An Italian Alenia C-27J Spartan transport aircraft lands at Zeltweg Airfield, Austria, June 2011 (Martin Wippel)

Some 170 Fijian troops will replace Austria’s United Nations peacekeepers in the Golan Heights that separate Israel from Syria later this month.

Austria initially reconsidered its deployment to the Golan last month when the European Union failed to extend its arms embargo on Syria. France and the United Kingdom were among member states calling for less stringent sanctions to enable them to provide weapons to rebels battling the regime of President Bashar Assad there. The Alpine country’s foreign minister Michael Spindelegger expressed concern that it would not longer be seen as a “neutral party” on the Israeli-Syrian frontier as a consequence of the decision.

Last week, two Austrian troops were wounded when Syrian opposition fighters captured a border post before they were driven out by government forces.

Austria’s soldiers comprised the bulk of the international monitoring mission in the Golan buffer zone that has been deployed since 1974. It also has peacekeepers in Bosnia, Lebanon and Kosovo.

Russia, seen as an ally of Assad’s, had offered to replace Austria in the Golan Heights. The United Nations turned down the offer because the agreement with Israel and Syria precludes permanent members of the Security Council from taking part.

Since the beginning of the uprising in Syria, Israel has at least twice carried out airstrikes into the country to prevent advanced weaponry from reaching Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that supports the regime in Damascus and is also backed by its ally Iran.

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi arrives for a European Council meeting in Brussels, June 24, 2011 (The Council of the European Union)

Italy’s conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi suggested on Tuesday that the government shouldn’t be afraid to defy the European Union’s budget rules because other member states won’t force it to leave the bloc.

Speaking in Pontida, the former premier said Italy’s economy was suffering as a result of austerity policies. He urged national leaders to go to Brussels and say, “From now on, you can forget about the fiscal pact and the deficit limit of 3 percent of GDP.” He reminded listeners that Italy pays €8 billion more into the bloc’s budget every year than it takes out. “Who would throw us out?”

Italy has been the biggest net contributor to the European Union’s budget since 2011.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Enrico Letta, a social democrat whose coalition government includes Berlusconi’s Il Popolo della Libertà, had assured European Commission president José Manuel Barroso that the southern European country would meet its fiscal targets this year.

“Italy wants to keep its promise,” he said. “That means not racking up debt but making economic, social and fiscal policy choices while parsimoniously managing public resources.” He announced additional savings as well as €3 billion in infrastructure investments that are supposed to create up to thirty thousand construction jobs this year. Letta also seeks to cut red tape to make it easier to do business in Italy.

Further liberalization is needed if Italy’s economy, which contracted 2.4 percent through last year when unemployment rose to over 11 percent, is to recover from its debt crisis. Former prime minister Mario Monti proposed to open up protected professions and liberalize the labor market altogether but couldn’t get a coalition of the same parties that now support Letta to embrace his plans wholeheartedly. It were Letta’s own leftists who watered down labor market reforms that would have made it easier for firms to hire and fire workers.

Average hourly labor costs in Italy are close to the eurozone average but have continued to rise during the crisis, unlike was the case in Greece, Ireland and Portugal, countries that needed European financial support to avert bankruptcy. Italian workers also tend to be less productive than their counterparts north of the Alps.

Berlusconi has conditioned his party’s support for Letta’s government on the repeal of an unpopular housing tax that would blow an €8 billion hole in this year’s budget. Economy minister Fabrizio Saccomanni told parliament last week, however, that the country couldn’t afford the tax repeal just yet.

That announcement, following Berlusconi’s party’s disappointing performance in local elections last month, may explain why he is ramping up the Euroskeptic rhetoric once again. It served him well in the last national election when he increased his support in the polls from a 15 percent low in December to almost 30 percent in February.

While the septuagenarian former prime minister and media tycoon appeared to have emerged the winner from months of coalition talks that saw Letta’s Partito Democrático split between left wing hardliners and socially liberal moderates like himself, it didn’t do as well in May’s elections as he might have expected. Instead, Letta’s members won pluralities in most of Italy’s major cities at the expense of the far left.

Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s Front nationale, addresses supporters in Paris, May 1, 2012 (Blandine LC)

“Far right” or “extreme right wing” parties have emerged across Europe in recent years, if with varying levels of electoral success, demonstrating that they cannot be termed as constituting a pan-European movement. But they do have characteristics in common. Chief among them, from the perspective of European politics as a whole, is that they’re driving mainstream right wing parties to the fringe.

