As Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine reminds European countries about the importance of manpower, many are once again weighing the promise and perils of compulsory military service.
Introduction
Russia is preparing a bill to ban the “childfree ideology,” Deputy Minister of Justice Vsevolod Vukolov said , calling the conscious refusal to have children “extremistically oriented.” In his latest May decree defining Russia’s “national development goals,” Vladimir Putin ordered an increase in birth rates. The average number of children per woman should increase from the current 1.41 to 1.6 by 2030 and to 1.8 by 2036. The problem with the total fertility rate is not unique to Russia: by 2050, the TFR will be sufficient to reproduce the population in only 49 countries. There is not a single country in the world where the birth rate has not decreased in 2021 compared to 1950. And decrees cannot help here. As modern research shows, even radical government regulation measures, such as bans on contraception and abortions, are not capable of reversing this trend.
“The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole,” writes the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.” What he has described are the nodal points where, after the contradictions within totalities intensify, conditions are created for great ruptures for qualitative leaps into new worlds.
The smooth and quick transfer of power in UK speak volume on the great democratic tradition in that country. Election results came out during the day and by the afternoon outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak went to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation. By the time, he stepped out, Labour leader Keir Starmer was appointed the Prime Minister by the King and within minutes he addresses the nation at the historic entrance of No 10-downing street. The Prime minister paid tribute to his predecessor Rishi Sunak and acknowledged his contribution to Britain. With-in hours, the Prime Minister announced his cabinet and the transfer of power was completed without any pomp and show. Britain, that way, is a great example unlike United States where the new President takes oath nearly two months after the results are out in November in a great pomp and show though both the forms of governments are based on majoritarianism and revolve around the white power elite of these countries.
The Nordic Resistance Movement has been listed as a foreign terrorist organization. Other groups should follow, but probably won’t.
Editor’s Note: The Biden administration’s recent designation of the Nordic Resistance Movement is a step in the right direction for fighting far-right terrorism. The Middlebury Institute of International Studies’s Jason Blazakis, however, argues that the United States has a very long way to go and outlines the many challenges the United States faces when trying to treat racist and anti-government groups with the same seriousness that it has jihadist terrorists.
Why Labour’s Sweeping Victory May Not Reverse the Country’s Decline
Although the polls had been predicting it for many months, the result of the United Kingdom’s July 4 general election was nonetheless stunning. This was the worst performance in the 190-year history of the Conservative Party. It lost almost half its share of the vote and 250 parliamentary seats. One former prime minister (Liz Truss), nine cabinet ministers (including the secretaries of defense, education, and justice), and other prominent Conservative figureheads were unceremoniously ejected from the House of Commons by their constituents. This was a tidal wave of anger washing over not just outgoing prime minister Rishi Sunak but also the last 14 years of Tory rule, and it made landfall with a deafening roar.
The fireworks in America this Fourth of July will be fuelled by the country’s imminent election, in which a convicted felon faces off against a doddering old man who is too senile to know that he isn’t really the President. The country’s elite would be glad if this were hyperbole; unfortunately for them, it is not. But Joe Biden’s fitness for office is no longer the big question that the American press is afraid to ask. After three years of near-total silence, they suddenly can’t stop asking it.
Attitudes on the war paint a complex picture where existential security threats are twisted by domestic political dynamics, but a sense of weariness is becoming evident even in the region’s most pro-Ukrainian countries.
The recent revelations by Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC, detailing the covert expulsion of four Indian intelligence officers in 2020, have stirred significant concern within the international community. These officers, allegedly attempting to infiltrate sensitive defense technologies and monitor the Indian-Australian community, highlight a troubling dimension of India’s intelligence operations abroad under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration.
Most people, if they were asked to list the great seafaring peoples of history, or more specifically the great naval fighting traditions, would come up with a fairly uniform list. There are obviously the two great naval powers of modernity in the British Empire and the United States (though the latter is now not without challengers), and the navigators of the first transatlantic empires in Portugal and Spain. China had a brief period of prolific shipbuilding and navigation in the early modern period, but was disinterested in trying to leverage this into durable power projection. Modern China seeks to rectify this missed opportunity. A deeper dive into the mental archives might churn up the ancient Phoenicians, or perhaps the Genoese and Venetian city states that dominated the Mediterranean in the early modern period. There are those wonderful Vikings, who managed to reach the Americas in their open hulled longboats, and terrorized and colonized much of Europe with their nautical reach. Few, however, would immediately think of the Romans.