WILMINGTON, Del. — A quick shot of the king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, and the queen of Sweden, Silvia, who ‘landed’ in Wilmington via a recreation of the Kalmar Nyckel on Saturday to commemorate the 375th anniversary of the formation of New Sweden, the colony that from 1638 to 1655 was the Swedish entry into the New World colonial sweepstakes.
Swedes gave the United States, among other things, the log cabin.
The quite interesting backstory here is that of Peter Minuit, the Dutchman who once purchased the island of Manhattan from native Americans for goods worth around 60 Dutch guilders. But Minuit, who remained the director of New Netherland from 1626 to 1633 was eventually expelled from the Dutch West India Company. In response, he took up shop with the Swedes and helped them found their only colony which, despite his best efforts, ultimately came under the control of New Netherland. After Minuit helped build Fort Christina (named after the Swedish queen of the time) in New Sweden, he set off for Stockholm for more colonists, stopping along the way in the Caribbean for a tobacco transaction, but got caught in a hurricane near the island of St. Christopher and died.
Though the Swedish foothold in colonial America wasn’t incredibly large, Carl Gustaf has made several trips to Delaware during his reign, which began in 1973. Sweden’s monarch is even less powerful than the British monarch — Carl Gustaf doesn’t even appoint Sweden’s prime minister, not even as a matter of formality, nor does he have the kind of coalition-building role that the Dutch monarch had until only very recently.
In 1980, the Swedish monarchy became the first in European history to establish absolute primogeniture, meaning that the first-born child of the king, whether male or female, will become first in line to the throne, in the present case, crown princess Victoria.
The next Swedish election is set to be held only in September 2014.
Photo credit to Kevin Lees — Wilimington, Delaware, May 2012.
It’s been a tough few weeks for the New Democratic Party in Canada, what with the surge of newly elected Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau pushing his once dominant party back into third place in polls.
But NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, who as the head of the second-largest party in the House of Commons, is also the leader of the opposition, pulled out a reference to the television series Arrested Development today while questioning what happened to government funding under Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper:
It’s not everyday that the gang of all of the living current and former (and possibly future) presidents of the United States gather in one place.
But it happened today on the occasion of the opening of the presidential library of former president George W. Bush in Dallas, Texas — see above the ‘most exclusive club in the world,’ from left to right:
Jimmy Carter, Democratic president from 1977 to 1981;
Bill Clinton, Democratic president from 1993 to 2001;
George H.W. Bush, Republican president from 1989 to 1993;
George W. Bush, Republican president from 2001 to 2009; and
Barack Obama, the Democratic incumbent since 2009.
It’s essentially every president elected since 1976, with the single exception of Republican president Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004. Carter’s predecessor, Republican president Gerald Ford, died in December 2006.
It’s notable that all of their spouses were well enough to attend as well, including Hillary Clinton, the former New York senator and until very recently, the U.S. secretary of state, who could well become the next president of the United States after the 2016 election:
This little pajarito told me earlier Saturday, while I was hiking up El Avila, the mountain that rises to the north of Caracas, that Nicolás Maduro’s campaign has indeed been blessed by the ghost of Hugo Chávez.
Just kidding — but today should be a very interesting day. Stay tuned!
Photo credit to Kevin Lees — Caracas, Venezuela, April 2013.
CARACAS, Venezuela — Imagine that following former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s death last week, the United Kingdom implemented a week-long period banning the sale of alcohol.
Or that in the weekend leading up to the 2012 U.S. presidential election, Americans would be unable to find a drink, forcing Americans to become public teetotalers.
But Friday night at 6 p.m., that’s exactly what happened in Venezuela in advance of the presidential election on Sunday — the ley seca takes effect, which means that no alcohol can be sold publicly in the country, through at least next Monday. It’s the third time in five weeks that the ley seca has been in effect — thirsty Venezuelans were out of luck for a week following the death of former president Hugo Chávez, and they were out of luck again during semana santa, the Holy Week.
In Venezuela, though, it’s just another obstacle to be overcome. In a country where the official exchange rate between dollars and bolívares and the black market rate can be up to 400% different, there will certainly be a way around
So around 6 p.m. tonight, if you were grabbing beers at a corner bar, for instance, your bartender might have switched out your bottle of beer into a more discrete, opaque cup. Venezuelans, especially, have practice getting around laws where economic incentives make breaking the law more efficient than upholding it. Prohibition in the United States in the 1920s, and really, the ‘war on drugs’ in the past 40 years in Latin America and the United States are illustrative.
Though in a country of perfectly fine aged dark rum, Venezuela is one of the world’s top whisky importers and imbibers, I withhold any judgment as to Venezuelan taste.
So bottoms up — and happy election weekend!
