Anti-Zionism is NOT Equivalent to Anti-Semitism

This post attempts to qualify the arguments of the previous post on Israel and the hopes that Arab Palestinians will actively engage in peaceful struggle for citizenship in a single state, encompassing the totality of the land currently included in Israel and the Israeli occupied territories.  Emphatically, I reject the notion of a two-state solution as a basis for peace in Palestine/Israel and as a realization of the aspirations of Arab Palestinians for sovereignty in favor of single, constitutionally secular, pluralist democracy, bringing together Israeli Jews, Arab Palestinians, and others as citizens and countrymen in a new collective national project.  My support of such a single state is grounded in my opposition to the project of Zionism.  In these terms, I have to definitively articulate my opposition to Zionism in terms that situate my views on the project of a sovereign, sectarian Jewish state in relation to past and present, more-or-less ignorant/prejudicial and more-or-less intellectual/rationalized anti-Semitic ideologies in order to firmly distinguish anti-Zionism from categorical oppositions to Jews and Judaism. 
1.  Zionism, in my understanding, is the conception that the survival of Judaism, as a religious and ethno-cultural tradition, relies on the capacity of the Jewish people to exist as a sovereign nation-state, with defined geographic boundaries, constitutionally exclusive citizenship to all Jews, and the capacity to wield force of arms in defense of the freedom of conscience of all Jews. 
The concept of Zionism established here most directly refers to the ideas of Jewish thinkers like Theodore Herzl (Der Judenstaat (1896). See, Herzl, The Jewish State (1988, New York: Dover Publications Inc., at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25282/25282-h/25282-h.htm).  Herzl's foundational articulation of the conception that the survival of Judaism required Jews to constitute an exclusive nation-state remains the clearest theoretic statement underlying the rise of Twentieth century Zionism, culminating in the post-Ottoman resettlement of Palestine by European Jewish migrants and the post-World War II United Nations' mandate for the establishment of a sectarian Jewish state in Palestine.  The pamphlet, moreover, constitutes an acerbic indictment of Nineteenth century European societies, liberal Jewish advocates of assimilation, and the failed promises of tolerance and freedom of conscience extended by the project of Enlightenment.  It is a dogmatically fatalistic assertion that Jews, framed as a single, geographically displaced, dispersed, and insoluble nation, permanently differentiated in relation to every transitory host nation with which it comes into contact, must infect every geographic context for Jewish immigration with Anti-Semitism and, thus, sow the seeds for new acts of discrimination and repression.  Herzl's argument, and the larger argument of contemporary Zionism, per se, is grounded on this conception that the Judaism constitutes a nationality rather than simply a religious faith. 
             Part of the novelty in this approach inheres to its capacity to mirror the reasoning of the most narrow-minded, Anti-Semitic, ethnocentric bigots in order to adamantly concede the insoluble character of the Jew within European society as the basis for, consequently, arguing that the survival of Judaism is entirely predicated on the separation of the Jewish nation from the eternally antagonistic nation-states/national societies of Europe (and, for that matter, from America).  Arising within the context of a century that took the pseudo-scientific nature of Anti-Semitic theorizations and the exposition/formalization of partisan arguments to unprecedented and dispicable extremes (e.g. eugenic conceptualizations on the genetic inferiority and/or criminal predispositions of the Jewish "race"), conceivable only at a stage in the evolution of European politics and the development of the nation-state as mass-political society, it is quite explicable that, within theory, Judaism could take on nationalist trappings and pursue its own self-defense by conceding the impossibility of Jewish assimilation into national societies thoroughly committed to seeing in Judaism incommensurable difference and imagining an existential threat.  On the other hand, it is absolutely imperative that we recognize that, dialectically speaking, Zionism is predicated and, in this sense, reliant on its diametrical opposite, in its clearest terms, Nazism - Zionism and Nazism are the opposite sides of the same coin and mutually constitutive discursive frameworks.  If Herzl's argument in Der Judenstaat was that the survival of Judaism relied on its absolute separation from European civilization, defined in inherent anti-Semitic terms, then Hitler's argument against Judaism, as the supposed fount of Marxist ideology, in Mein Kampf advances that the survival of European civilization, with the Germanic Aryan as its developmental apogy, is predicated on the elimination of the Jews.  To be clear, my contention here is not that Zionism, in some way, contains the seeds of the same sort of genocidal violence defended by the Nazis but that, theoretically speaking, Zionism takes radical anti-Semitism, and especially Nazism, as its generalized point of departure in defining Judaism as a unique and singular nation and contending that the survival of this nation ultimately demands a territorial Jewish state.  Judaism would never require its own state if the entire world it had known was not rabidly intent, in thought and practical mass political activity, on its destruction.
2.  Anti-Semitic theories and practices need to be understood on multiple different levels of complexity and theoretic assemblage to encompass basic conceptualizations on the "alien" character of Judaism relative to national ethno-cultural communities,  prejudicial reactions grounded in ideological religious narratives, and pseudo-scientific reflections on supposed genetic predispositions/tendencies.
The point here, critical in differentiating anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism, is to articulate the multiple forms and levels through which Jews and Judaism have been categorized in separation from non-Jews and non-Judaism.  It is, moreover, essential that such distinctions take on a categorical nature that renders Judaism and the Jew, per se, rather than a particular political project in some way associated with Judaism (i.e. Zionism), the source of the distinction and, perhaps, the incitement to antagonism.  That is to say, I am concerned here with characteristics applied universally against adherents of Judaism in order to definitively argue that there is nothing inherently anti-Semitic in anti-Zionism, except insofar as Zionism is attributed mistakenly as a universal attribute of Judaism and Jews.  Emphatically, as if the notion could be taken to be oxymoronic, Jewish anti-Zionist organizations can be found in the world! (See International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), at: http://www.ijan.org/).   
         Articulating specific threads of anti-Semitic thought and ideological groundings for prejudice against Jews and Judaism, religious sources in the Western traditions appear as an obvious starting point.  In this regard, Christian anti-Semitisms proceed from archaic foundations in the Gospel accounts, grounded in the narrative of Christ's Passion/crucifixion at the behest of the Judean Temple authorities (Sanhedrin).  In this respect, the interpretative legacy of the Christian Passion narrative, as a wellspring for Christian anti-Semitism, is thoroughly ambiguous.  Certain passages of the Pauline epistles, for example, sanction a broadly anti-Semitic reading on the crucifixion of Christ and subsequent persecutions by Jewish authorities of the early Judaic-Christian sect (e.g. First Thessalonians 2:13-16).  On the other hand, other passages of the Christian New Testament directly offer their testimonies to a Jewish audience in order to appeal to messianic predispositions otherwise through conformity with Mosaic law.  As such, emergent relations between mainline Judaism and Christianity, at least until official acquiescence in Christianity by Constantine and the Council of Nicea, reflect a broader debate over the nature of Mosaic law as a requisite over converted Gentile populations.  Clearly, religious arguments from Christian audiences against Judaism must acknowledge a broader history in which Judaism nurtured the emergent Christian faith, even insofar as Judaism suffered repression at Roman hands. 
         In the present circumstances in the geographical context of Palestine, the relationship between Judaism and Islam may be much more pertinent.  In this respect, however, the record is even more ambiguous!  At its roots within the Islamic tradition, this relationship is connected both to the divergent monotheistic practices of Jews and incipient Muslims and to the political alignments of Jewish tribal groupings in the immediate aftermath of Muhammad's flight (Hijra) from Mecca to the oasis of Yathrib (Medina) in 622.  Three Jewish tribes, the Banu Qaynuqa, the Banu Nadir, and the Banu Qurayza, made Yathrib their home.  Nearly half the population of the oasis may have embraced Judaism, against which local Arab tribes practiced divergent pagan religions.  Muhammad arrives in Yathrib at the invitation of local Arabs, seeking the charismatic preacher as an arbiter to bring peace among feuding tribes.  He initiates the Commonwealth (ummah) of Yathrib, a constitutional entity embracing all the tribal groups in the oasis and providing for the adjudication of disputes in accordance with divergent sectarian legal standards - Jews were to be held to account under Jewish Mosaic law, Muslims were to be held account under the emergent standards of Shar'iah (encompassing the Qur'an/direct pronouncements from God and legal and moral principles enunciated by Muhammad (e.g. the Hadith)).  The unity of Jews and Muslims under Muhammad's Commonwealth quickly dissipates, however.   In 624, apparently after a series of violent altercations between the Jewish Banu Qaynuqa and Muslim populations, Muhammad forcibly expels the tribe from Yathrib.  In 625, the Banu Nadir were expelled after an apparent failure of an assassination attempt on Muhammad.  Finally, in 627, the Banu Qurayza collaborated with the Quraysh of Mecca in an attempted siege of Yathrib.  Muhammad subjects the tribe to a trial by an impartial arbiter of Banu Qurayza's choosing.  Finding the tribe guilty of plotting against the Muslim defenders of Yathrib, the judge applied Jewish scriptural standards condemning all the males of the tribe to death for its actions in breaking their covenant with the Muslims. 
