank settlements is considered a violation of international law by the United Nations.19 These settlements are often a flashpoint for violence between communities and increasingly remove the possibility of a Jewish withdrawal from the territory reserved for the state of Palestine in a future treaty.20
By its nature, Christian Zionism demands the full annexation of Palestine by Israel without compromise; it is incompatible with any peace process resulting in an equitable division of land between the state of Israel and any future state of Palestine. Even though the United States maintains that it supports a two-state solution, it is the policy of elements within the current administration to sanction the complete Israeli annexation of the Holy Land in the hopes of expediting the Rapture. If a two-state solution is indeed the goal and the United States wishes to play the role of peace-broker, as it has before, it will have to first cast off the rigidity of an apocalyptic foreign policy.
At present, however, the outlook is grim for the flexibility and willingness to compromise. As American youth drift to the left and increasingly sympathize with the Palestinian cause, generational polarization and ideological rigidity will worsen. If, in the future, the pro-Israel lobby in America is entirely dominated by Christian Zionists who interpret expansionism as prophetic and compromise as failure, it is unlikely that a lasting peace between Israel and Palestine will be achieved.
Works Cited
1 Aiden Pink. “Ilhan Omar: Influential Americans ‘Push for Allegiance to Foreign Country.’” Haaretz, March 2019. Accessed April 30, 2019, https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/ilhan-omar-influential-americans-push-for-allegiance-to-foreign-country-1.6981211.
2 Jonathan Greenblatt. “ADL Calls on House Leadership to Take Action After Rep. Omar’s Anti-Semitic Tweets.” Anti-Defamation League, February 11, 2019. Accessed April 30, 2019, https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-calls-on-house-leadership-to-take-action-after-rep-omars-anti-semitic.
3 Sarah Ferris, Heather Caygle, and Melanie Zanona. ”House Repudiates Bigotry After Omar Comments Split Dems.” Politico, March 7, 2019. Accessed April 30, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/07/house-vote-ilhan-omar-rebuke-1209347.
4 Sheryl Stolberg. “Ilhan Omar’s Criticism Raises the Question: Is Aipac Too Powerful.” The New York Times, March 4th, 2019. Accessed April 30, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/aipac-congress-democrats.html.
5 Edward Wong. “The Rapture and the Real World: Mike Pompeo Blends Belief and Policy.” The New York Times, March 30, 2019. Accessed April 30, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/politics/pompeo-christian-policy.html.
6 ibid
7 ibid
8 Zec. 13:8 (New International Version).
9 “American Evangelicals and Israel.” Pew Research Center, April 15, 2005. Accessed April 30, 2019, https://www.pewforum.org/2005/04/15/american-evangelicals-and-israel/.
10 Philip Schwadel and Gregory Smith. “Evangelical Approval of Trump Remains High, but Other Religious Groups are Less Supportive.” March 18, 2019. Accessed April 30, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/18/evangelical-approval-of-trump-remains-high-but-other-religious-groups-are-less-supportive/.
11 Jordan Fabian. “Trump: Americans are Saying ‘Merry Christmas’ Thanks to Me.” The Hill, May 3, 2018. Accessed April 30, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/386069-trump-americans-are-saying-merry-christmas-thanks-to-me.
12 Crystal Woodall. “Trump Celebrates Efforts to Put God and Bible Back in Schools.” The Christian Broadcasting Network, January 28, 2019. Accessed April 30, 2019,https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/politics/2019/january/trump-celebrates-efforts-to-put-god-and-bible-back-in-schools.
13 Ariana Cha and Lena Sun. “Christian Conservatives in Trump Administration Build Global Antiabortion Coalition.” The Washington Post, March 15, 2019. Accessed May 3, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/03/15/trump-administration-seeks-build-global-coalition-against-abortion-rights/.
14 Frank Newport. “5 Things to Know About Evangelicals in America.” Gallup, May 31, 2018. Accessed May 3, 2019,
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/235208/things-know-evangelicals-america.aspx.
