[LINK] Argentines in Central Europe

Over at Transitions Online, Andres Schipani-Aduriz explores the phenomenon of return migration by by Argentines of central European descent to their ancestral homelands in his article "The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Argentine".

Teodoro Brhel [is] a Porteño (native of Buenos Aires) on the verge of gaining Czech citizenship, who is currently working as a Spanish teacher and translator in Prague. And there are many other potential Ariels. "The Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Slovenian communities of Argentina are the second-largest in the world, right after those in the United States," says Josef Opatrny, the head of the Hispanic-American Department at Charles University in Prague. In all, says Dr. Juan Eduardo Fleming, the Argentinian ambassador to the Czech Republic, 40,000 Czechs and Slovaks emigrated to Argentina. Numerous other Argentines are of Central European descent: the Hungarian consulate in Buenos Aires believes as many as 50,000 people in just this one Latin American country could claim a Hungarian passport. Brazil and other South American states are home to many others.

This wave was emigration was triggered partly by Argentina's economic collapse in 2000. Although the Argentine economy has largely recovered, having a central European passport is still enormously attractive to Argentines who want access to the labour markets of the European Union.

But even if the immediate compulsion to leave Argentina weakens, there is another reason for the minor exodus that will almost certainly remain powerful: the prospect of a relatively prosperous, secure, and orderly life that a European Union passport offers. For most Argentinians of Central European descent, it is in fact not the ancient motherland that calls most back to Europe. For Jose Balastik, a car-painter who left Argentina in early 2002, immediately after the economy imploded, the promised land is Spain, not the Czech Republic. "I was an illegal resident [in Spain] until last January," he says, but then "the Czech consulate in Madrid provided me with Czech citizenship." For him, his Czech passport, gained because his father was a Czechoslovak who emigrated to Argentina in 1930, is a passport of convenience.

This isn't altogether surprising, considering the still very real income differentials between the EU-15 and the new central European member-states. The future of this migratory wave depends on multiple factors: the growth of the Argentine economy, the development of central Europe as a wealthy destination for immigrants in its own right, changes in naturalization and immigration law. It's worthwhile to pay attention to it because of all of these factors.

Migration on the semiperiphery is always interesting to watch.

[LINK] More on Iraq's Future

The Washington Post reports that Shiite religious leaders in Iraq want the Shiite-majority south, including the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and Iraq's second city of Basra, to be united in a single state that would be home to more than half of the Iraqi population and governed by Islamic law. Quite apart from what this says about the likely human-rights situation in post-Saddam Iraq, such an overwhelmingly powerful federal unit would dominate the Iraqi state like Prussia within the Second Empire and Weimar Germany, while, like the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic it would be entirely capable of independent statehood in its own right. It's worth noting that, in Lebanon's The Daily Star, Peter Galbraith reports that Iraq is apparently beginning to take its cues from Iran while favouring an Islamic republic at home.

SCIRI and Daawa want Iraq to be an Islamic state. They propose making Islam the principal source of law, which most immediately would affect the status of women. For Muslim women, religious law - rather than Iraq's relatively progressive civil code - would govern personal status, including matters relating to marriage, divorce, property and child custody. A Daawa draft for the Iraqi constitution would limit religious freedom for non-Muslims, and apparently deny such freedom altogether to peoples not "of the book," such as the Yezidis (a significant minority in Kurdistan), Zoroastrians and Bahais.

This program is not just theoretical. Since Saddam's fall, Shiite religious parties have had de facto control over Iraq's southern cities. There Iranian-style religious police enforce a conservative Islamic code, including dress codes and bans on alcohol and other non-Islamic behavior. In most cases, the religious authorities govern - and legislate - without authority from Baghdad, and certainly without any reference to the freedoms incorporated in Iraq's American-written interim constitution - the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL).

Daawa and SCIRI are not just promoting an Iranian-style political system - they are also directly promoting Iranian interests. Abdul Aziz Hakim, the SCIRI leader, has advocated paying Iran billions in reparations for damage done in the Iran-Iraq war, even as the Bush administration has been working to win forgiveness for Iraq's Saddam-era debt. Iraq's Shiite oil minister is promoting construction of an export pipeline for petroleum from Basra to the Iranian port city of Abadan, creating an economic and strategic link between the two historic adversaries that would have been unthinkable until now. Iraq's Shiite government has acknowledged Iraq's responsibility for starting the Iran-Iraq war, and apologized. It is an acknowledgment probably justified by the historical record, but one that has infuriated Iraq's Sunni Arabs.

[. . .]

On July 7, the Iranian and Iraqi defense ministers signed an agreement on military cooperation that would have Iranians train the Iraqi military. The Iraqi defense minister made a point of saying American views would not count: "Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries." However, even if the training is deferred or derailed, it is only the visible - and very much smaller - component of a stealthy Iranian encroachment into Iraq's national institutions and security services.

It was perhaps inevitable that a post-Saddam Iraq would end up this way, and I continue to think that the goal of ending Saddam's dictatorship was worthy (though, alas, horribly executed). Even so, I have to congratulate the United States for managing such a spectacular own goal against its stated geopolitical interests.

[REVIEW] Rod Kedward's La Vie en bleu

La Vie en bleu, the third volume of Penguin's history of France, is a very enjoyable and academically respectable history of France from 1900 to the present. Adam Thorpe's review at The Guardian says most of what I'd like to say about this tome. I'll just add that Kedward's development of memory and representation as a trope of his analysis of France is rewarding.