Growth, jobs and more

For me personally, the most enjoyable moment in that whole “fake news” commotion has been the re-discovery of the concept called truth by the progressives. Finally the pudding of post-modernism relativism was made available for eating. And it did not taste well. However, fake news and related phenomena, such as echo chambers and social bots, are a matter of concern for the entire political spectrum. Politicians and media feel challenged or even threatened by it. Some are even suggesting that in order to save democracy we need to regulate social media just like the printed press. The issue boils down to the balance between the right of free speech and the danger of false information. There is a growing tendency to make the danger look bigger and the issue of freedom of speech smaller in order to achieve balance and thereby justify more governmental control of the social media at the expense of freedom of speech. The advocates of tighter regulation of social media base their argume...

One of the promises of the internet has been that it will bring about better democracy ( here and here , for example). Even before the web was invented, Vannevar Bush, the creator of the hypertext concept and the Memex machine expected science and information will lead to a better society ( source ). Since 1990s, when those ideas started to materialize, everybody saw that the internet is vastly increasing the access to information and the ease of connecting people. The conventional wisdom has been that better informed citizens would be making better political decisions and that the more connected people will also be forging a more tightly connected society. This would both lead to e- (for electronic) or i- (for internet) democracy. Peak eDemocracy In retrospect, it would appear that the peak eDemocracy optimism was reached in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama as the president of the United States. His was one of the first campaigns where the internet played a major, some wo...

At risk of  non-compliance  with   Stability and Growth Pact, running a  budget deficit  during an expansion cycle, unable to fix public healthcare, unable to do a pension reform, unable to address the public sector’s trade union requirements, but  growing at 2.2%  … the  Government of Slovenia is celebrating the end of the great depression  that lasted from 2009-2015 by introducing a new holiday – January 2nd. January 2nd is not actually new. Most regimes in the former Eastern Block introduced two work-free days for New Year so as to replace Christmas which was banned. Similarly they introduced two work free days for May 1st – for a good measure of social justice after cancelling Easter. May 2nd still is a holiday in Slovenia but January 2nd was cancelled at the peak of the crisis in 2012. It is now being re-introduced so that the working people of Slovenia “could have a proper rests after the exhausting New Year’s celebrations”. Twitosphere...

  Trump won. Surprising for some, shocking for others, even apocalyptic. Nevertheless, European leaders send congratulation letters. They quite interesting at   what they say . And even more interesting at   what they don’t say . French President  Hollande  congratulated Trump, because that is a decent thing to do and “ natural between two democratic heads of state ” and pointed to the common foundations of the two countries “ democracy, freedom and respect for the individual. “ German Chancellor  Merkel  was more specific: “Germany and America are bound together by values: democracy, freedom, respect of law and respect of people regardless of their origin, the color of their skin, their religion, gender, sexual orientation or their political beliefs. On the basis of these values I am offering to work closely with the future President of the United States, Donald Trump”. The European institutions did – as usual – a compromise between the French and the...

  There are few good news coming from Brussels these days. The pundits are still wondering if Brexit will happen, hoping it would not and wondering at the same time how hard it will be. CETA negotiations are an embarrassment for the EU. They showed that not only one single country but one region in a small member state can block a trade agreement. To make matters worse, common market and trade policy used to be a least contested and best functioning EU policy area. Agreement on migration policy is non-existent. The Euro crisis persists. Turkey is cooling in its EU membership ambitions. In all this doom and gloom it was so refreshing to see that the  Union remains attractive at least to some . Recently I took part in an event in Belgrade, Serbia, that gathered the government officials and civil society deliberating how to speed up the accession negotiations and how to better prepare Serbia for it. Most striking was the enthusiasm of young people – students who were showing shor...

The key problem of Europe is ontological. We are not sure what the European Union actually is. Is it a free trade area, a giant NGO based in Brussels and doing good for Europe and the World, or perhaps a country in the making? The compromise answer, popular in Brussels, is that  Europe is a project . The project is something that is not static, which is being developed, and has not yet reached its final form. Brussels vs. Bratislava As long as Europe is a project, it is possible to talk about the future of Europe. As long as Europe is a project, it can be illustrated as a bicycle – standing upright until it moves forward. Euro crisis, migrant crisis and Brexit have slowed down this bicycle or even reversed its direction. One cannot drive a bicycle backwards. This is in fact the  problem to be addressed by the leaders of the EU Member States this week in Bratislava . How to get the bicycle going again. They will, as many times before, debate the future of Europe, more precisely...

  Indeed, huge majority of Muslims are not terrorists. But majority of perpetrators of terrorist acts in Europe since 2001 are Muslims. That fifteen million European Muslims generate more terrorist – including the thousands that travel to join ISIS – than half a billion of Europeans shows that their   integration in Europe, especially in France, is failing .   What can’t Europe do? Campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq did achieve little but regrouping of radical Islamists into a different organization. Bombing the Middle East to stone age will not achieve much either.  We should stop the migration flows and improve the border controls.  This would make sense at least until we learn how to better integrate Muslims into our societies. But what about all those who  already are in Europe?  Again, I do not believe much can be achieved by violence. Fencing off Muslim ghettos or sending young jobless people to labor camps is unjust, inhumane and stupid. Policing...