Het had waar kunnen zijn
It could have been true. This is the title given by Flemish VRT journalist Tim Verheyden to his essay on disinformation and fake news, which circulates six times faster than well-documented factual information. Verheyden does not stop at identifying the sources and distribution media for this scourge, but also analyses its consequences for the people who fall victim to it, their circles and society itself, with its new dividing lines.
Although fake news may originate from many different sources, from the desire to see how gullible one’s contemporaries are to the motivation to earn easy money by fabricating stories involving personalities (Verheyden refers to a news report that took him to North Macedonia), the author stresses that disinformation is also a political weapon, used most notably by Russia during the American presidential elections of 2016. Four years later, the coronavirus pandemic mutated into a kind of “disinformation virus” sparking any number of conspiracy theories, before the Russian war on Ukraine took over.
“Three years of Donald Trump. Three years of alternative truths. In early 2020, reality fluctuated. Certain facts were no longer a matter of consensus. Society was already polarised, with its extremes played off against each other, when suddenly there was a pandemic of an unknown virus as well. While the number of cases increased exponentially, conspiracist thinking also grew exponentially. A fire was already alight and coronavirus fanned the flames”, Verheyden argues, adding that “in the past, conspiracy theories were more or less harmless to society: you really had to work hard to find them. Today, the new conspiracist mindset is undermining our democracy. The legitimacy of government, science and the media has been called into question. This is dangerous”.
Over the course of the essay, the author highlights the absurdity of some of these theories, but also stresses the close links between the extremes surfing waves of disinformation and conspiracy theories and recruiting the dissatisfied. Having discussed divisions between families, he notes that nobody is immune to disinformation and that it is becoming extremely difficult for all of us to distinguish between the truth and fabrication.
“The social networks have a large part to play in the distribution of disinformation, but the solution to this complex problem cannot be purely technical or legislative. It is a positive thing that the European Union is taking the lead in the fight against hate speech and the power of ‘big tech’, but laws on digital services and the digital markets will not stem the endless flow of disinformation and lies”, writes Verheyden, who believes that there is an urgent need to restore trust. He goes on to state that “creating trust is not easy. It calls for a good deal of work, particularly once people have lost trust. So many people feel ignored and excluded. The only way for the government and press to restore this broken trust is to show disillusioned people that they are being listened to. Really listened to”. (Olivier Jehin)
Tim Verheyden. Het had kunnen waar zijn – Op zoek naar de impact van desinformatie en fake news (available in Dutch only). Pelckmans. ISBN: 978-9-4640-1609-3. 272 pages. €22,50
Quelle évolution pour le système monétaire international ?
In this article, published in the French Revue d’économie financière, Patrick Artus and Isabelle Gravet examine the prospects of a sea change in the international monetary system (IMS), which has been based on the dominance of the US dollar since the 1970s.
The authors point out that “the Eurozone and the emerging countries (with the exception of China and oil exporters) currently finance the United States” and that “this state of affairs is highly unfavourable to both regions, whose savings are lent to the United States instead of paying for their own investment and funding growth”. “It makes no sense for international capital flows to go to the richest country, the United States”, Artus and Gravet add.
Is there any credible alternative to the dollar? “The euro is penalised, while there is not a high enough number of Eurobonds, by the segmentation of the sovereign debt market, with many issuing states, with different ratings”, the authors observe, adding that the “Chinese RMB is penalised by controls on capital in China, by the fact that China has external surpluses and therefore no external debt, by concerns over political developments in China”. The conclusion they draw is that there seems to be “no credible substitute to the dollar as dominant reserve currency at the moment”. However, the two economists take the view that the “external financing of the United States will (…) become more difficult, probably leading to a depreciation of the dollar, with a steep climb in US external debt, the determination of Europe to hold onto its savings to reinvest (for instance, the Recovery Plan of the European Union), with the determination of the emerging countries to limit capital outflows, with the logic that calls for capital flows to move from wealthy countries to poor ones”. Artus and Gravet also believe that the “IMS will continue to become more ‘private’, with an increased role for flows of capital in the form of shares and, therefore, the attractiveness of businesses, compared to flows of capital in the form of government debt”.
In another article on currency reserves, Camille Macaire, Alain Naef and Pierre-François Weber stress that the freezing of the assets of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, in response to the invasion of Ukraine, is a sanction with no comparable precedent, on the grounds of its scale and the size of the sanctioned Central Bank. “Russia saw almost 64% of its reserves frozen overnight. The assets that were not frozen are reserves held in China (14% of the total), gold (held in Moscow, 22% of the total) and special drawing rights (SDRs) of the IMF (International Monetary Fund, 4% of the total). But in actual fact, the last two of these categories are unusable. Russia can no longer access the London and Paris gold markets, which cover 84% of the gold market trade. Without access to liquidity, these assets cannot be mobilised. As for the SDRs, these have to be exchanged for currency, which requires them to be traded with another central bank willing to do so (…). Effectively, therefore, the sanctions have blocked almost 86% of Russian reserves”, conclude the authors, who all work for the Banque de France.
