Month: June 2024

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Private Riddles

Anne Carson once wrote that Paul Celan is ‘a poet who uses language as if he were always translating.’ His elliptical, compressed poetry has been a longstanding influence on Yoko Tawada, another writer who seems to exist between languages. Born in Toyko in 1960, Tawada moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, eventually settling in Berlin. She has written some ten books in Japanese – both fiction and poetry – and five in German. A keen observer of cultural and linguistic dislocation, Tawada has absorbed a kind of anti-language from Celan, a deeply affecting, sui generis diction unmoored from nationality or obvious tradition. As the poet and critic Ryan Ruby has written, ‘More than simply international, [Tawada’s] writing is translingual; she leaves the borders between languages open and allows them to cross-pollinate.’ She shares with Celan the desire to render inbetweenness legible, and to give form to emergent or unspeakable sensation.

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, newly translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, follows a literary scholar named Patrik through Covid-era Berlin as he contemplates presenting a paper on Celan’s 1968 collection Threadsuns at a conference in Paris. Lockdown has wreaked havoc on Patrik’s psychological and spiritual life; suffering from a kind of soul weariness, he is known as ‘the patient’. Listening to Patrik’s thoughts – diatribes against former colleagues, concerns about technology and disconnection, excursuses into poetic theory, musings on time – gives an impression of overlong isolation and anomie. For most of the novel, Patrik seems half-asleep, his language coiling in private riddles, his will thwarted by existential paralysis. Into this inert space, the past rushes, blurring distinctions, inviting phantoms and regrets. Above all he faces the challenge of simply finding enough to do to get through the day. He may or may not still be employed by the ‘Institute of World Literature’. His habits have calcified, transformed into strange, ascetic rituals. He watches a lot of opera DVDs, thinks about his ex-girlfriend, wanders the city, and begins conversing with an angel, Leo-Eric Fu, whom he meets at cafes to discuss loneliness, life and the koans of Celan. The conference in Paris begins to take on existential significance: if he attends, his life might begin again – a terrifying thought.

Is Leo-Eric really an angel? Does he actually exist or is he merely a figment of a lockdown-ravaged mind? ‘The man standing in front of Patrik looks very Trans-Tibetan,’ we’re told. He speaks ‘a straightforward German with a faint accent.’ He ‘appears to know even unimportant details about Patrik’s life.’ He gives Patrik a card on which is printed ‘Chinese Cultural Institute’; when Patrik calls the phone number on the card, no one has ever heard of a Leo-Eric Fu. He lends Patrik an anatomy book, one in which ‘Leo-Eric’s grandfather copied the traces left behind by [Celan]’ in a similar volume, the striking terms underlined: ‘aortic arch’, ‘cerebellum’, ‘bright blood.’ At the end of the novel he sprouts wings and bears Patrik to Paris – or maybe to his own death – a divine force shattering Patrik’s stasis in Berlin. He may be an emissary of God or of Celan himself. (In Patrik’s mind, there isn’t much difference.)

Born in 1920 in Czernowitz, then part of Romania (now Chernivtsi, in southwestern Ukraine), Celan was raised to speak German and Romanian, while also picking up Yiddish and Hebrew in his Jewish family home. From the start he felt an affinity with Kafka, who had complained of ‘the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, and the impossibility of writing differently.’ During World War II, Cernowitz was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans. Celan survived the camp he was interned at but both his parents perished. The tragedy would bequeath profoundly conflicted feelings about German, the language in which he wrote, and inform his haunted, compact style, rife with enigmatic silences, startling portmanteaus and ruthless self-interrogation. His attitude toward German was both unsparing and almost mystically devoted:

It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. It had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for what happened; yet it passed through this happening.

Though not a character, Celan suffuses Tawada’s novel like a vapour, his language, experiences and eventual suicide warping its gravity like a superdense star. In this respect, it continues a tradition – call it the skewed homage – well-represented in the last half century of European fiction. Works like Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser (1983), Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain (1984) and Enrique Vila-Matas’s Never Any End to Paris (2003) also ventriloquize or orbit an historical figure: the pianist Glenn Gould, the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, and the novelist Ernest Hemingway, respectively. They are strange and wonderful, these half-characters and shadowy projections, glancing figures skimming the surface of reality in service to the fictions they bolster and sustain.

Patrik is an avatar of Celanian aesthetics and concerns, his thoughts imbued with the poet’s obessions, his hyphenated nouns pulled directly from Celan’s ambiguous poetics: ‘thought-scraps’, ‘thought-worms’, ‘thought-foam’, ‘breath-pause’, ‘breath-turn’. The poems themselves have been ransacked for incident and imagery. In her translator’s afterword, Bernofsky lists some of the novel’s borrowings: ‘Rolling the dice, Van Gogh’s severed ear, the krater, foam, needles, hammers, pomegranate, quince, lips, blackbird, jackdaw, cockchafer, diving whales, phosphorus, comets, corona, melancholy, hard silence, and folie a deux.’ The non-expert will surely miss many of these references, though this hardly lessens the book’s effect. Something of Celan’s lyric mystery seeps through even the most obscure allusions.

Each lifted motif acts as a platform upon which Tawada arranges the fears and anxieties of contemporary life, many of them recognizably pandemic-era: technological atomization (‘What appears to connect everything with everything nowadays isn’t the soul – it’s a digital network’); temporal distortion (‘On the radio, they’re saying all the opera houses and concert halls are open again, but the timelessness persists’); emotional numbness (‘Opening hurts. Closing brings comfort’); pathology fatigue (‘Fortunately every human being is potentially sick, so you can ask for a checkup withoutspecifying your symptoms’); romantic hopelessness (‘What are the dead genres? Poetry? Opera? Love?’); and persistent fantasy (‘Telling well-calibrated lies is the only way he can draw a map in his head’). Yet amid these crises, Patrik’s consuming predicament is whether or not he should attend the Celan conference in Paris. When he receives a printed e-ticket from Leo-Eric Fu, he mistakes the barcode for a burn mark. The scrap of paper might free him or burn him, offering a potentially dangerous reacquaintance with the world at large.

Yet this is first and foremost a novel about loving a poet. Patrik is always coming back to Celan’s works – an elliptical return like that of migratory birds or weather patterns. He yearns to be absorbed in individual poems, permanently frustrated at anything – errands, obligations, relationships – that stands between him and his quarry. All sensation, all thought, all activity leads back to Celan. When he is ailing: ‘I’ll stop trying to read my partial physical pain. Instead, I’ll read Celan.’ When entertaining fantasies of purpose and meaning: ‘One day Patrik would give a lecture in which he revealed the significance of every single letter Celan used in his poetry.’ When facing social commitments: ‘I wished for nothing more than to become invisible so as to be able to read. To read Celan.’ Devoted readers will recognize such bewitchment – the beautiful, baffling, embarrassing ambit of literary enthusiasm for which prosaic reality is no match.

Celan’s refusal of answers urges the reader toward better questions, the kind that light a path through the text’s darkness. Tawada’s novel lifts this, too, from the great poet, the atmosphere of mysterious meaning in which one wanders, sometimes lost but for the illumination provided by leaps of chance understanding, references dimly apprehended, jokes overheard, problems rued and poetry exalted. This loose weave of connection – of what we love, what we lose, what we talk about, what we read – remains intelligible, even amid forms that don’t readily yield their meanings. In this sense, Patrik is lucky. Would that we all might find our Celan.

Read on: Michael Maar, ‘The Ordeals of Fire and Water’, NLR 2.

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The Collapse of Zionism

Hamas’s assault of October 7 can be likened to an earthquake that strikes an old building. The cracks were already beginning to show, but they are now visible in its very foundations. More than 120 years since its inception, could the Zionist project in Palestine – the idea of imposing a Jewish state on an Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern country – be facing the prospect of collapse? Historically, a plethora of factors can cause a state to capsize. It can result from constant attacks by neighbouring countries or from chronic civil war. It can follow the breakdown of public institutions, which become incapable of providing services to citizens. Often it begins as a slow process of disintegration that gathers momentum and then, in a short period of time, brings down structures that once appeared solid and steadfast.

The difficulty lies in spotting the early indicators. Here, I will argue that these are clearer than ever in the case of Israel. We are witnessing a historical process – or, more accurately, the beginnings of one – that is likely to culminate in the downfall of Zionism. And, if my diagnosis is correct, then we are also entering a particularly dangerous conjuncture. For once Israel realizes the magnitude of the crisis, it will unleash ferocious and uninhibited force to try to contain it, as did the South African apartheid regime during its final days.

1.

A first indicator is the fracturing of Israeli Jewish society. At present it is composed of two rival camps which are unable to find common ground. The rift stems from the anomalies of defining Judaism as nationalism. While Jewish identity in Israel has sometimes seemed little more than a subject of theoretical debate between religious and secular factions, it has now become a struggle over the character of the public sphere and the state itself. This is being fought not only in the media but also in the streets.

One camp can be termed the ‘State of Israel’. It comprises more secular, liberal and mostly but not exclusively middle-class European Jews and their descendants, who were instrumental in establishing the state in 1948 and remained hegemonic within it until the end of the last century. Make no mistake, their advocacy of ‘liberal democratic values’ does not affect their commitment to the apartheid system which is imposed, in various ways, on all Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Their basic wish is for Jewish citizens to live in a democratic and pluralist society from which Arabs are excluded.

The other camp is the ‘State of Judea’, which developed among the settlers of the occupied West Bank. It enjoys increasing levels of support within the country and constitutes the electoral base that secured Netanyahu’s victory in the November 2022 elections. Its influence in the upper echelons of the Israeli army and security services is growing exponentially. The State of Judea wants Israel to become a theocracy that stretches over the entirety of historical Palestine. To achieve this, it is determined to reduce the number of Palestinians to a bare minimum, and it is contemplating the construction of a Third Temple in place of al-Aqsa. Its members believe this will enable them to renew the golden era of the Biblical Kingdoms. For them, secular Jews are as heretical as the Palestinians if they refuse to join in this endeavour.

The two camps had begun to clash violently before October 7. For the first few weeks after the assault, they appeared to shelve their differences in the face of a common enemy. But this was an illusion. The street fighting has reignited, and it is difficult to see what could possibly bring about reconciliation. The more likely outcome is already unfolding before our eyes. More than half a million Israelis, representing the State of Israel, have left the country since October, an indication that the country is being engulfed by the State of Judea. This is a political project that the Arab world, and perhaps even the world at large, will not tolerate in the long term.

2.