          There are multiple possible interpretations that can be applied to these concrete historical events.  Critically, differences in sectarian religious practices and beliefs between tribal Jewish groups and Muslims in Yathrib seem to assume secondary relevance in relation to the acute political imperatives, in turn, driven by economic forces - the Jewish tribes in Yathrib seem to have been strongly represented in agricultural production and commerce to the extent that changes in their external relations with the Quraysh would have impacted their livelihoods.  They possessed an obvious economic rationale for maintaining the peace with the politically and economically dominant tribal grouping in the Hijaz region, even as Muhammad, a Quraysh himself, struggled religiously to convert his pagan fellow-tribesmen to Islam and to secure Yathrib as a home for himself and for his incipient religious sect.  In any case, the Jews emerge, at Islam's formative stages, as innately materialistic, disconnected from the spriritual demands of God by blind obedience to their worldly necessities.  Such materialist imperatives motivate their betrayal of the covenant with Muhammad and the Muslims, which apparently promised secular egalitarianism and respect for religious differences. 
          The appearance of full sectarian equality and freedom of conscience in Seventh century Yathrib is key, however.  The experience of the Yathrib commonwealth constitutes a major formative moment in Islamic tolerance of religious difference, in a period at which the passionate embrace of Islam by its first adherents was at high ebb.  It represents the hope that Islam will embrace sectarian/spiritual difference even as Muslims proselytize in conformity with the dictates of God through the Qur'an.  Such tolerance has not always been a halmark of Islam.  Certainly, in its relationship with Judaism, the experiences of Islam's first century have reinforced distinctly anti-Jewish sentiments in the Arab world (to say "anti-Semitic" would, of course, constitute a bizarre contradiction - Arabs are Semites).  Such sentiments are mirrored in certain passages of the Qur'an and in Muhammad's moral and religious adjudicative principles recounted through the Hadith of Muhammad.  Perhaps contemporary Salafist understandings of this legacy most directly represent an underlying Muslim antagonism against Judaism.  On the other hand, tolerant strains in Islamic thought and political and cultural practice over centuries in the development of Islam (e.g. tolerance of Judaism during Islamic rule in the Iberian peninsula prior to the rise of the unified Catholic monarchy at the close of the Fifteenth century) problematize any definitive reading of the relationship between Islam and Judaism.  As such, the foundational stages of both Christianity and Islam resound in experiences both producing/reinforcing alternative sources of prejudice against Jews, otherwise unconnected to sectarian differences and, alternatively, counteracting prejudice in the name of community, traversing sectarian boundaries.       
            More pertinent to the secular anti-Semitic prejudices of Europeans, the conception of Jews as perpetually alien to the everyday lives and social experiences of Christian populations forms the foundations of pervasive unwillingness on the part of European cultures to accept Jews as countrymen and fellow citizens in modern society/the nation-state.  The construction of this alien character is rooted in such conceptions as the "wandering Jew"/le Juif errant, emerging from the late Classical period as a dispersed, disinherited exiled "race," the product of Roman repression through which settlement of lands in Palestine connected intimately to the Jewish spiritual consciousness is terminated and Jews are scattered across the known world.  The wandering Jew is rooted in sectarian Christian beliefs regarding God's retribution toward His "chosen" people for having turned away and embraced materialism, but such conceptions ultimately become signifiers disconnected from their initial referents as everyday political, cultural, and economic practices over at least a millenium embed Jewish populations in Europe into particular, marginal social roles.  By the close of the European Medieval period around the Fifteenth century, the enforced exclusion of Jews from rural, manorial feudal society and from urban guilds creates a defined set of portraits of European Jewry.  In the rural Eastern European and Russian "second serfdom," Jews appear in radically communalistic villages (shtetls) on marginal lands, subject to recurring waves of repression by Orthodox and Catholic Christian overlords.  In Central and Western Europe, emerging from feudal times into the rise of the absolutist monarchical state and the age of liberal-democratic revolution, Jews occupy urban economic niche roles in interregional commerce and finance, at the margins of respectability for Christian European society.  In these terms, the enforced marginalization of Jews reinforces and reinscribes the story of the wandering Jew in reference to the emergence of mercantile capitalism.  Hence, Marx's account of Judaism as the personification of the love of money in his account "On the Jewish Question (1844)" (an account I will return to in the forthcoming section of this post). 
            The critical point here is that European intellectual culture from the dawn of the Enlightenment well into the Nineteenth century does not adequately historicize European economic development in ways that could adequately situate the particular roles performed by Jews in distinct European social formations to articulate the sources of Jewish marginalization in co-evolution with the development of Christian ethical principles.  In these terms, European Jews were explicitly pigeon-holed into social roles that would earn them the moral contempt of their Christian neighbors, compel their separation into insular, homogeneous communities, and nurture a sensibility among Christian populations that Jews represented an incommensurable, alien "other," never capable of assimilation, still less worthy of trust or even basic amity.  If intellectuals fail to create the cultural conditions for Jewish integration from the political beginnings of the nation-state, then it stands to reason that within mass/popular culture, Jews were wholly inscribed with the sorts of prejudices initially crafted by religion and further bolstered by centuries of Jewish economic exclusion. 
               With these thoughts in mind, even in the French heart of the liberal-democratic revolution, the Dreyfus affair at the close of the Nineteenth century is wholly revealing of the degree to which Jews are viewed as outsiders in the democratic project of the nation-state in Europe.  As such, Herzl is quite sensible in arguing, in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, that the hopes of liberal Jewish accomodationists for inclusion/integration as citizens in the European nation-state are ill-founded.  Again, Zionism, in this regard, is a product of the failure of European Christians (and secularist democrats) to integrate Jews as citizens in a more robust, culturally inclusive sense.  The legacy of this failure remains evident in the tepid reactions of Frenchmen and women to the slaughter of Jewish French citizens in a Parisian kosher market by militant Salafists days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
            Against a background shaped by the realization of the Zionist vision through the state of Israel, the Western European states, who participated in the creation of the Jewish sectarian state through U.N. mandate, might have, thus, consoled themselves for the lingering impact of their failure to defend the Jews against the horror of the Holocaust by conceding the need for the creation of a Jewish state as a prerequisite for the survival of Judaism.  It would have been harder for Western Europeans to admit that their own anti-Semitic rejection of the Jews as co-equal partners to their own nation-state projects demanded something completely different - a full and robust reaffirmation of the revolutionary, secular liberal-democratic principles advanced by the Enlightenment to vigorously integrate their Jewish populations and affirm their own responsibility for constituting the conditions that made the Holocaust a possibility long before Nazism and fascism were realities in Europe.  Instead fascism and rabid anti-Semitism are alive and well across Europe, as the success of far-right parties like Front National in France, Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom in Hungary, and Golden Dawn in Greece makes clear. 
             Before advancing a reparative reassertion of Enlightenment secularism against both divergent strains of anti-Semitic thought and the derivative ideology of Zionism, some consideration must be given to America's principal contribution to the development of biological/racialist anti-Semitic conceptions.  If, historically speaking, European anti-Semitism is ultimately a product of the intersection of Christian sectarian anti-Jewish prejudices and their impacts on the economic and cultural marginalization of Jews, then American anti-Semitic prejudices, like so many other manifestations of  American prejudice, assume distinctly racialist forms, grounded in the pseudo-scientific, quasi-Darwinian conceptions of eugenic theory.  Eugenics, which originated in Britain through the writings of Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin who suggested the potential for artificial genotypic selection by means of human breeding practices, came into its own in a country whose obsession with racial hierarchy and the purity of Whiteness manifests itself in political/legal, economic, and cultural institutions from the earliest moments of Anglo-American history.  In the U.S., eugenic arguments advanced by educated, academic advocates of racialist genetic engineering, like Charles Davenport and John H. Kellogg, supported both racially-structured immigration restrictions and laws mandating forced sterilization of individuals with "inferior" genetic traits as a defense against the dilution of the White American gene pool.  American eugenics invariably developed a body of racialist anti-Semitism, isolating ranges of "genetically"-grounded Jewish traits as arguments for restriction of immigration by European Jewish populations into the U.S.  Emphatically, Davenport apparently directly associated particular predispositions toward criminal behavior with the genetic heritage of European Jews. 
            In an immigrant country otherwise founded on the basis of liberal-democratic revolution and the Constitutional extension of national citizenship, the historical development of American genetic-racialist anti-Semitism perhaps reflects an otherwise perverse sentimentality of White Americans of Western and Northern European descent for the fictive racial purity of long-separated European ancestral-home countries.  In any sense, the particular zeal with which American defenders of White racial purity against the pollution of Jewish racial contamination sought to exclude Jews clearly shaped the development of European anti-Semitism in ways that made the co-evolution and alliance between German eugenics and Aryan racialist German ultra-nationalism, culminating in the Nazi seizure of power, more likely and more virulent with respect to the articulation of racialist ideologies in association with anti-Jewish state policies.  Maybe German eugenicists allied with the early-Twentieth century German ultra-nationalist political right did not require the particular academic ammunition supplied by like-minded American anti-Semites to create the circumstances in which the forcible extermination of millions from a "genetically-criminal" "race" could arise as the culmination of eighty years of pseudo-scientific racial prejudice, but the legacy of American racial anti-Semitism remains an indictment against the "enlightened" character of American thinking for which we must take account, if only for its fundamental incompatibility with the liberal ideals of some of our political forefathers and their revolution.                        
3.  The project of the liberal Enlightenment, anchored, in part, on the principle of universal freedom of conscience, is fundamentally antagonistic toward both anti-Semitic conceptualizations of Judaism and the sectarian project of Zionism.  On the other hand, the contradiction of the liberal (political) state and civil society/practical individuality lays the groundwork for the Nineteenth century "Jewish question" that gives rise to both Zionism and Nazism as contradictory illiberal responses.  Against such responses, imperfect compromises between liberal humanism/pluralistic individualism (unity in the generalization of difference) and socialism (unity in imposed homogeneity) seek to articulate a practical humanism, respecting both divergent spiritualities and the imperatives of human (species) collectivity. 
