By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 31st, 2012 
An interview recently published in the Polish online journal, Kultura Liberalna, posted here, provides an interesting insider’s view of how the political situation there is understood from the point of view of Putin’s opposition. Lukasz Pawlowski, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw and a contributing editor to Kultura Liberalna, interviews Lilia Shevtsova, a political scientist and expert on Russian politics. She served as director of the Center for Political Studies in Moscow and as deputy director of the Moscow Institute of International Economic and Political Studies. Currently she is a senior associate at the Moscow office of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is the author of numerous publications including her latest book Change or Decay: Russia’s Dilemma and the West’s Response (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011).
This interview raises a number of significant issues, concerning the problems of democratization and the problems of Russia. Most fundamental is that the democratization of Russia requires Russian action. Outsiders, “the West,” and specifically the United States, cannot do much about this. This is a theme we have been observing in many parts of the world. Consider, for example, how Elzbieta Matynia reflects on the issue as it applies to Egypt, Poland and South Africa.
And then the interview gets into the particulars: critically appraising the strengths and weaknesses of the democratic opposition Russia, reflecting on the Medvedev – Putin relationship, and how each of these figures challenge the democratic project, judging the short and long term prospects of democratic movement in Russia, and the necessity of change from the bottom up. One of Shevtsova’s more provocative claims is that Russia is better off with Putin than Medvedev as President.
To read the interview of Lilia Shevtsova “Do Not Democratize Russia: We Will Do It Ourselves,” click here.
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 31st, 2012 An Interview from Kultura Liberalna
Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Moscow Carnegie Center and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on Russian politics, democratic opposition and on why Putin may be better than Medvedev
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Lukasz Pawlowski: Why haven’t the mass protests prevented Mr. Putin from winning the presidential election for the third time?
Lilia Shevtsova: Because the protest tide was weak, it wasn’t a real tsunami. The December movement had no structured leadership and no concrete agenda. It wasn’t strong enough to force political leaders in the Kremlin even to think about some serious change at the moment. Nonetheless, it shocked them and proved the society has awakened although luckily for the Kremlin it is not that frightening yet.
In Russia there are numerous parties and non-governmental organizations working against the regime for democratization. There have been there for many years and now when they got a marvelous opportunity to achieve at least some of their goals they missed it. They have been working long to get Russian society out in the streets and when they finally managed to do that they seemed completely surprised.
Everybody was surprised, maybe with exception of some people, who – just like myself – have been telling themselves every year, every month: “it will come, it will come, the bubble will burst”. But even we were not sure, when it will happen. The number of people that took to the streets was some kind of revelation. Even sociological instruments failed to reveal, what was happening beneath the surface of the society. The most respectable survey institution, Levada Center – the best in Russia, and maybe even in Europe – before the parliamentary elections in December estimated that the Kremlin party, United Russia, will get about 55% of the votes, while in the end it got officially only 45% and in reality less than 35% of the vote. So yes, for many people in the society, even in the opposition the events that followed parliamentary elections were unexpected.
But why has the opposition failed in their hour of trial, despite the fact, that we have so many movements, groups and parties? Why have they failed to get together, to . . .
Read more: Do Not Democratize Russia: We Will Do It Ourselves
By Michael Corey, May 29th, 2012 
At The Tippler, a New York City bar located behind an inconspicuous door under the Chelsea Market, a patron described as a Saudi billionaire spent $60,000 on a special, limited production, extra-large bottle of Armand de Brignac (aka Ace of Spades) champagne. (A standard size, retail bottle of Armand de Brignac Brut Gold sells for about $350, but it may be found for about $250). While this purchase was the most expensive bottle of champagne ever sold by the club, and perhaps the most expensive sold in New York City, the expenditure pales in comparison with a double Nebuchadnezzar or Melchizedek (30 liters) bottle of Midas Armand de Brignac champagne that a “financier” bought for 125,000 British pounds in the Playground nightclub located at the Liverpool Hilton Hotel. The “financier’s” total bar bill for the evening was 204,000 British pounds including an 18,500 British pound service charge. The “financier” reportedly also bought forty standard bottles of Armand de Brignac for single women that were in the bar.
