#Euro-Bloc
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I know I'm always grumbling about tumblr people being incapable and unwilling of even for a lark trying to understand the worldview of people outside the imperial core, but I really want you to try to imagine that some of us out there really and genuinely don't recognize the US and Europe as "civilization".
I know that for many of you the development of Euro-USian societies up to the point of the Westphalian nation-state and eventually the postwar liberal democracy is definitionally and tautologically-civilization, but what if I told you that a large and growing contingent of people in the global south, especially since the beginning of al-Aqsa Flood, have began to view this bloc of nations as civilization's opposite?
What if I told you that to a great many people, the US and Europe are nothing more than brutal, bloodthirsty bandits and looters, who have not developed civilization but instead have used their mass stores of stolen wealth to avoid doing so? That they've used their masses of wealth gained through mass murder, banditry, and establishment of puppet leaders to flood the world with literally Orwellian propaganda, which defines civilization as its opposite, and merely hides the blood-stained, heartless cruelty of the white-lead "international community" under a petty façade of civility?
How might that fundamentally change the way you read global events?
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cities skylines if you will not let me build my communist bloc concrete apartment rows and have everybody like it because the rent is 10 euros and the rooms are well insulated and maintained for free then you have failed as a game about city building
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March 18 (UPI) -- Poland and three Baltic states Tuesday announced their intention to withdraw from the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning the use of anti-personnel mines to give their forces a critical defensive edge amid a "fundamental" deterioration of the security of NATO member states bordering Russia and Belarus.
In a joint statement, the defense ministers of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said that with a significant increase in military threats and the unstable security situation marked by Russia's aggression and the ongoing threat it posed to the Euro-Atlantic community, the decision was aimed at sending an unequivocal message they were ready and able to take "every necessary measure to defend our territory and freedom."
"We believe that in the current security environment, it is paramount to provide our defense forces flexibility and freedom of choice to potentially use new weapons systems and solutions to bolster the defense of the Alliance's vulnerable Eastern Flank," they said. "In light of these considerations, we unanimously recommend withdrawing from the Ottawa Convention."
The ministers vowed the move would not weaken their respective countries' commitment to international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians during armed conflict, saying they would continue to uphold IHL principles "while addressing our security needs."
They insisted the move was warranted by the "dire security challenges" confronting them, asking Allies and partners who recognized that reality to "respect our decision in this matter."
The announcement came two weeks after Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said his country, which saw parts of its territory annexed by Russia after World War II and the rest of the country forcibly subsumed into the Soviet-controlled communist-Eastern Bloc, would begin the process of quitting the landmines convention.
The war in Ukraine has seen Russia turn its neighbor into virtually the most mined country on Earth, according to the United Nations.
Ukraine, a signatory to the convention that has been provided with anti-personnel mines by the United States, has previously warned it cannot guarantee full compliance amid a battle for its very survival.
However, with no pressing military imperative to bring the banned mini-weapons, which are specifically designed to maim and kill troops as opposed to mines targeting tanks or ships, the ministers of the four countries said they would consult with allies and neighbors.
"Decisions regarding the Ottawa Convention should be made in solidarity and coordination within the region. At the same time, we currently have no plans to develop, stockpile, or use previously banned anti-personnel landmines," said Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur.
Latvian defense staff chief Major General Kaspars Pudans told Politico recently that currently anti-tank mines and artillery were a higher priority for Latvia's defense.
Notably, Finland, which has a remote 830-mile-long eastern border with Russia, did not sign onto Tuesday's declaration but Defense Minister Antii Hakkanen said it was also thinking about quitting.
The United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and South Korea are among more than 30 countries that have never signed the treaty.
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FVCKING FACTS
DOLLAR IS JUST PAPER
At the 16th annual BRICS summit (22-24 October), member states adopted the ‘Kazan Declaration’, with provisions to strengthen multilateralism, enhance cooperation for global and regional stability and security, foster economic and financial cooperation, and strengthen people-to-people exchanges for social and economic development. They also approved a BRICS ‘grain exchange’ to ensure food stability.
Some, like Zimbabwe-born motivational speaker Joshua Maponga in this clip, argue that fiat currencies, like the US dollar, Euro, British pound and Japanese yen, should be abandoned in favour of a gold-backed system.
At the summit, the bloc of five original members (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) plus four new members (Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates) welcomed using local currencies for transactions between BRICS countries and their trading partners.
Many African presidents have called for de-dollarisation, but the biggest win may be when Saudi Arabia pulls away from a decades-old petrodollar deal with the US.
The US dollar was pegged to gold’s value until US President Richard Nixon (1913-94) removed the gold standard in 1971. Since then, the US has printed the world’s reserve currency at will, sealing its status as a global hegemon.
So, how can countries break free of the US dollar's grip? Maponga argues gold is the answer.
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IBO reference notes on . . . the economic blocs
In episode 4, we are shown this map, depicting the current national organisation of the Earth in Iron-Blooded Orphans' setting.
This raises a number of questions, primarily 'what were they smoking when they decided to combine Canada and Russia'?, secondarily 'what does Gundam have against Australia?', and further, 'what's the deal here?' In the spirit of obsessive nerdery -- and inspired by @qqchurch posting about a particular map prop -- I thought I'd have a crack at pulling together some answers.
Some spoilers and a rhetorical swerve ahead.
The bigger picture
Geographically -- astrographically? -- the solar system of Iron-Blooded Orphans is split into different 'spheres', principally the Earth Sphere and the Outer Sphere. This is a holdover from the original 1979 Gundam series, which used 'Earth Sphere' to refer to the region of space containing Earth, the Moon, and the various orbital colonies located within this gravitational system.
I should note, mostly for myself, that while writing fan-fic for IBO I fell into the habit of writing Outer Spheres, pluralising a term I believe is only ever singular within the canon. This stems from the grouping of both Mars and Jupiter (and presumably the Asteroid Belt) into the Outer Sphere. I would argue that post-canon, the pluralisation makes sense since we then have the Mars Sphere as a discrete political entity, but even without this, grouping two distinct planet/moon groups into one sphere seems to cut against the Universal Century definition given above.
[EDIT: I was mistaken here; Kudelia does in fact use 'Outer Spheres' when discussing Earth and the colonies' reorganisation following the Calamity War. She in fact refers to Mars and Jupiter as Outer Spheres, so either I am misremembering the usage elsewhere, or the terminology drifts later.]
Nevertheless, as a in-universe division it makes sense. Earth is the centre of power in this setting, the other planets existing as its colonial holdings. An 'Inner Sphere' or 'Venus Sphere' (depending on which logic we follow to style it) is also visited in spin-off game Urdr Hunt, having been left to decay now its utility in terraforming Mars is over.
In terms of political organisation beyond the Earth Sphere, we spend most of our time with Mars, which is sub-divided into colonies following present-day naming conventions for Martian topography. The principle action takes place on the Chryse Planitia, with the city of Chryse being this region's capital. The city of Noachis, presumably capital of the neighbouring Noachis Terra, is also mentioned.