Speaking as a Marxist, the Enlightenment castes an array of incommensurable philosophical (ontological) problems in approaching the social nature of human existence and the organization of social processes.  Succinctly, as a defender of the Enlightenment, I must confront the lingering methodological individualism latent within liberal thought and, following Althusser's anti-humanist critique, challenge the abstract, individualist foundations of the liberal conception of man (e.g. man in the "state of nature").  Man in Marxian theory, as I understand it, is a site of overdetermination, devoid of innate, "natural" characteristics transcending the particularities of the biological, chemical, physical, political, economic, and cultural processes combining to constitute each man and woman at a particular temporal moment and spatial geography.  In these terms, it is impossible to extract from the body of thought that emerges in the Enlightenment a set of timeless principles governing either the physical reality of the universe (e.g. Newtonian physics) or the relations between abstract human subjects unified by the imperatives of self-government (e.g. Locke's two treatises).  Moreover, the legacy of the Enlightenment relative to anti-Semitism is, in itself, unclear.  Assembling a broader summation of Enlightenment thinkers and Enlightenment thinking here would proceed beyond the limited ends of this brief account - all that I mean to do here is theorize the particular ways in which the Enlightenment produced (if unintentionally) both fascism/Nazism and Zionism despite nominally opposing both such illiberal ideological structures.  For my purposes, I need to articulate an argument defining the Enlightenment project, connecting it to fascism/Nazism and Zionism, and advancing why it is now necessary to extract from the Enlightenment the liberal seeds to a new project succeeding the fragile imperfections of Enlightenment thinking, liberal principles infused with Marxian-inspired globalist aspirations in a new practical humanist project.
          The Enlightenment, as I understand it, encompasses a broader explosion of intellectual activity over the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, with its roots in the Copernican revolution of astronomy and the subsequent spillover of speculative thinking and empirical research into physics, chemistry, and biology.  The evolving transformations of the natural sciences toward contemporary manifestations of these disciplines promoted, philosophically, a revolution in ontological and epistemological conceptualizations, creating the tradition today comprehended by the label "modernism."  Critically, the Enlightenment thinkers resituate man in relation to the universe, slowly rejecting Neo-Platonic and Christian cosmological ontologies in favor of comprehensive naturalism and, progressively, a god-less universe.  Moreover, they pursue such a reframing of man with a deepening faith in both introspective rationalism and empirical speculation/positivism as means by which man could unravel the objective truths of the universe.  Finally, the Enlightenment introduces a revolution of political thought, conforming to such a resituating of man in the universe, inviting unbridled inquiry into the nature of government, the rights and liberties of human agents, and relational ethics in social life, including civil government and market relations/economics.  The evolving body of Classical Western liberal thought, thus, has its birth in this period, culminating in the late Eighteenth century liberal-democratic revolutions of Anglo-America and France.     
             To some extent, it is simply impossible to disaggregate racial from sectarian/religious breeds of anti-Semitic thought and practice in ways that enable us to trace the genesis of modern formulations within certain streams of Enlightenment theory.  Over two hundred years of development have rendered each thoroughly intermeshed.  Generalizing again, however, the "Jewish question" in Europe at the dawn of the nation-state is, first, a religious/sectarian issue and, secondarily, in the wake of the liberal democratic revolutions, a question of citizenship and inclusive nationalism.  Emphatically, for Marx as for Hegel before him and for the excommunicated secularist Jew, Spinoza, from whom each drew a substantial influence, there is no racial (i.e. biological/genetic) question in association with Judaism.  And yet, the absolute exclusion of Jews from European civilization exists as a fundamental point of departure in social analysis and for inquiry into the question of assimilation.  The same observation can be adduced later in regard to Nietzsche, for whom the Jew, as member of a "race" is representative of a particular set of characteristics linked more decisively to socio-cultural development than to biology/genetics.  The European "Jewish question" emerging from the Enlightenment continuously fails to become a racial/biological/genetic question in a manifestly pre-Darwinian landscape of biological knowledge.  Even to the extent that Enlightenment biological theorists like Carolus Linnaeus were anxious to include humanity within the animal world rather than allow it to suspended precariously above Creation in accordance with Christian cosmology, the types of knowledges required to assemble robust racialist hierarchies against which Jews could be situated fail to arise until Darwinian evolutionary theory and modern genetic theorizations, both Lamarckian and Mendelian, lend to aspiring racialists the building blocks for scientifically-inspired prejudices.  As such, the point here is to inquire how and why the Jew is excluded from the politically liberatory promise of the Enlightenment to the exclusion of any fictive racialist hierarchies and genetic attributions. 
              In this respect, it is necessary to inquire into the particular ways in which Enlightenment political thinkers like Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau approached religion, sectarian differences, and Judaism, in particular, to determine how such differences promoted the exclusion of Jews, in practice, from the liberal nation-state, an absence that continues to the present day in Europe and America.  With regard to both Locke and Montesquieu, the liberal-individualist influence of Protestant thought leaves the clearest imprint.  For both, the certainty of Christianity as the predominant religious tradition operative within European polities resonates as the point of departure against which the "Jewish question" (or, for that matter, the "Muhammudan/Muslim question") concerns the tolerance of a faith that exists by virtue of the relative ignorance of its adherents in relation to the "true" religion.  For Locke, in particular, Christianity and scriptural texts rooted in the Gospel remain the foundations for all true ethics, and the prerogative/responsibility of all believers to engage personally in scriptural reading, interpretation, and ethical incorporation, in conformity with the individualist ethos of the Protestant Reformation, forms the true basis for all interpersonal relations, law, and civil government.  As such, Lockean toleration of religious diversity (or, for that matter, the tolerance of religious diversity for Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, or other prominent American Lockeans) constitutes a kind of charity accorded to minority religious traditions whose influence on the wellbeing of a polity is too miniscule to merit repression in the name of truth.  By contrast, for Locke, Roman Catholicism deserves none of the same threshold of tolerance as Judaism or Islam because Catholicism poses a palpable threat to the authority exercised by Anglican ecclesiastical officials and by the monarchy, standing as the head of the church in confrontation with the external authority of the Papacy. 
          In L'esprit des lois, alternatively, Montesquieu's larger concern resides in the rationality of preponderant faiths and the influence of toleration as a means for maintaining the peace and civil harmony within a polity, characterized by at least some margin of sectarian heterogeneity.  That is to say, Montesquieu's concern for toleration appeals more strongly to the relational necessity of good will among citizens of divergent faiths than toward a practical and innocuous indifference of inconsequential minorities.  For neither Montesquieu nor Locke is there a fundamental need to engage with sectarian differences in connecting religion to civil governance, which, ultimately, respects the self-interests of all members within the polity regardless of their individual sectarian affiliations.  As such, for Locke and Montesquieu, any binding tie between religious faith and civil governance remains divorced from the practical need for the maintenance of the peace and the protection of each individual in their persons and their property, the overriding foci of Classical liberal discourse.  On the other hand, Protestant Christianity, as the grounding against which liberal discourse discloses the centrality of the individual as the fundamental entity in an atomistic social theory, remains a critical backdrop, periodically revealed in explicit terms, especially by Locke.  The political liberalism of each reflects theological liberalism, extending the principle of toleration to the extent that it seems practical and/or imperative. 
          Rousseau's Du Contrat Social, by contrast, remains anchored to a utilitarian rationality principle in advancing the argument in favor of absolute toleration of sectarian differences, but further asserts the need for a binding spirit of "civic religion"/faith in collectivity as the glue cementing each individual within the polity as individual members of the collective sovereign.  This difference from Locke and Montesquieu is relevant for two reasons related to my larger argument regarding anti-Semitism emerging from the Enlightenment.  First, Rousseau diverges from the rigorous Protestant individualist influence apparent for other Classical Enlightenment liberals to reinforce the notion of collectivity advanced in the idea of social contract.  If the social contractual logic emerges from the pursuit of naked individual self-interest in the protection of person and property, for Rousseau the realization of the polity as political community is a transformative act, re-grounding individual members within a collective body politic.  The notion of civic religion is proper to the individual in this second, collective sense as a citizen.  In contrast to the perspectives of Locke and Montesquieu, which continue to take Christianity as a point of departure and the preponderant Christian faith of individuals in their own national contexts as an irreproachable given against which the state must remain indifferent, Rousseau, in certain respects, rejects all sectarian religious faith, per se, and marginalizes the faith practices of individuals as inconsistent with the demands of civic unity.  Critically, as the second major divergence in Rousseau's approach, collectivity, as a phenomenon of social psychology, demands a structure of unifying ideology, by any other name, religion.  If, as such, Rousseau does not advocate militant atheism or even a rationally conceived ecumenical deism for all individuals, then he does rigorously argue that sectarian differences militating against the broader principles of a unified (national) civic ideology are intolerable to the state and to the sovereign polity that underlies it. 