The second indicator is Israel’s economic crisis. The political class does not seem to have any plan for balancing the public finances amid perpetual armed conflicts, beyond becoming increasingly reliant on American financial aid. In the final quarter of last year, the economy slumped by nearly 20%; since then, the recovery has been fragile. Washington’s pledge of $14 billion is unlikely to reverse this. On the contrary, the economic burden will only worsen if Israel follows through on its intention to go to war with Hezbollah while ramping up military activity in the West Bank, at a time when some countries – including Turkey and Colombia – have begun to apply economic sanctions.

The crisis is further aggravated by the incompetence of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who constantly channels money to Jewish settlements in the West Bank but seems otherwise unable to run his department. The conflict between the State of Israel and the State of Judea, along with the events of October 7, is meanwhile causing some of the economic and financial elite to move their capital outside the state. Those who are considering relocating their investments make up a significant part of the 20% of Israelis who pay 80% of the taxes.  

3.

The third indicator is Israel’s growing international isolation, as it gradually becomes a pariah state. This process began before October 7 but has intensified since the onset of the genocide. It is reflected by the unprecedented positions adopted by the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court. Previously, the global Palestine solidarity movement was able to galvanize people to participate in boycott initiatives, yet it failed to advance the prospect of international sanctions. In most countries, support for Israel remained unshakable among the political and economic establishment.  

In this context, the recent ICJ and ICC decisions – that Israel may be committing genocide, that it must halt its offensive in Rafah, that its leaders should be arrested for war crimes – must be seen as an attempt to heed the views of global civil society, as opposed to merely reflecting elite opinion. The tribunals have not eased the brutal attacks on the people of Gaza and the West Bank. But they have contributed to the growing chorus of criticism levelled at the Israeli state, which increasingly comes from above as well as below.

4.

The fourth, interconnected indicator is the sea-change among young Jews around the world. Following the events of the last nine months, many now seem willing to jettison their connection to Israel and Zionism and actively participate in the Palestinian solidarity movement. Jewish communities, particularly in the US, once provided Israel with effective immunity against criticism. The loss, or at least the partial loss, of this support has major implications for the country’s global standing. AIPAC can still rely on Christian Zionists to provide assistance and shore up its membership, but it will not be the same formidable organization without a significant Jewish constituency. The power of the lobby is eroding.

5.

The fifth indicator is the weakness of the Israeli army. There is no doubt that the IDF remains a powerful force with cutting-edge weaponry at its disposal. Yet its limitations were exposed on October 7. Many Israelis feel that the military was extremely fortunate, as the situation could have been far worse had Hezbollah joined in a coordinated assault. Since then, Israel has shown that it is desperately reliant on a regional coalition, led by the US, to defend itself against Iran, whose warning attack in April saw the deployment of around 170 drones plus ballistic and guided missiles. More than ever, the Zionist project depends on the rapid delivery of huge quantities of supplies from the Americans, without which it could not even fight a small guerrilla army in the south.

There is now a widespread perception of Israel’s unpreparedness and inability to defend itself among the country’s Jewish population. It has led to major pressure to remove the military exemption for ultra-Orthodox Jews – in place since 1948 – and begin drafting them in their thousands. This will hardly make much difference on the battlefield, but it reflects the scale of pessimism about the army – which has, in turn, deepened the political divisions within Israel.

6.

The final indicator is the renewal of energy among the younger generation of Palestinians. It is far more united, organically connected and clear about its prospects than the Palestinian political elite. Given the population of Gaza and the West Bank is among the youngest in the world, this new cohort will have an immense influence over the course of the liberation struggle. The discussions taking place among young Palestinian groups show that they are preoccupied with establishing a genuinely democratic organization – either a renewed PLO, or a new one altogether – that will pursue a vision of emancipation which is antithetical to the Palestinian Authority’s campaign for recognition as a state. They seem to favour a one-state solution to a discredited two-state model.

Will they be able to mount an effective response to the decline of Zionism? This is a difficult question to answer. The collapse of a state project is not always followed by a brighter alternative. Elsewhere in the Middle East – in Syria, Yemen and Libya – we have seen how bloody and protracted the results can be. In this case, it would be a matter of decolonization, and the previous century has shown that post-colonial realities do not always improve the colonial condition. Only the agency of the Palestinians can move us in the right direction. I believe that, sooner or later, an explosive fusion of these indicators will result in the destruction of the Zionist project in Palestine. When it does, we must hope that a robust liberation movement is there to fill the void.

For more than 56 years, what was termed the ‘peace process’ – a process that led nowhere – was actually a series of American-Israeli initiatives to which the Palestinians were asked to react. Today, ‘peace’ must be replaced with decolonization, and Palestinians must be able to articulate their vision for the region, with Israelis asked to react. This would mark the first time, at least for many decades, that the Palestinian movement would take the lead in setting out its proposals for a post-colonial and non-Zionist Palestine (or whatever the new entity will be called). In doing so, it will likely look to Europe (perhaps to the Swiss cantons and the Belgian model) or, more aptly, to the old structures of the eastern Mediterranean, where secularized religious groups morphed gradually into ethnocultural ones that lived side-by-side in the same territory.  

Whether people welcome the idea or dread it, the collapse of Israel has become foreseeable. This possibility should inform the long-term conversation about the region’s future. It will be forced onto the agenda as people realize that the century-long attempt, led by Britain and then the US, to impose a Jewish state on an Arab country is slowly coming to an end. It was successful enough to create a society of millions of settlers, many of them now second- and third-generation. But their presence still depends, as it did when they arrived, on their ability to violently impose their will on millions of indigenous people, who have never given up their struggle for self-determination and freedom in their homeland. In the decades to come, the settlers will have to part with this approach and show their willingness to live as equal citizens in a liberated and decolonized Palestine.

Read on: Haim Haneghi, Moshe Machover & Akiva Orr, ‘The Class Nature of Israeli Society’, NLR I/65.

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Transforming Mexico

Claudia Sheinbaum won a landslide in the Mexican presidential elections on 2 June. With close to 60% of the vote, the magnitude of her victory exceeded that of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018. Her party, Morena, formed only a decade ago, secured a two-thirds majority in Congress and is just two representatives short of doing so in the Senate. The opposition PRI, PAN and PRD – running on a unity ticket – got about 27%, a significant decline since the previous ballot. Three things are particularly striking about the results. First, the clarity of the mandate: an anomaly in Western democracies, which are increasingly accustomed to marginal contests and political stalemates. Second, the particularities of Morena’s constituency: a voting bloc anchored in the working classes yet capable of folding in parts of the middle strata. Third, the sense that a new political regime is emerging, founded on a post-neoliberal social pact.

Sheinbaum’s main competitor was Xóchitl Gálvez, leading the coalition of the PRI, PAN and PRD. Gálvez helmed an erratic campaign, representing the interests of big business sprinkled with lite social liberalism. Unable to run on an outwardly neoliberal agenda – the term has become toxic in Mexico – she opted instead for identity politics: her opening pitch emphasized her indigenous roots and humble beginnings, while her closing one leaned in to attacks on Sheinbaum’s non-Catholicism. Her platform was always too unfocused to frame the election around what is arguably the government’s weakest point: the extremely high levels of narco-violence in the country, which Morena inherited from the PAN and PRI and has struggled to meaningfully reduce.

The exhaustion of the Mexican right was clear from its contradictory messaging. Caught between having to uphold the widely popular cash transfer programmes implemented by AMLO, while also criticizing them as wasteful and clientelistic, Gálvez swung between calling for their expansion and demanding their contraction through time-limits and means-testing. One of her campaign slogans, ‘The programmes stay, Morena goes’, failed to cut through with an electorate that had witnessed her party, the PAN, vote against them just a few years earlier.

A career politician who has held various cabinet positions and been in elected office for decades, Gálvez nonetheless tried to present herself as an ordinary citizen, publicly distancing herself from the discredited parties that nominated her and ran her campaign. The opinocracia – the class of media commentators and op-ed writers that dominate mainstream media (and feed much of the foreign press) – described the vote as a choice between ‘democracy’ with Gálvez and ‘authoritarianism’ with Sheinbaum. But this strategy turned out to be stillborn. Meanwhile, the ‘third party’ candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez of the Movimiento Ciudadano – a substanceless outfit whose only aim was to pick up the votes not captured by the two main contenders – denounced ‘the old ways’ of doing politics but failed to specify the new ones. He ended up winning 10%. Yet his party demonstrated that it may have enough strategic nous to position itself as a potential replacement for the PRI-PAN-PRD in the long term.

Unable to fly the flag of neoliberalism, incapable of defending its legislative record or party legacy, offering little more than empty slogans and abstract appeals to ‘democracy’, what the opposition finally came up with was a type of anti-politics. In their most cynical moments, their pundits argued that ‘todos son iguales!’, ‘Morena is just as corrupt as us!’ Their main aim was not to discredit AMLO’s policies or offer an alternative programme, but to undermine the basic conviction that a political party can steer the state in the service of collective interests. It was this hopeless offer that the electorate rejected.

A recent Gallup poll suggests that the majority of Mexicans are, in fact, deeply invested in the political process. Not only does AMLO have an approval rating of 80%; there is also an increasing ‘confidence in national government’, which has jumped from 29% to 61% during Morena’s time in office: the highest in the twenty years since Gallup began asking the question. As of 2023, 73% of Mexicans felt their living standards were ‘getting better’, and 57% said the same about their local economy. Before AMLO, ‘confidence in the honesty of México’s elections’ averaged just 19%; during the past six years it rose to 44%. The Pew Research Center has likewise shown that ‘Mexicans’ satisfaction with their democracy’ has risen 42 percentage points since 2017. The number of people who identify as Morena party sympathizers has grown by 10 points since 2018, now reaching 34%, compared to 8% for both the PRI and PAN. Morena’s organizational power was on full display in 2022, when it turned out over three million people to elect delegates for its National Party Congress. In an age of generalized dissatisfaction with the party form and the well-storied hollowing out of mass politics, AMLO’s effect on national political culture is impressive.

Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former Head of Government of Mexico City, had a double-digit lead from the beginning of the campaign. Yet the extent of her support, encompassing multiple regions and demographics, remains noteworthy. Morena won in 31 out of Mexico’s 32 states. In 17 of these it managed to get over 60% of the vote, and in the southern states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Guerrero and Quintana Roo its tally exceeded 70%. Sheinbaum beat her opponents in 78% of all polling stations. She won with both men and women, with every age group, and with almost every educational attainment and income bracket. Morena also had a strong down-ballot vote and continued to gain ground at local level for the sixth consecutive year, wining or retaining a series of gubernatorial seats including Mexico City. It is expected to win the extra votes needed to pass Constitutional reforms.