15 “Jews in America: By the numbers.” Public Broadcasting Service, February 21, 2017. Accessed May 3, 2019,
https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/blog-post/jews-america-numbers.
16 Bob Allen. “Dispensationalists delight in Trump’s Golan Heights statement.” Baptist News Global, March 25, 2019. Accessed May 3, 2019,
17 Ron Kampeas. “Mike Pence’s Faith Drives His Support for Israel. Does it Drive Mideast Policy?” Times of Israel, January 24, 2018. Accessed May 3, 2019,
18 Sheera Frenkel. “American Christian Funding Flows to Jewish Settlers.” National Public Radio, June 12, 2009. Accessed May 3, 2019,
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105310088.
19 “Security Council Resolution 465.” The United Nations Security Council, March 1, 1980. Accessed May 3, 2019, www.undocs.org/A/RES/67/97.
20 “Two-State Solution in Jeopardy amid Escalating Violence, Settlement‑Building, Special Coordinator for Middle East Warns Security Council – Press Release.” The United Nations Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, September 20, 2018. Accessed May 3, 2019, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/two-state-solution-in-jeopardy-amid-escalating-violence-settlement%E2%80%91building-special-coordinator-for-middle-east-warns-security-council-press-release/.
“There is no Planet B.” In April 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron addressed1 a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, staked out a hard-line position on climate leadership, and exhorted the United States to reaffirm its commitment to “make our planet great again.” Hopes2 were high that Macron would not only overhaul French domestic climate policy, but that he would also fill the void left by America’s apparent abdication of international climate leadership. However, a lack of recent progress in French policy, little international pressure, and dissatisfaction expressed by environmental advocacy organizations suggest that Macron is failing to follow through on both fronts. The Macron administration’s recent and highly public gilet jaune3 embarrassment – a series of mass street protests that garnered international press coverage – holds the answers for France’s sluggish progress on climate policy and serves as a stark warning of the populist pitfalls that can befall climate advocates whose policies may, even unintentionally, reinforce existing inequalities.
Since the Paris Climate Conference in 2017, Macron’s France has made little measurable progress in the fight against global warming. This past August, French Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot dramatically resigned4 on live television, claiming that Macron’s government was unwilling to push for real change in environmental policy. Hulot claimed that lobbyist influence and political cowardice had hamstrung decision-makers in the French government such that only “mini-steps,” not the sweeping changes Macron promised, had been achieved. Tellingly, the day before Hulot unexpectedly resigned, both he and President Macron met with the National Hunting Association, laying the groundwork for a liberalization of hunting laws despite opposition5 from bird conservation groups. Hulot’s resignation, apparently well-justified, was a red flag for environmental advocates.
Additionally, despite the Macron administration’s vocal push to lower carbon emissions, France has so far been unsuccessful6. In January 2018, France admitted that it had surpassed its emissions target by 3.6%, an embarrassing result for the French government. Ironically, despite the U.S.’s exit from the Paris Agreements, American GHG emissions declined7 more than those of any other country when measured in 2017. This unexpected result was likely caused by America’s increasing reliance on natural gas, which, although a fossil-fuel, produces fewer emissions than coal. The French Environment Ministry, meanwhile, blamed low oil prices for an increase in energy consumption and cited transportation and winter-time heating as the two top culprits.
Seeing the gulf between Macron’s tough talk on global warming and his failures to curb domestic emissions, one might have fairly assumed before November of 2018 that the French president’s words were hollow. This would, however, have been a mistake.
Following the Macron government’s decision to raise the fuel tax, a national sales tax on all gasoline purchases, in the new year, as had been done consistently in prior years, chaos broke out. Mass demonstrations by yellow-vested protesters broke out in major French cities such as Paris, Nice, and Lyon as well as overseas territories like the island Réunion east of Madagascar. The protests were named for the gilets jaunes (yellow safety vests) they wore, which all French motorists are required to keep in their cars and wear in the event of road emergencies. These yellow vests, ubiquitous and associated with emergency situations, became the uniform and symbol of the growing unrest.