           To (inadequately!) summarize the expansive political theoretic legacy of the Enlightenment on the relationship of sectarian religious faith and national citizenship, a critical divergence between liberal individualism (expressed in commitments to political liberties) and inclusive ideological nationalism emerges from Seventeenth and Eighteenth century political theory.  The Nineteenth century "Jewish question" derives from the latter theoretic vein.  In important ways, Rousseau's own understanding of Judaism as a faith tradition within which individual morality and civil law are unified through the Mosaic law creates the basis for questioning the capacity of Jews to be assimilated within European national polities.  Minimally, the sort of inclusive nationalism reflected in Rousseau's social contractual theorization seems to invalidate transnational linkages expressed weakly in regard to the sectarian ecclesiastical unity of Roman Catholics and expressed in much less ambiguous, strongly sectarian nationalistic terms by late Nineteenth century Jewish Zionism.  Moreover, the progressive unification of national political forms and the gradual retraction of feudal and absolutist monarchical governance in the wake of liberal democratic revolution, supported, in part, by Rousseauean civic republican and inclusive-nationalist conceptions of citizenship, make such "Jewish questions" inevitable without simultaneously enforcing an a priori resolution.  I consider it critical that there is nothing either in Rousseau's theoretic approach to civic religion or in the initial articulations of liberal-democratic nationalism (e.g. the formative stages of the early French republics and Napoleonic-era France) that posits the insoluble character of the Jew relative to the European national polity.  Emphatically, Rousseau and the early secularist liberal democratic revolutionaries both defended, more or less dogmatically, the freedom of conscience of all individuals and absolute toleration of religious diversity in the eyes of the state.  Invariably, pursuing the evolution of the "Jewish question" through the Nineteenth century and into the Twentieth, from the initial stages of the French Revolution to the Jewish Holocaust and the contested realization of a Zionist state, compels us to sort through the reasons why the Enlightenment promises of individual freedom of conscience and toleration, particularly in the case of Jews, failed.
             Even in its most radical theories and at its most radical instances of political practice, the liberal Enlightenment operates with an impoverished conception of man that ultimately hinders its capacity to achieve a real and enduring cultural transformation to transform Europe's emerging national social formations into rigorously liberal, culturally inclusive, constitutionally-defined social formations.  That is to say, outside of its most cosmopolitan spaces, the citizens of a nation-state like France continue to comprehend the existence of state-political boundaries through which it can exclude populations that they regard as non-French.  In its juridical practices, such states may similarly dichotomize constitutional liberties conferred on citizens from those conferred on political "aliens," in order to differentiate between those privileges to which citizens are specifically entitled as a function of their belonging to the nation.  Pointedly, the potential of citizens to conceive of individuals external to the boundaries of the liberal polity evokes, in part, the failure of Enlightenment liberalism to realize its logical conclusions as a universalistic ideology - as a corpus of ideas to suture disparate "nations" into common humanity.
           In his 1844 essay "On the Jewish Question," Marx targets the problem underlying political liberalism.  The essay constitutes a critique of the limitations of political liberation (i.e. the constitutional specification of individual liberties against repressive state interference) relative to a more comprehensive human liberation, elevating man above the superstitions and mysticisms of religion as well as chauvinistic prejudices of nationality.  Emphatically, the inability of liberalism to transcend a vision of liberation wholly excluded to the notion of political man/the citizen inhibits its capacity to forge a fundamental species-unity and nurture a conception of human political, cultural, and economic development that will not simultaneously aggrandize individualistic egotisms and nationalistic exclusivities.  In these terms, the real Jewish question does not concern the extension of freedom of conscience on Jewish worshippers by the national state or assimilation of Jews as citizens with full political liberties but the abolition of Judaism as a particular religious tradition with particular superstitions and cultural proclivities.  However much Marx can be criticized, in this respect, for generalizing about Judaism and its particular relationship to certain economic activities and character traits without adequately historicizing the roles of Jews in the emergent market economies of capitalist Europe, he must, at least, be credited with maintaining a particular, rigorous, if abstract, conception of man transcending the liberal project. 
           Notwithstanding the ontological shortcomings of Marx's own Hegelian-inspired understanding of man in 1844, the central critique remains valid - liberalism fails to achieve its potential as a universalistic ideology precisely because it is predicated on a bifurcated conception of man that leaves intact the sources of irrational prejudice dividing human beings into sects, nations, races, classes, and other groupings.  The continuity of such a divided conception of man (i.e. between political man/the citizen and the (classed) individual of "civil society"), moreover, shapes the lived experience of Nineteenth and Twentieth century European politics, particularly in conjunction with the development of industrial and finance capitalism in Western Europe.  The citizen, as a legally free person and a free possessor of his/her own labor power, remains a subject to diverse political, economic, and cultural processes operating to both constrain and/or empower him/her in relation to other citizens.  Equality before the state and the law constitutes neither total human equality of state nor equal developmental potential.  Minimally, within the Marxian theoretic/class-analytic frame, citizens may approach each other in differential states through labor markets as possessors of labor power subject to its contractual alienation and exploitation/extraction of surplus labor.  The persistence of particular alignments of individuals within class processes, with given individuals effectively constrained over time to occupy a role as exploited producer of surplus labor against a given capitalist exploiter, manifests consequences for the maintenance of peace and civility within social formations shaped by the principles of Enlightenment liberalism.  From within the blind spaces constituted by liberal political ideology and its abstract constructions of the citizen emerge complex refractions of class inequality and derivative illiberal ideological responses (e.g. prejudicial characterizations of the Jew as the caricature of the bourgeois capitalist).
             In these terms, the sort of European anti-Semitism that arises in the Nineteenth century over the course of the development of Western European industrial capitalism, while shaped by the lineages of pre-industrial, sectarian Christian anti-Semitism, takes on, among other things, an accentuated economistic dimension, through which nationalistic anti-Jewish chauvinism stands in for the articulation of an actual anti-capitalist theory and political project. 
           

Referendum: Why Khamenei is on to something in advocating democracy as the ideal weapon to destroy Israel

Apparently, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued a set of tweets last November enunciating a new approach in confrontation with Israel (see Daniel Politi, "Iran's Khamenei: No Cure for Barbaric Israel but Annihilation," Slate (9 Nov. 2014), at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/11/09/iran_s_khamenei_israel_must_be_annihilated.html).  In addition to endorsing continue violent confrontation with Israel through the agency of Palestinian resistance in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as continued struggle on the boundaries of the Jewish state by armed paramilitaries like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Khamenei introduced, as the centerpiece to a new strategy, the idea of holding a worldwide referendum, among all present and former inhabitants of Palestine, of all religious denominations (i.e. Islamic, Jewish, Christian, other) on the nature of governance in this geography and, specifically, whether such an electorate approves of the presence of a Jewish state, constituted in accord with ideological Zionism. 
            Several criticisms of these tweets might be relevant here.  First, notwithstanding the fact that Iran is nominally constituted as a republic with parliamentary democratic institutions and an elected presidency, the preeminence of religious authority by Islamic jurists as the ultimate authorities on fundamental questions of Sharī’ah law, overriding the primacy of civil legislative enactments, and Khamenei's place within a political structure that effectively subordinates the democratic process as "un-Islamic" renders him a peculiar and cynical defender of the democratic process in regard to Palestine.  Beyond this, the realization of a worldwide referendum on the existence of Israel represents a virtual logistical and procedural impossibility with regard to organization of polling mechanisms, validation of credentials for participating members of the electorate, and verification of results.  It goes without saying that any country currently recognizing the existence of Israel would be hard pressed either to endorse participation in such a referendum by individuals living on its soil or to accept the results if they yielded disapproval for Israeli existence. 
            Most importantly, the larger focus of Khamenei's arguments seems oriented toward reversing almost a century in the production of historical facts regarding the settlement of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state on its territory as if the current state of Israel had never happened and as if there were no palpable obstructions to the literal deconstruction of Israel.  Assuming the delegitimization of Israel in a referendum, the suggestion that a successor state in Palestine might be empowered to expel millions of Jewish immigrant families, sending them to their former home countries in Europe and elsewhere, is patently ludicrous.  On the one hand, it imagines the existence of fictitious national lineages connecting Twentieth century Jewish settlers of Palestine to the European nation-states from which they came when, in many circumstances, the populations of these nation-states were so anxious to retain and support their former Jewish countrymen that they turned a blind eye to their mass murder by the Nazis.  On the other hand, it fundamentally miscomprehends the nature of the connection produced by Jewish settlers to Palestine over the course of the Twentieth century, as if nearly one hundred years in the Jewish re-colonization of Palestine amounted to a pure act of geo-political strip-mining without any tangible efforts to create durable social structures and emplace the infrastructural residues of the intense labor and the collective emotional/ideological commitment required to create a new nation from scratch in this otherwise harsh geography.  Whatever can be said about the Jewish populations that settled in Palestine during the Twentieth century, including in regards to the violence exercised by these immigrants to displace existing Arab Palestinian populations from their land, their claims to the land and the labor exerted to construct a modern society in Palestine have to be permanently recognized, regardless of what sort of political formation governs over this geographic space in whose interests.  The settlers of the old kibbutzim and their descendents enjoy as much claim to Palestine as do the residents of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordon, and many other places, who retain family connections to the soil of Palestine and long to come home. 
               Finally, and most practically, assuming a worldwide referendum on Palestine and the existence of Israel could be undertaken, and that such a referendum delegitimized Israel, who on earth would enforce the results against the already existing Jewish Zionist state, especially in view of its regional military hegemony and its globally hegemonic ally?  If the U.N. cannot currently enforce its existing resolutions mandating the establishment of an Arab Palestinian state against the flagrant violation of the land rights of such a state in the occupied territories, then it goes without saying that the U.N. would be incapable of enforcing a referendum mandating the destruction of Israel on land the U.N. had actually reserved for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.  No individual countries are going to step in to defend any claim to the delegitimization of Israel against both the Israeli military and that of the U.S.  In this regard, the very notion of a worldwide referendum on the existence of Israel by populations presently or formerly residing in Palestine is ridiculous.
