Hasta La Gadget!

My daughter, who just turned 16, is a fairly typical teenager. She’s absorbed in her friends to the exclusion of almost everything else, creating an insular world I only rarely get an insider’s glimpse of. A sophomore, she has friends of all ages, but for whatever reason, many of her closest friends are seniors, set to graduate in a few days before heading off to colleges across the country and even around the world in the fall.

For weeks, my daughter has talked to me about her many emotions surrounding these eventual departures. Already, the idea of saying goodbye to so many in her “friend group” is creating serious pangs of angst and sadness. Her desire to spend every waking moment with her friends this summer almost derailed her long-held goal of being a counselor at her beloved summer camp. She’s agreed to go — but reluctantly.

All this leads me to a conversation she and I had over lunch last week, in which she — once again — talked at length about how hard it will be for her and her friends to bid their farewells. She told me to prepare for a “flood of tears” — and I have no doubt there will be many days filled with crying come August. But as she carried on, and while I rifled through my purse trying to find money to pay the bill, I said something I almost instantly regretted: “Honey, I know this is hard for you to believe, but you probably won’t even remember these people when you’re my age.” At first she looked surprised, but then she turned defiant, assuring me that she most certainly would remember them — all of them — forever.

This obviously isn’t the first time I’ve made a remark in haste, only to wish I could take it back moments later, and it won’t be the last. But this exchange weighed on me more than most. Why was I so dismissive of her emotions? Was it because I am one of those people who was so eager to get out of high school that I graduated six months early? Was it because I wished I’d been better at keeping up with friends from my past? Or was it because I, too, have been feeling wistful about the past and anxious about — and probably even a little jealous of — my daughter’s future?

My daughter is the youngest of my three children. My oldest is already off at college while my middle son is about to graduate high school. Navigating all the changes in our family dynamics hasn’t been easy. Like other parents, I’ve struggled to deal with so many transitions. In the days just after my oldest set off for his freshman year of college, I felt dizzy from the loss. I began the long letting go, mourning the end of my experience as an active mom and trying to accept the shift to a more passive kind of parenting. I’m about to ride the same grief train again with my middle child.

My daughter’s personality has always skewed busy social butterfly and I admire her protective circle of smart, funny friends. But I also find that I sometimes project my own feelings onto her — which simply isn’t right. Just because my own high school experience wasn’t all that fulfilling, doesn’t mean hers won’t be. Indeed, it already is. I love my daughter and should never belittle her sensibilities, even if I don’t always relate to them.

Listening to her interminable worries over the departure of her friends made me wonder why some people hold tight to high school relationships and others don’t. I marvel at those who can remember every single aspect of high school — including their teachers’ names — when I can barely remember what I did last week.

I have one close 50-something friend who couldn’t be paid to attend a high school reunion, and another who counts her school friendships among the most important relationships of her life.

The latter told me, “I’m still friends with my core group from high school, and I feel like that’s a gift. I’ve known most of them since I was 8 years old. We grew up together, did stupid stuff and can now laugh about those times and discuss challenges we’re going through now — with zero judgement. They’re just solid. I feel like we appreciate and get each other in a deep way. It’s kind of weird. I feel like I can be more myself with them now than most anyone else, and that was my main complaint (in my head) about them growing up.”

And so maybe my daughter will be the same, and will keep her friends forever — or at least some of them. Sure, I’m struggling with my own difficult feelings about the stressful transitions coming up in my life — but so is she. Adding my own apprehensions to her emotional stew is never right. But being a good listener — and being more deliberate with my responses — is.

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Mashupye Herbert Maserumule, Tshwane University of Technology

The euphoria of South Africa’s 2016 municipal elections is at its peak, with political parties parading their manifestos, all in competition for a stake in the local sphere of government.

The razzmatazz is deafening. But, it blurs a vexing question: what does governing in the post-apartheid state, 22 years into democracy, mean?

This question is writ large in the level of discontent in the country, which often assumes a form of civil disobedience. Compared to previous years when service delivery protests subsided with electioneering in full swing, things are different this time around.

