EU Scream

• Ep.119: Post-Truth Nation

  There is an expanding landscape of lies, distortions, and half-truths shaping global politics. The latest instance is the immediate blame heaped on the left for the killing of Charlie Kirk despite evidence that right-leaning attacks are more common. It's one more sign that the line between reality and fabrication is getting blurrier. And as misinformation metastasizes, there are mounting concerns about whether democratic institutions can survive. This episode turns a spotlight on Slovakia, the central European nation that's become a hotspot for post-truth politics. Seven years ago, Prime Minister Robert Fico was forced from power after the execution-style murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée. But Fico made a comeback, formed a coalition with the far right, and now is surrounded by an array of ultranationalist reactionaries, white supremacists and delusional post-truthers. They include Rudolf Huliak, the misogynistic tourism minister; Peter Kotlár, the Covid denier who takes his cue from RFK Jr.; Filip Kuffa, the state secretary for the environment who mocks endangered species; Lukáš Machala, a powerful official prone to flat-earth theories; and his boss, Martina Šimkovičová, an aggressively homophobic culture minister who is putting Slovakia's public broadcaster under political control. That makes Slovakia a key test for the European Commission and for its new Media Freedom Act, which aims to stop political interference in editorial decisions. But whether the Commission will take action remains an open question. Like other leaders of would-be autocracies, Fico uses strategies to feign compliance to throw up roadblocks to enforcement. There are also geopolitical concerns. What if enforcement pushes Slovakia even further into the Kremlin's orbit? That’s the wrong question says Pavol Szalai of Reporters sans frontières. In reality the Commission's failure to act would expose Slovakia to yet more post-truth, pro-Russia messaging that weakens the EU's ability to defend Ukraine and itself. In this episode: Pavol describes how the EU can help Slovakia combat a trend that's hobbled media in Hungary, left Polish media in disarray, and that promises to damage media in Czechia if, as expected, the far right comes to power there in October.Support the show

  --------  

  1:00:02

  --------

  1:00:02
• Ep.118: Putting Guardrails On Playing God

  The recent European heatwave killed some 2,300 people with more than half of deaths attributable to human-caused climate change. But what if temperatures can be lowered using technology? It's a highly charged question. One of the ideas out there is to create a parasol of particles around the earth to reflect sunlight back into space. Cooling the planet this way is known as solar geoengineering. Many Europeans reject geoengineering outright. They say nobody should be playing God with the climate. Yet exploration of geoengineering, backed by private investors, looks to be zooming ahead. Unregulated. But in anticipation of strong future demand in a world where temperature rises are on course to reach nearly 3 degrees this century. That's way above the 1.5 degree target concluded a decade ago under the Paris climate agreement. In this episode: a conversation with Cynthia Scharf. Cynthia participated in the Paris climate negotiations as an aide to former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and she's now with the Brussels-based think-tank, the Center for Future Generations. She is not giving up on the Paris deal from a decade ago. Far from it. Efforts to drastically cut emissions are essential. But Cynthia also says the time has come to consider the implications of what she calls technologies of desperation like dimming the sun with solar geoengineering.​ And time for the Europe to take a leadership role to determine if the technology can ever be safe and viable — or if it's just too dangerous even to try. China’s preference for state secrecy makes it unsuitable for such a role, while the US, under Trump, has walked out on climate action and collective security. That leaves the European Union well placed to pick up the mantle of responsibility and to try to put up international guardrails against careless or malign use of geoengineering. Opening up discussion of geoengineering could also help to quell conspiracy theories linked to the technology, like the idea that contrails from aircraft are chemtrails for mind control. Less clearcut is how the EU can promote international governance of solar geoengineering in an era when multilateralism has hit the rocks and anti-science forces are on the rise. This episode was made in partnership with the Center for Future Generations. You can find more on Cynthia's work here and more on the Center's work on advanced AI, biotech and neurotech here.Support the show