                Getting passed these criticisms, however, I really do think that Khamenei is on to something in bringing up the proposal of a referendum.  The dimensions need to be truncated, however, and the fundamental terms of what is stake need to be more rigorously specified.  That is to say, I think that the Palestinian populations in the occupied West Bank and Gaza territories need to undertake a referendum on the specific conception of the Palestinian state and whether they reject the notion that a Palestinian state remains possible at this moment in their history.  In such terms, the populations of the occupied territories would be casting ballots for or against the two-state solution, and, by presumption, if such a resolution failed, mandating that the political leadership of the Palestinian people should seek citizenship within a single political entity encompassing both the occupied territories and the current state of Israel (i.e. the one-state solution).
                Pondering the implications of such a referendum realizing the approval of a one-state solution as the preferred choice of Arab Palestinians, there are multiple different directions in which such a collective decision could be taken.  One direction that seems axiomatic during a period in which militant Salafism has taken center stage might involve nurturing the ideological commitment of Palestinian communities to engage in violent confrontation with Israel for control of the totality of the land.  This might be the view currently represented through the Hamas movement and it might even be consonant with the views expressed by Ayatollah Khamenei, although I would tend to concede a more rational view to the latter.  Historically, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its allies, prior to the PLO's 1993 recognition of Israel, held such a view, somehow believing that armed struggle through low-intensity warfare/"terrorism" could restore Palestinian claims to the land under the Israelis' feet.  In my view, the position that Palestinians should achieve control of the totality of Palestine through armed struggle with the Jewish state is ill-conceived, grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of the capacity of Israel to both wage in overwhelming violence against Palestinian militants (and the civilian communities with whom they reside!) and to endure the prospect of permanent war as a condition for the realization of the Zionist project.  Moreover, the nominal disengagement of the Jewish state with the permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however rhetorical, confers a morally advantageous position of the Israeli government in its assertion that, contrary to Palestinian demands for the totality of the land, a two-state solution is the only avenue for peace. 
                 There are, however, other alternatives to advance a single-state solution in Palestine while enabling Palestinians to hold the moral high ground.  Emphatically, if Palestinians en masse were to reject the impractical farce that Israel has advanced as a two-state solution, then they could, instead issue the demand that Israel annex the West Bank and Gaza and incorporate their populations as citizens within a fully secular, pluralist democratic state, configured to ensure the full equality before the law and in the political process for all citizens, Jew, Christian, or Muslim Arab.  In my mind, the implications of issuing such a demand would compel Palestinians in the occupied territories to undertake a total reconceptualization of their strategy in confrontation with Israel - one does not engage in violent struggle with a state from whom one is seeking to be recognized as a citizen and a countryman. 
               Moreover, certain practical considerations to a rethinking of the struggle for Palestine must also obtain.  Notably, the entire political edifice of the Palestinian Authority (PA) would have to be autonomously and unilaterally dismantled.  There is no reason to perform quasi-state functions when you have ceased to aspire to the existence of a separate state.  The PA should discharge all of its bureaucratic personnel and its security forces, compelling the Israeli Defense Forces to undertake the business of performing security within the totality of the occupied territories or watch the archipelago of Palestinian settlements in the West Bank and Gaza degenerate into a state of abject anarchy.  With specific regard to Gaza, Hamas would have to agree to unilateral disarmament or be forcibly disarmed by PA/Fatah forces as a concluding action to ensure, for the world, that the Palestinian people in the occupied territories concede the necessity of renouncing armed struggle against Israel in categorical terms.
              The Fatah movement would have to reconstitute itself into a political organization committed to incorporation into Israel and Israeli annexation of the very soil that it had initially established itself, as the PLO, to violently contest in its struggle against the Zionist state.  More fundamentally, Fatah would have to agitate for the Israelis to confer full rights of citizenship on the populations of the occupied territories under a basis of full political and legal equality.  It should, likewise, advocate for the constitutional reconfiguration of Israel as a fully secular, pluralist democratic state, with a defined civil legal code and a separate, parallel sectarian judicial establishment to incorporate enforcement of both Jewish ecclesiastical principles and Islamic Sharī’ah.  The latter separation of juridical apparatuses appeals to the broader concern that institutional continuities, fundamental toward the Islamic character of the Palestinian people, would have to be secured outside of the civil legal apparatus of a constitutionally secular state.
               Furthermore, the active contestation of Palestinians in the occupied territories against Israel/for citizenship would need to change in regard to both form and substance.  In a formal sense, Palestinians would have to cultivate methodologies of confrontation stressing non-violent techniques (e.g. strategic non-cooperation in the mode of Indian satyagraha), grounded in both a commitment to political inclusion and equality and a belief in the fundamental consistency of non-violent struggle with specifically Islamic principles (i.e. holding simultaneously the necessity of jihad and its fundamentally non-violent character as a principle of struggle for righteousness in God's name).  Substantially, in addition to full sectarian religious freedom, the struggle must be oriented toward the exercise of a platform of basic individual liberties, including the capacity of Palestinians to engage in free movement within the occupied territories as well as within the current Israel proper.  Palestinians could also issue claims on diverse specific privileges conferred by the Israeli constitution on Israeli citizens, including demands for inclusion in social programs.
           Politically, in unilaterally relinquishing aspirations for a separate sovereign Palestinian state, Palestinians in the occupied territories should both demand expansion of the current Israeli knesset to incorporate representation from the occupied territories on a basis of proportional representation by population.  As such, local groups should autonomously stage elections for such representatives during Israeli parliamentary elections, even inviting sympathetic international observers to evaluate the legitimacy of electoral results.  To the extent possible, such political strategies might incorporate cooperation with existing Arab-Israeli parties and, thus, further problematize the political status of Arab Israelis in an effort to broaden the base of the Arab electorate within Israel.  Critically, if a partisan alliance between Arab-Israeli citizens and the Palestinians of the occupied territories, supporting the peaceful integration of Arab populations committed to the principle of equality and secular governance, can be effected, then it might induce Jewish parties, particularly Likud and the other parties of the right, to engage in the sort of acerbic, sectarian nationalist rhetoric and outright anti-Arab bigotry that would reveal the true anti-secular, anti-pluralist, and anti-democratic character of Zionism to the entire world, even more clearly than Netanyahu's campaign in the Likud's recent electoral triumph has demonstrated.        
             The ideas expressed here are suggestive of the broader principle that Zionism, as the principle that the survival of Judaism is predicated on the existence of a sovereign Jewish state, is inherently inconsistent with the secular, civic republican, democratic principles embodied in the liberal Enlightenment, and that, by forcing Israel to concede the incongruity of its constitutionally foundational principle with those of its principal supporters, a transformation in the strategical goals of the Palestinians vis-à-vis the Zionist state will elevate the moral stature of the Palestinian cause.  Emphatically, if Palestinian Arabs, en masse, renounce calls for the violent destruction of Israel and, instead, plead before the court of global public opinion, for citizenship and equal rights in a singular state, encompassing the territories that Israel is already occupying illegally, then Israel would be forced to either unilaterally abandon the occupied territories in their entirety as a prelude to the actual formation of a viable Palestinian state, or it would have to deal with the international repercussions of the reality that it is forcibly occupying the soil of populations against whom it is actively denying the rights of citizenship despite their expressed desire for inclusion.  The Arab Palestinians of the occupied territories would become a people truly colonized in their own country against their collective will. 
             Beyond this, an actual decision to annex the occupied territories and grant their populations full citizenship introduces the demographic nightmare for Israel, enforced by the differential birthrates of Palestinian households versus those of Israelis - that is to say, within a few generations, Israeli Jews would be a minority within their own country.  Whatever such a country might be called, it would certainly cease to be a Zionist state if its constitutional principles really embraced the principle of democratic rule by the majority.  From this point, the protections accorded to Jewish religious practices within a constitutionally parochial sectarian state prioritizing Judaism would have to be subjected to the promises of the liberal Enlightenment that basic human freedom of conscience inheres to the human condition and must be defended by a rigorously secular state against religious prejudice.  In these terms, we might question whether Islam could tolerate such a situation.  Historically, there is abundant evidence for the practice of both extreme religious tolerance and repression of alternative faith traditions by Muslim leaders and by Muslim majorities.  Judging Muslim commitments to the democratic process, embracing liberal conceptions of individual rights, from a unique historical moment in which political and radical/militant Salafism has assumed such a prominent position in our imaginations of Islam would be patently unfair in our Western appraisals of the Muslim world, per se, or the Palestinian people, specifically.  
           We cannot know precisely whether an eventual elevation to power of a Muslim majority in Palestine/Israel would lead to a new outflow of Jewish populations and a rebirth of Zionism with alternative geographic aspirations, but an active engagement by Western states in the development of political processes, a secular constitutional tradition, and a cultural commitment to liberal principles within such a single state might better secure the eternal character of religious liberties for Jews in Palestine/Israel.  And if a new Muslim Palestinian majority were to renege on the promise to respect the religious diversity of their country and realize the exceptional contribution that unabashed pluralism conferred on Palestine's political, economic, and cultural development, then the West might once again enjoy the contributions of millions of Jewish newcomers and, hopefully, learn to disavow our long and disgusting legacies of anti-semetism!