The countdown to the August 3 election day has seen a marked increase in protests, according to Municipal IQ, a data and intelligence gathering organisation specialising in local government. It’s predicting civil disobedience incidents could reach the highest record of 210 by the end of 2016.

Citizen insurrections are not a uniquely South African phenomenon. The Arab world had its own share of this, which had started earlier in Tunisia. Ukraine experienced a similar thing, while in Turkey, Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia democracy went through a rough patch, in some instances supplanted by dictatorship. In Europe political arrangements to manage public affairs are treated with skepticism.

In a well-argued essay in The Economist, “What’s gone wrong with democracy”, the results of a 2012 survey of seven European countries are telling: “more than half of voters had not trust whatsoever in government.

In a study of 49 democracies, the poll found that voter turnout “declined by 10 percentage points between 1980-84 and 2007-13“.

In South Africa, figures from Statistics South Africa showed that of the 32.6 million people eligible to vote in 2014, only 25.4 million registered while only 18 million actually voted. This means roughly 10 million people stayed away.

In their book Election 2014, political scientists Collete Schulz-Herzenberg and Roger Southall observe that voter turnout in South Africa declined by 29% between 1994 and 2014. The picture for local government elections is gloomier. The highest voter turnout ever recorded since democracy in 1994 was only 57.6% in 2011.

Municipalities are at the coalface of governance and promote socio-economic development and delivery of basic services. Their location within communities is strategically important to institutionalise the connection between government and the governed. They localise democracy.

Low participation in municipal elections creates a democratic deficit. This phenomenon is increasingly becoming a feature of post-apartheid South Africa. Coupled with rising protests, what does this democratic deficit say about the attitudes of citizens towards local government?

Worrying trends of disaffection

Municipal IQ economist Karen Heese characterises the rise in local protests as worrying. As the narrative goes, protests typically subside in an election year. The reason for this appears to be that electioneering in itself creates an opportunity for a direct interaction between politicians and citizens.

But, reading the figures closely, one is compelled to ask: does this narrative still hold?

I am asking this question because 2014, the year of national and provincial elections, saw the highest number of protests to date – at 191. Municipal IQ expects this figure to rise in 2016.

Doesn’t this change the narrative? Isn’t a new trend emerging, suggesting that during an election year, the number of service delivery protests are now most likely to increase?

If so, what could possibly be the reason for this? Could it be that the election period presents a perfect opportunity for voters to extort as many concessions as possible? This, as parties typically are vulnerable in their desperation for votes. At face value, this appears to be the only logical explanation.

In the past, communities extracted concessions from political parties in exchange for votes. But, as is often argued, nothing tangible came from those concessions after these parties were voted into power.

In the character of civil disobedience now at play, it appears that the attitude is increasingly becoming one of questioning the very concept of local government as a means to institutionalise order for the common good.

It seems the issue is no longer about the citizens’ preference for one political party over the other, but the concept of government. The citizens are disengaging from the political processes. In some instances, this assumes a character of governance without government.

Disengagement from local government

This follows the perception that politics are inherently corrupt while the administrations of the state are too bureaucratic to optimise the efficiency of the state. Consequently, this results in experiments about managing public affairs outside the institution of government.

Largely in affluent areas, private arrangements are made for safety and security – ordinarily a government function.

Body corporates are established and assigned the task of managing local affairs. This is particularly the case in sectional title suburban neighbourhoods. They manage water and electricity accounts and security arrangements on behalf of the neighbourhood.

But their relationship with the municipalities is not as antagonistic as is the case with ratepayers’ associations. These often pursue a more radical approach of governance without government. For example, ratepayers’ associations have refused to pay municipal rates in many instances.

Can neighbourhood management of local affairs evolve to the extent of displacing municipalities? Some are agitating for this. Their preference is that body corporates should hold water and electricity accounts directly with the bulk suppliers, cutting out the municipality in the middle.

This makes municipalities obsolete. This is a trend that is gaining traction because of the perception that the local sphere of government is prone to corruption, inefficiency and is largely dysfunctional.

Five years ago, the National Treasury reported in the Local Government Budgets and Expenditure Review that in 42 towns the ratepayers decided to pay “rates and utility charges into trust accounts”. At times they delivered services themselves.