A closer look at the electoral data reveals some interesting patterns. El Financiero Bloomberg reports that 74% of voters with elementary-level education and 71% in the lowest income bracket supported Sheinbaum, as opposed to 48% at college-level and 49% in the top income bracket. El Parametría shows a similar 20 point spread between the bottom and top income groups. It finds that while 65% of elementary-educated voters supported Morena, and 49% with a college degree, only 17% of those with advanced degrees did so. Exit polls indicate that Sheinbaum’s highest support, at around 60%, came from private sector employees, peasants, teachers, the self-employed and housewives, while her lowest support was found among professionals (46%) and employers (39%). The candidate performed best in historically marginalized southern states, while the richest areas, including many of the state capitals, were most likely to support the right. Morena’s popularity, then, stands at around 60-70% among the working classes. Among the upper classes it is lower, although – and this is crucial – it still amounts to about 40%.

This signals the emergence of a multi-class voting coalition anchored in the working classes. Unusually, Morena has not tried to win over the middle classes by moving to the right. The current administration has passed a wave of pro-worker reforms and ramped up efforts to relegitimize the state as a social actor, including significant infrastructure spending and a restructuring of energy provision in favour of the public sector. Real wages have increased by around 30% under AMLO. Data from the National Minimum Wage Commission points that labour’s share of income has gained 8 percentage points following a long period of stagnation. The bottom 10% of income earners have increased their earnings by 98.8%. The country’s Gini coefficient has declined and overall poverty has been reduced by 5%, the largest drop in 22 years, amounting to over five million people. Unemployment is the lowest in the region, including a slight reduction in informal labour. And all this amid a global pandemic and surging inflation.

Sheinbaum ran for president on a promise to defend such gains. She framed the election as a referendum on continuing the process of political transformation or returning to neoliberalism. Her platform included the extension of the programas sociales, reducing the pension age for women from 65 to 60 and giving welfare payments to students at different levels, while pushing ahead with plans for universal public healthcare. Amid a nationwide water crisis, the incoming government has vowed to roll back the privatization of water and place stricter regulations on its use by big business. And it intends to meet electricity demand increasingly through zero-carbon sources like wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal power. Morena’s support among the middle classes is not a sign of co-option; it appears to be a result of the generalized improvement in living standards, as well as Sheinbaum’s cautious political rhetoric.

The AMLO administration describes its role as enacting a Cuarta Transformación. Like the declaration of independence in 1810, the liberal state reforms of the 1850s and the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century, the victory of 2018 was meant to mark not just a change in government but a change in regime. At the level of party systems, this is bearing true. The coalition that nominated Gálvez is composed of parties that were fierce competitors up until AMLO’s presidency. The PRI was the inheritor of the Revolution which governed for most of the last century. The PAN, dating to the 1930s, was the historic opposition, to the right of the PRI during this period, while the PRD was formed in the 1980s as a left split from the PRI. They continued to dominate electoral politics throughout the neoliberal era, defining the so-called regímen de la transición that took shape after the PRI’s first presidential loss in the year 2000.  

This order is now in disarray. The PRI and PRD, and to lesser extent the PAN, are beset by internal crises. The PRI has been hit by a series of high-profile defections. The PRD – AMLO’s former party, which was once affiliated with the Partido Comunista Mexicano but which has moved to the centre since 2012 – is facing oblivion, having lost its party registration by failing to secure 3% of the national vote. Tensions among the opposition had already erupted earlier this year, when the leader of the PAN publicly denounced the PRI’s failure to distribute posts and spoils after winning the governorship of Coahuila. Now, after the defeat of 2 June, their coalition is on the brink of collapse. The Mexican party system will never be the same. Morena has so far benefited from this breakdown, yet it must guard against complacency. Unless it develops institutional mechanisms to solve internal disagreements, it may also be vulnerable to splits further down the line.  

The election came after a series of legislative setbacks for the government. Major Constitutional reforms in a wide range of areas – energy, public safety, electoral law – were thwarted by an obstructionist opposition. AMLO’s ‘Plan A’ was to get the measures ratified without modifications. When this failed, ‘Plan B’ was to alter them to secure their passing. But a hostile Supreme Court blocked the changes even after they had cleared the legislature. ‘Plan C’ was to wait for the election and hope to win a supermajority in Congress and the Senate, which would allow Morena to push through 18 Constitutional provisions, including reforms to the judicial system that would see judges elected rather than appointed. This is an attempt to transform one of the institutional pillars of the neoliberal era. At present, the High Court has little independence from private interest groups. The High Magistrates have refused to take a constitutionally mandated salary reduction as part of AMLO’s push for a more austere bureaucracy. And it was recently revealed that Norma Piña, the chair of the Supreme Court, had organized a secret meeting with the head of the PRI, for reasons that remain obscure. The government’s bid to make these actors more accountable power has proven hugely controversial.

Important changes are also taking place at an ideological level. In the late 1990s, the country’s neoliberal bloc effectively monopolized the rhetoric of ‘democracy’. The PAN’s anti-priismo easily doubled as anti-statism; its critique of the single-party system was also an attack on welfare and the public sector. The so-called ‘democratic transition’, with its guiding concepts like ‘civil society’ and ‘the citizen’, and its understanding of politics as the search for technocratic fixes, provided the perfect cover for capital’s advance. The commentariat that crafted this narrative liked to present itself as non-partisan – as apolitical guardians of democracy and critics of unaccountable state power. Under AMLO, however, they were forced to abandon this pretense to impartiality and align with the opposition. Over the past six years, they have pushed the narrative that by challenging neoliberalism and reconceiving politics as a process of negotiation between opposed interests, the president represents a regression to autocracy. The results of 2 June exposed its failure to resonate outside the media echo-chamber. Soon after the vote, one of the country’s star columnists, Denise Dresser, lamented that Mexicans ‘had put the chains back on that we’ – the pundit class – ‘had taken off’.

The emerging social order in Mexico – based on rising living standards and stronger social welfare – is the result of AMLO’s state-led nationalist-developmentalist capitalism. Such gains were made in adverse economic circumstances, in contrast to the global commodity boom that financed the Pink Tide. Yet important challenges remain ahead. Organized crime is prevalent. The government has largely capitulated to US demands that it police the flow of asylum seekers across the border. And it has so far avoided a risky showdown over tax reform, which may be necessary in the years ahead. Still, there is some evidence to support the argument that we are witnessing a Cuarta Transformación. The previous transformaciones all coincided with economic paradigm shifts on a world scale: the end of colonial mercantilism in the case of Independence, global capitalist expansion in the case of the Liberal Reform, the welfare state era after the Mexican Revolution. The current one, with all its possibilities and limitations, is taking place against the backdrop of a fracturing neoliberal consensus. Sheinbaum has now received a major mandate to consolidate it.

Read on: Victor Serge, ‘Mexican Notebooks’, NLR 82.

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Hard Work

In 1524, a peasant uprising against grinding poverty and feudal rule swept across parts of what is now Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Though it was eventually crushed, the revolt gave rise to folk legends that endured for centuries, among them the story of a towering woman fighter. ‘Black Anna’, as she was known – likely based on the peasant leader Margaret Renner – is the central figure in the German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s striking graphic cycle, ‘The Peasants’ War’ (1901-1908). Black Anna is depicted rallying her forces, her outstretched arms directing a line of armed men who surge across a field. The prints dramatize a dialectic of oppression and resistance: elsewhere we see the upward swoop of armed men rushing through a castle entryway, a mother bending over her dead son.

Kollwitz herself was an unusual figure in many respects. A female artist of the early twentieth century who was widely recognized during her lifetime, her primary medium was printing rather than painting. Committed to narrative and representation in a heyday of abstraction, Kollwitz valued sincerity over irony, distancing her from the key artistic movements – Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit – of the period. Never a member of the SPD or KPD, she nonetheless produced socially engaged art centred on the working class. A survey of her work currently showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – encompassing early paintings, numerous self-portraits, the major graphic series, the popular posters – brings these idiosyncrasies into relief. It also reveals some of the animating tensions of her oeuvre, among them the use of portraiture as means to represent collectivities, and of an intimate visual language to address world-historic themes.

Self-Portrait en Face with Right Hand (Selbstbildnis en face mit rechter Hand). c. 1900. Pastel on paper, 24 15/16 × 19 3/16″ (63.3 × 48.8 cm). Private Collection, Germany. © Kienzle | Oberhammer

She was born Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg in 1867, in what was then Prussia, and raised in an educated, upper-middle-class family of socialist and dissident religious convictions. Though neither of Kollwitz’s sisters worked outside the home, her father encouraged her to pursue an artistic career, paying for years of training and travel. Her ambitions were shaped by this paternal support, as well as encounters with socialism and feminism – formative writings included August Bebel’s Women and Socialism and the journalism of Clara Zetkin. In 1891, she married a doctor, Karl Kollwitz, and the couple settled in the working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin.

The marriage disappointed her father, who thought settling down spelled the end of her artistic ambitions (‘You have made your choice now. You will scarcely be able to do both things.’) Yet the couple divided their apartment between his practice and her studio, and the daily life of the clinic had a galvanizing effect on Kollwitz’s art: ‘When I became acquainted, especially through my husband, with the severity and tragedy of the depths of proletarian life, when I met women who came to my husband, and also to me, looking for help, the fate of the proletariat and all its consequences gripped me with all its force.’ Yet Kollwitz admitted that she was initially drawn to ‘the depiction of proletarian life’ for aesthetic rather than social reasons. ‘The real motive’, she wrote, ‘was because the motifs chosen from this sphere gave me, simply and unconditionally, what I found beautiful.’

Her first major undertaking was historical. In 1893, she saw Gerhardt Hauptmann’s play The Weavers, which dramatized the struggle of these early economic casualties of the industrial revolution. This inspired ‘A Weaver’s Revolt’ (1893-1897), three lithographs and three etchings, which took over five years to produce and established Kollwitz’s reputation. She was not the only visual artist of her day to take up the subject – Max Lieberman’s The Weaver (1883) also portrayed loom-weavers at work. In Kollwitz’s rendering, however, work has stuttered to a halt. A malnourished child lies on a bed, and there is a sense that the family cannot work their way out of a desperate situation. This sets the series in motion: the workers rebel against their conditions, but the revolt is defeated, and we conclude with the return of the victims’ corpses.

