New Geography

Author: Matthew Stevenson

  • Russian Rublette

    Is the demise of the ruble, together with falling crude oil prices, comeuppance for President Vladimir Putin’s expansionist dreams? That’s certainly the storyline of those holding faith in economic sanctions. In their eyes, he foolishly land grabbed eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and in exchange got back a cratered Russian economy, with a debased currency and little access to Western financial markets. Heck of a job, Vlad.

    The victors, presumably, are the sanction wizards of Washington and London who stared down the barrels of Putin’s tanks and fifth columnists. Under the theory that the Russian economy is a kleptocracy that sustains Putin in power, the sanctions were targeted at presidential cronies and their “sectoral” holdings, such as those in the oil business (the rallying cry should have been “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their proxy statements”).

    Amazingly, even the dysfunctional US Congress found time in its lame-duck session to vote additional sanctions against the Russian oil sector, although hidden in the fine print of the midnight legislation were goodie bags for Washington lobbyists, who are in line for a $60 million windfall to, as the New York Times reported, “promote democracy, independent news media, uncensored Internet access and anticorruption efforts in Russia.”

    For the moment, despite the free fall of his currency, President Putin remains defiant. Tired of getting finger-waggled for the benefit of western TV audiences, he ghosted from the G-20 summit in Brisbane. Heading early to the airport, Putin must have made a mental note to repay his Western confessors, someday, with the same currency that they fetched from Russian coffers.

    The irony of the allied attacks on the ruble, Russia, and President Putin is that the biggest losers may end up being the high-minded Western countries that would consign Russia and her Kremlin leadership to the dustbin of history.

    The Russian ruble—or should I say the new ruble—was reissued after the 1998 credit collapse in Russia. The previous currency was holdover Soviet bitcoin, issued on the full faith and credit of defunct tractor communes, and convertible, at best, into assets that the oligarchs had already claimed for themselves.

    In free fall as I write, the ruble is best understood as an oil junk bond, for which par is about $117 a barrel (the break-even point for Russia’s budget). Below that price, the ruble falls; above it, the currency strengthens. The reason it remains tied to oil is because the Russian economy has yet to stimulate a large enough middle class to free its markets from petroleum dependence.

    Sadly, Russia’s economy is like that of a Gulf state: it has oil revenues and anointed princes who share in the state’s wealth. Everyone else is a variation on guest workers from the Philippines.

    Despite the structural imbalance of Russia’s economy, the nation’s fundamentals are stronger than you might think. Its foreign currency reserves are $418 billion, placing it sixth in world rankings, way ahead of the US with $132 billion and even ahead of South Korea, which has $364 billion.

    Nor has Russia engaged in the same reckless deficit spending that defined the United States during the feel-good years. Despite the chimes of death, the projected budget deficit for Russia in 2014 is still only about 389 billion rubles (roughly $7 billion, depending on the ruble-dollar exchange rate), while the deficit for the US could reach $500 billion.

    Gross government debt, as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), in Russia remains a relatively healthy 10 percent, unlike that of the United States, which has maxed out its borrowings at more than 100 percent of GDP.

    Russia’s external or foreign debt is a manageable $715 billion compared to that of the U.S., which is on the hook for $17 trillion. It might not have a CVS drugstore on every corner or iPhones in every hand, but since emerging from communism in the early 1990s it has, reasonably, lived within its means.

    Even in the most solvent nations, circulating national currencies are best understood as company scrip; bonds drawn on faceless central banks that allow citizens to transact their daily business. As storehouses of wealth, national currencies make about as much sense as holding baseball cards or those Raleigh coupons that used to be included with packs of cigarettes.

    Not for a long time has any world currency been convertible to gold, silver, or any other commodity. At best they are unsecured loans undertaken by citizens in favor of their central banks. All that backs them is political confidence, something ebbing right now in Russia.

    Fortunately for the Russians, their economy is better able to withstand economic isolation than many others. The country can be self-sufficient in food and energy, and one of the few advantages learned in the hothouse years of Soviet communism is how to live apart from Western markets and malls.