The outbreak of violence between demonstrators and police led to thousands of injuries on both sides and the deaths8 of 10 civilians. After three weeks of escalating violence, President Macron backed down and suspended9 the fuel tax increase for six months.
What went wrong? It is worth examining the complexities of climate politics in the French context to understand why Macron’s fuel tax increase, which would have arguably reduced vehicle-based greenhouse gas emissions, provoked such a popular and violent response.
In effect, Macron’s fuel tax is a regressive policy which would have disproportionately punished an already economically disadvantaged population. Because the fuel tax is calculated on a cents-per-litre basis and does not take into account the socio-economic status of the individual taxed, it taxes a greater percentage of low-income and working-class individuals’ incomes and so disproportionately hurts those who are already struggling in a stagnant economy10 with a staggering unemployment rate of over 9%. For context, peak unemployment in the U.S. during the Great Recession of 2008 reached 10%11. It is understandable why the French people would react so angrily to a tax increase on those with little to give, especially as the Macron administration commits to lowering12 corporate tax rates. We can extrapolate an important lesson for other policy makers from Macron’s fuel tax failure.
In American politics and elsewhere, politicians, lobbyists, and climate activists must be careful that their commitment to environmental social engineering is not implemented in such a way that the financial burden of such policies falls on the most vulnerable. Without a doubt, a serious climate policy will force individuals to restructure their lives and consumption habits, but this must be done carefully. If, for instance, the United States were to institute a federal ban on the use of combustion-engine motor vehicles, that policy would no doubt benefit the environment and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But, those without the capital to purchase pricier electric cars and unable to use alternative transportation would be well within their rights to oppose such a measure. Instead of writing clumsily-designed laws that financially penalize vulnerable individuals who lack viable climate-friendly alternatives to their behavior, legislators should instead consider a corporate carbon tax or equivalent cap-and-trade system to incentivize industries to self-regulate their emissions and redirect this tax revenue into subsidies for renewable energy and invest in climate-friendly public infrastructure like urban mass transit and bike lanes, protect and expand government-funded nature reserves, and create job-training programs to transition workers away from dying fossil fuel industries like the American coal mines. It is therefore important that climate policies be not only effective but popular; after all, angry voters can always rebel against poorly-designed laws and, in doing so, set back the entire environmentalist movement.
Almost everyone agrees climate change is a real and existential threat to human society, but no one wants to foot the bill themselves. If world leaders are serious about preserving a habitable Earth for future generations, they must tread carefully when designing laws intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Handing the bill to the already-marginalized is just bad policy.
- Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Macron Critiques Trump’s Policies in Speech to Congress,” New York Times, Published April 25, 2018.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/politics/macron-congress-speech-trump.html
- David Livingston, “Macron takes on climate change mantle in address to Congress,” Axios, Published April 26, 2018
- Angelique Chrisafis, “Who are the gilets jaunes and what do they want,” The Guardian, Published December 7, 2018.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/03/who-are-the-gilets-jaunes-and-what-do-they-want
- James McAuley, “French environment minister quits with criticism of Macron,” Washington Post, Published August 28, 2018.
- Angelique Chrisafis, “French environment minister quits live on radio with anti-Macron broadside,” The Guardian, Published August 28, 2018.
- “France to revise carbon emissions target after missing 2016 goal,” Reuters, Published January 22, 2018.
- “CO2 Emissions,” BP.com, Published June 13, 2018. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/co2-emissions.html
- “Driver killed in accident at Yellow Vest roadblock in southern France,” The Telegraph, Published December 22, 2018.
9. Adam Nossiter, “France Suspends Fuel Tax Increase That Spurred Violent Protests,” New York Times, Published December 4, 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/world/europe/france-fuel-tax-yellow-vests.html
- Liz Alderman, “These 5 Numbers Explain Why the French Are in the Streets,” New York Times, Published December 4, 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/world/europe/france-economy-protests.html
- “The Recession of 2007-2009,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Published February 2012.
https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2012/recession/pdf/recession_bls_spotlight.pdf
- Stacy Meichtry, “France Unveils Billions in Tax Cuts as Support for Macron Ebbs,” Wall Street Journal, Published September 24, 2018.