The Melchizedek, “gold-plated” bottle weighted about one hundred pounds, and it had to be carried to the “financier” by two servers. The “financier” has been described as being in his twenties, perhaps a foreign exchange trader. The club DJ played dramatic, iconic music from the science fiction film 2001, A Space Odyssey as the bottle moved to the table. After the cork was popped, glasses of champagne were distributed to everyone that was in the VIP area of the club. People in the room were described as having a great time as they toasted the “financier.” One report noted that although the financier arrived with about ten of his friends, after the cork was popped, the party attracted a large number of beautiful women.
Was his status affirmed? Did this elicit envy? Did some feel less worthy? The young “financier” out conspicuously and invidiously spent U. S. gambler and businessman Don Johnson who ran up a tab of about 168,000 British pounds in June of 2011 at the One4One nightclub in London’s Park Lane. Johnson . . .
Read more: Artisanal Champagne and Conspicuous and Invidious Consumption
By Piki Ish-Shalom, May 25th, 2012 
 Piki Ish-Shalom, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reflects on an outbreak of racial hatred and xenophobic violence in Israel. – Jeff
History is a reservoir of teachings. For example, fusing together xenophobia, social unrest, racial stereotyping and sexual hysteria is especially explosive, endangering the marginalized others, the social fabric, and the political system as a whole. Looking at the rise of the xenophobic right in Europe, it sometimes seems that many Europeans have forgotten the lessons they so painfully learned. I fear that Israel, on the other hand, has not learned those fundamental teachings at all.
In the last couple of years Israel faced a steady inflow of Africans, smuggled in through its borders. Their numbers are hard to know accurately, but the estimation is in the tens of thousands. Most of them are from Eritrea and Sudan; countries torn by wars and hunger. Many of them are asylum-seekers, who apply for refugee status. But the state authorities mostly refuse to examine their requests, as is required by the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), of which Israel is party. On the other hand, they are not deported, and thus remain in a purgatory state in which they are legally banned from work, do not enjoy any social rights, and are pushed into lives of misery and poverty at the margins of society.
Hardly any asylum-seeker is granted the status of a refugee because Israel fails to fulfill its legal responsibility to examine their requests. Hence, they remain as asylum-seekers and are perceived as illegal immigrants. Many of them are crowded in the streets of southern Tel Aviv alongside poor sectors of Israeli society, sectors that themselves suffer from marginalization, alienation, and a host of economic and social problems. Seeing their streets crowded by foreigners, who allegedly steal their jobs and affect their standards of living, alienates those sectors further and flairs their anger at the government. Nothing new in the stratification of racial hate, unfortunately.
Recent weeks have witnessed a . . .
Read more: Asylum-Seekers, Hate Speech and Racism – Tel Aviv, Israel, May 22nd
By Michael Cohen, May 24th, 2012 
I welcome Will Milberg’s response to my book and was pleased with his appreciation of how the case of Argentina challenges conventional wisdom in economics. His review adds to the debate about Argentina, highlighting one of my motivations for writing the book: to show how the Argentine experience since 2001 flies in the face of economic pundits, both in the academy and in the financial press, and that it is important to pay attention. Milberg’s message was seconded by Paul Krugman in a NY Times blog posting in which he directly identifies “conventional wisdom” as obscuring accurate perception of strong Argentine recent economic performance.
I would carry this further to the case of the recent re-nationalization of the Argentine oil company, YPF. The exaggerated external critique and prediction of economic doom once again for Argentina fails to see that this decision makes sense if the government is able to achieve its own institutional objective of making YPF a well-run enterprise serving the national interest by expanding energy production. Commentaries by The Financial Times and The New York Times, with the exception of Krugman, sound eerily similar to their alarmist predictions in 2002 that Argentina would fall off the tip of South America after the default on its debt. Conventional wisdom, I believe, as Milberg notes, is sorely in need to revision.
And while I very much agree with most of Milberg’s observations about the Argentine case, and accept his friendly critique of some parts of my book, I think that he is too easily accepting some external views, from the U.S. and Europe, that “the country is once more on the edge.” This is not true in terms of its growth, balance of payments, fiscal deficit, growing investments in infrastructure, and most importantly reduced poverty and inequality. Low unemployment continues despite some slowdown in the construction sector.
Recent policy decisions and major legislative victories by President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner on critical issues of social policy and the reorganization of the Central Bank demonstrate continued . . .