             In these terms, I have hope that Ayatollah Khamenei is right.  The practice of democratic choice might just be what is needed to destroy Israel in its current form as a Zionist state.  However, if a successor state did not consequently embody a broader commitment to the sort of secular liberalism that would enable Jews, Muslims, and others to live together in Palestine/Israel in peace, with a mutual commitment to the development and continued wellbeing of themselves and their posterity, then it might be better simply to endure the continued agony of the present struggle of Israelis and Palestinians, unvarnished with the recurring pretension that a pathway to peace through the two-state solution actually exists.      
                 

Eurogroup "kicks the can down the road" on Greece - "Grexit" may be inevitable

This post seeks to articulate a few conclusions in regard to the 4-month extension of a bailout package from the Eurogroup to Greece in the aftermath of Syriza's electoral victory in late January.  As a preliminary summation of the argument here, I consider it unlikely that the Greek government will successfully achieve austerity-oriented reform measures demanded by major financiers of sovereign Greek debt, most notably Germany, within the four-month window offered by the Eurogroup finance ministers.  Rather, it may be far more productive for Syriza to utilize the next four months to undertake necessary measures in order to effect a transition back to an independent national currency (e.g. enact short term capital controls to prevent leakages from the financial system of a scale that would render major banks insolvent from the moment Greece exits the Euro).  Beyond this (and beyond the limited bounds of contemporary rationality within the Euro-zone), it might be worthwhile for Greece and certain of the weaker peripheral Euro-zone economies to cooperatively (and clandestinely) contemplate the creation of an alternative monetary union, oriented toward the developmental interests of economies reliant on relatively depreciated monetary valuations in their engagements with the larger global economy.  That is to say, it is not necessarily the case that monetary union was an intrinsically bad idea, but, in its conception, the Euro could never succeed in harmonizing the interests of all of the member states contained by the Euro-zone. 

1.  The set of reforms demanded of the Greek government by the Eurogroup contradict, at least in part, the agenda promised by Syriza in its rise to power.  Either Syriza will embrace these reforms half-heartedly and, thus, forgo any hope of a third bailout from Eurogroup/ECB/IMF, or, in its zeal to achieve the demands of the Eurogroup, Syriza will alienate the national electorate that chose its platform on the hope that Syriza would stand up for Greek sovereignty against the oppression of global finance capital.
Interestingly, the Eurogroup conferred the responsibility of defining a set of fiscal reform proposals to the Greek governing coalition (in line with Greek demands for sovereignty).  The proposals that were accepted (see "Key Points: Greece Economic Pledges to Europe," BBC (24 February 2015), at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31599838) seek to achieve a compromise between the demands of the Eurogroup for restrained governmental expenditures, "flexible" labor markets, and enhanced privatization of transportation and other key logistical infrastructures (e.g. utilities), and the electoral platform of Syriza, oriented toward enhancement of economic justice for lower income populations (e.g. increased taxation of higher income groups, increased minimum wages, subsidization of energy expenditures for lower income groups).  Over the next four months, notwithstanding an initial acceptance from the Eurogroup, these measures are not going to fly!  The notion of "balancing" a need for fairness against the demand for flexibility in collective bargaining agreements, for example, seems unlikely to achieve the sort of explosion of private entrepreneurial development in Greece sought by the Eurogroup.  For that matter, it seems unlikely that under any conceivable regime of labor regulations, crafted with even the slightest intention of protecting workers and promoting a decent standard of living for working people, adequate levels of private sector economic growth in the Greek economy could be achieved to bolster the willingness of German and other financiers to extend further resources to the Greek government to forestall a sovereign debt default.  Likewise, increased enforcement of tax collection will drive recalcitrant high income groups to relocate to the nearest available offshore tax haven!  No.  Four months from now, the Eurogroup will look at Syriza's Greece with disapproving eyes, however hard Syriza works to balance their demands against the demands of Greek citizens!  The best laid plans for reform in the Greek economy will come to naught because such demands from abroad are simply not oriented to serve the best interests of Greek citizens, who will remain and will hopefully and forcefully express their sovereignty!
2.  The problems of the Greek economy ultimately originate in monetary union with relatively strong national economies such as that of Germany.  These problems will only be successfully addressed by separation from the contemporary Euro-zone and restoration of the competitiveness of Greek export sectors by means of monetary devaluation (i.e. the restoration of currency valuations that reflect the relative competitiveness of Greek industry).
Expressing this argument in the simplest possible terms, the value of a currency in international exchange is largely determined by the levels of demand for the currency in transactions by foreign actors.  When firms in the U.S. seek to import a good from Mexico, they must pay for it in Mexican pesos.  As such, they must use U.S. dollars to purchase pesos on international exchange markets.  Such a transaction increases the supply of U.S. dollars in exchange markets and removes Mexican pesos, in the process incrementally lowering the value of the U.S. dollar and raising the value of the Mexican peso.  If, across all exchanges in a given period, the U.S. imports a larger value of goods and services from Mexico than it returns as exports, then this pattern of trade will tend to exert downward pressure on the value of the U.S. dollar and upward pressure on the value of the Mexican peso.  Subsequently, as the Mexican peso rises in value relative to the U.S. dollar, Mexican exports to the U.S. become relatively more expensive to purchase for U.S. firms and consumers.  If the cost of goods imported from Mexico continues to rise in the U.S., domestic American producers of the same goods or close substitutes may steal some of the market share among U.S. consumers away from Mexican imports, in turn, lowering the demand for Mexican pesos by importers and stabilizing the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and Mexican peso.  In this manner, in the current era of economic globalization, fluctuations in the nominal exchange rate (i.e. the international exchange market price for a currency in terms of another currency) for national currencies can be an important regulator on economic development at the level of individual national economies.
             Before European monetary integration, the Greek economy was poorly integrated with other European economies.  It relied largely on domestic production of consumption and investment goods.  To the extent that it exported goods and services to other European economies, the goods were largely composed of low-cost, labor-intensive goods, in addition to significant European consumption of labor-intensive Greek service exports in the travel and tourism industry.  The relative isolation of the Greek domestic economy from dependence on imported consumption goods contributed to keeping labor costs relatively low, enabling Greece to compete with numerous other national economies producing comparable low-skilled, labor-intensive goods.  The high degree of competition in the markets in which Greek exporters competed, moreover, kept the nominal exchange rate for Greece's national currency, the drachma, relatively low, ensuring that domestic producers of consumption and investment goods might remain somewhat sheltered from import competition by the country's weak ability to afford larger quantities of imports.  In short, the relative weakness of the drachma enabled Greece to occupy a particular, highly competitive market niche at the southeastern corner of Europe. 
             When Greece joined the Euro-zone in 2002, it traded a relatively weak currency for a comparatively strong currency.  Monetary unification with the economies of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other economies with relatively strong pre-Euro currencies and strong international demand for relatively high-skilled, capital-intensive goods and services meant that Greece would immediately encounter a significant appreciation in the purchasing power of its currency in international trade.  Such an appreciation in the nominal exchange rate for Greece both made imported goods and services relatively cheaper for Greek firms and consumers and made traditional Greek exports more expensive.  Insofar as the latter markets were already strongly competitive, the union-induced monetary appreciation for Greece implied that the continued growth of Greek exporters would be hampered.  On the other hand, increased international purchasing power implied that firms producing for the domestic economy would be hampered by influxes of imports.  As such, the trade balance for Greece, which was already negative in its trade relations with other European economies, displayed an exploding deficit with an increasing range of trade partners - both sides of Greece's trade balance sheet (demand for imports and demand for exports) necessitated the development of a steadily growing deficit.
           In view of this pattern, largely shaped by monetary integration and the appreciation of nominal exchange rates for Greece's new currency in relation to the drachma, a predictable counterbalancing pattern emerged - Greek businesses, consumers, and, most notably, the Greek government began accumulating significant quantities of debt from foreign capital markets.  In the case of the Greek government, the impact of monetary integration in hindering the growth of the private sector placed restraints on the growth of domestic tax-based finances.  Moreover, persistent growing demand for imports not supported by export growth placed inflationary pressures on the larger Greek economy.  As consumer prices increased, the government sought to create income supports (e.g. fuel subsidies), especially for low-income populations, financed largely through issuance of debt.  Such accumulations of sovereign debt were ultimately unsustainable.
            The enduring Greek debt crisis must be viewed, significantly, as a symptom of the failure of monetary integration in the appreciation of nominal exchange rates in peripheral European economies not otherwise linked to the macroeconomic "fundamentals" for these economies.  The diminished growth of low-skilled, labor intensive export industries in Greece should have induced a reconfiguration of Greek trading patterns and, hence, the development of new, high-skilled, more capital intensive export industries, catering to new, non-Euro-zone trade partners.  In some respect, such a transition appeared to be occurring in Greece's trade patterns from 2002 to 2008, but it did not occur quickly enough.  Rather, domestic consumption spending grew much more rapidly than investment in fixed capital for new export industries.  Moreover, if Greece is beginning to reorient its trade toward non-Euro-zone economies, the slow growth of export industries directed to these economies has opened up a generalized and strongly unfavorable balance of trade outside of the Euro-zone where one did not exist prior to monetary integration. 
               With these considerations in mind, the best possible course for Greece to follow, with respect to its trade relations to the larger global economy, would, first of all, involve exiting from the Euro-zone and reintroducing a devaluated national currency.  If nothing else, such a move would force Greek businesses and consumers to restrain their demand for imports and, as such, enable firms in traditional Greek export markets and newcomer industries to progressively close the gaps in Greece's current balance of trade.  While this might represent a long and painful process for Greece, it could be infinitely more fruitful for the long term growth of the Greek economy (if the development of fixed capital and logistical infrastructures to support new export sectors could be prioritized) and for the expression of the sovereign democratic will of the Greek people against domination by international capital markets.                                  