Kollwitz was a slow and methodical draughtswoman, and MoMA’s presentation displays her process of revision, with preparatory sketches arranged alongside the finished works. These reveal her emerging vocabulary: in an early version, for instance, a weaver’s hand hangs open; in the final work, their hands are clenched, a detail that transforms the scene. Yet its emotion is nonetheless ambiguous. Are the women surveying the bodies of their husbands and sons paralysed with grief or simmering with rage? The series was shown in the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, where it was denied a gold medal by the state minister of culture who found it, in MoMA curator Starr Figura’s words, lacking in ‘mitigating or conciliatory elements’ and thus ineligible for ‘explicit recognition by the state’.

Woman with Dead Child (Frau mit totem Kind). 1903. Etching with chine collé. Plate: 16 1/4 × 18 9/16″ (41.2 × 47.1 cm); sheet: 21 7/16 × 27 11/16″ (54.5 × 70.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Contemporary Drawing and Print Associates. Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo by Robert Gerhardt

This printmaking drew on a variety of modes and references, from the caprichos of Goya and the virtuosic engravings of Dürer to the radical woodcuts and satirical graphics of magazines like The New Masses and Simplicissimus. Kollwitz’s fine marks and muted tones foster a close connection with the viewer, the complexity of each print obliging one to lean in. This is part of their persuasiveness; they demand physical proximity to their scenes of anguish. ‘The passion inspired in her by her theme’, a disapproving Clement Greenberg wrote in 1945, ‘required a complementary passion for her medium, to counteract a certain inevitable excess.’

Lithographs and etchings predominate in these years, but by the First World War Kollwitz was increasingly turning to the starkness of woodcuts. In some, the background is left entirely uncut; figures emerge from a solid black void. Notable among these is her 1920 woodcut of SPD leader Karl Liebknecht’s funeral. The picture feels poised at the moment mourning tipped into defiance, as the wake erupted into mass demonstration. Though Kollwitz was asked by his family to produce the image, some wondered whether it was appropriate that the portrait be done by a non-party member. Kollwitz felt that she could portray the murdered Spartacist leader without ‘following politically’; that as an artist she had ‘the right to extract the emotional content out of everything, to let things work on me and then give them outward form’.

The Parents (Die Eltern) from War (Krieg), 1921–22, published 1923. One from a portfolio of seven woodcuts. Composition (irreg.): 13 13/16 x 16 3/4″ (35.1 x 42.5 cm); sheet (irreg.): 18 5/8 x 25 11/16″ (47.3 x 65.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Arnhold Family in memory of Sigrid Edwards. Digital Image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo by Robert Gerhardt

Artistic detachment is not easy to detect in Kollwitz’s work, particular after the tragedy of losing her younger son, killed at the First Battle of Ypres in 1914. Peter, who had left school to become a painter, was a minor when the war broke out and needed permission from his parents to enlist, which Kollwitz gave despite her husband’s reluctance. Kollwitz’s guilt was overwhelming, and she struggled to work: ‘I am seeking him as if I had to find him in the work’, but ‘I might make a hundred drawings and not get any closer to him’. It took years to complete the woodcuts that made up ‘War’ (1918-1922). The series went through three editions, with hundreds of copies in circulation; upon completion Kollwitz wrote that ‘these prints should be sent all over the world and give everybody the essence of what it was like – this is what we all went through during these unspeakably hard times.’

Her focus was not the battlefield, but the survivors and their loss. The Sacrifice and The Volunteers, which open the series, depict a mother holding her child out to an enveloping blackness and an arc of faces blending into skulls. The compositions echo recruitment posters, substituting boosterism for grief. Motherhood is both an illuminating and constraining lens through which to view Kollwitz’s work. Notwithstanding her father’s conviction that she had sacrificed her art to family, the MoMA audio guide, which features commentary from the novelist Sheila Heti (perhaps best known for writing about her decision not to have children), suggests that, absent maternal feeling, she may never have produced some of her most significant works.

Kollwitz was also a sculptor and spent years on a monument to Peter. An early sketch shows a mother and father kneeling before their son’s body, but the final version of Grieving Parents (1914-32) subtracted his remains, leaving the parents – who resemble Kollwitz and her husband – with an empty space between them. The sculpture was displayed at the Vladslo Cemetery in Belgium, where more than 25,000 German soldiers are buried. Kollwitz’s sculpture was clearly influenced by Rodin, whom she had met in Paris, and whose preference for naturalism over allegory and textural depth over polished, idealized lines concurred with her own tendencies.

The exhibition includes several other sculptures, including Pair of Lovers (1913-1915), an early effort that shows an entwined couple, one seated in the lap of the other. The face of the larger figure is hidden, buried in the neck of their companion. The ambiguity of the scene meant that the sculpture was miscatalogued for a time as Woman with a Dead Child. In Kollwitz’s work, both romantic and parental love are figured as physical melding. In Mother with Two Children (1932-6) a seated woman folds her arms and legs around two babies. The proportions of the bodies are distorted – necks shrunken, hands enlarged, torsos shortened – so that the trio blend together. In Farewell (1940), not shown in the exhibition, a mother grips her child so tightly she appears to disappear into him. The women’s motive in these latter two are agonisingly clear: to shield their children from carnage.

Mother, Clutching Two Children (Mutter, zwei Kinder an sich pressend). 1932. Charcoal on paper. 25 3/8 x 19″ (64.4 x 48.3 cm). Käthe Kollwitz Cologne. Image courtesy Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne

In the interwar period, Kollwitz contributed to anti-fascist campaigns and the Communist-led Workers International Relief. Her famous Never Again War poster (1924) – designed for the Central German Convention of Young Socialist workers – was distributed internationally. With the rise of National Socialism, her husband temporarily lost his medical licence and she was forced to resign from the Prussian Academy. Kollwitz found herself barred from public art programmes, her work removed from exhibitions. Karl died in 1940 and in 1943 Kollwitz accepted an aristocratic patron’s offer to take refuge in Moritzburg (shortly afterward her apartment of fifty years was destroyed in an air raid). She died in April 1945, days before the first Red Army tanks rolled into Berlin.

In Kollwitz’s last major cycle of lithographs, Death (1934-37), Death is depicted almost as a friend; in one image, it is figured as an inviting lap, cocooning a dying adolescent like an easy chair. Death is something to which ‘a woman entrusts herself’, as the title of one print has it; though elsewhere it is represented as a black-cloaked predator who seizes children from their mothers. It separates, welcomes, liberates, with pitiless certainty. And yet, Kollwitz’s final lithograph, Seed Crops Should not be Milled (1941) – the title was taken from Goethe – in which a woman wraps her arms around her children strikes a note of enduring resistance. In 1944, she wrote that ‘every war is answered by a new war’ unless ‘everything is smashed’, and ‘that is why I am so wholeheartedly for a radical end to this madness, and why my only hope is in a world socialism’. ‘Pacifism’, she concluded, ‘is not a matter of calm looking on; it is work, hard work.’

Read on: John Willet, ‘Art and Revolution’, NLR 112.

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Grand Éditeur

There is an infinitely reductive way of commemorating Eric Hazan, simply by saluting him as a courageous publisher and defender of the radical left, an unyielding supporter of the rights of the Palestinians and a man who, against the grain of his times, so believed in revolution that he devoted a book to the first measures to be taken on the morning after.

He was certainly all these things, but we first need to register the essential point: in an age when the word ‘publishing’ conjures up empires of businessmen for whom everything is a commodity, even the most nauseating ideas, he was first and foremost a great publisher. This was not simply a matter of competence. It was much more a question of personality. And Eric was an exceptional personality: possessed of a mind curious about everything, a scientist by training and neurosurgeon in a previous life, but also a connoisseur of the arts and lover of literature; a city-dweller, sensitive to the living history of every stone in the street; an open and welcoming man with a radiant smile and eloquent handshake, eager to communicate his passions, to share his discoveries and convince others – without preaching – of what he considered to be the exigences of justice.

I learnt from our first contact, just as La Fabrique was starting up, that he was no ordinary publisher. He had attended a few sessions of my seminar on aesthetics and wanted to better understand what I was doing and where it was heading. I sent him a short interview I’d done for a magazine published by friends of mine. A few days later, he told me that it was a book and that he was going to publish it. Which he did so effectively that this little volume, barely visible on a bookshelf, found its way around the world. I thereby discovered something surprising: a great publisher is one who can recognize you have written a book when you don’t know it yourself.  

Thus began a long collaboration punctuated by books whose titles alone prove that he was so much more than a publisher of revolutionary firebrands. Were that the case, what business would he have with exploring territories as remote from immediate political action as the landscape of eighteenth-century England, the dissolution of the traditional threads of narrative in the novels of Flaubert, Conrad or Virginia Woolf, the interweaving of time in the films of Dziga Vertov, John Ford or Pedro Costa, or the conception of the spectator implied by this or that installation of contemporary art? What, moreover, would lead him to publish a complete edition stretching to over a thousand pages of Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire? And to immerse himself in Balzac’s Paris? It’s not only that he was interested in everything and his engagement with humanist culture was far broader and deeper than so many of the ‘clercs’ who smirk at militant commitments of his kind. It was because he fought for a world of the widest and richest experience, and did not separate the work of knowledge and the emotions of art from the passion of justice. This man – indignant against all oppression – loved, more than sloganeers, those who seek, invent and create.

Changing the world was for him not a programme for the future but a daily task of adjusting our vision and finding the right words. And he understood that revolt is itself a means of discovery. In the work of the most radical authors he published, whether on feminism, decolonialism or pipeline sabotage, he discerned not only a cry of anger against the reign of injustice but also a project of research, a singular expression of the world we live in, and a new way of shedding light on it. Hence, he was careful to ensure that the most provocative titles appeared in booksellers’ windows adorned in such a way that made them precious objects.

Is this why he chose the name La Fabrique? For connoisseurs of workers’ history, the name recalls Echo de la fabrique, the newspaper of the Lyonnais canuts during their revolt of the 1830s. No doubt it was important for it to evoke the memory of the great days of 1848 and the Commune. But the word ‘fabrique’ also associated this tradition of struggle with a whole conception of the publisher’s work: a radical departure from the logic of profit and its associated strictures of management; an artisanal love of craftsmanship that neglected no aspect of book production; but also an idea of the fraternal workshop where men and women would bring the product of their labours which, as they intertwined, would be transformed into something else: a shared wealth of experience, of knowledge and insight, the sense of a collective capacity to build a world different from the one that our masters and their intellectual lackeys present to us as the only, inescapable reality.

Offering alternative cartographies of what is visible, of what takes place and what matters in our world: this is the concern that brought him together with so many authors of such different interests, ideas and sensibilities, all of which he respected equally without attempting to corral them into a common line. Because this great publisher was above all a free man who could only breathe in an atmosphere of freedom.