In practice, Mars is administered as a whole by Gjallarhorn, on behalf of the Earth political blocs that own the various individual colonies, with the officer in charge of the occupation ruling from the Ares space station. The Venus colonies, including the tethered Radonitisa Colony, are likewise overseen from an Aphrodite station, and we might therefore infer a Zeus station exists too. This is in fact one of the few guesses we can reasonably make about Jupiter, since we never actually visit it during the course of the series. Jupiter's moons are likely inhabited, since four subsidiaries of the Teiwaz conglomerate are named after them (IOS, Ganymede Farm, Euro Electronics, Callisto), and it is also probable there are a number of O'Neil cylinder space colonies in the vicinity (flashbacks with Naze and Amida show them sharing a hotel room aboard such a structure). But we never get any hint of how Jupiter is governed, except that the most powerful organisation there seems to be the aforementioned Teiwaz, a corporate mafia/yakuza (they are at once both Italian and Japanese; it's glorious). No other official body ever comes up.
The division of Mars dates to a few years after the Calamity War, when Gjallarhorn was directed to recreate the Martian government from scratch, following on from overseeing the reorganisation of the Earth into four 'economic blocs', abolishing old national borders. And it is here I shall be focusing this post, to take a look at what we are told about each bloc. For the sake of a structure, I am going to take them in reverse order to how much we know, which means we start with the Oceanian Federation.
The Oceanian Federation

Well, first off, their flag goes the hardest of the four. Just look at this.
That aside, of all the blocs, it is a little peculiar that we know the least about the Federation given theirs is the only non-Arbrau, non-Gjallarhorn territory we spend any time in while on Earth. It is they who offer refuge to Arbrau's ousted Prime Minister Makanai after all, setting him up on a tropical island retreat while he awaits the chance to regain power.
This is an impressively sprawling place, befitting a man of Makanai's station. It displays distinctly Japanese style architecture and decoration, which makes sense given this is the bloc in which Japan is situated (it combines Asia with Oceania). Given Makanai's name and preferred form of dress, it is plausible he is himself from the Federation originally, although there is sufficient cultural overlap on display elsewhere that this is far from a necessary conclusion. Regardless, for their own reasons, they give him sanctuary, up to the point Carta Issue pressures them into rescinding their protection and allowing her to pursue Tekkadan.
In a similar vein, the Federation offers Tekkadan's space-based forces safe harbour at their colonies, as quid pro quo for interfering with the African Union's operations. A different set of (specifically industrial) colonies is later shown in Season 2, undergoing an attempted workers' uprising. Having watched the African Union suffer from the Dort uprising in Season 1, the Federation's leaders are not prepared to risk the same happening to them and they give Gjallarhorn a free hand to violently suppress those involved.
Beyond this, we learn nothing whatsoever of the Federation's people or government. The world map aboard the Montag Company ship that carries Tekkadan from Makanai's island to Arbrau centres Japan, an indication that while Gjallarhorn uses Euro-centric maps, this doesn't represent cultural (or navigational) homogeneity. But this is I think more interesting on a meta level, in regards the positioning of the two maps within friendly and antagonistic factions, respectively. As a world-building detail, it's merely logical for a Pacific-based freighter to carry such a chart.
Going beyond the text and doing a quick spreadsheet calculation based on Wikipedia's summary of 2023 data, the Oceanian Federation would account for a full 50% of the Earth's population, with the African Union encompassing approximately 35%, the SAU 13% and Arbrau a paltry 2%. That, however, does not account for the Calamity War and the consequent extermination of a quarter of the human race. In light of this, we might spin the division as a subtly horrific bit of environmental storytelling. We know mobile armours will prioritise targetting the largest concentration of human beings they can detect. What would this have meant for places like India or China when things ran out of control?
Obviously we don't know the state of population distributions pre-War and the quarter figure is given for the solar system as a whole. Still, if we are to assume the four-way sub-division made some sort of sense in the immediate aftermath of the Calamity War, a proportionally heavy casualty rate for the most populous nations on the planet could provide a possible justification for such an uneven-looking arrangement.
(In case you're wondering, subtracting the entire quarter from the Oceanian Federation shifts the percentages as follows: OF: 34%, AU: 47%, SAU: 17%, A: 2%. I present this as an illustration of alternative distributions rather than a feasible scenario; I don't actually believe there's a way to make the division follow purely from current world population.)
Oh, yes, and per tradition, Australia has a big honking hole in it, a call-back to the original Gundam anime's opening colony-drop, that presumably marks an event from the Calamity War. Like the damage done to the Moon, this is never expanded upon, but it does lend some credence to assuming Oceania bore the brunt of the conflict.
The Strategic Alliance Union (SAU)

Hello, yes, this is American one.
The SAU's principle role in the plot is to be incited into war against Arbrau as part of Galan Mossa's plan to embarrass McGillis. This scheme takes advantage of a pre-existing border dispute, the exact details of which are not provided: they're far over the heads of our point of view characters. The conflict occurs on 'Balfour Plain', which I take to mean in the vicinity of Balfour, British Columbia. Beyond that, things are left vague.
It does highlight that friction between the blocs is present along lines going beyond mere economic competition. Indeed, it underlines the blocs as competing entities. They operate as nation-states, advancing their own agendas. This extends, following the events of Season 1, to amassing overt military strength.
We can't attribute the mobile suit storehouse show in the opening montage for Season 2 to any particular bloc. But it does house several Hexa frames in addition to Rodis, which ties in with the later appearance of Gildas at the head of the SAU's army. These are Calamity War-vintage 'suits brought out of mothballs after Tekkadan shook things up by deploying at Edmonton, and they make for a notable contrast with Arbrau's own mecha contingent, which consists of brand new Hloekk Grazes bought from Gjallarhorn.
Gjallarhorn also deploys to provide battlefield support to the SAU, indicating the extent to which this peace-keeping force can intervene in inter-bloc conflicts. Perhaps McGillis' forces act on behalf of the putative defender, given the war was instigated when an SAU jet crashes following exposure to an Arbrau Hloekk Graze's unshielded Ahab reactor. Having not considered the situation critical enough to require mobile suits, the SAU views this as unprovoked escalation and appeals for support.
Which brings us to the rest of the SAU's military forces, consisting of planes use for reconnaissance and mobile workers. This tells us jet fights still have a place Post-Disaster, and that the mobile worker industry is eccentrically prolific.
Like Arbrau, the SAU's military is described as inexperienced. I am not sure where to fit an evident air force into that picture: it could be the lack of experience does not denote newness, as it does for Arbrau's defence force, but simply the absence of any active role prior to the declaration of war. Although the bloc's name -- Strategic Alliance Union -- sounds atypically militaristic compared to the others (rather like naming a country after NATO), it is not ascribed greater martial prowess. The conflict boils down to two rag-tag armies chipping ineffectually away at another, falling for Mossa's attempt to bog the region down in a petty, protracted war and thus ruin McGillis' reputation as a peacekeeper.
That about covers the extent of the information we learn about the SAU in the main series. For more, we must turn to Urdr Hunt and...