At a town hall on January 11th, 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stoked controversy by choosing to answer a question about access to mental health services posed in English in French, stating that “since we’re in Quebec, I’ll respond in French.” Immediately, Trudeau was hit with a barrage of criticism and legal complaints from Quebecois organizations who felt that his refusal to answer a question posed in English in the same language was snobbish and disrespectful. Trudeau had committed a faux pas by upsetting the fragile peace between the English and French languages in Quebec.
Colonial History
Foreign observers might not realize that Quebec, now a Canadian province, was originally claimed by French explorer Jacques Cartier in 1534 and labeled Nouvelle-France (New France). Although Cartier’s initial settlement was abandoned by settlers fleeing disease and indigenous resistance, his compatriot Samuel de Champlain, a successive colonizer and fur trader, successfully established a French foothold in North America in 1608, which would develop into the city of Quebec. All of Canada would become a British possession in 1760 at the end of the Seven Years’ War, kicking off a conflict between an Anglophone majority and Francophone minority that would endure for over 200 years. Although the British Crown guaranteed the Catholic Francophone Quebecois freedom of worship in the Treaty of Paris, no such provisions were made for the preservation and use of the French language.
Relatively content with British rule and their guaranteed right to Catholic practice, French Canadians declined to assist their American neighbors to the south during the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 even though both were colonial subjects of the same Crown. But a continent apart from Europe and increasingly outnumbered by English settlers, they clung tightly to their Catholic faith and French language. As time went on, however, the Anglophone majority outside of Quebec began to crack down on the linguistic rights of French minority populations. Over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such provinces as New Brunswick, Manitoba, and Ontario instituted regulations suppressing the teaching of French in public schools either by cutting off public funds or, in the case of Ontario’s Regulation 17, limiting “the use of French as the language of instruction and communication to the first two years of elementary school.” As a result, Quebec soon became the only Canadian province in which the French-speaking minority did not face an aggressive campaign of Anglophone assimilationism.
Although both Canadian Anglophones and Francophones supported the Dominion of Canada’s entry into the First World War – the United Kingdom and France were military allies – the war would greatly exacerbate Anglo-Franco tensions. Specifically, the 1917 Military Service Act, which established forced conscription to make up for casualties at the Battle of the Somme, sparked Canadien resentment, led to mass draft riots, and fanned the flames of Quebecois nationalism. Fearing a revolution like the 1916 Easter Rising, the Canadian federal government used force to suppress the riots, resulting in civilian casualties when soldiers opened fire on demonstrators.
Nationalism on the rise
In 1960, the so-termed Quiet Revolution in Quebecois politics began. The Parti libéral du Québec (Quebec Liberal Party) swept into power in the Quebec National Assembly, ending a sixteen-year reign of domination by the conservative Union Nationale (National Union). The effective secularization of Quebec’s government, nationalization of certain industries, and creation of the province’s first-ever welfare state led to a dramatic increase in economic development and rekindled the dormant embers of Quebecois nationalism.
A militant Marxist-Leninist organization known as the Front de libération du Québec (Quebec Liberation Front, otherwise known as the FLQ) began a campaign of terror in 1963 aimed at the overthrow of the existing government of Quebec and violent separatism from the Dominion of Canada. Responsible for over 160 acts of violence, the FLQ bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1969 and precipitated the 1970 October Crisis by kidnapping British Trade Commissioner James Cross. During hostage negotiations, an independent FLQ cell subsequently kidnapped and assassinated Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte.
Pierre Trudeau, then Prime Minister of Canada (and father of current Canadian PM Justin Trudeau) invoked the War Measures Act, granting the federal government emergency powers to criminalize FLQ membership, suspend civil liberties, and detain approximately 450 Quebecois without charge.