Was it the thinning of this atmosphere that, alongside his illness, darkened his final days? Never have the causes for which he fought been so mockingly besmirched in theory, so blithely trampled underfoot in practice, as they are today. For a long time, Eric saw in the very ignominy of the powers that govern us a reason to hope for the coming revolution. Their world, he thought, is so decrepit that the slightest blow here or there is bound to bring about its collapse. This is the logic, perhaps a little too cursory, of good craftsmen and sons of the Enlightenment. They believe that rot causes buildings to crumble. Unfortunately, it is more like the glue holding the system together. And this imposes a long and painstaking task on those who first and foremost need air that is more breathable and more conducive to the preparation of other tomorrows. It is, in any case, a task for which his uncompromising resistance to baseness in every form will long serve as an example.

This article was originally published in French in Libération.

Read on: Eric Hazan, ‘Faces of Paris’, NLR 62.

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After Euroscepticism

European parliamentary elections mean different things to different people. For the Brussels press corps, they are an occasion for feverish speculation about who will get the ‘top jobs’ – the presidencies of the Council and Commission, the head of parliament, the High Representative for foreign policy – after days of horse-trading and backroom deals. For leaders of member states, they are an opportunity to increase their party’s share of MEPs and possibly lead a parliamentary grouping – winning power and prestige, plus negotiating leverage with other European nations. For opposition politicians, the EU parliament provides a useful (and lucrative) way to bide one’s time until political opportunities open up at home. Italy’s current foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, spent more than two decades there; Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage were also long-serving MEPs.

For the bloc’s citizens, meanwhile, the significance of the elections often lies in crystallizing national political struggles. The 2014 ballot marked the breakthrough of Podemos and the Five Star Movement, and allowed Syriza to push Pasok aside and become Greece’s leading electoral force on the left. In the UK, the 2019 vote functioned as a de facto second referendum on Brexit. In 2024, we were supposed to witness a reactionary sorpasso on a continental scale: a moment when populists and extremists would tear down the parliament’s mainstream political formations. Ursula von der Leyen, standing for a second term as Commission President, doubted whether she could maintain her ‘grand coalition’ of centrists and liberals, and reached out to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni ahead of the vote – signalling the prospect of a deal with the far right.

Yet, when the vote was held last week, talk of a landslide turned out to be exaggerated. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom gained six seats but was beaten by the centre-left and green coalition. Germany’s AfD surged from nine to fifteen seats, but lagged far behind the CDU–CSU alliance, which won a hefty 29. In Spain, Vox gained two seats but its vote share remained under 10%, while the Partido Popular claimed victory, coming four percentage points ahead of the governing PSOE. The True Finns also won less than 10% of the vote and lost a seat, while the Swedish Democrats gained one but finished in fourth place, behind the country’s mainstream parties and the Greens. The dominant groupings in the EU Parliament have also proven relatively resilient. The centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) gained nine seats, bringing its total up to 185, while the centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) lost just two, bringing them down to 137. The biggest losers were the liberal Renew Europe and the Greens, shedding 23 and 19 seats respectively.

The two main far-right formations only gained thirteen seats between them; the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) now have 73, while Identity and Democracy (ID) have 58. There is little chance of the two uniting, and it is still unclear where the AfD – unaffiliated to either – will fit in. The ECR was set up in 2009 by the British Conservatives, who felt the EPP was becoming too pro-European. It represents the more moderate wing of the far right, and is not subject to the cordon sanitaire that excludes radical right MEPs from powerful positions in the parliament. Its members include Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia as well as Poland’s Law and Justice party. ID, by contrast, is considered beyond the pale, hosting Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and Matteo Salvini’s Lega as well as Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party.

What is taking place in the EU, then, is a rightward shift in the composition of the parliament, though at a slower-than-expected pace, with populist-nationalist groupings afflicted by deep divisions. The election results indicate that business-as-usual will continue. Von der Leyen has insisted that ‘the centre is holding’ and that her coalition will live to see another day, perhaps propped up by the Greens. The bloc’s main political currents seem willing to put aside their differences in order to maintain their hegemony. Yet, as many in Brussels are aware, this strategy of the grand coalition is liable to make the political centre look even more like an undifferentiated mass of power-hungry politicians, fuelling support for their opponents and causing problems further down the line.

The most exciting national contests were those that seemed to presage political developments on the domestic front. The strong performance of Péter Magyar – a Fidesz insider turned opponent and whistleblower – was interpreted, perhaps prematurely, as a sign that Viktor Orbán’s dominance was on the wane. In Poland, Law and Justice continued to decline, losing five seats and ceding further ground to Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform. Meloni ran a remarkably personalized campaign, telling her supporters to write ‘Giorgia’ on their ballot papers, and coming away with just under 30% of the vote along with 14 extra seats. Scholz’s SPD was meanwhile surpassed by both the main opposition and the AfD, prompting speculation about how much longer he can last in office.

It was France, however, that won the prize for the most drama at the national level. The Rassemblement National cast the elections as a referendum on Macron’s second term and won more than double the vote share of the president’s electoral formation. The Parti socialiste’s Raphaël Glucksmann emerged as a new figure on the centre left, winning thirteen seats – the same number as Macron’s party – for his new joint list. The other parties of the fractured NUPES alliance generally fared badly, although La France insoumise picked up 10% and nine seats. In light of the results, Macron has dissolved parliament and scheduled new legislative elections for 30 June and 7 July. This looks like an attempt to call the RN’s bluff. The far right says it is ready to govern – but should it win the upcoming ballot, its leader Jordan Bardella may well become Prime Minister, and Macron knows that it is difficult to maintain one’s popularity in that position.

Less commented upon is what all this means for the principle division in European politics: between the EU’s supporters and its critics. The political scientist Peter Mair once observed that the peculiar structure of this supranational body made it difficult for citizens to shape or contest individual policies. As a result, opposition to them necessarily took the form of opposition to the EU tout court. While Euroscepticism was prominent on the left throughout the postwar period, it became associated with the sovereignist and nationalist right from the 1990s onwards – emblematized by UKIP in the UK and the Freedom Party in Austria. This shift reflected both the implosion of the continent’s communist parties as an electoral force, as with the spectacular decline of France’s Parti communiste, as well as the wider left’s abandonment of the principle of national sovereignty, vividly captured in Pasok’s journey from arch critic of European integration in the 1970s to a loyal supporter by the end of the 1980s.

This year, while far right parties have made the most significant gains in the history of the EU, the elections also reflected the extent to which they have accommodated themselves to the institution. Strident Euroscepticism has been replaced with tepid reformism, exemplified by Meloni’s campaign slogan: ‘Italy Changes Europe’. Wilders, once an advocate of leaving the EU, swiftly abandoned this position as the campaign got underway. Le Pen likewise argued for ‘Frexit’ in the 2014 European elections but has since embraced a policy of ‘change from within’.

Western Europe’s far right parties have, in this sense, begun to replicate the strategies of their counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe. Law and Justice has been at loggerheads with Brussels for years, yet it never seriously floated the idea of ‘Polexit’. Fidesz frequently clashes with the EU over its treaty obligations, but it will not contemplate jumping ship. An exception to this reformist trend would seem to be the AfD, which still takes a hard line on leaving the Euro area and reintroducing the Deutschmark; yet this is by no means the party’s raison d’être, nor the cause of its success, which owes much more to its role in fomenting Germany’s culture wars.

One reason for this moderating tendency is Brexit: an event that, by provoking a constitutional crisis and failing to cut inward migration, taught Europe’s far right to be cautious about the merits of leaving the EU. Another is the continued support for the bloc among the populations of most member states. With groups like the RN and Fratelli d’Italia seeking to displace the traditional parties of the right by courting swing voters, anti-EU positions have become an electoral liability. Though the leaders of such parties are often presented as unflinching ideologues, in reality most of them are flexible pragmatists. Those that are too rigid, such as the AfD’s Maxmilian Krah, have typically found themselves marginalized. In recent years, Europe’s populist forces have been slowly assimilated into the Brussels hierarchy. This election may not have seen them rise to its apex, as some predicted. But it has shown that they are willing to ease their ascent by parting ways with Euroscepticism.

Read on: Christopher Bickerton, ‘The Persistence Of Europe’, NLR 122.

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Rule of Law?

On 30 May, around cocktail time, a jury in New York criminal court found former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump guilty on all thirty-four counts of falsifying business records to cover up a payoff for Stormy Daniels’ silence in the run-up to the 2016 election. Throughout the five-week trial (on state, not federal, charges), Trump had been crafting the story of its end: the proceedings, and now the verdict, are ‘a disgrace’, ‘rigged’, presided over by ‘a judge who was corrupt’, and all of it – every grand juror and trial juror and prosecution employee and court officer – worked by orders of the Biden Administration. On the legal front, Trump will appeal. On the financial front, the verdict has been a boon, raising $52.8 million for the candidate in twenty-four hours. On the political front, CBS News immediately reported that his campaign vowed to launch ‘a grievance war across the country’.

The grievance war has been ginning up for some time. Every day, many times a day, for years, the campaign, the Republican Party and its sound machine have been broadcasting a twin message of alarm: the law is against us; the law is us. Contradiction is the point. Fear is the operative instrument: while the ‘very innocent man’ suffers, crime stalks every citizen. Immigrants and terrorists flood the country from foreign prisons and mental institutions, raping women, stealing jobs from citizens, driving down their wages, destroying their communities. The country is ‘a mess’, government broken and venal. Law and order lie prostrate, police handcuffed by the woke mob. It’s ‘American carnage’ redux, as bloodletting around the world and ‘Jihad Joe’ represent US impotence or worse – and all of this while January 6 patriots languish in federal prison. ‘Remember, it’s not me they’re after’, Trump’s campaign messages wail, ‘THEY’RE AFTER YOU – I’M JUST STANDING IN THEIR WAY!’

Hence, his mugshot is an election poster; his past, recent and pending trials both persecution and campaign platform. Hence, he promises a cleansing fire:

Patriot, when we win, we’ll have the LARGEST deportation operation in HISTORY!

We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

Today’s victim of a witch hunt is tomorrow’s Grand Inquisitor. Judge Arthur Engoron, who in a civil case in February found Trump, his company, his two sons, the company’s former CEO and former controller guilty of sprawling financial fraud, is ‘whacked out’. Everyone in real estate lies and defrauds insurance companies, banks and assessors, the Trump team claimed; it’s just business. The political strategy has been to inflame emotions: a most instrumental moral panic. The cultural strategy has been to make impunity acceptable, worthy of but a shrug.