Well. OK. I am obliging myself to include this, aren't I? The Zahn Clan are introduced in the game as a crime family from the SAU. The two sons of the Clan's founder, Rubian, are dispatched to take part in the titular hunt to test whether they have the chops to succeed him as head of the organisation. I won't go into the plot here; you can look up my summaries or simply go watch it for yourselves. (Note: official translations of the names have since been provided on the website for the upcoming animated adaptation, but some of these seem of slightly dubious quality compared to earlier fan-sourced versions [I don't think 'Lubian' can be right].)
The thing is, the Zahn family -- Rubian, Rome and Aiko -- are African American gangsters. Stereotypically so. Their mobile suits are styled after cars, they're decked out in rings and gold chains, Aiko has a baseball cap, Rome, extravagant piercings, etc. They're a caricature of United States criminality and the problem is, IBO's art-style tends grotesque when it comes to the underworld, meaning the result is, in motion, when the detail level drops, extremely uncomfortable. It certainly doesn't help that the brothers are depicted as buffoons, playing straight the 'comedy relief idiot' trope Iok subverts in the anime proper (that is, Iok is an idiot and it is not remotely funny).
Their dad is *not* a fool, nor is fellow gangster Jabiro, but I really, really wish this didn't hit quite so many racism buttons at once. Nonetheless, they are a depiction of an aspect of the SAU and must be included in a post covering what we know about the blocs.
Rubian has been wildly successful at running his underworld empire. Though old and infirm, he remains extremely sharp, ruling the Zahn Clan from an honest-to-goodness castle in his home territory. I have no idea which way this cuts with regard to racist caricatures. It seems to be suggesting a level of in-universe tastelessness but quite frankly, I don't think I can fault a mobster who gets wealthy enough to go, 'I'll live like a literal king'.
In terms of the Zahns' relationship to their home bloc, I noted in another post that they are remarkably well-equipped, fielding top-of-the line 'suits alongside more venerable models (including a lot of Gildas) and surplus Gjallarhorn spacecraft. While we know 'top-down' corruption is rife in the Earth Sphere in the sense of Gjallarhorn members empowering themselves by overstepping the bounds of neutrality, the Zahns demonstrate that 'bottom-up' corruption is alive and well too. Indeed, they are described as being explicitly 'backed' by the SAU , with a presence in all of the SAU's territory on Earth and having both Gjallarhorn and government officials in their pocket.
As is to be expected, the blocs are as sordid as contemporary nations, with the criminal classes very much in on the act.
The African Union

That's the Republic of Gambia's flag rearranged into something less cool.
I hesitate to classify the African Union conspiring with Gjallarhorn against the workers unions as an act of corruption, on the principle that 'corruption' implies the system is not functioning as intended. Far from being broken by moving to curtail the activism of people who are (theoretically) its citizens, the Union works to perpetuate its interests, something judged to have been harmed when it eventually concedes to some of the workers' demands. These are economic blocs, after all. Extracting profit and generating wealth is the tacit reason for their existence.
Let's back up. I've re-litigated Season 1's Dort Colony arc in multiple essays at this point, largely because it is a capsule of the series' themes. The struggles of the people who operate industrial facilities for the benefit of "rich factory owners from Earth" -- who live in splendour compared to the slums where the masses are relegated -- culminates with a bloody massacre, Gjallarhorn having manufactured an excuse for violence by allowing tensions to escalate to the point of armed insurrection. These events provide a snapshot of how the writers conceive of colonial and anti-labour oppression, a demonstration of the injustices that permeate every level of the society they have imagined, and an ambiguous moment of success for the protagonists. Kudelia Aina Bernstein gets to be the brave, fearless 'maiden of revolution', photogenically turning the media apparatus against government overreach. But it is underpinned by dubious backroom deals and a sense of how easily things could have gone the other way. This won't be the last time Tekkadan faces the Arianrhod Fleet and their visible insignificance before hundreds of ships and mobile suits is sinisterly prefigurative in retrospect.
For my purposes today, there are two important components to this arc. Well, three really, but we can take Gjallarhorn's utility as the blocs' enforcer as read. So -- the first is how the African Union relates to those living aboard the space colonies, and the second is the way in which those colonies are run for its benefit.
The Dort Company is described as running the colonies as a 'public enterprise' for the Union. As I mentioned in an aside while writing about how IBO engages with capitalism, this creates a surface-level contradiction where we have factories privately owned, presumably for profit, but the colonies themselves framed as a public service. Yet I don't think anybody familiar with how privatisation consumes such services will have a hard time reconciling this. The degree to which the Union is or is not doing state capitalism is ultimately irrelevant: the conflict is between the workers and the company that employs them, as a proxy for the bloc that consigned them to a miserable existence as expendable labour.
The Dort Company is an extremely prominent presence, their branding displayed at scale and their workers all sporting green jackets. 'Dort', by the way, is the historical English name for Dordrecht, the oldest city in Holland and a shipbuilding centre for the Netherlands Trading Society, which maintained shipping lines to the 'Dutch East Indies' (Indonesia). Dordrecht also gave its name to a town in South Africa, in a further link to European imperialism. I can't be sure to what extent IBO's writers were deliberately evoking that history, but it seems unlikely to be an idle connection. The Dort Company is a tool of an Earth-centric empire, maintaining the industrial mechanisms that sustain the African Union, space colonies having taken the place of 'third-world' manufacturing centres. This is where consumer goods are produced, for those who live well, by those who scrape by in poverty.
The visuals sell this with straightforward bluntness. We are shown the slums that house the workers and we are shown the shopping centres frequented by the factory-owning class. Yamagi comments, on seeing the home of labour union leader Navona Mingo on Dort 2, that he expected the colonies to be a lot nicer. He was perhaps picturing the kind of environment Mikazuki, Biscuit, Kudelia, Atra and Fumintan explore aboard Dort 3, a 'first-world' cityscape. The point being made is that these contrasts go together, often in the very cities that look so good on the surface. There is always a disposable underclass, always exploitation required to fuel superficial prosperity.
What I find interesting is that in none of this do we ever see the 'true' African Union, the society the Dort Colonies exist to serve. We never meet any representatives of the Union itself: Gjallarhorn deals with Dort Company executives and faceless communiques. Even in spin-off manga Moon Steel, where the bribery of Gjallarhorn officers by African Union officials is a key plot point, the action remains focused on the space colonies, on the people living in what is essentially captive territory.
This is likewise true for the previous two blocs I've covered and it's a canny choice, centring the struggles of the colonial subjects. The African Union has a 'ruling council'. But our sole insight into them is that they decide to reverse course and put a stop to Gjallarhorn's anti-labour operation at the last minute, afraid of the media exposure Nobliss Gordon arranged for Kudelia. The Dort Company then comes to the table with the (remaining) workers, granting labour rights equal to those existing on Earth.