Although the FLQ was ultimately unsuccessful in its attempts to forge an independent socialist Quebec, increased Quebecois nationalism and Anglo-Franco tension in Canada enabled the more moderate sovereigntist Parti Québécois (Quebec Party) to gain a majority in the Quebec assembly. Under the leadership of René Lévesque, the Parti Québécois advocated for souverainété-association (sovereignty-association), political autonomy for the province of Quebec while maintaining a free-trade zone and close economic ties with the rest of Canada. Central to the electoral success of the Parti Québécois was its promise to hold a referendum on sovereignty-association. The 1980 Quebec Referendum, in which a staggering 80% of provincial voters participated, was voted down by 59.56%. A subsequent referendum in 1995 was defeated by a hair-thin margin of 50.6%.
Official Bilingualism
Since 1969, the year of the Montreal Stock Exchange Bombing, French-English bilingualism has been the official policy of the Canadian national government. Per the 1969 Official Languages Act, all government services must be made equally available in both languages. Moreover, the Act was substantially amended in 1988 to also require that all official government communications and legal proceedings be in both French and English, that both languages be equally protected and taught in public schools, and that the Federal Court must hear complaints regarding violations.
This is why, for example, all of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s posts on Instagram (@justinpjtrudeau) have both English and French captions, why all traffic signs in bilingual regions of Canada are in both languages, and why some complain that the Act has closed off governmental jobs to a “bilingual elite” because fluency in both English and French is now required for many bureaucratic posts even though only 17.9% of Canadians are fluent in both.
So what exactly was so offensive about Justin Trudeau choosing to respond to an English question in French during a town hall in Quebec? For one, the Anglophone minority of the province perceived the language-switch as pandering to the French majority at the cost of excluding English-speakers despite the fact that the two languages are, at least theoretically, equal. Moreover, some Canadians actually filed complaints that Trudeau had violated the 1988 Official Languages Act by refusing to accommodate an English-speaking woman by responding in her own language. Ironically, it was Trudeau’s own father who is considered “the father of official bilingualism in Canada.”
There is evidence that, although restrictive, Canada’s policy of official bilingualism has been an important and popular safeguard for the country’s French-speaking minority. A Nielsen survey in 2016, for instance, found that 92% of Quebecois and over 80% of all Canadians supported the policy of official bilingualism, an increase from ten years prior.
However, with pro-independence political parties continuing to win seats in recent provincial elections, the debate is far from over. A new right-wing nationalist party, the Coalition Avenir Quebec (Coalition for Quebec’s Future) won a majority in the October 2018 election and formed government for the first time in the Quebec National Assembly. Commentators argue that the success of CAQ was the result of populist-nationalist rhetoric, Islamophobia (including opposition to a National Day against Islamophobia in commemoration of the 6 Muslim victims of a 2017 mosque shooting), and xenophobia. This marks a strong rightward shift from the Quebecois nationalism of decades past, which was championed by the recently-defeated Quebec Liberal Party as well as the Marxist FLQ. Ultimately, only time will tell whether the French and English-speaking communities of Canada continue to coexist, or whether this new rightist nationalist majority in Quebec’s provincial government is a harbinger of conflict to come.
Two years after the British people narrowly voted for a “Brexit” referendum to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union, the EU is more threatened than ever. Trade and customs negotiations between the British government and the European Union are at a standstill, nationalist parties blame the EU’s open border policy for enabling the passage of Syrian and and African refugees into Europe, and support for pan-European internationalism appears to be in decline. Political pressure from emboldened Eurosceptics like former London Mayor Boris Johnson and ardent Europeanists like French President Emmanuel Macron complicates the already fraught negotiations between the EU and UK. How these negotiations unfold may well determine whether or not the European system endures or succumbs to nationalist revolts in its member states.
At 11 PM on March 29, 2019, the United Kingdom is scheduled to exit the European Union. In the event of a “No-Deal” Brexit – that is, an exit without any trade or customs agreements with the European Union – the UK will be left without a legal framework for trade or border controls with the EU. In the short term, the result would be absolute pandemonium.