  --------  

  1:01:34

  --------

  1:01:34
• Ep.117: Countdown to Budapest Pride

  Millions of people in more than a hundred countries march at Pride festivities each year. Attendees come mostly to express support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, queer and intersex people — the LGBTQI+ community. And although Pride may be on every continent, there's a swathe of countries where Pride still is not freely celebrated. Take Russia, where a court last decade issued a one-hundred-year ban on Pride events. Or Turkey, where police in recent years have been harassing, attacking and detaining activists and members of the LGBTQ+ community. And then there's Hungary, which is inside the EU but out of step with its laws and values. This year Hungary's illiberal prime minister Viktor Orbán said he intended to stop Pride in the capital Budapest, on the pretext of child-protection. Under-18s are supposedly at risk from so-called displays of homosexuality, displays that themselves were banned four years ago. That's a direct echo of Russia's anti-LGBT statute on Protecting Children and Traditional Family Values signed into law by Vladimir Putin more than a decade ago. This month Hungarian police duly imposed the Budapest ban that Orbán called for. And they added a dystopian touch: facial recognition technology. Attendees identified at Budapest Pride could face fines of 500 euros; they also could face neofascist thugs from far-right splinter groups. But Budapest mayor Gergely Karácsony says this year's event is going ahead this weekend just the same. After all, Budapest has had Pride marches for the best part of three decades. It's also worth recalling that Pride was born out of state repression. The first marches were held in the early 70s in a handful of US cities to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. That name, Stonewall, comes from a bar, the Stonewall Inn, in New York City's Greenwich Village. The gay and transgender patrons of the Stonewall had grown sick of police harassment and abuse, and their uprising in 1969 still marks a key moment for civil rights movements everywhere. One beneficiary of such hard-won victories is Marc Angel, one of five so-called Quaestors at the European Parliament overseeing matters affecting the chamber's 705 members. Marc is a Socialist from Luxembourg and also co-president of the European Parliament's intergroup on LGBTIQ+ rights. For him, this weekend's Budapest Pride events amount to a protest — a protest against bogus limits on freedom of assembly in Hungary, and a protest against an international anti-gender movement, backed by Russia, supported by US ultraconservatives, and aimed at polarizing societies and weakening democracy.Support the show

  --------  

  32:21

  --------

  32:21
• Ep.116: Gaza, Staatsräson, and von der Leyen

  An initial wave of support for Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in which Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages has been eclipsed by 20 months of reprisals in which Israel has killed nearly 55,000 Palestinians in Gaza including thousands of children. Public support for Israel is sinking and the country's staunchest allies are rowing back. Even so, a huge gap remains between the political rhetoric and the reality of what Israel's partners are doing to stop the atrocities. Among the European Union states that have been most reluctant to condemn Israel is Germany, where the history of the Holocaust is a complicating factor. Germany considers ties with Israel part of its so-called Staatsräson, or raison d'état, effectively aligning German foreign policy and security with that of Israel. And despite the abundant evidence of disproportionate and indiscriminate strikes by Israel, Germany has continued to allow arms sales and to oppose severing trade and political ties. Sharing Germany's support for Israel are countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic with Spain, Slovenia and Ireland among those most supportive of the Palestinians. But as the EU's biggest and richest member state, Germany has an outsized influence on the bloc, and its stance has fed the perception that Europeans are reluctant to restrain Israel. Adding to that impression is Ursula von der Leyen, a German conservative, and the president of the bloc's powerful executive, the European Commission. She only recently shifted tone on Israel by calling targeting of civilian infrastructure abhorrent. In this episode: German journalist Katrin Pribyl on the extent of her country's the pro-Israel stance and the awkward silence von der Leyen has long maintained over Gaza — and on whether von der Leyen has inadvertently imposed Germany's Staatsräson on the rest of Europe.Support the show

  --------  

  47:38

  --------

  47:38
• Ep.115: A Real Nuclear Option for Orbán's Hungary

  Call it the real nuclear option for bringing Viktor Orbán's Hungary to heel — but also call it a risky thought experiment. Tom Theuns of Leiden University wants to empower the EU to sever ties with a rogue member state like Hungary, where Orbán has fashioned an autocracy and set about cultivating the EU's strategic rivals. Introducing an expulsion threat could push EU autocrats like Orbán to show more respect for rule of law and democracy, says Tom, while the current lack of any such mechanism has instead emboldened them. For now, Tom's ideas still are legally theoretical, not to mention politically delicate. In his new book, Protecting Democracy in Europe, Tom envisages democratic states each leaving the EU and then immediately re-founding the Union — an EU 2.0 — minus any autocratic states. More than two dozen countries would need to coordinate national consents in advance, using the same EU treaty article that Britain used in Brexit. But if all doesn't go to plan — think obdurate legislators, sudden calls for referendums, or a even French demand for more subsidies — the exercise could usher in the kind of political warfare that sinks the EU for good. Tom's goal is, above all, to end what he calls fatalistic and defeatist thinking — that the EU must remain stuck in perpetuity with Orbán's brand of kleptocratic illiberalism. "Supranational union with an autocratic state is a choice," insists Tom. "EU member states can also choose to disengage." In this episode Tom also reflects on what happened a quarter-century ago, when European authorities failed to block Austria's far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) from government, to elucidate a pattern of insufficient EU responses in the Hungarian context. Support the show

  --------  

  35:07

  --------

  35:07

Más podcasts de Gobierno

Podcasts a la moda de Gobierno

Acerca de EU Scream