A Strange Article

A strange news story that stuck out to me (it's behind a pay-wall, so here's the important bits):

IQALUIT, Nunavut (Dow Jones)--European members of the Group of Seven nations told their counterparts that budget problems in Greece are "no matter" for the International Monetary Fund, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Saturday.

Speaking to reporters at the end of a meeting with top G-7 financial officials, Schaeuble said there was "no doubt" that the euro-zone members oppose any outside involvement in helping Greece to solve its problems.

"All our partners outside the euro zone have the firm impression that the Europeans will solve the problem and can deal with it and that we are aware of the problem," Schaeuble said. "But we have strongly and unanimously refused to discuss internal problems." To make that point, he added that Europe isn't discussing problems occurring in the U.S. state of California either.

I don't exactly know why this article struck me so oddly. I guess it's the strongest statement of territorial integrity from Europe I've seen yet. I've held that the slow process of the EU's birth and solidification has been like watching the US' Constitutional Conventions in slow motion -- watching a federation of states become a single nation -- but this is an interesting new take. I suppose this is a by-product of the new EU Constitution, stating that there's now one EU foreign policy and therefore things like the IMF have to go through Europe first.

I guess what really strikes me is that the State of California does not have any internationally recognized sovereignty, whereas as far as I know Greece still does. (side-note: the United States did want to give California some form of internationally recognized sovereignty during the very early days of the United Nations -- the USSR wanted each of its 14 Republics to be treated as separate states for the purposes of the UN's Security Council, and the US threatened that if that was the case, each of its 50 states would be given a vote on the council -- but I digress) I wonder how that statement played in Greece.

Cold War Stories

In addition to being a Supreme Court nut, I am very much a history buff, specifically Cold War history. I'm one day hoping to create a one-man show around my love of telling Cold War stories, but I have other things on my plate.

Why do I love Cold War stories?

Well, the Cold War is an interesting case that makes something I believe about life very clear. In the Cold War, you have events that are driven, largely, because of the Force of History. Each event calls back to the event right before it, each seems like a natural response to the thing that just happened, and yet by the time you're ten events down history has taken baffling turns. Yet things seem to drive towards inevitable events and conclusions.

As a for instance, a lot of ink has been spilled about why the Soviet Union collapsed, and one of the stories -- the one economists tend to favor -- is that the centrally planned economy was inefficient and created a perverse incentive structure which, in aggregate, corroded the economy from Day One, until eventually it was untenable. (the Reagan-killed-the-USSR theory is really an extension of that theory).

On the other hand, the "inevitable force of history" is kind of boring and abstract. And there's a lot of case to be made that Cold War history can be seen through the lens of a few individuals who appear, in choice moments, to make singular decisions that ripple out through history. After all, the Soviet economy was struggling for years and years before the collapse, but the Soviet Union didn't really collapse until Mikhail Gorbachev decided that he was not going to use military force in Eastern Europe, even if Eastern European countries turned away from communism -- that his democratic reforms were more important than territorial integrity. As a point of comparison, Khrushchev was faced with the same decision at the end of the Khrushchev Thaw, when his resolve to end the bloodshed Stalin had unleashed was challenged by an uprising in Hungary. Khrushchev decided differently, and the USSR persisted.

So on the one hand, you have a view of history that is individuals making heroic decisions -- which is, by the way, the theatrical view of history -- or the view of history where large economies of scale overpower the individual and force their hands. These views are not, in fact, incompatible. In fact, the latter emerges from the former.

(That word is very complicated, and rather than explain it, which I would do a pretty poor job of it, I'll leave it to the masters at Radiolab to do that for me. Honestly, LTTWT)

At any rate, I love those moments when a single person managed to change the direction of the Cold War, whether by accident by pure moxie.

Case 1: Matthias Rust, a young West German Teenager who learns how to fly, flies into Moscow, lands outside the Kremlin, goes to prison for a long time, and gives Gorbachev pretext to fire old-guard Communists from the military chain of command.

Case 2: (my favorite) Guenter Schabowski, a party bureaucrat whose single press conference gaffe brought down the Berlin Wall and, in its own way, set a date for the dissolution of the Soviet Union as it had been known for three full decades.