Obviously this tells us such rights are not the general rule in the colonies, that employees on Earth enjoy privileges denied to those in space, and that the Union leadership is sufficiently sensitive to bad press, they don't want to be seen to sanction the killing of hundreds of colonists. At the same time, what is not said is also significant. We don't know, precisely, what 'rights equal to workers on Earth' materially entails. McGillis' backstory establishes the existence of a terrestrial underclass. There is every reason to believe Yamagi's misapprehensions hold true for the planet as they do for the space colonies: there is no land of wholesale luxury, just the same hierarchical, exploitative structures repeated in different locations.
I admit to finding the idea of Europe being subsumed into an African Union a deliciously ironic one. As a background detail, it's shallowly pleasing. Implied turnabout. But that doesn't matter, does it? Any redress of historical crimes is overshadowed by the fact nothing has been fixed. The same old imperial structures are reiterated, the same old injustices perpetuated. Who is being exploited is of lesser concern than that exploitation is occurring. That's why the details of the blocs' governmental structure and home conditions are largely irrelevant. They are powerful national entities engaged in the operation of capitalism at the expense of their subjects. Whether those operations occur in Indonesia, high orbit or on Mars, the flaw lies in the basic structure of the relationship.
Someone is being worked to death so that someone else, distant or otherwise isolated from this material reality, can profit.
Arbrau

OK, now you're just throwing shapes at a background.
It is inevitable that the bloc we are told the most about should be the one that owns the territory in which the story begins. Chryse is an Arbrau colony; ergo, it is with the Arbrau government that Kudelia must negotiate in order to improve the lot of her fellow Martians. Season 1 is about reaching the heart of this bloc's power, the parliament in Edmonton, Alberta, an aim that morphs into restoring Togonosuke Makanai to the office of prime minister and stymieing the machinations of his Gjallarhorn-backed rival, Henri Fleurs. At last, we can take a look at how Iron-Blooded Orphans conceptualises the political functions of its quartered Earth.
Gundam Wiki states that Arbrau "appears to be a parliamentary democracy" and, while I occasionally have cause to take issue with the editors at that site, this is entirely correct. There is a parliament, as mentioned, a prime minister, a debating chamber, and elections. It is an overtly civilian institution, in contrast to Gjallarhorn's militaristic aristocracy. It is overtly civilised, in the sense of being a bunch of people in business suits ruling a nation.
I should clarify immediately, not least because this threw me on first viewing, that it is not the form of parliamentary democracy found in modern-day Canada. The way the election of the prime minister works is modelling (unsurprisingly) on the Japanese system, where the legislative body holds responsibility for nominating someone to that position (rather than it being de-facto filled by the leader of the dominant party). Hence Makanai and Fleurs courting the support of various ministers and the election being entirely contained within the bounds of the sitting government.
In the epilogue to the series, Lasker Alessi talks about having a constituency, hoping Takaki will take over from him there in the future. We can take from this that Arbrau is a representative parliamentary democracy (not a given; parliaments can operate without representing the citizenry), and therefore that it is more or less the assumed default in the context where the show was written. This is what politics is 'supposed' to look like.
These markers of familiarity are worth bearing in mind when considering the ways Arbrau is depicted as being overtly sympathetic. Makanai has long championed greater economic freedom for the Chryse region; indeed, Arbrau was the first of the blocs to grant limited autonomy to its Martian colonies, some hundred odd years prior to the present. The parliament members respond favourably to Kudelia's landmark speech before them. Later, Alessi takes Takaki on as his protegee, and Edmonton is where the Human Debris Abolishment Treaty is signed.
Furthermore, Chyrse is the only colonial holding Arbrau is shown to possess. While Governor Norman Bernstein is a craven, cowardly man who sells out his own daughter, he is also depicted as being in Gjallarhorn's pocket, part of the (textual, actual) corruption miring the governance of Mars. It is Gjallarhorn who work to uphold the present colonial arrangements, opposing those more open to change. They are behind Fleurs and her temporary ousting of Makanai. Lord Iznario Fareed might be acting for his own personal gain, but he also represents the factions who wish for things to continue as they are, in opposition to McGillis's revolutionary movement and Rustal Elion's (eventual) reforms.
If Arbrau has its own equivalent of the Dort Company, this is kept off-screen. Is it reasonable to assume it does? We know from Urdr Hunt that Dort is one colony management company among many -- the Omden Colony Company is arguably even worse -- so it's far from implausible that Arbrau would have a similar arrangement with its own set of industrial colonies. There is also mention of an 'Outer Sphere Development Corporation' on Mars, which sounds very much like what you would name something that went around exploiting poorer nations for the betterment of shareholders in richer ones. And besides, Chryse has definitely not done well out of Arbrau's nominal stewardship. Abandoning the colony to Gjallarhorn's rule speaks to how little regard has been shown to the people living there, not to mention that while Makanai says his belief in advancing their cause is long-held, it has amounted to very little concrete difference over the course of his presumably lengthy career. Kudelia's trip to Earth is a clearly necessary spur to action.
Action results, though. The restrictions on Chryse are eased, a step toward Mars becoming an independent state. Arbrau is the vanguard of a change in attitude towards the red planet. Perhaps then we should ask why this bloc among the four would be the one to begin this process (beyond the mere narrative convenience of 'that's where the majority of the cast come from').
As I alluded to at the top of this post, I struggle to see the sense in joining Canada, Alaska, Russia and Svalbard together when you're also combining India and China, the entirety of Europe with the entirety of Africa, and the majority of the Americas into one. It really doesn't follow from modern population distributions, nor can I imagine it being an easy stretch of geography to manage. That it should be ruled from Edmonton is additionally baffling; it's not like Russia doesn't have existing civic infrastructure, placed at an awkward distance from this capital.
We can of course attempt to fill in the blanks. We might say a large number of refugees were displaced north during the Calamity War, fleeing densely populated areas for the relative safety of Russian and Canadian wildernesses. There is something compelling about this idea, that Gjallarhorn had to redraw the map simply based on where people ended up once the dust settled.
But let's take Arbrau as given: an expanse of tundra, connected by trains the prime minister doesn't seem to have known were there. Even admitting there are a great many large cities continued within its borders and assuming an increased population, it looks paltry in comparison to the other blocs, seeming to lack large amounts of colonial territory and needing to create a defence force from the ground up when tensions escalate. Where the SAU and the African Union display pre-existing mobile suit stockpiles (placed in the hands of the SAU military and the Dort Company, respectively), Arbrau must buy new 'suits from Gjallarhorn and rely on mercenary groups like Tekkadan to train its recruits.

Overall, everything we learn of Arbrau makes it appear weaker than its counterparts and maybe that in itself is why it should be at the forefront of letting go of Mars. Empires are only worthwhile so long as the costs are outweighed by the gains. A weaker bloc is less likely to make that equation work. Ergo, once Chryse is more trouble than it's worth -- say, because the governor's daughter just parked a paramilitary group run by teenagers on the front lawn -- letting it go becomes an inevitability.
