À l’aube de la 6e extinction
This paperback, a bargain at just €7,70, deserves to be widely read and distributed. Bruno David, palaeontologist, biologist and president of the French National History Museum, unpicks the crisis of the biosphere that is taking shape before our eyes. In simple language and imparting a great deal of knowledge, he explains the mechanisms and interactions at play in this crisis, the outcome of which cannot be predicted with any precision, but could well culminate in a sixth extinction. Avoiding disaster is unquestionably still possible, if the preservation of diversity finally becomes more important to us than our obsession with growth. And as David goes on to explain, each and every one of us, at our own level and without too much personal deprivation, can contribute in our daily lives to slowing down this “silent crisis that is progressing at nominal speed” (our translation throughout).
“The climates in ancient times fluctuated greatly, far more than trends in recent decades, but (…) the biosphere has virtually never experienced climate fluctuations at the speed we are observing today, even though the scales in question may have been far greater”, the author explains, observing that “at the rate things are going, by 2050 London’s climate might be very similar to that of Madrid today, representing a leap of 1200 km in 30 years”.
At the same time, “the recent IPBES (the biodiversity counterpart of the IPCC for climate change) report is unequivocal. In May 2019, it announced that between 500,000 and 1 million species were likely to decline in the next few decades and ultimately come under threat of extinction”, the author stresses.
“Like all living creatures, we put pressure on the planet, just more so than the rest. It is therefore by questioning our daily behaviour that we will be able to change our behaviour and bring a different influence to bear on the biodiversity that surrounds us and upon which we live”, writes the author, who develops the theme of deploring the inability of our societies and the indecisiveness of our governments to act in favour of health and biodiversity and against economic behaviour that is accelerating climate change. Among other examples, he highlights the absurd decision made by the Swiss railway company, which has had the facade of the building recently constructed in Zürich cladded with stone that came from a quarry in southern Germany, but was carved into shape in China. This means that 50,000 tonnes of stone travelled 43,000 km. Lamenting the enormous environmental impact of the combination of ‘consumption, transport and globalisation’, he quite rightly points out that “a company like Amazon that has built its phenomenal success on the mass movement of all kinds of goods from one continent to another is an absolute ecological nightmare”.
On the subject of endocrine disruptors, David quotes from a study published by the French public health institute in 2019, which revealed that six substances presumed to be toxic were present in the organisms of all French people. He added: “the most striking image is that of the plastic that we all ingest in form of microparticles. Every week, that represents 5 g – the equivalent of a credit card! Barbara Demeneix, Professor at the Muséum, describes the neuro-developmental effects of this with terrifying precision in her work ‘Cocktail toxique’, in which she estimates the cost of the negative consequences of endocrine disruptors at several hundred billion euros a year in Europe and asks: should the economy take precedence over health?” As for GMOs, these “frequently fail to keep their promises and are not necessarily more economical than their traditional equivalents”. Why is this the case? “Because the demiurges of GMOs take a mechanistic approach to life, which is extremely dangerous as life is not a machine. Life has a propensity to react unpredictably. That is what it has been ‘built to do’ for the last 3800 million years!” Is this not going off at a tangent from our subject? No, of course not. Goods transport is highly polluting and directly affects biodiversity, particularly in the sea. The same is true of the micro-plastics ingested by animals, most notably the fish we eat. A recession is dawning. Will it be possible to start thinking about economic recovery predicated on well-being and the environment?
This is a matter of particular urgency as the pressure being brought to bear by man on his environment is increasing exponentially. Yet “even if we avoid eating too much meat, even if we reduce our travel, even if we give up unnecessary products, even if we are able to do without servers for our digital flows, even if this, even if that… the planet cannot sustain 12 billion inhabitants under conditions compatible with an ongoing environmental balance (and projections already forecast 10 billion in 2050: Ed). We therefore need to consider calmly the idea of an accepted and painful global degrowth, rather than one that is imposed by environmental circumstances or a dictatorship of any kind”, the author considers.
