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Welcome to vox europe. VOX Europe welcome to VOX Europe. I'm Chris Gilson. On this episode we'll hear from specialists on politics in Eastern Europe and take an in depth look at Europe's austerity policies. We first speak to Pulitzer Prize winner and LSE's current Philip Rohman Chair in History and International Affairs, Anne Applebaum about Russia's managed democracy and the effects of so called Putinism.
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I use Putinism a little bit ironically, but also with some seriousness because it really has become over time a complete system. You can almost call it an ideology.
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Clara Volontieru, expert in Romanian politics, speaks about the decreasing levels of trust Romanians have in their government.
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Widespread corruption and widespread scandals and wasteful allocation of resources do tend to further create a divide between politicians and the population.
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And for our segment on the future of Europe, we talked to linguist and renowned political critic Noam Chomsky about Europe's austerity policy.
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It's destroying a generation, which is not a trivial matter. It's also economically outlandish, all that Coming up.
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This is Vox Europe, a podcast series from the European Politics and Policy blog at the London School of Economics. The LSEUROP blog brings you the latest debates around issues in the European Union, states and Brussels. UROP's central mission is to increase the public understanding of social science in the context of European governance and policymaking. Our focus is broad based and multidisciplinary, covering everything from European governance to politics and society. Visit us at Europe. EU corruption is nothing new in Russia, but it is meeting a growing resistance from a so called new generation of Russian dissidents. Stuart Brown speaks to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ann Applebaum about the overreaching effects of so called Putinism on the country's economic system and democratic processes and goes on to explain how the evolution of Russia's political opposition movement may pose a challenge to Putin and the ruling class.
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Putinism is of course a name that I use to describe the philosophy and ruling style of Vladimir Putin who is now for the third time been elected President of Russia. And I use Putinism a little bit ironically, but also with some seriousness because it really has become over time a complete system. You can almost call it an ideology. Putinism from the beginning has involved the use of what's often called managed democracy in Russia. So some democratic norms are observed, but elections are nevertheless manipulated, not just through the voting process, but through the media and so on. It's involved the control over the media and particularly the control over the televised media. Putinism has always allowed some dissent and some outsider voices into the public space, but has kept control over mainstream media. I would say, put it that way. Putinism has also involved the resurrection and repoliticization of Soviet history, so bringing back symbols and stories and sometimes even events from the past. So, for example, the resurrection of a kind of cult of May 1945, you know, the victory in the Second World War, which was, of course, a moment in Soviet history of imperial triumph when the Soviet Union marched into Central Europe and took it over. And it's a moment Putin has chosen to focus on that moment of history and to reenact it in annual May Day parades and to discuss it as a way of resurrecting a kind of Russian sense of imperial triumph. Putinism, you know, it's not a static thing. It's changed in recent years as it's become, I think, a little bit harder for Putin to keep this system under control. Managed democracy hasn't worked quite as well in recent years as it did initially, but it's very stable, largely because. Or it has been stable because of its economic side as well. Putinism is also an economic system which is, in effect, a form of, you know, we have managed democracy and managed press. It's also a form of managed capitalism. Large companies are allowed to exist. Many of them make their money because of their corrupt relationships with the state. The large businessmen who control the economy, directly or indirectly, owe their money, and they owe their positions to Putin or to people around Putin, and that's how they're able to keep their wealth. It has not been a system which has encouraged much grassroots entrepreneurship, and it's not a system that's been very dynamic in creating a new middle class or lots of economic energy. It has benefited enormously from the rise in oil prices over the last two decades and from Russia's continued dominance of gas markets and other energy markets in Europe. So it's a system geared towards maintaining those kinds of monopolies and, to some extent, dependent on them.
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Last year saw a number of crackdowns in Russia. Do you think this is likely to continue?
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The crackdowns in Russia in the last year or so have been made necessary by the fact that the opposition in Russia has recently reorganized itself, and it's changed quite a bit its tactics and even, to some extent, its identity. There has been, since 2000, there has been an opposition to Russia which mostly came from the old human rights movement and used the language of human rights and democracy to argue that much of what Putin was doing was undemocratic. More recently, the Russian opposition has changed its language and it talks more about corruption than it talks about democracy, and has actually become quite active in pinpointing, identifying, tracking down and publicizing stories of corruption. So it's really an anti corruption movement. This is, of course, much more dangerous to Putin and to the people around him because it affects quite in a very basic way, the source of their money and their power. You know, if it's just about democracy, they can dismiss that kind of claim and they can say, well, we have democracy here, look, we have elections. But rhetoric about corruption has been much harder for them to argue against. And so the tactics used against the new Russian opposition have been much more brutal, actually, than those in the past. There's been a raft of laws passed that make it more difficult for people to protest and have forced some into jail, some into long prison sentences. And I think that's a reflection of the fact that the Russian regime has, is made much more nervous recently by this kind of opposition and this kind of oppositional rhetoric than it was previously.