Photo credit to Kevin Lees — Caracas, Venezuela, April 2013.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been reviewing a law review article that I wrote in 2006 comparing, on the one hand, the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and, on the other hand, E.U. Regulation 1049/2001.
The paper, Ever Closer Transparency: Comparing the European Regulation on Public Access to Documents with the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, tries to accomplish three tasks: (i) establishing the theoretical context for freedom of information and the policy rationales underlying it, (ii) explicates the text of FOIA (5 U.S.C. §552), as adopted in 1966 and amended in 1974 in the United States, and Regulation 1049/2001, as adopted in the European Union in 2001, elucidating their similarities and differences, and (iii) providing five recommendations to strengthen the freedom-of-information regimes in each country.
Given that I spent the next part of the year taking the New York bar exam and jumping into a fund formation legal practice at Latham & Watkins, I never followed up with actually publishing the article, so I’m considering revising the paper and submitting it.
Any comments or recommendations on the original text (see in Scribd below — the link ishere) are very much welcomed!
K-pop star and Internet sensation Psy has a message to South Korea’s new president:
Heyyyyyy, sexy lady.
Conservative Park Geun-hye (박근혜), the daughter of Park Chun-hee (박정희), the authoritarian leader of South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s widely credited with engineering Korea’s economic growth, was inaugurated on Tuesday as South Korea’s first female president following a convincing victory in the December 2012 presidential election over liberal candidate Moon Jae-in (문재인).
She marked her first day in office with an otherwise somber inaugural address that served mostly as a warning to North Korea to cease its nuclear tests and to dismantle its nuclear weapons program:
“North Korea’s recent nuclear test is a challenge to the survival and future of the Korean people,” Park said outside the national assembly building in the South Korean capital. “Make no mistake, the biggest victim will be North Korea itself.”
Referencing her father’s astoundingly successful economic program, Park also called for a ‘2nd miracle on the Han River’ — Park promised to preside over a happier Korea after a shaking transition period that saw her first choice for prime minister withdraw over a real estate scandal. Park herself has already met sharp criticism over her own apparent backtracking on her campaign commitment to address economic democratization — essentially, income inequality issues in South Korea.
For one day, though, it seems that a happier Korea began with a performance by Psy, who kicked off a decidedly much less somber start to the Park era.
Of course, most Americans this weekend aren’t thinking about the Cypriot presidential election or even the relatively higher-impact Italian elections, but the results of yet another election this weekend in Hollywood — the winners of the 85th Academy Awards.
It’s been a very foreign-policy heavy year for the Oscars.
Zero Dark Thirty, a nominee for best picture, depicts the raid that led to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan two years ago. It’s ignited anew a political thunderstorm over the use of torture (ahem, I mean enhanced interrogation techniques) in procuring information by the United States in its fight against radical Islamic terrorists.
Argo, another nominee for best picture, directed by Ben Affleck, depicts the daring 1979 raid in Iran by CIA operatives and other, mostly Canadian, nationals to rescue six diplomats from Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, who approved the raid while in office, and top film critic, recently gave the film two thumbs up.
Indeed, it’s a highly international year for the awards, given that Amour, an Austrian film is up for both best foreign language film and best picture, and Life of Pi, a film based on Yann Martel’s novel of the same name, which won the 2002 Booker Prize, is also up for best film.
Even if the Academy’s rule limiting each country to just one nominee for best foreign film in a year is outdated, No, Chile’s first nomination for best foreign film, stars Gael García Bernal in an impressive picture about the end of Augusto Pinochet’s autocratic rule in that country in 1988. Nanni Moretti, perhaps the best living director in Italy, will have been disappointed that his Habemus Papam (‘We Have a Pope’), was not nominated, despite the film’s sudden timeliness.
Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy surveys the recent history of films that weigh the issues of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the post-9/11 phase and ponders whether Hollywood itself has a discernible foreign policy view and how that could change in the future:
One big question going forward is whether Hollywood’s increasing reliance on international audiences will affect the kinds of stories that get told. The Academy has shown itself to be more open to films with Indian protagonists like Slumdog Millionaire and The Life of Pi in recent years. Perhaps it will soon be ready for a movie about America’s place in the world where the rest of the planet gets a speaking role.
But Keating ignores two short films that have been nominated for best live action short that, I believe, are really the future of Hollywood — Buzkashi Boys and Asad.
Buzkashi Boys (see trailer above) is a 27-minute film about two young boys in Kabul — and it might be my own favorite film from among the entire oeuvre of 2013 nominees.
Director Sam French has captured an incredibly beautiful side of Kabul — the snowy, mountainous backdrop has never made the war-zone city look more appealing — and in avoiding any direct mention to the 12-year U.S. military action there, has managed to show a side of Afghanistan that’s rarely seen and even more rarely appreciated in the United States. Notably — and unusually — the U.S. government helped bankroll the film, with a $220,000 grant from the U.S. state department.