In several countries, including Britain, Ireland and Spain, the far right has repeatedly failed to garner a considerable share of the votes whereas in France, the Front nationale‘s Marine Le Pen got almost 18 percent support in the first round of last year’s presidential election, consolidating the nationalist party’s position as the “third force” in French politics.

The rise of far right movements is closely linked to mass immigration into Europe, especially from developing countries that used to be European colonies and former communist states in Eastern Europe. The inclusion of some of the latter in the European Union has brought about a loss of national sovereignty in the traditional Westphalian sense, moreover, and has also served to foster a malaise among populations whose sense of national identity is in a state of flux. Right wing parties tend to take advantage of this social identity cleavage within European communities, coupling it with an alarm over high immigration.

The ideological core of these movements is the concept of the sovereign nation state. Their narrow definition of who and what constitutes the nation is of key importance to understanding their motivations. In their view, the nation is confined to those within the territory who share the same culture and ethnicity. It is through this lens that far right parties frame their political positions to their supporters, especially their Euroskepticism and opposition to immigration, and it allows them to draw on a disenfranchised element of society that is susceptible to simple explanations for complex problems.

Their alternative is conveyed to voters in uncomplicated terms. In juxtaposing immigrants against the “nation”, far right parties present themselves as defending the latter against an “other” while avoiding the stigmatization of being overt racist. Both the Flemish Interest in Belgium and Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands couch their exclusionary politics in terms of culture and religion instead of race—which would be far less popular.

In exploiting the issue of immigration, in contrast to not emphasizing other, less divisive elements of their manifestos, far right parties not only increase their voting base but also drive the entire political spectrum to the right, thus consolidating a greater proportion of the vote than they might otherwise be able to garner.

For example, the United Kingdom Independence Party’s Euroskeptic and anti-immigration positions, popular on the British right, force the ruling Conservatives to adopt or at least echo these positions or risk losing voters in the next election.

The political fallout from the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London last month could also serve the interests of UKIP in much the same way as Mohamed Merah’s killing spree in Toulouse last year proved of political benefit to France’s Front nationale. The party was able to highlight what it considers an Islamic challenge to France’s culture and secular traditions and forced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservatives to raise their own anti-immigration rhetoric in order to lure right wing voters during the second round of the presidential election for which Le Pen had failed to qualify.

Far right parties utilize such events for their own political efficacy and operationalize the issue of immigration by coloring their social policies with strong nationalistic hues. It is from this basis that we can best understand their inherent opposition to immigration and the very rational way they utilize actions of political terrorism which are viewed as a threat to the culture and society to which they belong, as a means to diffuse their policies within the mainstream political spectrum.

Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, campaigns for reelection, April 15, 2012 (BackBoris2012/I-Images/Andrew Parsons)

Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, distanced himself from his own Conservative Party leader on Sunday when he questioned the wisdom of arming Syria’s rebels.

While Prime Minister David Cameron has long called for increasing Western support of “moderate” opposition forces in Syria, Johnson, who might rival Cameron for the party leadership ahead of the next election, argued in The Telegraph newspaper that they cannot be kept separate from religious extremists who are fighting on the same side. “How are we meant to furnish machine guns and antitank weapons to one set of opposition forces, without them ending up in the hands of men like the Al Qaeda affiliated thugs?” he wondered.

The answer is that we have no means of preventing such a disaster, any more than we can control what kind of “government” the rebels—if they were successful—would form in Damascus.

The most effective elements in the armed opposition movement do appear to be radical Islamists whose aim, according to Johnson, is not freedom, rather “a terrifying Islamic state in which they would have the whip hand.”

Fearing such an outcome in a conflict that has divided world powers for more than two years, Western countries have limited themselves to providing “nonlethal” aid to the opposition, including communications and sanitation equipment as well as British body armor, while allied Arab Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, did supply weapons. China and Russia have opposed such intervention.

The United States announced last week that they, too, would start sending weapons into Syria, supposedly following conclusive evidence of chemical weapons use in the conflict although The Washington Post revealed that the decision to arm opposition forces was actually made weeks in advance.

Late last month, France and the United Kingdom prevented the European Union from extending its weapons embargo on Syria, enabling them to send whatever equipment they want to the rebels—while chastising Russia for doing the same in support of the other side.

British and French officials insist that the aim is not to join the war effort on the rebels’ side but only to put their capabilities on par with those of the loyalist forces. Leaders have also demanded that President Bashar Assad step down, though, to make way for a democratic transition.

Whatever the exact goal of providing weapons, Johnson sees no good way out of the crisis. “Surely to goodness it is time to recognize that no one can win this conflict because it has become at least partly a religious conflict, between Sunni and Shia.”