As much as Makanai is broadly on the side of our protagonists, he remains an ambiguous character. He is openly self-serving, threatening Tekkadan into assisting him and frequently espousing a hard-hearted, cynical world-view. If he wasn't just flattering Kudelia, then he genuinely gave little thought to the infrastructure that operated at the ground-level of his nation. He later goes on to treat a greater sense of the moral weight of his actions (following a brush with death) as a personal failing. Given all this, it is unfeasible he would act without considering the economic realities of possessing colonies, good and bad. Thus, his decision to support Kudelia must also benefit Arbrau, freeing them of an economic burden and -- perhaps -- sowing discord among Arbrau's rivals.
This is, once again, speculation, filling space in the narrative where details are not required. To return to my earlier point, the nature of the blocs is far less important than their presence as oppressive forces. They and their representatives signify wealth and power imposing itself upon a wider world. Indeed, signifiers of wealth take the place of any technicalities of the colonial system. The Governor's residence in Chryse is of a piece with Dort 3 and even with Rubian Zahn's castle. This is what the ruling class looks like, in Iron-Blooded Orphans, and the visual obviates the need for explanation.


The Arbrau parliament is the same kind of shorthand. The image of a reasonable political system that, though it may suffer from bad actors, can still be gamed to create good results. It's only natural for it to resemble the form of government socially agreed upon to be correct, by dint of it being the one outside.
Yet, as with everything else IBO does, there is a pleasing degree of problematisation on display. Makanai is the only significant human face provided for the blocs and he is, beneath his oft-times jovial affect, a cold, aloof pragmatist who acts to secure his own position first and foremost, personal beliefs subject to the flow of power around him. His status as a helpful, progressive figure is tinged by his being at home within the broader context. Reasonable and proper though parliamentary democracy is in principle, the reality is still assumed to be unpleasant.
Indeed, can a 'democracy' that owns/owned colonies be anything else?
Cartographical gestures
Let's get this out of the way: the economic blocs as depicted are exactly as fleshed-out as the block-colour map shown in episode 4. That is to say, they are shorthand for global superpowers engaged in a vast, sprawling competition. There is little culture, political nuance, or comprehensible structure instilled into them. These are simply not things Iron-Blooded Orphans cares about exploring and there's no connective tissue to be 'decoded' from what we're shown.
As ever, we can speculate wildly (and have a lot of fun doing so), and unpick what the sketched background tell us about the creators' assumptions and approach. We can question how they envision government bodies, military build-up, American criminality, even what 'rich' looks like. But it is important to be able to step back and really grasp what we are looking at.
The episode 4 map is there to inform the audience that the world is divided between massive superpowers, that the division was enacted by Gjallarhorn, and that the results define where and why our heroes are going on their journey. The actual details of the division are irrelevant. Further, the differences between the blocs are far less significant than their similarities. At the start of the show, they all possess colonies, they can all be assumed to be party to oppressive acts, we have no reason to think their systems of government differ much (they were all set up by the same group of people, at the same time), and their reactions to developments in the setting are of a piece. They even release their hold on Mars in unison! Arbrau gets cast in a more positive light than the others, but that has more to do with Makanai's role as a (relatively) reasonable authority figure. It's not hard to imagine the introduction of equally reasonable characters representing the other blocs, with no change to the underlying message that the blocs at large are callous, indifferent, and imperialistic.
Suffice to say, I think this is the right decision for the story Iron-Blooded Orphans is telling. It is also an entirely unremarkable move, hand-waving a larger world as justification for a particular plot. But I find myself considering the a conceptual floor represented by that map. A geopolitical why underlying Makanai's behaviour is not extant because the story is about the difficulty of reaching those in power with pleas for improvement. Within this framework, he just is a supporter of Martian autonomy and that's that. Digging beneath this is writing fan-fic, not extracting 'lore' or canonical detail.
Ultimately, I take from that a lesson in a piece of fiction's priorities. We have here a marker of a certain geopolitical relationship, within a tale about oppression primarily told from the perspective of the oppressed, that is not strictly concerned with the mechanics of said relationship but rather what it entails.
The map is wallpaper.
Interesting, simplistic, potentially insensitive wallpaper that can be used as the basis for some good stories.
Yet wallpaper all the same.
[Index of other writing]
#gundam iron blooded orphans#gundam ibo#g tekketsu#tekketsu no orphans#reference#notes#arbrau#SAU#oceanian federation#african union#dort company#Togonosuke Makanai#fictional politics#flags
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If you were drafted, would you willingly go to the killing fields of eastern Ukraine? What about your children? The war in Ukraine has been an endless “meat grinder” that has already claimed hundreds of thousands of Russian lives and more than a million Ukrainian lives. Those that are sane want to see if there is a peaceful way out of this mess so that the killing can stop. Unfortunately, vast numbers of leftists all over the United States and western Europe have been transformed into rabid pro-war lunatics that are absolutely obsessed with “defeating” Russia. So gigantic mountains of dollars and euros have been poured into the war in Ukraine, but it hasn’t worked. The Russians are winning, and so now European leaders are preparing to take things to the next level.
On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen unveiled a brand new $840 billion program that will be known as “Rearm Europe”…
The European Union will free up $840 billion in funding to funnel into defense across the bloc, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen announced on Tuesday.
Interestingly, this new effort was announced just a few hours after President Trump paused all U.S. military aid to the Ukrainians…
Dubbed “Rearm Europe,” the remarks from the European Commission’s president came hours after President Donald Trump suspended all U.S. military aid to Ukraine, widening the gulf between Washington and Kyiv and going against the fresh commitments of support from Europe for Ukraine in recent days. “I do not need to describe the grave nature of the threats that we face, or the devastating consequences that we will have to endure if those threats would come to pass,” von der Leyen told reporters.
Of course money won’t be enough to accomplish what European leaders have planned.
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In a matter of hours last August, Bulgarian legislators rushed through changes to the country’s national education act to ban so-called LGBTQ “propaganda” in schools.
The new law caught human rights groups and the Bulgarian public by surprise. Similar amendments had been proposed before but didn’t go anywhere. This time, the proposal moved with breakneck speed, advancing from the committee stage to the final vote in one week before the summer recess. It has been in effect since the school year started in September.
The law echoes discriminatory Russian legislation—first passed more than a decade ago—that used children and education as conduits for labelling the existence of LGBTQ peoples as “propaganda.” And its passage poses fundamental questions about what violations the European Union will allow to its foundational promise of human rights.
Bulgaria now joins Hungary as the second EU member state to use a national law to target its LGBTQ community. In recent years, lawmakers in Slovakia and Poland have also introduced similarly restrictive legislation focused on what can be taught in schools.
Specifically, the amendment to Bulgaria’s Preschool and Education Act prohibits “carrying out propaganda, promoting and inciting in any way, directly or indirectly, ideas and views related to nontraditional homosexual orientation and/or determination of gender identity other than the biological.”
An additional text passed in tandem explicitly defines “nontraditional sexual orientation” as “different from the generally accepted and embedded in the Bulgarian legal tradition concept of emotional, romantic, sexual, or sensual attraction between persons of opposite sexes.”