This is an example of disengaging from the processes of government and re-engaging those of the community in the delivery of services.

In rural areas the rejection of municipalities is in the form of violent protests without an alternative form of governance outside government as a means to provide services.

The institution of traditional leadership – an indigenous system of government recognised by the country’s constitution that coexists with the modern system of managing local affairs – does not have adequate administrative dexterity to become an alternative.

Democratic dysfunction or distemper?

Because of all these post-apartheid challenges of managing local affairs, coupled with the fact that year in and year out South Africa’s Auditor-General laments the poor management of municipal finances, we are compelled to ask whether what is at play is, as asked in The Economist essay referred to earlier, “democratic dysfunction or distemper”. Instead of being a means to achieve social order for the common good, the local sphere of government is increasingly becoming a citadel of corruption. It sustains an illicit economy.

The culture of “it’s our turn to eat”, to borrow Michela Wrong’s title of a book about the story of a Kenyan whistleblower, is rampant. This all feeds into the attitude that rejects the concept of government and the agitation for the arrangement of governance without government. Is this what the future holds for local government?

Mashupye Herbert Maserumule, Professor of Public Affairs, Tshwane University of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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I am not going to answer to this question because it is pointless. There are many people, such as myself, who have to start over anyway, no matter what their age.

Life seldom asks you questions. It pushes you into situations where you either swim or sink.

So, what did I do when I found myself jobless, moneyless, marriageless and, well, clueless, at an age when people normally start pondering questions like which country club to join and with whom to play bridge, to kill the afternoon boredom that is the necessary by-product of the life of leisure?

I did what everybody else does when life falls apart: I freaked out, panicked and started to contemplate ways to stop existing.

Then I hit the rock bottom and fell into such pain that even my ever vigilant Ego got silent for a second, long enough for me to have time to send a desperate plea for mercy to whatever/whoever is up there. I did not get any answers, the way Moses got the tablets of stone in the Mount Sinai. But I got a sudden inspiration to become a meditation teacher.

This was a rather curious choice of vocation, as I barely knew what meditation was.

At first it looked as if I was to become a meditation teacher to, well, teach meditation. But it turned out that I needed to take the course because it made me meditate. The occasional Shivasana-moments in my occasional yoga classes weren’t enough. I needed to dig deep into what meditation really was. And I needed to commit myself to practicing it.

Meditation woke me up. I know this is a cliché and like most clichés, this one is true, too.

I woke up, slowly but surely, and got in touch with the The Real Me. She had always been there, of course, under the misty layers of what I had been trained to think was me but wasn’t.

I wish I could say that the rest was history. It wasn’t. But it was a beginning of a new, more awakened life.

Here is what I discovered:

I had seen my sorry situation as a dead-end, not because it was but because I resisted it. I resisted it because it made me feel like a loser. I felt like a loser because I kept doing what we do all the time: compared my failures to other people´ success stories.

What I needed to do first was to accept my situation, in all its crapness.

It was hard. But what choice did I have? What had happened, had happened, and there was no way to make it unhappen because we cannot go back to our past, to fix things so that what has happened would not happen.

And thank Goddess for that, for if we could travel back in time, no one would ever be here, in the Now, to deal with the acute issues, because everybody would be busy in the past, trying to prevent disasters from happening.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to accept what happened — you only need to accept that what happened did happen and, because it did, you are where you are.

The next thing to do was to give a closer look at my anguish. What did it consist of?

There was disappointment. I felt betrayed. Life had let me down.

Disappointment follows when things don’t go the way we have expected. We are trained to think that when we walk the safe side, we have the right to expect to be safe. But life does not work that way. Life has a course of its own.

There was also envy, grief and fear.

I was envious of people who had what I had been ripped off of. For most of my life I had compared myself to others. But then I figured out that not only were such comparisons detrimental to my own well-being, they were also based on the false premise that me and the rest of the people were separate and destined to compete with one another, as if the Universe was be a giant game. It isn’t. There is no competition. We are in this together, like the bulbs in Christmas lights. We either glow together or go out together. The sense of unity was one of the first revelations meditation gave to me.