It’s the first film shot in Afghanistan to be nominated for any Oscar awards.
The two young stars of the film, Jawanmard Paiz and Fawad Mohammadi, are in Hollywood for tonight’s Oscars, and French has started an education fund for Mohammadi, who French came to know on ‘Chicken Street’ in Kabul as one of many boys selling maps, gum and other small items to foreigners.
Asad, an 18-minute short film produced in South Africa, features a cast of Somali refugees currently living in South Africa, none of which are professional actors, an African version of neorealismo that examines the effects of nearly two decades of civil war and state failure in a small Somali fishing village. A far cry indeed from the over-the-top depiction of Somalis in Black Hawk Down, which won director Ridley Scott a ‘best director’ nomination in 2001.
In both cases, unlike the more well-known films Keating mentions, which as he correctly notes, all too often lump Muslims worldwide as an ‘undifferentiated mass of beards and hijabs,’ Buzkashi Boys and Asad alike both depict their protagonists in more tender, human, universal and relatable terms.
Regardless of whether either Buzkashi Boys or Asad wins tonight, both are well worth your time for a brief view into the cultures of both Afghanistan and Somalia.
But don’t blame it on curmudgeonry, blame it on corruption — apparently, Cupid and cupidity go hand in hand:
A four-paragraph story in People’s Daily said Valentine’s Day had become a hatchery of decadent ideology, indulgent lifestyle, fraud and corruption for some party members who squandered money indulging their lovers.
It went on to say that such a trend had been seen among some senior party members, including disgraced former Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai, former railways minister Liu Zhijun and former Shanghai party secretary Chen Liangyu, who all kept mistresses or had illicit affairs with many women.
The writer then asked why such a romantic holiday in the West, where lovers presented flowers, offered chocolates and sent greeting cards, had transformed into a breeding ground for corruption when it reached the mainland. The problem was cadres who had abandoned communist beliefs, the article said, breaking their party oath and betraying the cause.
I cannot find the story on the People’s Daily English website, only a piece that seemed to welcome the fact that the Spring Festival surrounding Lunar New Year coincides with Valentine’s Day, giving business a boost:
Any concerns that Valentine’s Day clashing with the Spring Festival
holiday might hurt business have been allayed as both retailers and
restaurateurs report good turnover. It could even be said
that the two dates are perfect partners and suit
each other down to the ground.
It’s quite true that Xi Jinping (习近平), the secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党) and the incoming president of the People’s Republic of China, has made waves recently in a speech stating that opposing corruption will be a top priority of his incoming administration — he pledged to pursue both ‘tigers’ and ‘flies’ (in other worlds, both top Party officials and rank-and-file bureaucrats) guilty of corruption.
But perhaps this is taking things a little too far?
Meanwhile, with the United States pursuing a free trade agreement both with the European Union and, through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with South American and East Asian nations, maybe it’s time for China to send a valentine to the European Union to discuss its own bilateral trade agreement.
So, it’s not everyday that The Smoking Gun obtains hacked e-mails from the former president of the United States that showcase his self-portraits.
While I don’t necessarily condone hacking — some of the e-mails detail incredibly sensitive information about the medical condition of former U.S. president George H.W. Bush and other family details, and it seems especially cruel to publish those — they did contain a couple of images I found totally fascinating. It’s also astounding (or maybe not so much, two months after a Gmail account featured prominently ending the career of former CIA director David Petraeus), that a hacker could access so much from a former U.S. president.
Former U.S. president George W. Bush has taken up painting in the years since leaving the White House, and that’s fine (so did former U.S. president and supreme commander of the Allied Forces in World War II, Dwight Eisenhower).
But these paintings are bizarre — self-portraits of the former president in the tub and in the shower that he allegedly thereupon sent to his sister.
It’s a Freudian’s dream — is Bush washing away the sins of his foreign policy decisions on Guantánamo, Iraq and Afghanistan? The running water symbolizing 43’s own private waterboarding?
There’s obviously a limit to what we can learn from the amateur paintings of a former president.
But in a world where leaders from Russian president Vladimir Putin to former UK prime minister Tony Blair bare all in photos and candid memoirs, these self-portraits similarly remind us that world leaders are, after all, human like the rest of us — and it underscores that their decisions while in power are equally influenced by all-too-human convictions, human passions and human errors. Continue reading Photo(s) of the day: Bush 43 takes to painting→
In February 2012, I started this blog as a part-time venture and, nearly 17,000 hits and over 550 posts later, I’m still going strong.
As usual, thanks to my readers and guest contributors — and of course, please do share any thoughts to make Suffragio better: more relevant, more thoughtful, more prescient and more engaging.