3.  Austerity, as a policy regime, not only undermines the sovereign democratic interests of subjected national economies (like Greece), but also reflects an irrational preference for the "strip mining" of capital assets in weaker economies at the behest of globally dominant economies and the global financial sector.
I need to differentiate here between particular sets of policy recommendations here that might otherwise be linked to the term "austerity."  In this respect, I want to initially offer the insight that Greek household consumers and businesses are entering a period of their country's history in which consumption and investment resources will be more scarce.  As such, there is simply no way for the Greek economy to avoid austerity, understood as a broad and sustained negative shift in the production of goods and services and/or purchasing power.  Austerity, as a macroeconomic phenomenon, may not be problematic in itself.  Rather, the problems concern the sources for such a shift, the distribution of pain (i.e. diminished consumption possibilities) across a national economy, and the means by which an economy can transition back to a positive and sustainable growth path.  In the last decade its economic history, Greece experienced a vast penetration of relatively inexpensive imports while the prices of domestically produced goods suffered inflation and became steadily less competitive.  This pattern created or otherwise exacerbated the accumulation of debt, both public and private.  It was, thus, unsustainable, and Greece needs to move to a more austere and moderate, but still outwardly focused, mode of economic development.  The most important concern here, in various ways, involves the distribution of austerity across the Greek population.  How can the government enact policies that will ensure that the wealthy bear their own weight in suffering a downsizing of the Greek economy?  How can Greece forge a new, more equitable and entrepreneurial economic developmental model that will restore economic growth while more broadly distributing the gains from enhanced productivity and output?  These are all valid concerns as Greece goes forward, especially as it leaves the Euro behind.  They implicate the notion of economic citizenship, configured as a generalized commitment of every man and woman in Greece to the project of ensuring that every one of their fellow citizens can eat and shelter themselves today and that every child will have a brighter and sustainable (not only in financial but also in ecological terms) economic future. 
              By contrast, the policy regime that Germany and other strong Euro-zone economies are pressing on Greece as a condition of assistance in avoiding a sovereign debt default and the collapse of its financial system involves a very specific approach addressing Greece's unsustainable accumulation of debt to the exclusion of any concern for the long term welfare of the Greek economy.  As opposed to some intentionally enacted effort by the Greek population to scale back domestic consumption and prioritize the development of a financially and ecologically sustainable export-driven economy over the long term, the policy regime that the Eurogroup and the Troika seem intent on imposing on Greece amounts to, on the one hand, a crash diet for the Greek government, taking little account of the social service needs of a larger population currently enduring twenty-five percent or more unemployment, and, on the other hand, a yard sale of publicly held capital assets in order to generate funds that may just scratch the surface on Greek sovereign debt obligations.  Moreover, in the face of the pain this brand of "austerity" has imposed and will continue to impose on Greece, at the behest of the Greek government's institutional financiers in the EU, it affords no obvious mechanisms to bring Greece back to a positive, sustainable growth path and does not address the biggest obstacle to Greek fiscal solvency and private sector economic health, inclusion in a monetary union enforcing the repercussions of nominal exchange rates fundamentally misaligned with respect to Greek national economic performance and absent any fiscal redistributive mechanisms to channel the gains from monetary union from the strongest economies to the weakest.
              To be clear, the medicine being prescribed by the Eurogroup and the Troika to Greece most directly serves the short term interests of the largest holders of Greek sovereign debt, in private financial institutions and government treasuries throughout the EU.  With this in mind, the austerity regime serves to create conditions necessary to recover as much of the government's debt obligations as possible even as the Troika extends bailout funds to prevent an outright default.  In effect, the global financial sector, through the agency of the Troika and Eurogroup, is forcing the Greek government to forgo a range of necessary social expenditures in order to prioritize payment of its sovereign debt obligations.  Further, by pursuing the privatization of segments of the Greek economy held by the government, the administrators of the bailout are seeking a short term solution to generate revenues through which the government can offset some of the need for outside financing in order to meet debt servicing obligations. 
              In and of themselves, the sorts of fiscal reform initiatives and privatizations being undertaken as a requisite for bailout funds may not be entirely unreasonable and salutary to the long term restructuring of the Greek economy.  To be fair, I am not entirely cognizant of the scale of Greek governmental bureaucracy in relation to those of other EU states.  For that matter, measures oriented toward cracking down on corruption in the Greek government's engagement with private sector beneficiaries of state largesse are absolutely imperative if Greece is to emerge with a more efficient and transparent fiscal policy apparatus.  Finally, I have previously expressed doubts on this blog about the Greek government's capacity to adequately manage key infrastructures, in transportation and logistics, in order to promote a larger reconfiguration of export industries.  Emphatically, I do not know whether the privatization of the Piraeus port complex will have positive or negative implications for long term macroeconomic growth in Greece.  Minimally, it will aid the Greek government in meeting its short term obligations for debt servicing, but the capacity of the Syriza government to develop a meaningful long term infrastructure development plan, conducive to the growth of targeted export industries, remains an open question.  In this regard, maybe the sale of the Greek's most important port complex to China's Cosco Group or other foreign investors will create conditions through which its facilities can be adequately maintained and upgraded as necessary for some time into the future and without further liabilities to Greek taxpayers. 
                On the other hand, an aggressive effort to make the privatization of government assets a centerpiece in the generation of fiscal resources to pay debt obligations may impose long term negative consequences for the Greek economy.  Increased foreign ownership of capital assets in the Greek economy will entail some degree of long term outflow on generated incomes to parent corporate entities outside of Greece, in turn counterbalancing the realization of short run government revenues through the creation of long term current account liabilities.  In more symbolic terms, an extensive privatization effort through foreign investment represents a displacement of the stakes held by Greek citizens in key elements of their own economy.  The fact that the Greek government would never have considered parting with its sixty-seven percent stake in the port of Piraeus if it was not being compelled by the Eurogroup to do so is evidence enough that this privatization was enacted without extensive and deliberate consideration by the government on the long term consequences of ceding public control over a key transportation infrastructure.  It goes without saying that the German finance ministry, in safeguarding its interests and those of German banks with exposure to Greek debt, isn't extensively considering what privatizations of Greek infrastructure might be undertaken to generate revenues while simultaneously minimizing the long term negative effects on Greek economic growth. 
                Finally, in patterning its own policy regime to suit the demands of the Eurogroup, the Syriza government has made tangible efforts to redirect some of the pain from austerity toward higher income groups and, in particular, police tax avoidance within such circles.  Predictably, these corners of the Greek population have reacted noisely to the notion that they should be forced to pay their fair share in order to set the government on the road toward fiscal solvency.  It seems clear that the Eurogroup is indifferent as to how the Greek government can generate the revenues necessary to pay off its debts, but the larger problem here is that the government will be extracting further resources from the economy at a time in which the it has already experienced a significant decline in activity and employment and no meaningful plan seems to have emerged for restoring economic growth short of some nebulous expectation that Greece will eventually begin to attract foreign investors if it reduces labor costs and restores state fiscal solvency.         
4.  The best resolution for the lingering crisis of the Greek economy would arise from Greek integration in a new, alternative monetary union, embracing the peripheral Euro-zone economies, certain dis-favored regions of core Euro-zone economies, and certain non-European economies.  
From a Jacobsean standpoint, the question we most need to ask in regard to international trade and monetary policy concerns how to maximize positive feedback signals to discrete regional economic systems.  By this I mean that the currency used by a regional economy must, as accurately as possible, reflect, through nominal exchange rate fluctuations, the demand for goods and services generated as exports from the regional economy.  The best way to achieve these ends would be to have unique regional currencies, with floating nominal exchange rates, for every regional economy (i.e. city-regional/metropolitan and rural agrarian/extractive regional economies).  This entails the portrait of a global economy with, perhaps, thousands of currencies, exchanged openly with floating exchange rates without any effort to hedge the value of currencies against some metallic base or a reserve currency (e.g. the U.S. dollar).  Such a structure poses obvious problems arising from the complexities of a global financial system in which the value of each currency must be continuously expressed in terms of thousands of other currencies - a dream for monetary speculators but a nightmare for investors in real economic processes seeking predictable relations between exchange rates, interest rates, and future commodity values.
           Recognizing the problems apparent in constructing systems of regional currencies that would more accurately reflect fluctuations in internal economic activities and demand for exports from discrete regional economies, it is equally apparent that the opposite extreme, consolidation of regional and entire national economies into unified currency zones like that of the Euro, has been a disaster for weaker regional and national economies, desperately in need of positive monetary feedback mechanisms through appreciation and depreciation of nominal exchange rates in direct relation to the macroeconomic "fundamentals" of regional economies.  As I have argued previously on this blog and as many, many other economists have argued in regard to the Euro-zone economies, the presence of a monetary union without a complementary fiscal union to redistribute the gains and losses from monetary consolidation implies that the stronger economies will enjoy excess gains in competitiveness for exports from implicit devaluation and the weaker economies will suffer uncompensated losses in competitiveness from induced implicit appreciation.  Moreover, it is clear that the political will does not exist and probably never will exist to establish a fiscal union in the Euro-zone that would tax the stronger economies and deliver compensation to the weaker economies to offset the effects of a unified currency. 