Although the definition of a “traditional” relationship is narrow, the interpretation of the rest of the law is broad, raising concerns of legalized harassment; self-censorship; and forced changes to science, psychology, and literature curricula. In a survey of Bulgarian schoolchildren published in 2020, 70.6 percent of LGBTQ students said they had been verbally harassed in the prior year. This fall, students feared increased bullying because of the new law.
There were two consecutive days of protests in August immediately following the parliamentary vote. A petition urging the President Rumen Radev to veto the law was signed by more than 7,000 people in 24 hours, but Radev—an independent whose politics follow those of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, a direct descendent of the Soviet-era Bulgarian Communist Party that is still in step with Russia—signed the bill into law.
Multiple pathways exist at the national and EU level to roll back the law but require the political will to follow them. Nationally, Bulgaria’s latest parliament—elected in October after the seventh elections in less than four years—could choose to overturn the bill. This is unlikely, given that the makeup of the current parliament is similar to the last one. Revival, the nationalist and pro-Russia party that proposed the anti-LGBTQ bill, is now the third-largest group in parliament.
There’s also the possibility of petitioning the country’s constitutional court, whose members could rule that it violates the Bulgarian constitution guaranteeing equality and the freedoms of expression, education, and receiving information.
The EU, which Bulgaria joined in 2007, has the power to deny funds and initiate penalizing legal procedures for member states. These actions would align with its stated ideals, but they haven’t been invoked yet—a marked contrast to when Hungary passed its own anti-LGBTQ law in 2021 and was swiftly condemned by the EU. At the time, the bloc froze 700 million euros in funding, contingent on the law being repealed. And there is currently a case at the Court of Justice—brought by the European Commission, European Parliament, and 16 member states—arguing that the Hungarian law discriminates against LGBTQ Hungarians. Specifically, the plaintiffs are arguing that the law violates Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union, which guarantees equality and respect for human rights. The court case is the first time that this accusation has been brought against a member state.
Calculations by Reclaim, a Brussels-based human rights nongovernmental organization, found that more than 650 million euros ($680.8 million) in EU funding could be blocked for Bulgaria, similarly to Hungary, until the law is undone. The Bulgarian law breaches the same EU-defined human rights that are being argued at the Court of Justice. Deystvie, which provides pro bono legal assistance to Bulgaria’s LGBTQ community, is documenting the impact of the law for possible future cases.
“This is a very bureaucratic Union,” Deystvie cofounder and human rights lawyer Denitsa Lyubenova said. “But there are means to counteract what’s happening in Europe.”
The leverage of EU mechanism within Bulgaria remains uneven. Over the past four years, the nation’s politicians have been willing to shrug off or actively oppose EU funds to gain domestic political points. Earlier this fall, a parliamentary debate over EU-mandated energy reforms ended with MPs from Revival and another populist party ripping out microphone cables and stopping two critical votes. The action, which MPs used as part of their election campaign, contributed to a likely loss of more than 1 billion euros in the EU’s Recovery and Resilience funds.
On the topic of LGBTQ rights, Bulgaria already has a track record of ignoring rulings from both of Europe’s higher courts. Last year, Bulgaria’s Supreme Administrative Court refused to issue a birth certificate to a child with two mothers despite a 2021 Court of Justice of the European Union ruling requiring it. Bulgaria doesn’t recognize same-sex unions and recently banned gender changes to legal documents, putting it out of step with case law at the European Court of Human Rights, which rules for the broader 46 members of the Council of Europe.
The violations aren’t seen as negative to some Bulgarians because “they don’t look at the EU law as a constitution or as something that they value,” said Iliana Boycheva, a legal analyst with the Sofia-based Center for the Study of Democracy. “So this does not disappoint [them].”
Some EU parliamentary groups have made statements on the matter. The body’s equality commissioner announced that she’ll be looking into the Bulgarian law’s legality, although her role will be eliminated in the next European Parliament. At a November parliamentary discussion about legislation targeting LGBTQ communities, commissioners noted Bulgaria’s recent law; Dutch MP Raquel García Hermida-Van Der Walle went as far as to say the law is a cover for corruption and called for “immediate action towards Bulgaria and any other country breaking down our fundamental freedoms.”
The bigger players, though, have been mysteriously quiet. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the Hungarian law “a shame” in 2021 but hasn’t spoken out against the Bulgarian law.
Overall, the EU over the past twelve months has taken a rightward and more nationalist shift. Leaders such as von der Leyer—who want to maintain a centrist position—tend to follow.
But Hungary and Bulgaria have been treated differently by the EU since before the parliamentary elections. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been narratively established as a villain, and the bloc is often swift to condemn his actions. Former Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who governed until 2021 and still holds considerable power as the GERB party leader and a member of parliament, oversaw Bulgaria’s efforts to bankroll the TurkStream pipeline that gave Russian gas an essential transport route, as well as what many say is a corrupt court system. Borisov’s GERB party sits with von der Leyen as part of the center-right European People’s Party, and she flew to Bulgaria to campaign alongside him ahead of this summer’s EU elections.
Borisov, along with most GERB representatives present, voted in favor of the anti-LGBTQ law.
The Bulgarian law and the broader EU response is about LGBTQ rights, but it’s also about geopolitics, said Remy Bonny, the executive director of Forbidden Colors, whose advocacy work includes pushing for the lawsuit against Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ bill. “A lot of the backlashes that we have seen, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, on LGBTQ+ rights—they have always been going hand in hand with democratic backlashes as well.”
The current moment, Bonny said, can be traced back to Russia targeting its LGBTQ community in 2013, in part to push back against civil rights progress in the form of marriage equality in much of Europe. In the years since, Russia “has been abusing the topic of LGBTQ+ rights to polarize and destabilize the European Union,” Bonny added.
“This should be one of the largest wake-up signs for human rights that we’ve seen in the last decade,” he said. “The fact that the Russian legislation against LGBTQ+ people is able to be passed without serious sanctions—that’s saying a lot.”
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I see the Qun being compared to communism by many DA fans as criticism but honestly yes, gimme. hire people who studied the history of the Eastern Bloc or people who grew up and lived under communism, show both the good and the bad and turn it up to 11. make my east euro heart happy
and they better have paneláky on Par Vollen
#please please please i need to see the glory of soviet architecture and the horrors of stalinism with a fantasy flair#make it amazing and make it fucked up. make players question everything about what they thought to be right and wrong. go ham#in a perfect case you'd have a game where players predisposed to disliking the Qun from the previous games begin to genuinely love the Qun#only to be brutally reminded of its flaws. and vice versa#dragon age#qunari#the qun
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Google lost its last bid to overturn a European Union antitrust penalty, after the bloc’s top court ruled against it Tuesday in a case that came with a whopping fine and helped jumpstart an era of intensifying scrutiny for Big Tech companies. The European Union’s top court rejected Google’s appeal against the 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion) penalty from the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, for violating antitrust rules with its comparison shopping service. Also Tuesday, Apple lost its challenge against an order to repay 13 billion euros ($14.34 billion) in back taxes to Ireland, after the European Court of Justice issued a separate decision siding with the commission in a case targeting unlawful state aid for global corporations. Both companies have now exhausted their appeals in the cases that date to the previous decade.