With the emergence of Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg as one of two finalists for the Czech presidency in a runoff to be held later this month, it’s worth taking a closer look at the House of Schwarzenberg and its role in European history throughout the centuries.
The house dates back to the Middle Ages, and perhaps its most illustrious member was once referred to as the ‘Austrian Bismarck’ for guiding the Austro-Hungarian empire during the tumultuous and revolutionary 1840s.
So if he wins the runoff on January 26, Karel Schwarzenberg will become an elected head of state with familial ties running throughout the remnants of European monarchy. Schwarzenberg’s mother belonged to another princely family, the Fürstenbergs, making him cousins with the late fashion designer Egon von Fürstenberg. He was also second cousins with Ranier III, who was the prince of Monaco from 1949 until his death in 2005.
The family was initially based Franconia, in what is present-day Bavaria in Germany, and you can tour the ‘Schloss Schwarzenberg’ near Scheinfeld in Bavaria today. Rebuilt in 1618 after its destruction by a fire, it was increasingly less important as the family’s base moved from Franconia to Bohemia in the heart of what is today the Czech Republic in the 17th century (though the castle was occupied by the Nazis during World War II, used as an American hospital on their march to Nuremberg, and it was transformed into a center for Czech literature in 1986).
One of the most influential of the earliest Schwarzenbergs was Johann, a close friend of Martin Luther, an episcopal judge who revised his court’s code of evidence and an influential member of the government of the Holy Roman Empire.
Adam, Count of Schwarzenberg, played a unique role as a top adviser of the Brandenburg Privy Council in the 1630s during the reign of elector George William, keeping Brandenburg neutral during the Thirty Years’ War, though he was ultimately forced to raise an army to expel invading Swedes and became the de facto ruler of Brandenburg from 1638 to 1640 when George William was forced into exile.
The Schwarzenberg coat of arms (pictured above) features a rather graphic tale about central Europe’s battles with the Ottoman Empire — a raven is pecking away at the head of a Turkish man, which was meant to symbolize the 1598 capture of a fortress, Raab (which translates to ‘raven’) in present-day Hungary.
Despite his family’s historical antipathy to the Ottomans in the 16th century, Karel Schwarzenberg, as the Czech foreign minister, has been relatively friendly to a possible Turkish accession to the European Union when the Czech Republic held the rotating six-month EU presidency in 2009, and he even used European history as a way to tweak France’s strident opposition to Turkey’s EU bid:
In the 17th century when central European countries all together fought fierce battles with Turkey, during the Ottoman offensive in Europe, France was practically an ally of Turkey. In the 19th century, as you know, in the Crimean War, France was an ally of Turkey. And now they are opposing it. You see, alliances and attitudes come and go and change, and sometimes we see that even during our lifetime. Continue reading A primer on the House of Schwarzenberg→
It’s somewhat of a New Year’s treat to have been nominated for the 2013 Online Achievement in International Studies awards over at The Duck of Minerva, a top academic international studies blogging forum.
Suffragio has been nominated for 2013’s ‘Most Promising New Blog,’ which is an incredible honor, given that Suffragio remains a one-man show for someone whose day job is outside international affairs. So while my blog has always been a work of love rather than my primary occupation, it’s really great to see that many of my readers enjoy and value Suffragio‘s analysis of world politics.
And it’s been a lot of fun reading the other blogs up for various awards, many of which I was already familiar and some of which are new to me.
The 2013 Most Promising New Blog (Group or Individual) OAIS prize will be awarded to blog, founded in 2011 or 2012, that displays the most promise for ongoing contribution to the intellectual vibrancy of the international-studies blogging community…. Finalists will be selected by popular vote, which will run from 5 January-31 January 2013. We will conduct the vote via online survey. In order to register as a voter, email us.
So I’m not entirely sure who is eligible to register as a voter, but if you’re a regular reader and you want to help Suffragio obtain a little positive notoriety, by all means, please register and vote for Suffragio before January 31!
In the meanwhile, for anyone who has come to my blog via Duck of Minerva, see some of the top Suffragio posts from the past year below the jump.
A humorous post on Weibo, China’s variant of Twitter, of various shots of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin nodding off — or otherwise looking quite somnolent at the 18th National People’s Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Congress kicked off earlier today in Beijing, and is expected to produce the elevation of Xi Jinping (习近平) to the position of general secretary of the Party as China’s current president and ‘paramount leader’ Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) transfers power to a new generation of leaders.
Notably, Hu’s predecessor, former president Jiang Zemin (江泽民) has emerged as a key political player, and he has influenced many of the expected new members of the Politburo Standing Committee that will essentially govern China for the next five years under Xi’s leadership.
The post was removed from Weibo, of course. Despite a remarkably more open transfer of power, there are still limits on political expression in the People’s Republic.