“Do we have the right to destroy what has taken millions of years to build, to accept that our grandchildren will never see snow, elephants or bears other than in archive pictures, in total awareness of what we are doing?”, David asks, answering his own question: “we have an ethical contract with future generations. We have inherited a planet in decent condition, with a certain number of species living on it. And that brings responsibilities. We must take true responsibility”. He goes on to add that “the diversity of life is our life assurance policy. If we do not conserve it, we condemn ourselves. So for purely selfish reasons, we can ask difficult questions of ourselves about our future. On the other hand, I have no worries at all about the future of life on Earth. It is only the future of mankind that we need to worry about. There will always be bacteria, viruses, fungi and animals who will ride out the crisis. As long as there is water in liquid form, there will be life on Earth. The question is: with us or without us?”
David concludes by arguing that “we must be realistic, keep our feet on the ground and accept ourselves for what we are, a species that has become finely and precisely adapted to its environment, the Earth, the third-largest planet of the solar system. Unless we can find a highly unlikely blue planet that is Earth’s absolute twin and acquire an equally unlikely means of transport to get there, there is no escape route. We must stop dreaming. There’s no planet B!” (Olivier Jehin)
Bruno David. À l’aube de la 6e extinction – Comment habiter la Terre (available in French only). Le Livre de Poche. ISBN: 978-2-2531-0468-1. 253 pages. €7,70
L’Europe fédérale, cette utopie vivante
Anybody who has ever met Domenico Rossetti di Valdalbero will be aware of his commitment to Europe and Federalist thinking. His enthusiasm is very much in evidence in this essay – perhaps too much, as the dynamic, full of generosity, leads to a discussion without proper organisation and tending towards redundancies, like the quotations that crop up again and again, like mantras. To excess, some will feel, given that the “living utopia” of federal Europe, as the author puts it, is struggling to find its way (our translation throughout). Europe will be federal or it will not be. But how long will it take? Because, as Domenico explains very clearly, time is of the essence, if Europeans want to come together to restore, within a new federal state, the sovereignty they have lost at national level. And if they do want to, how would they go about it? The work offers a number of suggestions as to how to make progress on the path towards reinforced integration.
“We are moving forward peacefully towards greater integration, but with small steps, too small in this 21st century compared to the biggest players of the world. In ten years, China has laid more kilometres of high-speed railway than Europe has managed in forty. Eight of the ten largest market capitalisations in the world are American. We are going to have to take a faster leap towards greater European deepening if we want to count in tomorrow’s world”, argues Rossetti di Valdalbero, who is deputy head of unit within DG Research at the European Commission.
“We have no real alternative to federalism. Our two federal institutions, the Court of Justice of the EU and the European Central Bank, show this, in the way they do their jobs. On the other hand, the EU inter-governmental method has all too often shown its limits, its lack of speed and, on occasion, its ineffectiveness”, the author writes with some justification. He reminds his readers of Denis de Rougemont’s definition of federalism: “it is neither unification at the cost of diversity nor the denial of all central power, internalisation to the point of separatism; it is the synthesis of union and diversity”.
The author identifies four “great leaps forward” that will contribute to the completion of European integration: (1) introducing a proper system of democratic elections for the leaders of the European institutions, which may be based on primary is within the major European political parties, taking inspiration from the Spitzenkanditaten system but, he adds, we must “move away from elitist debates to public prime-time debates on major television channels, with every side putting forward its point of view”. “Popular ownership needs to be earned and requires considerable efforts to be closer to the citizens”; (2) make the Union the sovereign entity par excellence in matters requiring its intervention, such as the management of migration flows and the internal security of the EU: “within a zone of free movement, the centralisation of information, the pooling of resources and the speed of decision-making are vital. European border guards and coastguards should be in place as the free movement of people is a reality”; (3) if the EU own resources and a Treasury worthy of the name: “the American federal budget represents 20% of the GDP of the United States, Germany’s 10% and the EU’s 1% (2% with the post-Covid recovery plan: Ed) (…). It would be laughable, ridiculous even, to imagine the 50 States of America or the 16 German Länder meeting up every seven years and fighting like cat and dog, coming cap-in-hand for the dollars or euros needed to manage policies of common interest. Yet this is what happens at European level”, the author writes; (4) continue the issuance of European State bonds beyond the Covid recovery scheme to pay for infrastructure as social aid mechanisms with a view to creating European solidarity.