It is natural to grieve a loss but what was I afraid of?

I was afraid of my future that had suddenly become totally unpredictable. I was screwed-up, so to speak. With a closer look I noticed, much to my surprise, that what I really was afraid of, was the unexpected freedom that I had suddenly been bestowed.

Freedom is a funny thing. It is simultaneously wonderful and scary. But here’s the thing: it is only scary if we let ourselves to get confused by the gazillion of options we see in front of us — or the total lack of them. If, instead, we close our eyes, take a few deep breaths and look within, we realize that we have always been free.

Freedom is detachment. It is faith that whatever happens, we’ll be fine. There is no need to frenetically search for something out there to be okay, when you understand that everything we need is and has always been right here.

When you get that, you are free and will cope with whatever situation you find yourself in.

Earlier on Huff/Post50:

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This August, my husband and I will be celebrating 35 years of marriage. Yes, we even did it all wrong. I was truly a child bride.

Our engagement picture; I was 18.

What is real is that we are “happily enough” married. Still. The truth is, that we have all kinds of shit going down around us all the time. Not one thing. A ton of things. And a lot works about our marriage, and some things will always be problems because we have relationship patterns that suck sometimes. As a love, sexuality and relationship consultant, I know all about relationship patterns, and my husband and I definitely have them.

Our marriage is a blend of old world ideals and lots of stuff that we make up as we go along. Some of what makes our marriage work may not work for you but it works for us and that is key. Our relationships belong to us and nobody else.

Now, staying together for close to four decades of long-term relationship/marriage is kinda a big deal in a world where people celebrate weddings more than they actually stay together. I remember someone telling me that they didn’t want what my husband and I have together, and I remember telling them that they didn’t have a clue. Most people really don’t. To have a happy, and fulfilling long term relationship you need to be able to do a few things besides not dying:

1. Suck it up and turn the other way. Door slamming and walking out doesn’t ever work. Emotional explosions/tantrums are for 3-year-olds. They don’t work in marriages/relationships. And you really don’t have to talk everything out.
2. Be more than willing to let things go.
3. Acknowledge each other’s humanness.
4. Be a fucking cheerleader.
5. Forget sexy date nights as the key to a long-term relationship. Instead, do the fucking dishes. Pour each other coffee in the morning. Put toothpaste on each other’s toothbrush so you find it waiting for you. It’s THAT stuff that will hold you together — believe it or not — the sex educator here will tell you that it is NOT 25 positions and the Karma Sultra.
6. Hold each other. Hold hands. Cuddle. Touch. Marriage needs to be a cuddle party that never ends.
7. Don’t lie.
8. Don’t tell each other everything. There is a big difference between privacy and secrecy. Everyone needs their own space — even extroverts.
9. Share activities and adventures.
10. Have separate activities and adventures.
11. Share an erotic life.
12. Have a private erotic life.
13. Praise each other a lot.
14 Keep some of your life private. Protect each other.
15. Take an interest in each other’s work.
16. Have your own money.
17. Share money.
18. Have your own friends.
19. Share friends.
20. Ask before you choose a movie on Netflix , or turn the channel if the other person wants to watch what you want to watch too.
21. Relationships that go the long haul are not about controlling your partner.
22. Keep your jealousy in check. It might wreck you and them.
23. Apologize.
24. If your partner says go away. You might want to for a little while, but checking in and reaching back is always a good idea. Even if it’s to say: “You know, I love you. I want you in my life. We can work this out.” Sometimes, when we push people away out of hurt and anger — what we really want is for them is to come closer.

Anniversary Picture

Yep. 35 years this summer. I might have learned something, and I am happy to share.

Pamela Madsen runs retreats around the country to help women re-connect to their bodies and sensuous nature and is author of the book; “Shameless: How I Ditched The Diet, Got Naked, Found True Pleasure and Somehow Got Home in Time to Cook Dinner” (Rodale 2011).
https://www.amazon.com/Shameless-Ditched-Pleasure-Somehow-Dinner/dp/1605291757?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Earlier on Huff/Post50:

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On June 23 2016, two days after this is posted, British electors will make a historic decision, which will affect the peoples of Europe and America to a degree they do not yet appreciate. The result of the UK referendum on whether to remain in the EU, or leave it, is still highly unpredictable; as are the consequences of either decision.