At present, EU-UK negotiations are deadlocked. Despite UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s insistence that a deal on border controls and other contentious issues such as aviation rules and fishing rights is still possible, disagreements persist without a resolution in sight. More critically, however, is the potential for a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which concluded the Troubles – decades of sectarian violence between Irish supporters of the United Kingdom and those desiring an independent Irish state – established a ceasefire between Irish Republican guerillas and the United Kingdom. The division between British-governed Northern Ireland and its southern neighbor, the Republic of Ireland remained. As a compromise, citizens of Northern Ireland were given the option of being both Irish and British citizens, and the border between the two Irish states was softened to allow greater freedom of movement.
In 2016, Northern Ireland, still a part of the United Kingdom, overwhelmingly opposed the Brexit referendum and voted to remain in the European Union, but was outvoted by the rest of the UK. If the UK is unable to reach an agreement with the EU that includes free movement of citizens (akin to the existing Schengen Area), a political crisis may result. A hard border between a non-EU Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, still an EU member state, could undo the fragile peace and inflame Irish nationalist and unionist passions.
While talks between the British government and the European Union stall, internal political pressure from hard-line Brexiteers like Boris Johnson, who demand a more complete withdrawal than even Prime Minister May is proposing, threatens the likelihood of a deal. Johnson and other proponents of total disengagement from European institutions are fomenting an internal revolt within the UK’s Conservative Party, claiming that Prime Minister May’s “Chequers Plan” preserves unacceptably close ties with the EU and fails to “take back control” from European customs and trade regulatory agencies. Johnson resigned his cabinet post in July in protest of the Chequers Plan, sending May’s government into a tailspin and renewing concerns about the feasibility of a Brexit deal. Any agreement reached between May’s government and the EU will likely be seen as too moderate by Johnson and other strict Brexiteers, but the EU is unlikely to accept a “Hard Brexit” akin to what Johnson proposes.
To further complicate matters, French President Emmanuel Macron has taken a noticeably tougher stance on the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, labeling Brexit proponents “liars” and rejecting May’s insistence that the EU accept the Chequers Plan as a framework for ongoing negotiations. For Macron, this hard-line stance on Brexit negotiations is not motivated by any pragmatic concern for the fine print of an eventual UK-EU deal, but by an overarching desire to preserve the integrity of the European system.
The European Union is extremely vulnerable, more so than at any previous time since it was founded by the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. The Greek bailout, in which the EU (mostly Germany and France) were obliged to extend credit to a fiscally-irresponsible and oft-corrupt Greek government, concluded on August 20th of this year, but financial instability in neighboring Italy, whose populist government under the Five Star Movement is violating EU fiscal rules as it increases welfare spending, has experts worried that another sovereign debt crisis is on the horizon. Nationalist movements are ascendant across Europe; along with the Five Star Movement, Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally (formerly National Front), and others have capitalized on their constituencies’ opposition to the liberal democratic order, internationalism, and immigration embodied by the European Union.
Macron’s stance on Brexit should be read as an intentional show of force to impress upon other nations the costs of exiting the European Union. If the UK were allowed to exit the EU with favorable terms, this would likely embolden other Eurosceptics like France’s own National Rally. If other European nations believed that they could free-ride and keep the benefits of EU membership, such as the tariff-free common market, while avoiding the dues, restrictions, and open-border policy, they would likely follow in the UK’s example. Macron is thus determined to make the UK’s exit from the European Union difficult either to dissuade continental Eurosceptics in the event of a “Hard Brexit” or to encourage the UK to reverse course in face of the likely costs.
Even though France continues to insist that a Brexit deal is achievable, the French government has begun drawing up contingency plans, pointing to a real fear that no deal will be finalized before the March 2019 deadline. The French Parliament published a draft bill, which can be quickly passed in the event of a “No-Deal” Brexit, to address issues including work permits and residency visas for British nationals. According to French minister of European Affairs Nathalie Loiseau, the Eurostar train which connects England and France underneath the English channel might be barred from entering French soil, and British planes could be denied access to French airspace if no Brexit deal is finalized.
This would be a dramatic departure from the current state of affairs, which is essentially a state of open borders between the UK and continental Europe. At present, the journey from France to England is a 35 minute train ride under the English Channel, so brief that so-called “Eurocommuters” can live in one country but work in the other. Next year, that same train may be turned away by armed police at the French border.