Read more: Argentina Continues to Defy Conventional Wisdom: A Response to Milberg
By Gary Alan Fine, May 23rd, 2012 
Marriage season is now upon us, and in year 2012 there are stirrings. Perhaps not in heteronormative quarters, where divorce remains a spectator sport, but unfecund passion is blooming where moral fences and rocky laws abound. Just recently our president, commander-in-chief of the bully pulpit, revealed that he has evolved, no longer uncomfortable with what was once termed, with slight derision, gay marriage, but is now known as “marriage equality.”
Perhaps President Obama was pushed to catch up to his verbose Veep or perhaps he saw this revelation as a strategy to open the promiscuous wallets on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, but he was historic, rhetorically. So much for Barack Hussein Obama as closet Muslim fundamentalist. True, he did not call on states to act on his pronouncement and certainly didn’t call on the Supreme Court to do so, but the occasion was remarkable partly because here as elsewhere Obama was leading from behind. But leading still.
When I teach classes on social movements, I attempt a dangerous feat. I ask students to imagine how not so very long ago – indeed, in my conscious remembrance, a half century back – American citizens could believe that segregation was right and proper. While many other citizens disagreed, the defenders of segregation in 1962 were not wild-eyed, in-bred, or illiterate. They were, some of them, responsible, highly educated, and often compassionate. Most were soon to decide that they were wrong, even if they did not phrase their racial conversion narrative in that way. But in the American South between 1964 and 1972, many former segregationists recognized that they were standing on the “wrong side” of history, or, as Leon Trotsky acidly phrased the matter, in the “dustbin” of history.
Perhaps we need be grateful that contemporary students have so much difficulty in figuring out how a plausible segregationist argument was possible. Today such a policy seems more than wrong; it seems inexplicable.
And perhaps we are at a branching point today – or soon – in that much the same will be said of our current marriage debate. Someday students may puzzle . . .
Read more: Marriage Equality and the Dustbin of History
By Anna Lisa Tota, May 21st, 2012 
I was in New York at the end of April in the days preceding the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death, there to take part in a conference on Memory Studies at The New School for Social Research. An American colleague of mine, Alexandra Delano, along with Ben Nienass, presented a paper on the invisible victims of 9/11: the illegal Mexican workers who were in the towers at the time. During the conference, Alexandra movingly declared that these illegal workers had not had rights, alive or dead. Their names are not listed on the sides of the two big pools, which constitute the memorial for the victims of the terrorist attack of 9/11.
I really loved the idea of giving a voice to the invisible, so I decided that it was time to pay a visit to the 9/11 National Memorial. I set out for a long walk across Manhattan to reach downtown. I hoped that the walk would prepare me for what I was about to confront. Once I got to the vicinity of the commemorative site, I found countless signs that explained to me where to book my tour. Everything was organized in a very efficient way, and after waiting for less than an hour, I was able to enter.
I found myself standing in line together with many visitors, thoroughly watched by many kind and smiling policemen, and when I say many, I mean that they were so numerous that it came to mind that there must be a clear and present danger to watch out for. They asked me to let them scan my purse into a metal detector in order to make sure I did not carry a weapon. Finally, after walking along a closely watched path, I stepped into a garden.
There were two enormous water pools, as if they were two gigantic swimming pools with high walls from which two immense water falls flowed down with tremendous force and energy. I noticed that there was absolutely nothing one could tamper with, so I kept on asking . . .
Read more: On the National 9/11 Memorial: An Italian Perspective
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, May 18th, 2012 
I am preparing my class on the new “new social movements” this week. I will be giving it at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland in July. I am excited and challenged about the course, happy to be returning to our institute, which has a long history, related to the topic of my class. The seminar, also, will be an attempt to thoroughly address the complex issues in my May Day post.
In that post I noted the media obstacles OWS faced on May 1st. Neither the serious, nor the sensational media portrayed a meaningful popular demonstration, a national commemoration of May Day demanding social justice. While some might see this as a kind of conspiracy, I, as a matter of principle, don’t, or rather won’t until I consider alternative explanations. In the summer seminar, I hope to explore the alternatives with an international student body. Here’s an overview, which is informing my preparation.