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Do you think that corruption in Russia has an influence in neighboring countries in Eastern Europe, such as Belarus and Ukraine?
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I think Russia has quite consciously tried to export corruption not only to its neighbors, not only to those in the post Soviet space or in Eastern Europe, what used to be Eastern Europe, but also to Western Europe. The Russian economic system is essentially a relationship between a very wealthy. It's now not just a tiny group of oligarchs, it's quite a number of wealthy people, and the state, and the two sides make money in a mutually acceptable way off of one another. And the Russian business class would like to follow the same tactic in other places. And so, to the degree that it's able to corrupt the Ukrainian government, the Byelorussian government, governments in Eastern and Western Europe, it has done so, I think big Russian oil and gas and natural resources purchases in Western Europe and Central Europe have sometimes, sometimes appear to have that as a goal. You know, there's purchase of the most important, you know, Serbian or Romanian oil and gas businesses are sometimes intended to give Russian business that kind of clout in those countries so that they can alter laws in their own favor. Their similar kinds of investments in Germany, in Austria, in Italy, even in Portugal have been carried out with the aim, of course, of making money, but also with having political influence in those countries. And so, yes, I think the desire to export corruption in order to make life easier for Russian businessmen around Europe is very important.
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That was Anne Applebaum. 2012 was a turbulent year for Politics in Romania with an unsuccessful referendum to impeach the current president, Traian Vercescu, in July and national elections in December, Vox Europe spoke to LSC government department PhD student Clara Volontieru about politics in Romania in the wake of the referendum. I started the interview by asking Clara about the current state of democracy in Romania.
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The referendum is the main subject of debate surrounding the rule of law and the state of democracy. And in this sense, I think we should look at three dimensions of the political fight. The first one is the objective dimension, in which the rule of law should not be a variable. And unfortunately, the current government has tended to regard the procedures for the referendum as something they could change in the eve the event. And that was just a fair amount of foreign observers, something that isn't to be taken lightly and should not happen, and fortunately did not happen. But this left a big issue of legitimacy with a very unpopular president and a very conflictual situation, creating a de facto deadlock. A second dimension would be the subjective one. Much of the foreign debates have been fueled by an elite, intellectual elite that has been a steady reporter of events in Romania for the past 20 years. And this elite is usually connected to the president's party, which has been a traditional hub for intellectuals more recently. And so you might say there is this sense of subjectivity from the point of view of who has pointed the finger and who has signaled issues in terms of the state of democracy. And a third a dimension would be one of structure, meaning that the current framework and thresholds of the referendum, which were 50% of the population plus one presence to vote, was something that the former governing party has been thinking and has set up early in advance. In this sense, one might look at the structure of the Democratic Liberal Party as being very organized, very strategic, and has anticipated this situation and has safeguarded itself, while the Social Liberal Union is much more massive, much more fragmented. It had its strategy very improvised, from my point of view. And so this is why there was so much babbling surrounding the referendum procedures. And it looked like a very troubling situation from the legal point of view and the state of democracy in general.
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You've called President Basescu in the past a one man show. What do you mean when you say this?
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There have been two major popular personalistic figures, President Uliescu and President Basescu. They have been what analysts call them in Romania, the drivers of the parties they represent or the coalitions. President Basescu, as opposed to President Uliescu, hasn't been very concerned to, to maintain and develop the organizational base of the party President Basescu, has been very improvisational, conflictual. He has an antagonistic style of politics and has surrounded himself with very close friends, family and allies. So he has done this to be certain that his political intentions are followed. So he's not a sister systemic personality. Whereas other politicians have tended to be more party oriented.
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There's widespread distrust to politicians in Romania. Why do you think this is the case and do you think it's likely to be overcome in the future?
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I think there is wide disenchantment within the electorate and I think traditional bases of supporters have changed their profiles and have shifted. The Social Democrats have traditionally been basing their electoral success on retirees and blue collar workers, which are decreasing in the demographic percentage. So they need to change their strategy and they are trying to appeal to a younger electorate. At the moment, not very successfully yet. Prime Minister Ponta, and the party leader of the Social Democrats is the youngest prime minister in Europe and he surrounded himself. He's doing a showcase of young political figures. But this hasn't attracted the younger electorate. Here then you have the disenchantment of the disenfranchised, the austerity measures that have left many people under the poverty line. And so there is this sense of not getting what they deserve from the politicians. And the second issue would be the fact that widespread corruption and widespread scandals and wasteful allocation of resources do tend to further create a divide between politicians and the population. The problem is that the measures to counteract corruption and proprietary use of state resources haven't been effective to date. And whatever efforts have been made have been perceived, such as the prosecution of the former Prime Minister Adriana Stasse, have been widely perceived as political agenda and insufficient evidence of sustained and supported and fair and unpartisan strategy of anti corruption.