No one can win that conflict because it is almost beyond reason. It is an argument about the protocol that surrounded the succession of the Prophet Muhammad—in the seventh century AD! One side or the other might technically “win,” and impose a government over the whole country. But unless that government has the approval of both Sunnis and Shias, we are doomed to sectarian violence and reprisals forever.

Johnson has also sounded more Euroskeptic than the prime minister, suggesting that leaving the European Union would not be as “cataclysmic” for British jobs as supporters of membership claim although he does not advocate such an exit.

Cameron is under pressure from Euroskeptic lawmakers to call a referendum on Britain’s membership of the body before, instead of after, the next general election, scheduled for 2015.

Czech prime minister Petr Nečas during a meeting in Prague, May 17 (Saeimas Kanceleja/Ernests Dinka)

The Czech Republic’s ruling conservatives tried to find a replacement for Petr Nečas on Monday who resigned as premier a day earlier. They hope to continue their right wing coalition although Nečas told reporters the same day that President Miloš Zeman would rather call early elections.

Nečas quit after prosecutors charged his chief of staff with bribery and illegally ordering military intelligence agents to conduct surveillance operations. She and seven more officials were arrested on Thursday in connection with graft scandals.

While Nečas denied personal involvement, the revelations embarrassed his own party as well as its liberal coalition partners who had staked their credibility on fighting corruption in a country that has had its fair share of political and business scandals since the collapse of communism.

The opposition Social Democrats, who are far ahead in opinion polls, had threatened Nečas to call a confidence vote in parliament and are likely to demand early elections. Nečas’ conservatives by contrast, who got over 20 percent of the votes in the last election but are hovering between 10 and 15 percent support in recent surveys, would rather serve out the government’s mandate.

For that, they need the leftist president’s support for he is the only one who can appoint a replacement premier. However, it takes twenty more votes than a regular majority to dissolve parliament and trigger elections which would require the support of at least one coalition party. Either Zeman or one of the ruling parties will have to acquiesce.

If the former does, the current industry and trade minister Martin Kuba is the most likely candidate to succeed Nečas, according to Czech media. “I’m ready to take this responsibility,” he told reporters on Sunday.

Justice minister Jiří Pospíšil, another potential candidate, wouldn’t tell Lidové noviny newspaper on Monday whether he intended to stand for the prime ministership but did insist, “We would like to complete the program of the government.”

Hamburg, Germany, March 21, 2010 (Jürgen Stemper)

Germany’s economy is considered the engine of growth in a Europe recovering from sovereign debt crises but a special report in The Economist this week reminds readers that it took hard work for the country to get where it is today—and that there’s more to be done.

The British newspaper points out that in spite of lower growth figures than in Britain and the United States, Germany has managed “to avoid a surge of layoffs after the financial crisis and has done far better than others at getting the young and the hard to employ into work.”

Part of the explanation lies in labor market reforms that were enacted by Germany’s former, social democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the early years of the last decade. His government eliminated payroll taxes on monthly earnings under €400, recently raised €50, encouraging part time work. A flat rate benefit also nudged jobless Germans back into work.

The reforms, while successful, ended Schröder’s political life and the conservative Angela Merkel succeeded him in 2005. Germany’s social democrats now complain that she reaped the benefits of reforms that cost them the chancellorship. There’s some truth to that statement although Germany’s economic success has more structural causes as well.

One, The Economist points out, is the system of Mitbestimmung that gives labor unions a seat on company boards. That has kept wages down. Between 2001 and 2010, German wages rose by an average of 1.1 percent per year, barely enough to keep up with inflation. Unit labor costs rose only 5 percent in the same period, compared with 21 percent in Italy, while Germany’s workers, unlike Italy’s, actually became more productive.

Most explanations of the German miracle also heap praise on the Mittelstand model and the system of vocational training. Medium sized firms, which form the backbone of the German economy, take on apprentices, mixing practical training with classroom tuition.

While that has kept unemployment low, it also creates, in effect, a closed shop. Germany’s federal government now recognizes foreign technical qualifications but only five of the states do. “Virtually the only route to many technical occupations is to join as a sixteen year old school leaver,” The Economist laments.

The European Commission last month also singled out Germany’s qualifications system for one of its lengthiest policy recommendations, noting that in many industries, including construction, “there is still a requirement to hold a master craftsman’s certificate or an equivalent qualification in order to run a business,” keeping entrepreneurs and professionals with otherwise comparable skills out and the costs for consumers, as a result of lessened competition, high.

Regulations for especially small businesses are similarly hostile to new entrants, The New York Times reported in February of last year.