The potential economic costs of Brexit are severe for both the United Kingdom and European Union nations like France. The Center for European Progress estimates that, even though the UK has not yet officially left the European Union, wary European investors and reduced cross-channel trade have already made a dent in the British economy, to the tune of “€26 billion [$29.49 billion] per annum – or €500 million [$567 million] a week.” The Center’s study projected that as a result of the passage of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the British economy is 2.5% smaller than it otherwise would have been. When the UK actually exits the EU, the economic repercussions will be even more severe, especially in the event of a “Hard” or “No-Deal” Brexit which results in significant barriers to trade and investment. The International Monetary Fund projects that a “No-Deal” Brexit would cost the EU around $250 billion, or about 1.5% of the EU’s GDP.
It is a very real possibility that, in the event of a “No-Deal” withdrawal from the European Union, the United Kingdom will become immediately isolated from the European continent and excluded from the European body politic for the first time in twenty years. If that comes to pass, continental nationalist parties will no doubt be emboldened, and the European experiment of free trade, free movement, and free people may find itself in mortal danger. At a time when illiberal sentiments such as hyper-nationalism, xenophobia, and distrust of globalism appear to be in vogue, the survival or disintegration of the European Union will likely determine whether or not the liberal international order can endure.
What does all this mean for confused American spectators? Since the end of the Second World War, the U.S has greatly benefited from this liberal order, built on rules-based international organizations, free trade agreements, and, ideally, respect for human rights. In large part, this is because the United States was the de-facto leader of the postwar West, hence the moniker “Leader of the Free World,” and has therefore traditionally held great sway over the United Nations, World Trade Organization, and similar institutions.
Nationalist movements which threaten the European Union are in many ways identical to the post-2016 American Right which calls for immigration restrictions, trade protectionism, and a withdrawal of American support for international institutions like NATO. With the U.S. itching to abdicate these responsibilities, if the European Union falls, so too may the international system upon which American hegemony has rested for the last 70 years.
Along a desert road, a military convoy is passed by an unassuming gray car. There is a sudden explosion, then gunfire. Fifteen minutes later, four civilians are dead and eight Western soldiers are wounded. This is not the first act of terrorism in the region, nor will it be the last. The story is familiar – an Islamic terrorist attack against Western soldiers stationed in the region – but the players and setting are not. These foreign forces are not American, and the battleground is not Iraq or Afghanistan. The soldiers are French, and they are in the Sahel, a sub-Saharan strip of Africa that links the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Red Sea to the east.
The Sahel is a vast, scarcely populated, and loosely governed region that stretches across fourteen African countries, including Mali, Chad, and Niger. In recent decades, the absence of effective governance has allowed the Sahel to become a hotbed of political violence and a safe haven for transnational terrorist organizations. Boko Haram, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and smaller, regional terrorist organizations have all used the Sahel as a base of operations and refuge from counter-terrorist operations. The Sahel states’ porous borders enable militant groups to travel unchecked across vast swaths of the continent and strike targets in North African nations such as Algeria and Tunisia.
Ethnic and economic tensions in the Sahel predate the arrival of transient Islamic terrorist organizations, but temporary alliances between militant groups and villagers increase the scale and danger of regional violence. The New York Times reported that France and Mali estimate that ISIS in the Greater Sahara has only 40 to 60 core members. By inflaming local passions and escalating grievances between villagers, small groups of transnational militants are able to create disproportionately large violence and chaos. For instance, Niger and Mali’s cattle-herding Tuareg people, who had previously only taken up arms to defend their cattle and on occasion engage in small-scale ethnic violence, became involved with international terrorism. Far from home, Tuareg recruits have been involved in terrorist incidents in Libya, raids in Nigeria, and “banditry” in northern Niger and southern Algeria. Ethnic grievances between the Tuareg and Fulani peoples in both Mali and Niger led to ethnic armed conflict which was dramatically escalated by the presence of Islamic militant groups. Because these ethnic grievances are often intertwined with economic concerns, especially cattle ownership, external pressures that threaten the livelihood of Sahelian villagers can catalyze conflict.