    One reason the West decided to fight Russian expansion with sanctions as opposed to bayonets is that the encroachments into Ukraine came at a time of oversupply in Western energy markets.

    By turning down the taps of Russian oil companies — or by at least limiting their access to Western financial markets — the Obama administration was throwing a subsidy bone to domestic energy producers, which were already choking on glutted markets and depressed stocks.

    Nor do the Western allies fear much from Russian retaliation. Moscow laughably imposed travel bans on Obama administration and congressional figures, to keep them from vacationing in Omsk, but it has left open the pipelines that supply Western Europe with natural gas.

    In the same vein, while it may have been aggressive in protecting the rights of Russians living in Ukraine, it refrained from imposing its own sanctions when the US launched similar wars of national liberation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Serbia, and Somalia.

    The unspoken risk in the great game of economic sanctions and currency strangulation is that the United States has a lot more to lose should, say, China join Russia someday in playing pin-the-tail-on-the-dollar, or if Russia decides to lash back at the Americans by, for example, stirring the cauldron in the Middle East.

    Already Putin’s push-back in favor of Syria’s president Assad turned a civil uprising into a regional war. Russia might also decide to damn the $60 million in press-release torpedoes and take more, if not all, of Ukraine.

    Watching the takedown of another country’s currency — I am assuming that the West is gloating over Putin’s misfortunes — has the air of harmless fun. The assumption is that only a few banks, rogue states, or crony capitalists will suffer.

    Worth further consideration, however, is that currency collapses and hyperinflation have often ushered in civil war and continental instability. Rarely have the effects been contained to the country of origin and its discontents.

    The dissolution of its legal tender, Assignats, in part turned the French Revolution away from the rights of man and into a counting house for disembodied heads. Weimar’s wheelbarrow currencies had disastrous effects beyond Germany’s market squares.

    The last Russian tsar abdicated in 1917, at a moment when his currency had collapsed, and the West lived with the consequences of what followed for almost a century.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author, most recently, of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays, and Whistle-Stopping America. His next book, Reading the Rails, will be published in 2015. He lives in Switzerland.

    Flickr photo by James Malone. The “old” ruble: Russian note for 100 Rubles; 1993.

  • Sterling, the Clippers, and $2B of Monopoly Money

    Is there a more crooked roulette wheel than the one that spins around in the circles of professional sports? I ask in the context of the punishment meted out to Donald Sterling, the in-limbo owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, who, for his commentaries about race in America, was banned from the league and might be “forced” to sell his team for $2 billion, about $1.5 billion more than it was worth before his girlfriend taped their tawdry talks.

    On paper, let alone on the basketball court, the Clippers should be close to worthless—an inept franchise that has yet to win a championship in the 44 years of its existence, which began in Buffalo.

    The magic of pro sports accounting, thanks to antitrust exemption from the US Congress, is that all team owners enjoy the perquisites of monopoly money, which entitles even the racist Sterling to billion-dollar pay days.

    It makes sense that Sterling’s wife is trying to sell the Clippers to Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, who ought to know a thing or two about oligopoly.

    Ballmer’s bet is that the NBA’s cartel pricing will allow the team more revenue sharing from television, while paying less to the players, so that instead of paying 133 times earnings for a team earning about $15 million a year, he can reduce his paid premium to, say, 40 times earnings if the Clippers start earning $50 million annually.

    Should the team acquisition simply be a rich man’s hobby, he can console himself for his losses by sitting court-side in Los Angeles with various starlets, although $2 billion is a lot to pay for a matchmaking subscription.

    Nor is Ballmer alone among executives in celebrating the un-level playing fields of monopoly. The owners of major league teams in football and basketball have long understood that the points on the scoreboards are incidental to their business of collecting money, paid out by the cable television industry (another oligopoly), and from treating the workers as if they were (high-end) strip miners.