Though Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, often harangues countries like Spain, Italy and Greece to become more competitive, the German economy features some of the same flaws that they do, including protected professions and zoning laws that favor existing businesses over new ones.

The OECD, a club of industrialized nations, estimates that Germany could add some 10 percent growth over the next decade if it removed such barriers to competition. “Surprisingly,” the American newspaper observed, “the untapped potential in Germany was almost as high as that in Italy and higher than that in Spain.”

It is high time Germany tapped that potential for The Economist knows that its economic success is not as robust as it might appear.

Merkel’s second government with the otherwise pro-business Free Democrats has enacted virtually no growth enhancing reforms in the last four years. Germany’s phasing out of nuclear energy and generous subsidization of renewables has produced energy bills for households that are 40 percent higher than is the average in the rest of the continent. “And it boasts the oldest population in Europe. Over the next ten years its workforce will shrink by some 6.5 million, the equivalent of all the workers in Bavaria.”

Germany must innovate if it is to preempt a crisis of demographics and in energy. It should make it easier to do business, remove burdensome regulations and subsidies that distort the market and relax certificate requirements that harken back to the medieval guild system—especially for migrant workers it needs in the coming years when the native population ages. In short, like the rest of Europe, Germany has to become more competitive.

President Barack Obama is briefed in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington DC, September 2, 2010 (White House/Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama’s decision to start arming Syria’s rebels has baffled many foreign policy realists who see little reason for the United States to involve themselves in the Middle Eastern country’s civil war. But his seemingly indecisive posture in the conflict may yet stem from a shrewd analysis of American interests in the region.

Daniel W. Drezner writes at Foreign Policy that last week’s announcement—which supposedly followed conclusive evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria although The Washington Post revealed on Saturday that the decision to arm opposition forces was made weeks in advance—”is simply the next iteration of the unspoken, brutally realpolitik policy toward Syria that’s been going on for the past two years,” the goal of which, he argues, “is to ensnare Iran and Hezbollah into a protracted, resource draining civil war, with as minimal costs as possible.”

This policy doesn’t require any course correction… so long as rebels are holding their own or winning. A faltering Assad simply forces Iran et al. into doubling down and committing even more resources. A faltering rebel movement, on the other hand, does require some external support, lest the Iranians actually win the conflict.

Syria’s Bashar Assad is Iran’s only Arab ally and provides it with access to the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon which is, in turn, an Iranian ally against Israel. Britain’s The Independent newspaper reported on Sunday that Iran was even planning to deploy several thousands of its troops to the country to support Assad’s. Hezbollah fighters also recently joined his army and helped drive rebels out of Qusayr last month, a city on the road from the capital Damascus to Homs, another hotbed of rebel activity.

The opposition, on the other hand, is backed by Sunni powers in the Persian Gulf who regard Iran as their nemesis. Unlike Western countries, which fear (or feared) galvanizing an Islamist insurgency in Syria, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have send weapons into the country, sustaining the rebellion against Assad. They are motivated by not only strategic but sectarian imperatives. The uprising is composed of mostly Sunni Muslims who are Syria’s majority population whereas religious minorities, including Assad’s Alawite tribe, continue to support the regime, if reluctantly, for fear of retribution under a majoritarian successor government.

Such an outcome is probably not desired in Washington DC. Indeed, it doesn’t seem that the Obama Administration envisages a particular outcome in Syria at all. But by giving the rebels a shot in the arm—the “small arms” the United States are expected to send will be of but some help against Assad’s professional army—it does keep Hezbollah and Iran occupied a little while longer, forcing them to commit more resources to the war and preventing them from causing mischief elsewhere.

A French transport aircraft flies over French Polynesia, January 10 (EMA/Ministère de la Défense)

The United Nations last month added French Polynesia again to its list of territories it insists are colonized. The organization urges France to get the Pacific islands on the path to self-determination. But they don’t want to.

Less than two weeks before French Polynesia was reinscribed to the United Nations’ list of “non-self-governing territories,” its inhabitants voted out longtime president Oscar Temaru, who wants the islands to ultimately become independent, and replaced him with Gaston Flosse, a conservative who advocates no change in the territory’s relations with France.

French Polynesians’ wariness of independence is mirrored across the territories that the United Nations still considers colonies.

Earlier this year, the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the United Kingdom. Similarly, the citizens of tiny Tokelau have voted against independence from New Zealand twice in recent years. The leaders of American Samoa have repeatedly asked to be removed from the United Nations’ list.