Except when it’s not. By Trumpist calculus, when Michael Cohen lied and falsified records as an attorney for the Trump Organization it was just business; when he testified about the Stormy Daniels scheme as a coordinated effort to kill a sex story in order to influence the election, he was a rogue liar who should be sent back to prison for perjury. And so it goes … Trump as president had immunity and should not be tried for anything, ever (a claim the Supreme Court had to ponder and whose decision will come down this month). People who assaulted police and smashed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, are ‘political prisoners’ who should be pardoned; people who smashed storefronts in 2020 protesting police violence are ‘thugs’ who should have been shot. White nationalists who marched with tiki torches shouting ‘The Jews will not replace us’ in 2017 were ‘very fine people’; students who protest against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza are antisemitic terrorists, so ‘I [would] throw them out of the country.’ Biden is a ‘tyrant’ who hates America; Trump, who will be a ‘dictator’, but ‘only on day one’, tells the faithful, ‘I will be your retribution’ and Make America …

Anyone not barraged by Trumpist emails may say, At least with Trump we get truth in advertising. Or, He doesn’t mean what he says. Or, We lived through one presidency; it wasn’t that bad. We got those pandemic checks. He can’t be worse on Israel. And can you believe the price of things? Those are familiar rejoinders these days. They reflect the power of forgetting. They also reveal the power of the right at the level of culture.

We have grown accustomed to the carnival barker, the conman. Just as we grew accustomed to torture and permanent war decades ago, and before that to the ideas that retribution is justice, that market values are human ones, that tax cuts benefit us all, that ‘the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.’ Across the political spectrum, we accommodate the idea that some political views should be silenced. Meanwhile, the liberal sound machine’s gleeful disdain for Trump-the-person, its enthusiasm for prosecutors and national security services, arouse suspicion if not fury on the left. The Biden campaign’s apparent decision to contend for re-election as a bulwark against imperilled democracy is tone deaf. Americans have got used to cynicism; to being taken for a ride economically and politically (or taken into police custody); to ‘democracy’ as a sick joke.

Trump has had much to do with this, but he did not start it. To take but one relevant indicator, since the 1980s, the proportion of US adults with a criminal record has swelled. As the Brennan Center for Justice put it a few years ago, ‘if all arrested Americans were a nation, they would be the world’s 18th largest … Holding hands, [they] could circle the earth three times.’ It is inconceivable that Trump will be sentenced to prison on 11 July, but his story of victimization by the state, told so often and so loudly, can ring true for those habituated to the realities of Prison America. It is canon for those whose God promises vengeance but not much enjoyment. In the country’s long-running morality play of Good vs. Evil, the heroic victim returns as a cartoon of suffering and a back-slapping punisher.

*

The episodic drama of court appearances and appeals has given the lifelong grifter a priceless, if unconventional, stage to propound his version of reality and express contempt (sleeping at trial, insulting judge and jury) when anything interferes. It has done the same for Republican bootlickers, vice-presidential auditioners, assorted tough guys, the Speaker of the House and other lackeys and their entourages, who made the pilgrimage to Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom and found receptive media crews outside. It has also obscured the right’s organizing at the level of law.

A formidable liberal mythology has surrounded the idea that The courts will save us. The right, meanwhile, regards the law, the Constitution, the courts, the electoral process, every other institution, as they are: areas of struggle, where nothing is permanent, and every loss is but a setback. Following the verdict, Trump thundered, ‘We will fight for the Constitution!’ No, he will fight for himself, the law being now convenient, now discardable, as opportunity dictates. This would be just another bit of Flimflam Americana except that it has been cultivated far more methodically than the theatrics suggest. When the now-convicted felon said the real verdict will be on Election Day, his statement was both true politically and a gesture to the right’s preparations for steering that verdict his way.

Earlier this spring we got a glimpse of these efforts. On 4 March, in the case Trump v. Anderson, the Supreme Court ruled that no state – unless, in some near-impossible future, Congress passes legislation – can disqualify an oath-breaking insurrectionist from seeking federal office under the 14th Amendment. It was a political rather than legal decision. The amendment’s language and history are plain. The Trumpists on the court, who typically crook the knee to the text, original intent and states’ rights, blithely disregarded their avowed tenets this time. Four days later, Trump loyalists replaced the leadership of the already grovelling Republican National Committee to concentrate on election finagling. The old party chair had committed an intolerable offense by sponsoring debates and asserting neutrality until voters had made their choice for the GOP presidential nominee. The new party chair, Michael Whatley, had begun lying about a rigged election before it was decided. Check. Once Trump lost, Whatley, then head of the North Carolina GOP, told radio listeners, ‘It really is kind of a scary proposition to think that you’re gonna have a court overturn some of those results. But that’s really the plan.’ Check. Ever since, and despite the Trump team losing more than sixty lawsuits challenging the 2020 results in six states, Whatley has held to the gospel. Consequently, insuring ‘election integrity’ is the ‘core mission’ of the RNC, along with raising money. Check and check.

Co-chairing the party is Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, a former Fox News pundit. Her husband, Eric, a dedicated if dimwitted liar, was fined $4 million for his part in the civil fraud. His brother Don Jr. received the same sentence. Their father, never as rich as he claimed, strapped to cover his $355 million fine (plus interest) and given a break pending appeal, was cunning to have launched another family business. Daughter Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, got $2 billion from the Saudis shortly after leaving his White House job. Lara herself, upon assuming her new job, spoke of using RNC funds to relieve her father-in-law’s legal costs: ‘I think that is a big interest to people. Absolutely. [Donors] feel like it’s an attack not just on Donald Trump but on this country.’

By 12 March, the new party leadership had lawyered up to ‘initiate battle on election integrity from an offensive instead of defensive posture’. That was Chris LaCivita, co-manager of the Trump campaign and the RNC’s chief of staff. Joining him, as chief counsel, is Charlie Spies, an old GOP hand who applauds the boost that his field of election law got after the Supreme Court decided the presidential election of 2000. Next up, as senior counsel for election integrity, is Christina Bobb, a media hack, sometime lawyer for Trump, unindicted election meddler and the author of Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024. Outside counsel for election integrity is Bill McGinley, who as counsel to the Republican convention’s rules committee in 2012 engineered the disqualification of some delegates for Ron Paul to benefit Mitt Romney – shocking Paul’s supporters, libertarians mostly new to politics, who had imagined themselves helping to shape the party’s direction and instead protested outside the hall, ‘Where’s democracy?’

The leadership shuffle aligns the party apparatus with an ongoing Trumpist effort that has been building an army of trained poll watchers, poll workers, election clerks, and legal backup in strategic majority-Democrat precincts to challenge voters at the polls, intervene to block vote counts and generally create enough chaos to win outright or send the decision to courts or state legislatures. As early as 2021 the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan said at a recorded training session for poll workers, ‘We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?’ As reported by Politico, recruits are cautioned that it’s illegal to try to disqualify every likely Democratic voter. But disqualification is the reason they are being trained.

Now the party aggressively promotes Trump’s pitch to black and Hispanic voters – colour has signified ‘likely Democratic voters’ since the mid 1960s – and headlines announce rising enthusiasm for the MAGA brand among them. But ‘the vibe’, as Trump’s appeal has been described, might fade, the voters tire. Law is more reliable, so GOP state legislators have been busily working to dilute black voting strength through redistricting. The party’s lawyers are also challenging various state rules that make voting easier. If history is a guide, Republican poll challengers will not be massed in majority-white districts.

*

‘I am a Political Prisoner’, Trump now begins his pleas for love and money. The quest for love has been a regular feature of Trump campaign missives, the baby voice – ‘please, pretty please’, don’t desert me, say you’ll vote for me, tell me now, ‘before I go to bed’ – alternating with a let’s-get-ready-to-rumble yell: ‘It’s time for me and you to shove it back in their corrupt faces!’

Two years ago, my Inbox rang with fears for ‘the children!’ Tykes were being taught porno, forced into story time with drag queens, urged to turn trans, to hate themselves if white and to rule the roost if black. School libraries had to be purged, curricula gutted, teachers struck off as mind-twisting perverts who’d brought litter boxes into the classroom for kids who ‘identify as cats’. As with previous hysterias over the imperilled child, words didn’t need to be true, only effective for energizing a political base. The mania translated into laws rewarding that base, placed rivals on the defensive, and helped win or hold elective seats for pursuing a broader agenda from school board on up. Liberals have decried ‘Hate’, but however much real pain the manipulators of moral panic cause, they are driven more by tangible benefits than a sadistic frisson. By last June, Republican-controlled state legislatures had introduced 549 anti-trans bills. By year’s end, eighty-six had passed (LGBTQ fightback has been formidable). Then, as if by magic, the children were saved.

The culture war continues as a vehicle for GOP base-building, law-making and leadership training. Legislators have introduced 347 new anti-trans bills this year, of which forty passed. But sex-crazed maniacs destroying children ceased to trip the alarm in national messaging as 2023 wound down. Enter January 6 ‘hostages’, a brotherhood of lambs for liberty being ‘tortured’ by the legal system, like Trump, then on trial for fraud. A Supreme Court decision on a case challenging the federal obstruction statute used to prosecute hundreds (including Trump) for efforts to overturn the 2020 election will also come down this month. ‘Welcome to the end of democracy’, GOP foot soldiers at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February were greeted. ‘We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavour to get rid of it and replace it with this right here’, the speaker said, holding up a cross. Yet today, appeals for the prisoners come mostly from their wives.

Having reassured the most embarrassing elements of his coalition – religious fanatics, Proud Boy hoodlums, QAnon symps – Trump’s messaging moved on to focus almost exclusively on one heroic victim and one scourge. The jury’s verdict has upped the volume and the rhetoric, as Trump bellows, ‘The US is a fascist state’ while his campaign simultaneously offers Americans the invigorating prospect of mass round-ups, concentration camps and revenge against those who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’.

Trump’s consigliere Stephen Miller, a practiced peddler of fear and evangelist for violent white grievance against immigrants, pushed Trump to decree an end to 14th Amendment guarantees of birth citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants while he was in the White House. The idea sputtered, but Miller has said Trump 2.0 will revisit it. Meanwhile, Miller’s organization America First Legal has also been sending scare emails about threats to voters’ democratic rights. It has tied up courts in Arizona, challenging the state’s election administration procedures, claiming, in part, that they favour blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites and Native Americans. Courts have thwarted Miller on some challenges, as they have the RNC in its effort to impinge on voting rights there, though lawsuits continue in Arizona as part of the right’s election interference offensive in pivotal states.