Although it will be impossible to take these leaps forward in European integration between all twenty-seven member states, the author argues in favour of “developing a hardcourt – based on the six founding states or the Eurozone”. He adds, with what I see as a great measure of optimism, that “the Franco-German motor must give the first impetus. Germany is the only country capable of moving forward the debate on the European Treasury and France is the best placed to manage negotiations on the internal security of the EU”.
“Any further enlargement should be carried out with the explicit agreement of a majority of European citizens. A consultation, to be held on the same day and with the same question throughout Europe, is vital to bring Europe closer to the people and its citizens”, argues Rossetti di Valdalbero, who also supports the development of the European defence system offering a European pillar to the Atlantic Alliance. (OJ)
Domenico Rossetti di Valdalbero. L’Europe fédérale, cette utopie vivante (available in French only). L’Harmattan. ISBN: 978-2-1402-6160-2. 165 pages. €18,00
Hungary after the General Elections
In this article, which appeared in the German review Südosteuropa Mitteilungen, political scientists Sonja Priebus (Doctor of political science, University of Magdeburg) and Zsuzsanna Végh (Central European University, Budapest) analyse the conduct and results of the Hungarian elections of 3 April 2022.
The authors point out that the general elections, which were won by the Fidesz-KDNP coalition of Viktor Orbán with a two-thirds majority, gave the electorate their first ever opportunity to vote for an alliance of opposition parties. At the same time, they were invited to take position by referendum on the protection of children from the promotion of gender issues and LGBTQ, which was invalidated due to an excessively low turnout.
While the opposition coalition had been expected to do better, it achieved worse results than its individual components had done in the previous elections. But it was supporters of Jobbik who were most notable by their absence, deciding instead to vote for the Fidesz-KDNP coalition or the far-right list Our Homeland, the two researchers explain on the basis of the available figures. Elections also confirmed the growing gap between the capital, where the Orbán coalition won just two seats (down from five in 2018), while the opposition gained 17 (19 if one includes the two external districts of Pécs and Szeged), and the rest of the country, which very much voted Fidesz. Aside from the usual conservative rhetoric and the opposition’s struggles to gain access to the media, Orbán’s sizeable victory can also, the authors argue, be explained by fears raised by the war in Ukraine.
Referring to the defence of national sovereignty, the government has already reinforced the prerogatives of the Prime Minister. “In the new government, all the civil national security services have been transferred from the ministers of home affairs and foreign affairs to the Cabinet of the Prime Minister”, the authors stress, also highlighting the creation of a new “National Information Centre” headed up by the chef de cabinet of the Prime Minister, sometimes referred to as the “Minister of Propaganda”. On the very day the new government entered into office, the Fidesz-KDNP parliamentary majority approved an amendment to the fundamental law introducing a state of emergency (referred to as a state of danger), allowing a concentration of powers with exceptional measures, including the lilmitation of fundamental freedoms in the event of a neighbouring country experiencing a state of war, armed conflict or humanitarian crisis on its territory, as is currently the case in Ukraine. This state of danger was immediately proclaimed by Orbán and entered into force on 25 May.
Although relations with Poland’s PiS party suffered from the Hungarian government’s refusal to condemn Putin and to break its close political and economic ties with Russia, Priebus and Végh doubt that there will be any full and ongoing fall-out between Fidesz and PiS as long as the two allies continue their tendency towards internal autocracy, as they need each other to put up a united front against potential European sanctions. The reinforcement of Orbán’s power base will increase the pressure on the last democratic bastions, particularly non-government organisations and the last remaining independent media, the authors consider, considering it “unlikely that the Orbán government will fully copy the Russian model and transform Hungary into an entirely autocratic regime”, because of its dependency on European subsidies. “However, experience suggests that the constraints imposed by the EU will not be enough to reverse the trend”, the authors add, going on to conclude that the “future re-democratisation of the country will depend largely on the resilience of the democratic forces in Hungary, first and foremost the parliamentary and ex-parliamentary opposition, but also civil society”. (OJ)
Sonja Priebus, Zsuzsanna Végh. Hungary after the General Elections – Down the Road of Autocratisation ? Südosteuropa Mitteilungen 03/2022. ISSN: 0340-174X. 112 pages. €15,00