Here are nine questions to set the context:

1. Can the EU be unscrambled?

Parag Khanna, the visionary futurist, has no doubt. “EU countries,” he says, “are functionally inseparable, an egg that cannot be unscrambled. Their monetary system, transportation routes, energy grids, financial networks, and manufacturing supply chains are all heavily integrated.”

In Khanna’s view, this is all part of a mainly benevolent global script, whereby cities and regions are becoming closer connected by all kinds of networks – digital, supply chains and other trade networks, gas and oil pipelines, high-speed railroads, electricity grids, new roads, bridges and tunnels, and flows of goods, capital, people, and information.

I will explore the useful insights and implications of Khanna’s book Connectography in my next blog. Broadly he is right – more connections and more trade increases the comparative advantage of different parts of the globe and their wealth. This is hardly a new insight, derived as it is mainly from Adam Smith (1766) and David Ricardo (1817). But Khanna shows in some ways I had not appreciated how this is playing out today, and who the winners and losers are. I’ll cover this next time.

For the moment, however, I will pause and say that the trouble with Khanna’s broad sweep is that he gets a lot of the detail and implications wrong, and nowhere worse than when discussing – with a breath-taking combination of banality and false assertion – our dear old European Union.

According to Khanna, “EU countries are functionally inseparable, an egg that cannot be unscrambled.” It’s a curious metaphor. If anything is being scrambled, it is the nations of Europe, into one entity, a kind of United States of Europe. If they are scrambled irrevocably, this implies that Europe exists, but the nation states that used to exist no longer do. Some people might hope that will become true, and other people would fight it with all their strength. But the idea that it is already true is nonsense.

If it were true, there would be no difference “functionally” between the French and the Germans, between Brits and Belgians, between the Portuguese and the Polish, and so on. This is just not true. Each of these peoples have their own cultures, traditions and values, and they are far from similar – as for example demonstrated by the work of the great Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede.

While nobody has noticed it, have centuries-old democracies would have been abolished, to be replaced by a new dictatorship ruling the whole Continent? Not yet. If the EU was scrambled, then the electors of the United Kingdom could not be deciding whether to leave it.

What about the other “scrambling” cited by Khanna – the EU countries’ “monetary system, transportation routes, energy grids, financial networks, and manufacturing supply chains” which are “all heavily integrated”. Leave aside the euro – I will come to that later. The other elements are somewhat integrated, but still somewhat separate; and the integration, to the extent it exists, stretches beyond the EU countries too. Norway and Switzerland, for example, which lie outside the EU, are integrated into these systems just as much as France and Germany, and rather more than certain EU countries such as Portugal, Malta, and Greece.

If the UK left the EU, it would be no less integrated into European transport routes, energy grids, financial markets, and supply chains. The railways would continue to run. The Channel Tunnel would not be closed. The Portuguese factory making wooden toys for one of my British companies would carry on doing that. Such connections flow from agreements between individual firms and other individual firms, or sometimes individual cities or countries and others, and not between countries and the EU. If the latter were true, the EU would be even more tangled, ungovernable and moribund than the USSR just before it fell.

Global integration is a pluralistic matter, a patchwork quilt of literally millions of separate agreements between decentralized actors, not deals stitched up by governments. Different EU nations have starkly contrasting degrees of connection, both within and outside the EU.

Germany is enormously connected, both within and outside the EU, to partners with whom it trades goods and supply chains to a prodigious extent. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, Germany has a Connected Index score of 110, compared to China at 62, and the United States at 36. But Portugal has relatively few good connections, either to other EU countries or beyond them. Germany would flourish even if the EU was suddenly abolished; and Portugal, as I will argue later, would almost certainly be better off. Connections do not come automatically because of the EU, and would not disappear if it did.

The EU has not been scrambled. If nation states wish to leave or dismantle it, or reform it to take out its objectionable characteristics, they are free to do so. In another ten or twenty years it may be a different matter.