As global warming progresses, the increased frequency of droughts, expanding desertification of the Sahel, and dwindling resources in the area will likely worsen regional tensions and create conditions favorable for the growth of terrorist networks. In 2012, according to the State Department, droughts and failed harvests in the Sahel placed 18.7 million Africans at risk for food insecurity, further fueling instability in the region. It is no coincidence that, immediately following the outbreak of drought, cattle die-offs, and famine, relations between Mali’s Tuareg and Fulani peoples worsened. A series of escalating cattle raids led to an arms race and created an opportunity for al-Qaeda affiliates to supply villagers with automatic weapons. Within the year, the Tuareg people of northern Mali, with support from al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, formed the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (NMLA) and rebelled against the central government of Mali.
When French military assets entered Mali in 2013, the campaign, known officially as Operation Serval, aimed to support the beleaguered Malian government and block the NMLA’s war for a Tuareg ethnostate in northern Mali. Although Mali and France decisively defeated the NMLA after only a few months, the French remained in Mali in an attempt to suppress a continued insurgency. Five years later, Operation Barkhane, France’s ongoing operation to stabilize the greater Sahel is ongoing and there are fresh casualties. As recently as July 1, a car bombing in Gao injured French soldiers and killed dozens of Malian civilians. Nusrat al-Islam, an al-Qaeda linked organization and the primary terrorist network currently operating in the Sahel, claimed responsibility.
In 2013, three-quarters of the French citizenry supported Operation Serval, the original intervention against NMLA secessionists in Mali. Today, substantial French support endures for the ongoing Operation Barkhane despite the campaign’s duration and casualties.
At first, it may seem surprising that France is leading the international effort to stamp out terrorism in the Sahel. After all, in 2003, the French government’s opposition to American intervention in Iraq was widely mocked in the United States. In protest, Los Angelenos (and even some UCLA students) publicly poured out French wine in front of the French consulate, and the U.S. House of Representatives cafeteria menu infamously renamed French fries to Freedom fries. During this wave of anti-French sentiment, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared that “France is becoming our enemy.” In 2003, France insisted on a multilateral diplomatic approach to Iraq, in opposition to U.S. President Bush’s insistence on unilateral military action. Yet, ten years later, the French army unilaterally entered Mali, touching off a protracted five-year campaign that has expanded to include the entire Sahel region.
What changed between Freedom fries and a permanent French presence in the Sahel? In reality, France’s relationships with Iraq and the Sahel are vastly different. Countries in the western Sahel such as Mali and Niger were colonized and imperialized by France during the European Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century. These Francophone African nations still bear both the trauma and cultural legacy of French rule.
Many leftist and African scholars argue that France’s reassertion of authority and military power over historic colonial possessions is best characterized as neo-imperialist. Skeptical that France’s primary concern is protecting Malian citizens from terrorism, these critics of French intervention point to plausible ulterior motives including the protection of French corporate mining interests and nearby uranium mines (in both Niger and Nigeria) on which the French energy sector relies. In February, Congolese novelist and UCLA professor Alain Mabanckou criticized la Francophonie, the informal and institutionalized network of French speaking countries, and described it not as a partnership of equals but as an instrument of French neo-imperial domination.
However, there is also evidence that the French feel a sense of obligation to and fraternity with the Francophone Africans of the Sahel. Cultural ties, a shared language, and a sense of historical interconnectedness (despite the region’s colonial past) are all factors. Arguably, elements within France feel a sense of guilt and noblesse oblige, or responsibility of the privileged, towards the nations their ancestors exploited. Whether this concern is genuine or paternalistically self-serving is a matter of debate. What is clear, however, is that the security situation in the Sahel is as of yet unresolved and that the potent mixture of ethnic conflict, Islamic terrorism, rising global temperatures, and increasingly severe droughts represents a enduring security risk for African nations and a source of serious concern for France.