The authors contend that there are only two situations that can ensure the stability of the international monetary system: a dominant currency or the coexistence of several reserve currencies. They consider that “for want of a genuine alternative, a radical diversification to the detriment of the USD (US dollar) (and of the euro) with a replacement for a new dominant currency is not likely in the medium or long terms”. They go on to argue that the “central hypothesis is one of a migration to a more multi-polar system, a movement that is already underway, but which needs to speed up in the wake of the sanctions against Russia”.
“The gradual divergence of monetary zones into regional hubs could, moreover, be supported by another breakaway, this time technological in nature: the development of central bank digital currencies (CBDC). By reforming the financial infrastructures, this innovation could challenge the status quo and deliver opportunities for countries already committed to this path. Certainly, the effectiveness of the CBDC networks will depend partly on the capacity of the various national networks to be connected to each other and to allow international transactions (principle of interoperability of the networks)”, the authors explain. They go on to point out that “CBDC initiatives have increased in number in recent years. In 2020, the Bahamas launched the Sand Dollar. However, the currency is still too small to have any influence on the IMS. The Central Bank of Nigeria launched the eNaria in October 2021, but use of this remains limited. China has also developed a CBDC. The country had an operational CBDC, launched and tested by means of pilot programmes, by the end of 2019. In October 2021, the e-CNY had more than 260 million users. It is the greatest CBDC experiment to date. These developments in the field of CBDCs could also fragment the IMS”. (OJ)
Patrick Artus, Isabelle Gravet. Quelle évolution pour le système monétaire international? (Available in French only) Revue d’économie financière. No.145, Q1 2022. ISBN: 978-2-3764-7063-2. 288 pages. €32,00
L’accès aux droits de la personne et de la famille en Europe
This collective work looks at questions of international family law born of mobility, from the point of view of access to rights. The contributions it contains discuss matters related to the status of children, relationships between parents and children and relationships between couples.
Maria Caterina Baruffi (University of Bergamo) examines the decision of the Italian Supreme Court of 8 May 2019, which concludes that the prohibition on surrogate motherhood is a principle of public order aiming to protect the fundamental values, such as the human dignity of the surrogate mother. She relates that in an opinion published in April 2019 by request of the French Cour de cassation, the European Court of Human Rights recognised the discretionary power of each state to set the terms under which it guarantees the recognition of the parent-child relationship. The result is a wide variety of situations against the backdrop of a right that is still unsettled. The French Cour de cassation, for instance, agreed to include in the French civil registry parentage established by a birth certificate issued by a different country. On 18 December 2019, it even agreed to extend this recognition to a same-sex male couple. However, the French law on bioethics, adopted on 2 August 2021, is more restrictive. It provides that the birth certificate of a child born from surrogacy abroad may be transcribed only to establish the parental relationship with the biological parent. In the absence of any harmonisation of European law on the matter, Baruffi describes the British approach aiming to establish recognition on a bilateral basis as interesting.
Cinzia Peraro (University of Bergamo) devotes an article to Italy’s recognition of a child under the kafala sponsorship system, in accordance with a judgment of the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice, which found that a minor hosted in this framework is not a direct descendant, but is granted the status of other family member, in the framework of the 2004 directive on the freedom of movement. This Islamic institution is also recognised under the sponsorship rules in force in Belgium and France.
Carmen Ruiz Sutil (University of Granada) analyses advances in European law on the protection of women who have been the victim of domestic violence, with particular focus on the fate of foreign women who are third-country nationals and whose migration situation is precarious. “As things stand, the question of the right of a victim of misogynist violence in an irregular situation to remain does not meet any of the special categories set in place by the European Union for third-country nationals wishing to reside and work in another member state, as is the case for highly qualified workers or researchers”, the author notes, adding that “the lack of resident status at European level for victims of sex-based violence is not an anodyne question, in that it could serve as a harmonisation instrument of their overall complexion, whilst making it possible to move forward gradually to a level of equality with the protection mechanism set in place for nationals, and thus contribute to successful integration in the host country”. The author considers that “we have missed our chance to implement the Istanbul Convention in the framework of the review of the Brussels IIa regulation”, which led to EU Regulation 2019/1111 of 25 June 2019 and which contains just three references, all of them vague or indirect, to violence against women.
The book also deals with maintenance payments and their cross-border recovery as well as matrimonial regimes and laws on inheritance. It concludes with a presentation by the European Platform for Access to Personal and Family Rights (http://www.epapfr.com ), which aims to coordinate resources allowing people to get answers to family law questions of particular interest to people in situations of mobility. (OJ)
Patrick Wautelet and Cécile Corso (edited by). L’accès aux droits de la personne et de la famille en Europe (available in French only). Bruylant. ISBN: 978-2-8027-7128-9. 336 pages. €75,00