2. Is the European Single Market a good thing?

Free trade is good. It is the basis of the enormous expansion of wealth since the eighteenth century. It is wonderful, marvellous, and priceless. It conquers poverty, and enriches everybody.

The EU encourages free trade within Europe, but is less generous to other regions. Virtually the only goods many African countries can trade are agricultural, and these goods are competitive with European farmers. The EU hands enormous subsidies to French farmers and others within its borders; and keeps cheap food from Africa and elsewhere out.

On balance, though, the single European market increases the flows of free or relatively free trade – and is therefore a very good thing.

The Common Market existed before the EU, and would probably continue to exist after its demise. The Common Market is in every European country’s interests, and if Britain left the EU, it would be able to negotiate access to the single market, as Switzerland and Norway have done without joining the EU.

3. Does the EU’s inexorable expansion plan make sense?

The EU is behaving like an old-fashioned empire, which is highly ironical. The institutions which later morphed into the EU were set up after the Second World War, as a way of overcoming the historic enmity between France and Germany. Under Hitler, Germany had tried to conquer the whole of Europe, and very nearly succeeded. The European experiment was a wonderful way of reconstructing Europe so that common prosperity could bury the enmities that had nearly destroyed the world.

In the first thirty or so years, the European experiment was an enormous success. Without any question, it was a very good thing.

But then – the EU went mad, almost as though it was infected by the plague it had destroyed. The EU’s leaders now believe that the more territory it absorbs, the better. Thus already countries quite unlike Western Europe, such as Bulgaria and Romania, have already been taken into the EU. The latest plan is to bring in Turkey, a huge nation which is half-European and half-Asiatic. The EU has also seen fit to try to influence events in Ukraine, where corruption is rampant and which has always been a Russian satellite.

There are two fundamental issues with the EU’s imperialism. One is that the countries that are already absorbed, and proposed to be absorbed, are quite unlike Western Europe – in the state of their economies, in their democratic maturity, in the standards of their public life, in their degree of corruption, and in their lack of equality between citizens. The second issue is that all the inhabitants of these countries, once they enter the EU, qualify for residence in all other EU countries. I will discuss below whether this is a good or bad thing.

4. Does the quest for Ever-Closer Union between EU countries make sense?

The leaders of the EU are committed to seeking “ever closer union” between its member states. If this means anything, it means that there will eventually be a common economic policy, to which the euro with its common interest rate regime across the twenty-eight current members – with the single exception of the United Kingdom – is already a half-way house. The other half of a common economic policy is a common taxation regime, which would imply that the member states give up the ability to direct their economies separately. If there is ever a common economic policy, this would be the end of the democracy of sovereign states, with annual budgets enshrining the principle of “no taxation without representation”. Representation within an amalgam of twenty-eight – or by that stage perhaps thirty or forty – separate countries would be no representation at all, since everything would be decided at the central level, or by horse-trading within an artificial and ungovernable “European Parliament”.

The result would be that no individual nation would get what it wanted, and the individual citizen in every country would be effectively disenfranchised. This would be particularly true because of the activities of the European Central Bank, which has already forced one member state – Greece – to effectively cancel its democracy and impose an economic policy dictated by the central bureaucracy of the EU, speaking with a heavy German accent.

It should be apparent that the powers-that-be within the EU are remorselessly trying to pursue two policies that are totally incompatible – ever-greater expansion, and ever-closer union. As the EU expands into countries that are at an earlier stage of economic development – including some countries that are scarcely viable economically, according to Western European standards – the task of ever-closer union becomes ever more impossible, socially, culturally, and economically. Even with the current size of the EU, ever-closer union would mean the death of democracy. With expansion beyond its current size, the EU risks becoming ungovernable and/or forcing the richer countries of the North and West of Europe to secede, as their electorates baulk at the ever-greater cost of subsidizing the newer entrants to the EU as well as the existing problem-children of Italy, Spain, and Greece.

5. Is the euro a good thing?

For the traveller and the business-person, a common currency is certainly convenient.

But it comes at an immense cost – making the economies of the weaker countries unviable, and causing huge unemployment there.