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Do you think that the EU could do more to ensure democracy isn't threatened in Romania?
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I think an interesting thing about the Romanian population is that they are very much pro European. They have traditionally held in high regard whatever comes from the part of Europe. This added to the fact that a lot of Romanians live in the diaspora. But here, here we don't have really consistent records because they range from 1.5 million to 8 million. So we don't really know how many Romanian actually live in the diaspora. And you can see that the connections with the foreign environment are really strong. And the fact that the EU was very concerned about what happened this summer with the referendum was indeed a big bonus for President Basescu and his party, because a lot of the electorate that didn't support him did question the approach that the Social Liberal Union had on the issue. So, yes, I think whatever the European Union does address on the issue of the state of democracy in Romania is very much taken into account, both by politicians and the population, because the population is sensitive in the topic. But otherwise I don't think there is much structurally that they can do, because it's not the rule of law that's a problem. It's the fact that there are significant overlaps between prerogatives of the highest functions. You can't really say who's to blame because each one can interpret the law to it to his own advantage.
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That was Clara Volontero. The Future of Europe series on our podcasts takes a closer look at what's going on in Europe and what the future might hold. For this episode of Voxeurop, we spoke to Noam Chomsky about how Europe might resolve its crisis and the role of technocratic government. I started by asking Professor Chomsky about austerity and Europe's welfare policies.
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Europe needs a stimulus to even the IMF's coming around to that position. And there's plenty of capacity for stimulus. There's no shortage. Europe's rich place. There's plenty of reserves in the ecb. The Bundesbank doesn't like it, investors don't like it, banks don't like it. But that's the policies that should be pursued. Even writers in the Financial Times agree with that, and the US business press too. But if they don't, they're just going to go into a deeper recession. Actually, the European Commission just released its report expectations for next year, which are for very low growth, increasing problems of joblessness. The main problem, which is a very serious problem, it's destroying a generation, which is not a trivial matter. It's also economically outlandish. If people are forced into joblessness, that's not only extremely harmful from a human point of view to them, but even from an economic point of view, means there's unused resources which could be used to grow and develop. So it's the policies, they make sense only on one assumption, that the goal is to try to undermine and unravel the welfare state. And that's almost been said. Mario Draghi, the ecb, had an interview with the Wall Street Journal where he said the social contract in Europe is dead. He wasn't advocating it, he was describing it, but not dead. That's an exaggeration, but under attack. Right now, the Eurozone is just putting off its problems it's called kicking the can down the road. Now there are serious problems. The Eurozone in my view was a positive development in general, but it's being handled in a way which is undermining the promise it should have. I think it's widely agreed that there has to be more of a. A political union and you can't have a system in which the countries cannot control their own currencies and then have austerity imposed on them when they can't carry out the measures that any country would carry out if it was in economic straits. That's just an impossible situation and that has to be dealt with. But it should also be recognized that Europe is suffering to an extent from its relative humanity. So if you compare Europe with North America, the Eurozone was established approximately when the North American unification, economic unification was established, nafta, North American Free Trade Agreement. But they were done in very different ways. In Europe, before the poor countries were brought in, the poor southern countries, there were significant efforts made to raise their level in subventions, subsidies, all kinds of things so that they wouldn't undermine the work, living standards and so on of Northern European workers. It was done to a non trivial extent. Southern countries in Ireland. That's a relatively humane way of moving towards integration. In the United States, something quite similar was proposed by the US labor movement and even by Congress's Research Bureau. But it was dismissed without comment and instead Mexico was integrated in a fashion which is quite harmful to Mexicans and to Canadian and U.S. workers. Worst possible way. So Europe is now suffering from that.
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That's all for this episode on Eastern Europe. Join us soon as we take a closer look at European philosophy and what it means to be a European with Paul Stark and Simon Glendinning of the LSE Voxurop is a podcast series put out by the Public Policy Group, the London School of Economics. One member of our blog family, the LSE British Politics and Policy blog have launched the first episode in their British Politicast series. This episode focuses on the 2011 riots in England and features professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College Lesbach who walks through Catford, London and reflects on the rioting that took place in the area. In this generation there is a harsh division being marked between those young people who have something to lose and those young people who feel they have almost nothing to lose. You can listen and download the LSE British Politicast on itunes or@lsepoliticsblog.com this podcast was produced by Cheryl Brumley. For a full list of the music and sound used in this episode, visit our blog@erop.eu. that's EUROPP.eu. i'm Chris Gilson. Thanks for listening.