Social movements have generally been understood in two ways. They have been seen as non-institutional means of a group of people to pursue their common interests and achieve their shared goals. The traditional archetype for this is the labor movement. Alternatively, social movements have been seen as not only interest focused, but as well, and perhaps more importantly, as non-institutional means for the formation of a group with common identities, concerned with supporting the identities and acting upon them. Civil rights movements, the women, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender movements, environmental movements and the like, are understood as being newer kinds of movements, “new social movements.” To tell the truth, I never quite understood why the new social movements were considered new. They, like labor movements, emerged in the nineteenth century. They, like the traditional movements, pursue interests. And the traditional movements, like the new ones, are about identity. Yet, I know this is not central. Rather we need to note that new and old movements are not only about the pursuit of interests. Movements are important ends in themselves for the people who create and are . . .
Read more: OWS and the Arab Spring: The New “New Social Movements”
By Christiane Wilke, May 16th, 2012 
The European Left seems on the rise. With left-of-center parties doing very well in elections in France, Greece, and Germany, it is tempting to read these elections as part of a broader repudiation of the conservative EU project of fiscal stability and indifference to unemployment. And surely, no election in Europe these days is removed from the question of where the EU is going.
Yet, the German elections, in the provinces/states of Schleswig-Holstein and North-Rhine Westphalia, were primarily provincial elections about provincial problems. At the same time, the recent election in North Rhine-Westphalia reveals interesting dimensions of how people negotiate the financial crisis at the provincial level.
The elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) had become necessary because the liberal party inadvertently brought down the minority government of the Social Democrats and the Green Party. The occasion was a fight over the budget in which the liberals wanted to appeal to their anti-tax constituency and at the same time support their minority government. Germany is not used to minority governments. Hence, those who deal with minority governments do not necessarily understand the arcane legal and political rules involved in keeping minority governments alive.
The results:
The elections worked well for the two parties that had formed the minority government: the Social Democrats received 39.1% of the vote (up by 4.6%) and the Greens 11.3% (down by 0.8%). The Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Merkel, received a disappointing 26.3% (down 8.3%). The Liberals, whose grandstanding had caused the election, came out with a surprisingly high 8.6%. The Pirate Party, barely visible in the last election, scored a strong 7.8%. What do these results mean? Who and what has won?
 
First, women won. Hannelore Kraft and Sylvia Löhrmann, the leading candidates for the Social Democrats and the Greens, respectively, converted their . . .
Read more: German Provincial Elections: On to the Post-Macho Welfare State, Pirates Included
By Minas Samatas, May 14th, 2012 
In this post, Minas Samatas, Professor of Political Sociology, University of Crete, reports that while the Greeks said no to draconian austerity, no to the two ruling parties, and no to European threats of Greece’s exit from euro zone, “Grexit,” they suggested a new path for a democratically legitimate European Union. -Jeff
Μay 6th elections in Greece have sent a loud and clear message: the Greek people said no to the draconian austerity measures that have devastated the country in exchange for dead-end bailouts from the troika of European Union (EU), European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Designed by IMF and Eurocrats, the bailout “memorandum” does not guarantee a safe path to move Greece away from disaster, even if implemented in full. The austerity policy gives absolute priority for paying creditors at the expense of citizens’ incomes, without any future prospect of development and growth. It promotes sharp reductions in public spending, shattering the healthcare and educational system, and the “Balkanization” of Greece with salaries under 200 Euros comparable to Bulgaria. The Greek electorate rejected this in no uncertain terms.
They also, and very importantly, said no to the two ruling parties, punishing the socialist PASOK and conservative New Democracy (ND). They are responsible for the dramatic economic crisis and signed the disastrous austerity program (memorandum) to protect the foreign creditors and the banks at the expense of the most vulnerable. The outcome of the ballot expressed anger against the corrupted political elite and its policies. It expressed dismay at the lack of punishment of those responsible for the crisis. It was a call for social justice for those who suffer from the crisis. The election results express the fear and despair of the Greek people affected by the memorandum’s inhumane policy, lurching deeper into poverty and despair by sharp salary and pensions cuts, unfair tax increases, 22% unemployment (with 922 people losing their job per day over the past year), leaving no future for the young people but immigration, leading to over 3,000 persons to suicide.
The results:
The conservative New Democracy (ND) came in first place with . . .
Read more: Reflections on the Elections in Greece
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