Other than pushing for a federal law imposing ID requirements on every voter, ostensibly to prevent Democrats from mobilizing ‘illegals’ and fraudsters to pick the president, Republicans recognize that precincts, cities, counties and states are where it’s at in presidential elections. The grift – diverting election funds to Trump’s legal defence – could result in a hollowing out of conventional ground-game organizing, though the spectre of Trump behind bars, avidly promoted by the man himself, has opened spigots of cash, so the party might recoup. After Trump’s conviction, Steve Bannon, Miller’s mentor, criticized the campaign, arguing that on ‘voter registration and ballot chasing, district by district’, on mailing ballots, election officials and lawsuits, ‘we have to be maniacally focused’.

*

All of this draws a contrast with the fantasyland of ‘national elections’ conjured by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Anderson, and to so much reverential talk (beyond the right) about the ‘rule of law’ since the jury’s verdict. I return to Anderson because, of the many legal actions that have favoured Trump, it resonates most with the reality that law, like the voting booth, is not a sacristy of pure principle but a gritty fight ring.

As Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar emphasized in an energetic amicus brief to the court, there is no true national election in the United States. There is a national popular vote, which does not mean the popular winner becomes president. (See 2000, 2016.) There is a national Election Day, which does not mean everyone votes in the same way all at once, since different states have different rules. The US Constitution sets out basic rules of eligibility – a presidential candidate must be a resident citizen, native-born and at least 35 – but it’s up to states to enforce those. As it’s up to each state to decide how it will run presidential elections, what is required for ballot access, what form the ballot will take, how and by whom votes will be counted, how electors will be delegated to the Electoral College (which chooses the president), whether voting will be convenient or difficult, and who is able to vote. Every stage invites political manoeuvre. Supporters of a third party in some states may find their candidate on the ballot, while in others they have to write in their choice. A convicted felon like Trump may vote at some point in some states, and be disenfranchised forever in others. A college student may vote with only a matching signature in New York, but in 2012 I witnessed students frantically printing out utility bills in their name to be allowed a ballot in Arizona. Presidential candidates have national campaigns, but people in only a few states, ‘battlegrounds’, are likely to see them, and those states’ electors hold the fate of the country. In so-called safe states, for either party, it’s not uncommon for people to say, It’s not on me; someone else will decide it. New Yorkers disgusted with Biden, who so far has fractured rather than consolidated his base, say this today. (The formula is not fool proof, of course; Nixon and Reagan won New York.)

Despite this hodgepodge, justices scratched their head over Colorado’s decision to disqualify Trump from the state’s ballot for breaking his oath of office and fomenting insurrection. ‘Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination not only for their own citizens but for the rest of the nation?’ wondered liberal Elena Kagan in oral argument. Wouldn’t it be undemocratic for a state to have so much power? others pondered. In the end, despite some disagreement, all nine concluded, ‘Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.’

Nothing in the Constitution even requires states to hold popular elections for president. Chaos, however, is something the document anticipates, and sowed from the start, while lightly sketching how disputes might be resolved, or sort-of resolved, as the people (a fuzzy category) strive to get things right. The great chaos, the Civil War, brought voting rights into the text for the first time, in 1870 with the 15th Amendment. The other landmark Reconstruction-era amendments – the 13th (1865), which abolished slavery; the 14th (1868), which guaranteed birthright citizenship (negating Dred Scott) and equal protection under the law, extended due process rights, limited states’ power over individual liberties, and placed restrictions on insurrectionists – addressed conditions particular to the time, principally for the Freedmen in the South, but also asserted broad civil freedoms that people have fought over ever since.

The symbolism of these amendments in the American psyche cannot be understated. Their drafting, passage, ratification and enforcement were anything but orderly, just as the rights they established were anything but certain or sweeping. For a century after, black people primarily laboured to realize their promise, an unfinished battle, like the unending class struggle to secure a piece of the ‘unalienable rights’ in the Declaration of Independence. Congressional legislation was never understood to be required by the Reconstruction-era amendments; it was required because white state and class power, not only in the South, flouted the plain language of the law, as the justices did this spring. Women’s experience of slavery was ignored in laws written to reverse it. Women are dying or threatened and resisting today because the same court that said states cannot disqualify an oath-breaking insurrectionist from the ballot has held that states can control women’s bodies – each case, in opposite ways, saying history be damned.

Now, after a common jury’s declaration thirty-four-times ‘Guilty’, nothing feels so grotesque as the right’s hijacking of the language of liberation, thundering against fascists, unequal treatment and ‘the ruling class’, all of which Trump plans to advance if elected; rousing joy and rage within a movement aptly symbolized by a Confederate flag marched through the Capitol on January 6 for the first time in history. The rule of law may yet exonerate the hoodlums, as it may exonerate their hero and (exonerated or not) allow his ascendancy once again, at which point he aims to redefine it.

Read on: Dylan Riley, ‘What is Trump?’, NLR 114.

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All or Nothing

Jiajun ‘Oscar’ Zhang’s debut film, All, or Nothing at All, is composed of two parts, each around an hour long, featuring the same cast and designed to be shown in any order. Were it up to Zhang, projectionists would flip a coin. The film is set in and around a huge shopping mall in Shanghai called Global Harbour: 270,000 square metres of retail space sprawled across six floors, above which tower a pair of residential skyscrapers whose neon light-show facades erupt across a never-quite-night sky. When Zhang moved back to his hometown after graduating from the London Film School in 2017 and a stint in the US, the mall had ‘suddenly appeared’ (it opened in 2014). He began to conduct ‘research’: capturing the daily lives of shoppers and workers within its gleaming faux-marble halls (like a ‘magnificent Roman bath’, Zhang has said). The resulting fiction incorporates some of this footage, but each half focuses on a triangle of characters with the same names, engaged in transient, ambiguous and ultimately disappointed infatuations. 

‘Nothing at All’ – the first half of the film as I saw it at the New Directors/New Films festival in New York – follows a teenage amateur filmmaker named Lan Tian as he documents the goings-on of the mall on his phone. He approaches Yoyo (Chen Xiaoyi), a shy, withdrawn girl who works at a skincare kiosk, hoping to interview her, but she brushes him off and summons her manager, Perry (Liang Cuishan). Undeterred, Lan Tian returns under the guise of wanting a free sample. Yoyo talks up the benefits of the product in rote monotone while rubbing cream onto the back of his hand. The moment of ersatz intimacy between strangers is charged with real longing – for romance or recognition, if not necessarily for each other.

It is unclear whether Lan Tian (alias ‘Kafka’ on the social-media app WeChat) identifies with Yoyo’s loneliness, or whether she is merely the first person he comes across who doesn’t tell him to get lost – or whether, perhaps, she fulfils his idea of a romantic object. He films constantly, which at times seems invasive, even creepy, at others touching, betraying a kind of guileless wonder. During their equivocal friendship, he captures hours of mundane interactions, his gaze imbuing them with an almost sacred beauty. For her part, Yoyo appears to warm to Lan Tian’s company, if only out of ennui. When a barista at one of the mall’s cafés asks them whether they are an item, Lan Tian offers a tepid ‘Maybe?’ and Yoyo simply wrinkles her nose. Her thoughts seem elsewhere. When Yoyo risks breaking protocol by having him back for another sample treatment, her manager Perry catches on and lectures Yoyo on professionalism. Yet this gives way to another intimacy: soon Perry and Yoyo are sharing meals and making a game of trading uniforms, the once stern Perry pretending to wait on her new ‘boss’. In the glow of this newfound friendship, Lan Tian is all but forgotten.

The good times, such as they are, don’t last. Scandal erupts over a social-media post appearing to show Perry hooking up after hours at the kiosk with a married man (a sackable offence). Yoyo suspects Lan Tian. He insists he is innocent – his footage purely for his own enjoyment – but their tentative bond is ruptured, though Lan Tian continues to spy on Yoyo from afar, zooming in with his phone’s camera to the point of pixelated illegibility. What does he know of Yoyo’s experience, let alone her feelings?

‘All’ recasts Yoyo as the voyeur and aspiring creative (she wants to study architecture). No longer passive and reserved, here she is stylish and self-possessed. With her pointed sunglasses and effortless cool, Yoyo resembles a character from another film by a Shanghai-born director with a bipartite structure and concerned with youthful alienation – the anonymous woman with the blonde wig in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994). We meet Yoyo also poised between sweet and creepy: peering from behind a column at her high school ex, a transformed Lan Tian (played this time by the taller, older actor An Yu), who is working the front desk at a children’s dance studio. Nodding along to the music, his absorbed, earnest demeanour is endearing but hardly dazzling. What private meanings does Yoyo’s gaze bestow on this unlikely heartthrob? Lan Tian initially rebuffs Yoyo, then relents. Perry reappears as a third wheel, this time as the mother of a pupil at Lan Tian’s studio. He babysits for Perry, but there is a suggestion of a romance between them. Yoyo angrily disparages her as ‘that auntie’; Lan Tian’s puppyish infatuation has been replaced with fierce jealousy.

Although each half follows the transient dramas among its characters, the real protagonist of All, or Nothing at All is the mall itself. In Zhang’s vision Global Harbour is a disorienting space: at once overwhelming and somehow cramped – the effect heightened by the boxy aspect ratio and by camerawork which is alternately still, as though basking in the shopping centre’s numbing artifice, and anxiously following at the heels of characters, like a child afraid to lose their parent in a crowd. The sound is overwhelming too: a muzak version of Handel’s ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ playing from the loudspeakers; the din of background chatter from thousands of mouths; the drone of the air conditioning. Sometimes, American-style pop music blares over montages of crowds using the escalators. Occasionally, there is silence, in which a whisper rings out like a scream.

Global Harbour is a self-contained world, a kind of microcosm of society, but it is also – with its ultra-generic opulence, gleaming surfaces and frescoes of merchant vessels to match its name – an almost phantasmagorical space, a kind of lurid utopia which promises to meet every need – eating, socializing, amusement – but delivers shallow satisfactions. An ambience of tedium, isolation and stupefying artifice prevails. Everyone appears caught up in a personal simulation. People are constantly on their phones; their virtual worlds, crammed with commodified stimulation, seem a logical extension of the mall. In ‘Nothing at All’, Lan Tian hardly looks at the world except as it appears on his phone screen. We see Yoyo and Lan Tian wearing VR headsets aiming plastic rifles into the air as they play a shooter game; looking out from one of the mall’s mezzanines, Yoyo’s mother and grandmother point out paper parrots perched in plastic trees, as if they are birdwatching. (Later, birdsong plays over another shot of the fake parrots.) In another scene, a man stops to admire a digitally animated backdrop of a snowy landscape, then pulls out his phone to record it.