Because trade unions naturally protect their existing – older – members, it becomes very hard for young people in Southern Europe to get a decent job. Youth unemployment in Greece and Spain approaches half of all people under twenty-five, and Portugal is not far behind. Poverty amongst young people and less skilled older people in Greece and southern Italy has to be seen to be believed. Crime, prostitution, and emigration are the only options for many.

Before the euro was introduced in 1999, countries with weak economies could stay afloat by allowing their currencies to depreciate, causing exports to become cheaper and imports more expensive. With the advent of the euro, this price mechanism, which is central to trade between weaker economies and stronger ones, ceased to operate. Rising unemployment and national indebtedness was the inevitable consequence for the weaker countries.

The current system has huge benefits for the stronger countries within the euro – principally Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. Germany in particular, which has competitive advantage in many engineering-based industries such as car manufacture, is able to export its goods at prices that are attractive, because of the euro. If the mark was still its currency, Germany would have a steadily appreciating currency and its exports would fall. Effectively Germany has zero unemployment as a result; its natural level of unemployment is being exported to Southern Europe along with its cars.

Not all the economic ills of Greece, Italy, Spain or Portugal flow from the euro. There are structural problems because of entrenched union power, inflexible labor markets, lack of competitive advantage in growth markets, lack of a high customer service culture, the dead hand of massive state and regional bureaucracies, and a dearth of experienced entrepreneurs. All of these disqualifications applied before the euro; and they apply still. But the euro removed the safety valve of currency depreciation, the crucial mechanism for allowing trade between strong and weak economies and therefore keeping the latter alive.

6. Will Southern European countries leave the euro?

Sooner or later, they will have to.

The problem is that they are bullied into staying in the euro, for fear that leaving it will trigger expulsion from the EU. This is because the strong countries within the euro benefit massively – for weak countries, staying in the euro is the price for being subsidized by massive grants, loans, and other hand-outs from Brussels; and for freedom to move to the rich countries.

Ultimately the price will prove too high.

7. Is freedom to migrate within the EU a good thing?

Yes. Ultimately, freedom to move to richer countries is a form of economic development, as well as a precious right for energetic people determined to better their lives. And history shows that economies always benefit from large-scale immigration. This was why the United States became such a powerhouse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Free trade in people makes as much sense as free trade in products and services.

But there is a problem of absorption. Migration within the EU is not random. The migrants come from the poorer countries and go the richer ones.

And here we come to the nub of the problem. For centuries, national states have defended their borders against invaders. In the last century or so, nation states have retained control over immigration, as the necessary precaution to avoid social unrest and hostility to new arrivals. It is a delicate balance between an economic good, the economic benefit to both immigrants and the existing population, on the one hand; and a social and political reaction if immigration is too great or of people too diverse and different from the host population. Experience shows that cultural problems can be overcome, and the host nation ends up richer socially and culturally as well as economically.

But to require nations to give up control over immigration, as the EU has long done, is contentious when the numbers rise dramatically, as they have recently.

What seems to me sensible is to give EU countries the freedom to determine their own immigration policy, but with a points-based system giving a large but not necessarily decisive advantage to applicants from other EU countries.

If the EU were serious about reform, it would have implemented such a policy already, instead of trying to foist a large number of migrants on individual member-states by compulsion.

This will end in tears.

8. Is national sovereignty an outdated concept?

Nation states are not everything. As Parag Khanna has shown, cities in particular are becoming as important as nations, at least economically.

But Europe is one of the most diverse places on earth, culturally, historically, and politically. Each country has its own culture, values, and identity.

Politically, Europeans are united on one thing only – that they will never give up the central role of their own national parliaments. If they have to leave the EU to retain control, they will do so.

9. Should the UK leave the EU?

Yes.

For the sake of Europe – to jolt the EU into serious reform and a recognition that the existing “deal” between richer and poorer European nations is unsustainable. The euro must go, to allow Southern European countries to recover and employ their own young people. Freedom of movement must be a qualified right, as it is everywhere else on earth between sovereign nations. The budget and the power of EU leader-bureaucrats must be clipped. The sovereignty of individual states must be respected in perpetuity. And the EU must stop behaving like an old-fashioned imperialist, greedy to expand its reach into unsuitable countries.

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