Mars Returns

01/29/23 • 39 min

Putin's barbarism is somehow felt by us all even though it can be hard to get to grips with the magnitude of what's at stake. One reason may be what writer and academic Tom Nichols calls normalcy bias, an inherent resistance to accepting that large changes can upend our lives. Another may be what Lithuanian arts curator Raimundas Malasauskas calls unlearned lessons from history about Russia's imperialist and colonialist drives. Political scientist David Rowe is a Fulbright NATO Security Studies scholar and a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and he has been looking into why so much of Europe wasn't ready for Putin. David, who's on sabbatical from Kenyon College in the US, gives his personal views about how the EU needs to rethink the role of war and peace in building and maintaining liberal democracy. Among points he addresses in this podcast are the consequences for the Western allies of not spilling their own blood in Ukraine, and the resentment Ukrainians will surely feel if the door to the EU club isn't really open after all. David starts with a description of the philosophical roots — laid some two centuries ago — of the EU's approach to international politics. It's an approach that's helped much of Europe keep the peace over recent decades. But it may also have left Europe flat-footed in the face of abhorrent aggression. "The problem," says David, "is that peace seems so evidently good, that it is very easy to overlook the deep structures that give rise to it."
Poem 11/22 by Ariana Reines.
Video from Mars Returns in Kaunas.

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Previous Episode

Ethics After Qatargate

The European Parliament is reeling from corruption allegations involving the Gulf state of Qatar. Members' offices have been sealed. Raids have been carried out by Italian and Belgian authorities. And large sums of cash seized including sacks of banknotes from the father of one of the lawmakers at the centre of the scandal. That lawmaker, Eva Kaili, was with the Greek socialist Pasok party. She was a vice president of the European Parliament — and she'd been strongly promoting Qatar. Kaili has now been stripped of her title and is in custody. Of course it's far from the first corruption scandal in the EU. But in this case there's the promise of further lurid revelations of cash-fuelled influence peddling on a much bigger scale than previously thought. And now the race is on to apportion blame. Some lawmakers suggest malign foreign interference is mainly responsible. Others say non-governmental organisations and campaign groups should be in the crosshairs. Still others stress that there will always be bad apples and so there should be no need for collective guilt in a Parliament with 705 members. But such finger-pointing mostly amounts to denial and deflection. That's because the dumpster fire at the European Parliament may be largely of the EU's own making. Foreign governments still can meet lawmakers largely undetected, and there's still no central independent investigator and no system for anonymous whistle-blowers. It's what Transparency International calls a complete lack of independent ethics oversight. And while the EU has many gifted politicians and policymakers who are above reproach — still too many are low grade national party hacks and worse. One of the leading voices on making the E.U. more accountable and transparent is Alberto Alemanno. Alberto is Jean Monnet Professor in European Union Law at HEC Paris, and he sits on the board of several civil society organisations. He's also a good sport for taking a scooter through downtown Brussels, in the dark, on an icy evening, to come talk about, yes, "Qatargate".

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Next Episode

Corruption in the Family

Families can go wrong. And unless you've been under a rock these last weeks, you'll know that a number of members of the Socialist family at the European Parliament went very wrong. They allegedly took sack loads of Qatari cash on top of their already generous salaries and benefits in return, it seems, for trying to block their own Socialist colleagues from criticising Qatar's record on human rights. In this episode, Lara Wolters, a Socialist member, gives a first-hand account of being obstructed and misled by two of the prime suspects in the scandal. She also shares her feelings of vindication now that the truth is coming out. Yet Lara shows compassion for Eva Kaili, a young mother like herself, who has been implicated in the so-called Qatargate scandal and separated from her daughter. Also in this episode, a lawmaker from outside the Socialist family: co-president of the Left group Manon Aubry. Manon was convinced she saw the heavy hand of Qatar on lawmakers weeks before news about the scandal broke. So she blew the whistle on social media, where her video on the topic has racked up nearly 70,000 views. Manon, who has emerged as one of the firmest advocates for an EU ethics overhaul, reserves some of her most acid criticism for the conservative EPP group, which she says perpetuated a culture of opacity that has helped breed corruption.

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