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European Union and Mercosur trade bloc announce free trade deal that’s 25 years in the making
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says the European Union and the Mercosur trade bloc have agreed to terms for a long-anticipated free trade deal

The European Union on Friday finalized a blockbuster free trade agreement with Brazil, Argentina and three other South American nations in the Mercosur trade alliance, a long-awaited breakthrough despite fierce opposition from France that caps a quarter-century of on-off negotiations.
The accord would create a market of over 700 million people, nearly 25% of the world’s gross domestic product, and save businesses an estimated 4 billion euros ($4.26 billion) in duties each year.
From Uruguay, the host of the Mercosur summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed the deal — which would create one of the largest free trade zones in the world — as a “truly historic milestone" at a time when global protectionism is on the rise.
Provided it is ratified, the deal promises benefits especially to European manufacturers and South American farmers, slashing red tape and removing tariffs on products like Italian wine, Argentine steak, Brazilian oranges and German Volkswagens.
Continue reading.
#politics#brazil#brazilian politics#european union#economy#international politics#mercosur#image description in alt#mod nise da silveira
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I've said this many times before, but the terms "West" and "East" are massively overloaded, geographically inaccurate, excessively value laden, and a bunch of other bothersome stuff. Here are some alternatives.
For referring to sets of countries with specific attributes that already have commonly known names, just use those names; e.g. "rich countries", "poor countries", "primarily agrarian countries", "industrialized countries", whatever.
For referring to European settler colonies, there is an adjective "Eurocolonial".
For referring to the set of countries including those in Europe and their present and former settler colonies (one common meaning of "the West", and IMO the one most difficult to find an alternate term for) I am tempted to suggest the cumbersome "Euro-Eurocolonial", as in "the Euro-Eurocolonial world". This is unambiguous but ugly. You might also try "Eurocolonial sensu lato", and oppose to the above "Eurocolonial sensu stricto". When it's clear from context, both can be shortened simply to "Eurocolonial".
For referring to the geopolitical alignment emergent from the former Western bloc, I think "the West" is technically appropriate but is confusing. The phrase "Western Bloc" itself is unambiguous but anachronistic; I am tempted to say something like "the ascended Western bloc", accurate but goofy. Hmm. Any ideas? Might just drop the pretense and call it "America's bloc" ("American bloc" is somewhat ambiguous as well). Any other ideas?
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EU seeks to extend exemption for London clearing house until 2028
The European Union has proposed allowing London to continue clearing trade within the bloc until 2028, a departure from its previous pledge that the post-Brexit agreement would end this summer, Luxembourg Times reports.
A spokesman for the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said it would consult with member states on extending the transition period by three years, until the end of June 2028.
“When it comes to clearing and CCPs, financial stability is our overarching objective, as this is the pillar upon which the Savings and Investments Union can develop,” added Olof Gill, referring to the central counterparty clearing houses.
It is part of the EU’s long-term financial system development project, also known as the Capital Markets Union, which is a core part of Financial Services Commissioner Maria Luis Albuquerque’s mission.
Brussels has spent the past five years trying to wrest control of EU clearing from London, the region’s dominant financial centre after Brexit. The effort has been met with scepticism by the financial industry, which believes Europe lacks the infrastructure to handle the trillions of euros of derivatives clearing done through London exchanges. Gill said on Wednesday:
“Two UK CCPs have been identified by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) as systematically important for the EU’s financial stability. An extension of the equivalence decision is therefore needed to avoid any risks to our financial stability in the short term, and give certainty and clarity to EU financial market participants.”
The deadline for postponing clearing has already been extended once from its original deadline of June 2022, after financial leaders, including Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, repeatedly warned of the risk to financial stability if clearing is abruptly postponed.
The EU has since introduced a complex package of measures requiring EU-based banks and other organisations to have active accounts with EU clearing houses to prove they can move activities to Europe in the event of a crisis. The bloc’s more accommodating stance comes amid demands for pro-business measures that could boost growth.
Read more HERE
#world news#news#world politics#europe#european news#european union#eu politics#eu news#uk#uk politics#uk news#united kingdom#england#london#politics#bank of england#brexit#geopolitics
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The European Union is set to generate millions of euros more from the high rejection rates of visa applications by African visitors with a new increase in non-refundable fees.
Citizens of the 26 member states within Europe’s Schengen area have unhindered borderless access within the area, while most travelers from elsewhere require visas. A 12.5% price hike that takes effect on June 11 increases the cost of a short-term (90 days) visa application to €90.
But while the price hike applies equally to all non-EU residents who require a Schengen visa, it raises the prospect of the bloc making disproportionately more money from its rejection rates for applicants from Africa, analysts say.
Of the €130 million the EU earned in 2023 from rejected visa applications, about 42% of that was from applicants living in Africa, even though the continent accounts for 24% of Schengen visa applications, according to London-based research firm LAGO Collective. Prospective visitors who apply from Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria receive rejection rates of between 40% and 50%, LAGO estimated, based on data from the European Commission’s migration and home affairs office.
“We found a relationship between the GDP of countries and rejection rates for short-term visas,” Marta Foresti, LAGO’s founder, told Semafor Africa. A similar rejection trend in 2024 with the new price would deepen long-standing inequality of outcomes between consumers paying for the same service from high and low-income countries, Foresti said.
While these encourage dangerous attempts to reach Europe across seas and deserts, most African migration is via “regular channels,” the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington DC notes.
Yet Africans applying to visit Europe for short-term stays, such as business engagements or conferences, continue to face a stumbling block.
Average rejection rates for African applicants are generally 10 percentage points higher than the global average, Mehari Taddele Maru, a researcher at the EU-owned European University Institute in Italy, found. Seven of the top ten countries with the highest rejection rates for Schengen visa applications in 2022 were in Africa.
The EU’s more expensive visa and its potentially disproportionate impact on Africans comes as the bloc takes a tougher stance on migration.
New rules approved by the EU Commission in April impose a higher standard for screening non-EU nationals at borders, including the collection of biometric data, and health and security checks. Border fences set up by member states within the Schengen area have become longer in the last decade, stretching from 315 km to 2,048 km as of 2022.
Higher visa prices could be another type of fence, which when combined with high rejection rates, will continue to enrich European consulates at the expense of residents of low income countries who nevertheless have legitimate reasons to be in Europe.
Africa’s high rejection rate is sometimes explained as a consequence of visitors overstaying their visas. But “there is no evidence to suggest that a higher rejection rate leads to a decrease in irregular migration or visa overstays,” Maru argues. In essence, an unexplained bias against Africans is at play.
The costs of rejection to African entrepreneurs, career professionals, artists and other seekers of the EU’s short-term visa calls for a reform of the approval process, Foresti told me. Consulates with high unequal outcomes should review their decision-making to ensure “systematic discrimination” against some countries isn’t an underlying cause.