           Appropriately the question is how can weaker national economies, like that of Greece, move away from the particular advantages of an international/interregional super currency toward a currency that will more accurately convey positive monetary feedback with regard to internal economic activity.  Beyond the obvious solution of reenacting national currencies, another possible direction might exist in breaking up the single currency zone into two or three interregional super currencies, grouping internal regional and national economies into a unified currency area with other regional and national economies of a similar scale, orientation of economic activity, level of technological development of fixed capital and infrastructure, and structure of financial institutions.  If Greece were, thus, to unify with Spain and Portugal, possibly Ireland, and sub-national economies like southern Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia) and southern France (including Corsica), then it would be able to truncate the range of economic forces promoting an appreciation of nominal exchange rates beyond those directly attributable to the health of each single regional economy. 
          Within such a consolidated currency zone, some variation in the comparative strength of particular national and regional economies would continue to exist, but it would be less stark than the level of variation posed by the unification of these national and regional economies with a national economy like that of Germany.  Moreover, it might be at least somewhat easier to discover the political will to develop a regime of fiscal redistributions addressing the gains and losses from consolidation.  Likewise, central bank operations and the development of monetary policy within such a monetary zone might be easier to harmonize, against the interests of borrowers and lenders, across a smaller monetary zone.  At the same time, acknowledging the hurdles currently faced by the Greek state in obtaining outside financing of governmental expenditures, it might be somewhat easier for governmental jursidictions in such a union to market sovereign debt instruments at less than wholly prohibitive rates of interest. 
           The great complexities involved in developing such an interregional currency zone below that of the current Euro certainly reside in the notion of carving certain regional economies out of particular national economies that might continue to reside in another currency zone.  A unified national currency is both a subject for the exercise of sovereign political will and a culturally unifying symbol.  While it might make sense to argue that the regional economy of Naples exists within a distinct network of trade and investment relations from that of Turin and that the comparative sensitivities toward international commodity market fluctuations in Toulouse are vastly different than those experience in the Paris metropolitan economy, it requires a energetic stretch in reasoning, fortified by the confidence that only well reasoned theories can provide, to argue that it would not only be feasible but beneficial to all involved if particular national economies, configured as hodge-podge assemblages of distinct regional economies, were monetarily disaggregated.  The complexities involved in such a disaggregation, again, concern the functioning of national states, as sovereign entities with unitary national fiscal processes.  If the French and Italian economies were broken to incorporate parts of these economies into a new unified currency zone of the peripheral Euro-zone economies, then these states would have to develop entirely new forms of fiscal policy management to account for the fact that a single political sovereign governs over space in distinct monetary zones, with divergent fiscal accounting and budgetary mechanisms and divergent capacities to finance expenditures through sovereign debt.  With regard to the intersections of monetary and fiscal policy, and, for that matter, for the evolution of political questions on the exercise of national sovereignty, the breakup of individual national monetary unities through divergent interregional monetary consolidations would constitute a new tableau for experimentation and, perhaps, a model for other such experiments (e.g. a breakup of the consolidated monetary economy of the U.S.?!!). 
               Closing, the development of a consolidated monetary zone for the peripheral economies of the Euro-zone seems manifestly unlikely, if only because no one seems to even be considering the possibility that there might be some kind of half-way house between full reincorporation of national currencies and total monetary union from one end of Europe to the other.  In its favor, I would continue to assert that the destabilizing effects of a total breakup of the current Euro-zone into a space of national currencies would be minimized to some extent by a partial breakup into new consolidated currencies.  If Germany remained in a currency zone with certain other national and regional economies with comparable levels of strength in international trade and finance, it would suffer less of an appreciation in currency valuations than it would if it reverted to a national mark.  Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese consumers would suffer less inflation of import prices relative to a return to national currencies if their national economies could unify with others of a similar economic developmental level and export potential.  Finally, the addition of certain other disarticulated regions of other national economies might finally give such disarticulated regional economies the sort of boost needed from devaluation to kick start economic development in independence from the dominant metropolitan regional economies inside their national boundaries. 
                Conversely, it seems almost indisputable that Greece will perform a Grexit from the Euro-zone this year, returning to the drachma and defaulting on its Euro-denominated debts.  When Greece leaves, the Euro may experience an appreciation in nominal exchange rates, reflecting the absence of continued liabilities for the remaining national economies to support Greece's servicing of sovereign debt obligations.  Such an appreciation would, likely, continue to hinder the capacity of Spain, Portugal, and Ireland to manage their recoveries from the particular circumstances of their debt crises.  In general, if the presently diminished value of the Euro remains overvalued in relation to the macroeconomic fundamentals of the peripheral economies, then an appreciation will continue to hurt the competitiveness of their export sectors and invite more accumulations of debt to offset current account deficits.  On the other end, nominal exchange rate appreciation would inflict some pain on the German economy, manifest through certain losses in demand for manufactures against firms in China and the U.S.  All of these predictions, in turn, assume that a one-time forced write-off of Greek sovereign debt will not create significant crises within the financial sectors of exposed Euro-zone economies, driving investors away from the Euro-zone, causing a larger devaluation of the unified currency, and reinforcing deflationary pressures currently in place.  Neither prediction sounds salutary to the economic health and, more importantly, the political stability of Europe. 
5.  The EU states, including the U.K. (at least until UKIP pushes it out of the EU!), need to pursue a consistent, unified policy regime with regard to the maintenance of peace (e.g. peace in eastern Ukraine!) and the continuation of free trade, even if the Euro disappears into the dust bin of history.
The underlying practical rationale behind the European Monetary Union and, before it, the European Economic Community/trade liberalization is grounded in theoretic conceptions at least as old as Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.  Emphatically, nation-states, committed to the principles of international free trade for mutual benefit, should be less inclined to configure their conceptions of nationality in ways that prioritize militaristic visions of a national destiny and, thus, reduce international relations to a zero-sum game to be resolved, in the last instance, by armed violence.  Over Europe's short history with rigorous trade liberalization and even shorter history with collective monetary policy management, the Western European states have been too preoccupied with the development of favorable economic relations and maintenance of the competitiveness of European firms against industrial sectors in the U.S. and East Asia to re-visit the logic of militaristic nationalism. 
           In view of recent circumstances, most notably the recent round of European Parliamentary elections, it would seem that this pattern may be changing as the negative effects of monetary integration wear away at the  limited sources of trade competitiveness enjoyed by the peripheral EU/Euro-zone economies.  Predictably, labor flows within the Euro-zone and from outside of it have demonstrated the willingness of workers and their families to chase the best opportunities to achieve a better life in countries with more robust labor markets and more generous national social expenditures.  As the regulation of labor flows have progressed to incorporate greater degrees of liberalization, consequently, the increasingly open states at the upper and middle ranges of the income distribution in the Euro-zone have caught anti-immigrant xenophobia, a phenomenon most apparent in middle range economies like that of France, where the diminishing competitiveness of manufacturing industries has compounded the political effects of increased labor migration.  Succinctly, for France, a long history of official acquiescence toward culturally heterogeneous migration from former colonial possessions combined with a persistent failure to adequately integrate racially and ethnically distinct newcomers into a more embracing, socio-historically grounded concept of citoyenneté is helping to simultaneously nurture Salafist Muslim extremism in the Parisian suburbs (e.g. the Charlie Hebdo massacre), reinforce anti-semetic pressures bolstering Jewish emigration from the country, and invigorating anti-EU sentiment across broad swaths of the electorate outside of the Paris region, most pronounced in the electoral gains of the Front National.
           It is my contention that, outside influences notwithstanding, the  pernicious effects of monetary integration on almost every national economy of the Euro-zone, save Germany, significantly explains the current political strife in most Euro-zone states and the rise of partisan extremists on both the left and the right of the political spectrum.  Taking this consideration in mind, the hope of a unified Europe, internally committed to the principle that the economic welfare of all members secures peace on the continent, might paradoxically rest on the potential for a breakup of the Euro-zone and either a reversion to former national currencies or the development of new regional or interregional currencies.  Critically, whatever impedes the economic growth of peripheral economies and, hence, propels increasing quantities of labor from the peripheries toward the core economies will undermine the viability of the EU as the organizational basis for a consensus on European unity, anchored economically on free trade in commodities, free capital flow, free labor migration, and free flow of information. 
           The presence of a single currency does not follow from a basic commitment to sustainable and mutual economic development.  Rather, it emanates from a fixation on the reduction of transaction costs from financial market exchange and speculative manipulation of nominal exchange rates.  While such considerations are, of course, relevant to the larger question of how to integrate multiple national economies into a free-trading zone, reductions in financial transaction costs are not sufficient to produce free trade.  Moreover, if the effects of monetary integration induce more intense rates of labor migration and capital flow, from the peripheries to the core, to chase more abundant opportunities for employment and profit, then a return to monetary heterogeneity might re-introduce the sorts of structural rigidities that made a common market in Western Europe both sustainable and mutually beneficial for its participants.
           At this moment in Western history, the success of underlying principles advanced in the legacy of the Enlightenment is at stake.  In the same way that an incident like the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris raises questions concerning the values of free speech/freedom of the press, the virtues of cultural heterogeneity in world cities, and the potential or salutary nature of more inclusive visions of citizenship, the wrong turn of European monetary integration has called into question the logic of international economic mutual interdependence as a force ensuring peace among the countries of Europe and undermining national parochialism and ethno-centric bigotry.  A simultaneous failure of Europe to stand together against the resurgence of Russian nationalist, imperialistic ambitions in regard to Ukraine and other states on the Russian Federation's borders would, likewise, reinforce the potential for a return to an age in which economic liberalism no longer offers a meaningful argument against zero-sum militarist nationalism.  In the nuclear age, human civilization cannot endure such a defeat.