In the postmodern maze of Global Harbour, distinctions between work and leisure are rendered ambiguous. Workers, like Yoyo in ‘Nothing at All’, finish their shift and then while away their downtime spending their wages in the very place that employs them. ‘What is work and what is fun? Tell me!’, Lan Tian says to Yoyo on her day off. Relations between characters become ambiguous too: the distinction between commercial transaction and heartfelt exchange, instrumental attachment and authentic bond blurs. In each half of the film the pursuer is at leisure, the pursued an employee of the mall: in ‘All’, Yoyo can afford to indulge her infatuation with Lan Tian because she’s at a loose end; Lan Tian’s affair with Perry, meanwhile, may be freighted by the fact he is paid to look after her child. In ‘Nothing at All’, Lan Tian can cultivate his obsession with Yoyo because he is unemployed; Yoyo, in turn, entertains his advances in part because it is her job to. Film-making isn’t innocent either, of course. Is Lan Tian obsessed with Yoyo herself or with his project of recording her? At one point he asks a delivery worker if he wouldn’t mind answering a few questions. The worker agrees, then asks, ‘So, I’m your material?’.

Read On: Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, NLR 21.

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Wartime Lithuania

On Sunday 26 May, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda was re-elected for a second five-year term, winning a decisive majority in a runoff with current Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė. Nausėda, a centrist who stood on an independent ticket, and Šimonytė, who represents the conservative Homeland Union–Christian Democrats, had previously run against each other in the 2019 presidential contest, with similar results. The ballot reflects a deep-seated inertia among the country’s political establishment, which has taken a maximally hard line against Russia while neglecting a wide range of social and economic problems on the domestic front. How long can this approach last? What opposition might it face?

Lithuania’s ongoing militarization is set to continue over the coming years, spearheaded by Defence Minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas, whom Šimonytė nominated and Nausėda appointed in March. The former head of a neo-Nazi youth organization, Kasčiūnas has accelerated the government’s sabre-rattling, pushing for a civilian armed force, universal military conscription and withdrawal from treaties banning cluster munitions. He has also allowed a US Army battalion to remain in Lithuania indefinitely and visited Washington to pitch the defence industry on his ‘vast acquisition plan’, which includes rocket launchers, air-to-air missiles, four Blackhawk helicopters, 500 tactical vehicles and unmanned aerial systems.

Nausėda’s administration is also ushering in a new era of military cooperation with post-Zeitenwende Germany. Just weeks ago, the first tranche of a planned 4,800 German troops and 200 civilian workers were stationed on Lithuanian soil, with the aim of being ‘combat-ready’ by 2027. They will augment the 1,100 German soldiers already based there under NATO’s mission Enhanced Forward Presence and Germany’s Operation Vigilant Owl, which trains Lithuanian forces in electromagnetic warfare. Twelve thousand NATO troops were deployed for live-fire operations as part of last month’s Operation Steadfast Defender, which NATO describes as its ‘largest military exercise since the Cold War’. Lithuania has also announced that it will acquire German Leopard tanks and spend €200 million annually on a new army division, while opening a Rheinmetall factory to produce NATO-standard artillery shells. The national defence budget has grown by more than 16% each year since 2020, and a law passed in April aims to expand the domestic arms industry. The Finance Ministry has proposed raising taxes and extending a bank levy to increase military spending.  

Lithuania’s hawkishness has been too much for some of its Western allies. In 2022 it was forced by the EU to lift sanctions it imposed on Russian rail transit through its territory. At the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, the host nation was the only one to call for Ukraine’s immediate accession. And this year, when Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis demanded a ‘firm response’ following reports that Russia was planning to redraw borders in the Baltic Sea, he was rebuked by Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, who remarked that ‘In Finland, we always first investigate the facts in detail and then draw conclusions’. Landsbergis, who chairs the Homeland Union–Christian Democrats – currently the country’s largest parliamentary grouping – is among Lithuania’s most rabid New Cold Warriors. He has denounced Hungary for blocking military aid to Ukraine and railed against the US policy of not allowing long-range missiles to be fired on Russian territory. Under his watch, Taiwan opened its first official embassy in the EU, creating an ongoing diplomatic scandal and straining relations between Beijing and the trading bloc.

While Lithuania prepares for war, the home front looks bleak. After three quarters of declining GDP, the country entered a technical recession in autumn. Growth is among the lowest in the EU while inflation is among the highest, reaching over 24% in September, although it has slowed this year. Food price inflation, partly exacerbated by a drought, was over 30% for eight consecutive months from 2022 to 2023. The country’s secular decline in population was recently reversed, but educated young people continue to emigrate in large numbers to seek higher wages. A once-promising tech sector is now beginning to contract. Lithuania has also been one of the focal points of the European migration crisis, after EU sanctions against Belarus in 2021 prompted Aleksandr Lukashenko to send migrants to his country’s forested border with Lithuania, which responded by constructing 500 kilometres of new border fence and engaging in illegal ‘pushbacks’. The general population has mixed feelings about migrants. In some border towns, locals have hung signs demanding their removal; yet the country has also opened its doors to over 65,000 Ukrainian refugees since the start of the war, prompting accusations of favouritism.

Economic pressures, along with EU regulations, have meanwhile activated Lithuanian farmers, who, like their counterparts across Europe, have been organizing a series of mass protests. Last year, farmers campaigning against low milk prices dumped manure near parliament. In January they staged a two-day demonstration in Vilnius, clogging thoroughfares with tractors and demanding changes to EU land management rules as well as the government’s exorbitant excise tax on liquified petroleum gas (which was subsequently scrapped). Unrest has not been limited to the agriculture sector. The union that represents most of Lithuania’s teachers launched two strikes at the start of this school year, while public transit workers engaged in a work stoppage for most of December 2022.

The government has generally been unresponsive to popular discontent. But two recent developments have unsettled an otherwise predictable political landscape. An organization known as the Family Movement was formed in 2021 after a series of well-attended marches against Lithuania’s rigid vaccine passport system. It opposes pro-LGBT legislation, including gay marriage and civil partnerships, and other supposed threats to the nuclear family. It is also out of step with elite opinion on Ukraine. In February, it formed a political party by joining forces with the Christian Union, which broke away from the Homeland Union–Christian Democrats in 2020. Ignas Vėgėlė, a former head of the Lithuanian Bar Association with close ties to the Family Movement, ran a vigorous independent presidential campaign on a platform of soft Euroscepticism, greater investment in education and healthcare, and military de-escalation (although he made clear that he still supported sanctions on Russia). He was placing second in the polls as recently as 21 April, though he failed to make it to the final runoff.

The other development is the rise of the National Alliance, another right-wing party founded in 2020 which opposes emigration and European integration. It is headed by thirty-four-year-old Vytautas Sinica, a former leader of the conservative Christian youth movement Pro Patria, who holds a doctorate in political theory. He describes the outfit as an ‘intellectual party’ which aims to promote ‘national conservatism’ – blending reactionary cultural politics with hardline Atlanticism. Its slogan, ‘Raise your head, Lithuanian!’, is borrowed from the title of an antisemitic pamphlet published in 1933 by Jonas Noreika, a Lithuanian general notorious for signing off on the death of thousands of Jews during WWII. In interviews, Sinica has been known appear beside a copy of the memoir of Kazys Škirpa, founder of the Nazi-collaborationist Lithuanian Activist Front. Having won three municipal seats in Vilnius last year, the party is now gearing up for parliamentary and European elections, which will test their popularity outside the capital.

Though the Lithuanian left has grown in recent years, it remains a marginal presence on the national stage. In 2022, a new movement called the Left Alliance was formed out of a thinktank in Vilnius. Last month it launched a political party called Together, whose manifesto calls for large-scale investment in public services and anti-poverty programmes. On questions of war and militarization, however, there is not be much daylight between it and the National Alliance. The Left Alliance has rejected calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine, arguing that ‘peacebuilding is only possible when the autocratic aggressor who invades the sovereign country is fully stopped and punished’. Together likewise endorses ‘comprehensive preparation of the army for national defence’ and ‘civil defence preparedness’. With no serious anti-war voice on the left, elements of the Family Movement have filled the vacuum, forming a group called the Peace Coalition which is contesting the upcoming European elections. Led by a former general, and consisting of members of the Christian Democrats plus a regional party representing western Lithuanians, its platform centres on opposition to sending soldiers to fight in Ukraine and opening up a front in Lithuania. One of its leaders has enjoined the country to ‘start speaking the language of diplomacy’.

Across the spectrum, Lithuanian politicians offer no remedies for the country’s lagging economy, popular unrest and migrant crisis. The Social Democrats and Farmers and Labour Party promote the standard package of centre-right neoliberal policies at home and abroad. The same goes for the Freedom Party, founded in 2019, though it has tried to attract younger voters with its pro-LGBT platform and gaudy pink branding. The Farmers and Greens Union, representing the agriculture industry, has a more progressive economic platform, given its reliance on government subsidies, but is more conservative on social issues. Disenchantment with these electoral options is widespread. A survey conducted last year found that only 20% of respondents had a positive view of the parliament, while 30% had a positive view of the government. Turnout for the upcoming European parliamentary elections is expected to be extremely low, which may benefit newer parties.

It remains unclear whether a popular left can emerge to harness the discontent that has so far been captured by the Family Movement. Will younger generations protest the introduction of military conscription and the rising bellicosity on Lithuania’s borders? New journals such as Lūžis (Fracture) and Šauksmas (Scream) express a more oppositional left perspective germinating in the universities: theoretically sophisticated, firmly anti-capitalist and critical of Atlanticism. The union Gegužės 1-osios Profesinė Sąjunga (G1PS) has also been organizing gig workers, arts workers and domestic cleaners since it was founded in 2018. But the reach of these institutions is limited. G1PS is known as ‘gipsas’ in Lithuanian, which is the same word for ‘plaster cast’. Some have joked that the country’s left consists of nothing more than a fracture, a scream and a cast.

Nausėda insists that he will improve state benefits such as pensions to reduce inequality and ease the burden of inflation. But as long as his priority is ‘national defence’, social progress is unlikely. There are already fears that the billeting of German troops and their families will lead to a spike in rents, in a market where housing prices more than doubled between 2010 and 2023. And as the government welcomes a ‘permanent’ German military presence on its soil, it continues to erode the sense of sovereignty which many Lithuanian are craving – one whose only articulation has so far come from the populist right. Unless the left also begins to challenge the militarization agenda, there is little hope of changing the country’s balance of power.

Read on: Joy Neumeyer, ‘In the Woods’, Sidecar.