And should some EU members enforce high rejection for short-term visas to dissuade overstays by residents of particular African countries, more paths to legal migration should be considered, she argued.
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European Union members discussed on Wednesday ways to increase the voluntary return of Syrian refugees to the war-torn country, an idea that has gained traction in recent months but that remains controversial.
The talks among ambassadors were promoted by Hungary, the country currently chairing the EU Council's presidency, and were based on a document presented by the European Commission, several diplomats said.
The document stressed the role played by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in supporting the return of Syrian refugees, which the EU is looking to strengthen.
These returns would take place on a strictly voluntary basis. The bloc cannot forcibly deport Syrians because they are almost always granted asylum. Additionally, the principle of non-refoulement forbids authorities from deporting migrants to nations where they could face persecution, torture or any other form of ill-treatment.
Ambassadors also touched on the lack of diplomatic relations with the autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad, who has publicly called on his citizens to return, and the fraught situation in the Middle East, where hostilities between Israel and Lebanon have triggered the movement of tens of thousands into Syria.
The start of the Syrian Civil War in 2011 prompted millions to flee their homes and seek international protection in nearby countries, with many crossing into Europe.
The UNCHR estimates that European countries host over one million Syrian asylum seekers and refugees, with 59% of them based in Germany alone. Sweden, Austria, Greece, the Netherlands and France also host significant populations.
Last year, about 38,300 Syrian refugees chose to go back, the agency said in an annual overview, noting the conditions inside the country "were not yet conducive for the facilitation of large-scale voluntary returns in safety and dignity."
Concerns over security, livelihoods, basic services and housing were cited as reasons for the low rate of repatriations. About 90% of people in Syria live in poverty.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch has warned that "Syrians fleeing violence in Lebanon face risks of repression and persecution by the Syrian government upon return, including enforced disappearance, torture and death in detention."
A similar assessment is shared by the Commission, which has repeatedly said current circumstances in Syria cannot ensure safe and dignified repatriations.
Talks are expected to continue among member states in the coming months, with no immediate breakthrough in sight. However, the fact the discussion is happening at all signals a growing political willingness to address the controversial matter.
Earlier this month, EU leaders endorsed a hardened approach to migration management and tasked the Commission with exploring outsourcing projects and reviewing the concept of "safe third countries" to speed up deportations.
The summit in Brussels featured Syria as one of the items on the agenda. "The European Council reaffirms the need to achieve conditions for safe, voluntary and dignified returns of Syrian refugees, as defined by UNHCR," leaders said in their conclusions.
In July, Italy and Austria led a joint letter of eight member states asking for a new EU strategy on Syria that should be "more active, results-oriented, and operational."
The European External Action Service (EEAS), the bloc's diplomatic arm, has confirmed it is considering appointing a special envoy for Syria, one of Italy's key demands.
Since 2011, the EU and member states have allocated more than €30 billion in humanitarian and development aid to support Syrians in the country and the region.
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Nonetheless, Palestinians have illegally built on more than 2,000 acres of Area C, spread across 250 different locations. This does not include 600 km of illegally-built roadways and more than 112,000 meters of retaining walls and terracing.
Investigative author Edwin Black, in a report entitled “EU Funding of Illegal Palestinian Settlement in Area C,” noted that Palestinian settlements “are often strategically scattered to effectively carve up Area C, sometimes surround Jewish villages, and sometimes push onto Israeli nature or military reserves.”
Black also described some of the various structures in these new, illegal settlements: Makeshift structures adorned with the EU logo on them, multi-floor office centers and palatial homes. “A broad gamut of construction styles can be seen,” he wrote.
All of this is being done in accordance with a joint Palestinian-EU plan to take control of land—without negotiations—for the creation of a de-facto Palestinian state based on the 1948 armistice lines that resulted from Israel’s war of independence.
An article in the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture described the implementation of this plan: “Since August 2009, [Palestinian Prime Minister Salam] Fayyad, with the help of the Barack Obama administration and the European Union, has been quietly building national institutions and physical infrastructure . . . in the West Bank.”
Last year, it was revealed that the EU, too, has a secret plan to fund illegal Palestinian construction, known as the “European Joint Development Programme for Area C.” It has an annual budget of 300 million Euros.
One illegal Palestinian structure financed by the EU was a school located inside an Israeli nature reserve. Last May, Israel demolished it. In a statement, the IDF said the school was built illegally and “was found to be dangerous to the safety of anyone studying or otherwise visiting there,” therefore an Israeli court, “ordered it demolished.”
Instead of praising Israel for ensuring the safety of Palestinian children, the EU condemned the Jewish state. A spokesperson for the bloc said, “(Such) demolitions are illegal under international law and children’s rights to education must be respected.” Apparently, Palestinian children have the right to education, but not to safety.
As Edwin Black wrote in his report, “The European governments and the PA have thus joined forces to complete the final shredding of the already weakened Oslo agreements.”
#palestinians#illegal building#area c#european union#european joint development programme for area c
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https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-countries-back-landmark-artificial-intelligence-rules-2024-05-21/
BRUSSELS, May 21 (Reuters) - Europe's landmark rules on artificial intelligence will enter into force next month after EU countries endorsed on Tuesday a political deal reached in December, setting a potential global benchmark for a technology used in business and everyday life.
The European Union's AI Act is more comprehensive than the United States' light-touch voluntary compliance approach while China's approach aims to maintain social stability and state control.
The vote by EU countries came two months after EU lawmakers backed the AI legislation drafted by the European Commission in 2021 after making a number of key changes.
Concerns about AI contributing to misinformation, fake news and copyrighted material have intensified globally in recent months amid the growing popularity of generative AI systems such as Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O), opens new tab OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab chatbot Gemini.
"This landmark law, the first of its kind in the world, addresses a global technological challenge that also creates opportunities for our societies and economies," Belgian digitisation minister Mathieu Michel said in a statement.
"With the AI Act, Europe emphasizes the importance of trust, transparency and accountability when dealing with new technologies while at the same time ensuring this fast-changing technology can flourish and boost European innovation," he said.
The AI Act imposes strict transparency obligations on high-risk AI systems while such requirements for general-purpose AI models will be lighter.
It restricts governments' use of real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces to cases of certain crimes, prevention of terrorist attacks and searches for people suspected of the most serious crimes.
The new legislation will have an impact beyond the 27-country bloc, said Patrick van Eecke at law firm Cooley.
"The Act will have global reach. Companies outside the EU who use EU customer data in their AI platforms will need to comply. Other countries and regions are likely to use the AI Act as a blueprint, just as they did with the GDPR," he said, referring to EU privacy rules.
While the new legislation will apply in 2026, bans on the use of artificial intelligence in social scoring, predictive policing and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage will kick in in six months once the new regulation enters into force.
Obligations for general purpose AI models will apply after 12 months and rules for AI systems embedded into regulated products in 36 months.
Fines for violations range from 7.5 million euros ($8.2 million) or 1.5% of turnover to 35 million euros or 7% of global turnover depending on the type of violations.
($1 = 0.9199 euros)
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