The only Pacific territory whose ties with the fatherland are troublesome is New Caledonia, a French colony since 1853. When it was due to vote on independence in a referendum in 1998, local leaders postponed the vote fifteen to twenty years. Many of the French settlers there have no desire for independence but some 40 percent of the population does. That could yet prove problematic but it seems that for now, both camps are comfortable putting off the issue.

Whatever happens on New Caledonia, the French are right to maintain that self-determination “cannot be exercised against the will of the concerned populations.” That would defeat the point. If a people vote to remain a “colony,” they aren’t colonized at all, rather willful subjects of a nation, even if the rest of that nation is half a world away.

If, instead, they vote to become independent, a country like France will surely honor that vote and let them go their way. The colonial period is over. It’s about time the United Nations recognize that as well.

President Barack Obama meets with senior advisors in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, December 30, 2012 (White House/Pete Souza)

The Obama Administration announced this week that it would begin arming Syrian rebels after it found that chemical weapons had been deployed in the Middle Eastern country’s civil war.

But The Washington Post revealed on Saturday that the decision to send weapons into Syria was made weeks in advance “and that the chemical weapons finding provided fresh justification to act.”

As loyalist forces, bolstered by Hezbollah militiamen from neighboring Lebanon, began to turn the civil war in President Bashar Assad’s favor, the president “ordered officials in late April to begin planning what weaponry to send and how to deliver it,” the newspaper reported.

That decision effectively ended the lengthy disagreement among those in the White House—primarily Obama’s political advisors—who argued that providing arms would be a slippery slope to greater involvement, military leaders who said it would be too risky and expensive and State Department officials who insisted that Syria and the region would collapse in chaos if action were not taken.

The administration has deflected questions about what equipment it intends to provide. Western countries have for months provided exclusively “nonlethal” aid, including communications and sanitation equipment as well as British body armor, while allied Arab Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have given weapons to Syria’s anti-government fighters.

Most of the arms the Sunni monarchies, which seek to hasten Assad’s demise because he is the only Arab ally of their regional nemesis Iran, provided ended up in the hands of religious extremists the West abhors. Indeed, the deadliest fighters in the Syrian opposition movement appear to be the more radical ones, including those affiliated with Al Qaeda, the organization that carried out terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001.

Russia, which resists Western attempts to influence the outcome of the conflict in Syria, has repeatedly cautioned other countries against supporting the insurgency there. President Vladimir Putin told RT television in an interview that was broadcast last September: “Today, some want to use militants from Al Qaeda or some other organizations with equally radical views to achieve their goals in Syria.” He compared the situation to the United States backing mujahideen rebels during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s and warned that propping up Muslim extremists in Syria will similarly backfire.

Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov expressed alarm on Saturday when the United States announced that they would deploy F-16 fighter jets and Patriot missile defense systems in Jordan, a neighbor of Syria. “You don’t have to be a great expert to understand that this will violate international law,” he said. Russia fears that the weapons might be used to try to implement a no-fly zone over Syria as Western powers did over Libya in 2011. Russia was critical of that intervention as well.

Czech prime minister Petr Nečas answers questions from reporters ahead of a European Council meeting in Brussels, November 22, 2012 (The Council of the European Union)

The future of Czech prime minister Petr Nečas’ administration hinged on the support of junior coalition partners as of Saturday who said that they were considering whether to stay in government with him after a close aid to Nečas was detained over corruption charges.

A court in the eastern city of Ostrava ordered the detention of Jana Nagyová, who has been in charge of Nečas’ office for years. Prosecutors allege that she bribed politicians and illegally ordered military intelligence agents to conduct surveillance operations. Seven more officials were arrested on Thursday in connection with graft scandals.

Nečas’ own liberal conservatives do not have a majority in parliament. If either of his partners pulls out of the coalition, the government could fall, possibly triggering new elections or forcing President Miloš Zeman to appoint another premier.

TOP 09, a libertarian party led by foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg, who was narrowly defeated by the leftist Zeman in January’s presidential election, and the Liberal Democrats command fifty seats between them in the lower house of parliament. Both have staked their credibility on fighting corruption in a country that has had its fair share of political and business scandals.

Left wing opposition parties plan to call a confidence vote in parliament. Nečas, whose popularity has suffered as a result of austerity measures that were introduced to keep the Czech Republic’s deficit in line with European fiscal law, dismissed allegations of wrongdoing in a speech to lawmakers on Friday. If any of the ruling parties defect, however, it could be the end for his political career.

It could also be the end for the Central European country’s fiscal consolidation efforts. The opposition Social Democrats, who have held a wide lead in opinion polls for months, vow to repeal spending cuts.