    To be sure, many athletes in professional sports earn multimillion-dollar salaries. But they are paid as a coefficient of their ability to draw television ratings. Few other businesses in a country theoretically devoted to free enterprise are allowed to allot franchises as though they were noble fiefs, and to treat workers as indentured servants.

    Even now, it takes years for baseball and football players to become free agents, and leagues impose salary caps, in theory to equalize competition, although in practice to save money.

    If the movie or insurance businesses conducted a draft of prospective employees, Congress would cry foul and enforce an open and free labor market.

    Not only can the professional leagues allocate talent as if at a slave auction, but they enjoy the further subsidy that colleges and universities (in basketball and football) operate their minor leagues at no cost to the professional owners.

    On average, big-time universities earn about $50 to $100 million a year on their sports programs—much of that from basketball and football—but then become indignant when players, such as those at Northwestern University, suggest forming a union or ask for long-term healthcare benefits when they leave school programs with permanent injuries. Aren’t worthless degrees in something like social media enough reward?

    Best of all, few of the operating costs are passed on to the beneficiaries, the peers of Donald Sterling, who unwrap their golden tickets even if their teams are losing or they are degrading the fan base.

    With so much monopoly money to spread around among relatively few pro teams, owners can throw multimillion dollar, multiyear contracts blindly at athletes, who often look more like lottery winners than stars.

    In the last two years, for example, the bloated New York Yankees have lavished C.C. Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, Alex Rodriquez, Derek Jeter, Curtis Granderson, and others more than $100 million a year, even though they have played in only a fraction of the games, or poorly.

    During the last off-season, the Yankees committed another half a billion dollars to new free agents, including catcher Brian McCann, who as I write is batting an anemic .226.

    In 2013 the iconic team reported a loss of $9.1 million, although Forbes listed the worth of the franchise at $2.5 billion, with annual revenues of $431 million. A closer look at the numbers, however, suggests the Yankees are a cable network (jointly owned with FOX) with a team, not the other way around.

    Only monopoly economics allows the dimwitted Yankees to stay in business. Thanks to deductible ticket purchases by spendthrift corporate clients, the average seat at Yankee Stadium runs about $50, although the good seats cost over $200. The price of a monthly cable sports package in New York, at least for those that want a Yankees TV fix, can be another $1000 a year.

    Were pro sports in the interest of the community and worthy of an antitrust exemption, anyone with a video camera could broadcast the games as a news event. Instead, the games are the property of the major league cartels, whose officials, acting as though they were OPEC magnates, allocate the product.

    As if the pro sports honey pot needed anymore sweeteners, think, too, how easily many owners have extorted new stadiums from their home markets, in exchange only for agreeing to keep the team in the city. Or they skip town as soon as they’re promised millions elsewhere.

    According to several studies, some $17 billion in tax-exempt public funding has gone into stadium construction in recent years, another reason it’s impossible to lose as a team owner.

    For the fans, the new $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium feels the same as the old one. But owners lobby for new, tax-subsidized ballparks, especially in the NFL, so they can increase the number of skyboxes; that money drops straight to the owner’s bottom line, avoiding the pools of revenue sharing.

    Are there risks to owning these golden franchises? Pro football leagues will be hit with endless class-action lawsuits, until they can indemnify all current and past players with long-term disability in exchange for their primetime tackles and concussions. But I doubt these lawsuits will turn the NFL into flag football.

    Another threat to pro sports could come from an end to monopoly pricing in the cable television industry. Once every phone and iPad is a handheld TV, will customers really pay Time-Warner $90 every month for 500 channels? Will there be networks with enough subscribers to pay billions to the major leagues? Will audiences continue to watch baseball on television if the stadiums are empty, as many are now?

    Of course the best response to loutish team owners—among whom I suspect Donald Sterling is par for the course—would be to end the antitrust exemption and let the teams compete with other, newer teams and leagues. Why must pro sports be a regulated industry? Are they the equivalent of nuclear power?

    Why can’t even small and medium-sized cities have teams? The community-owned Packers have flourished in Green Bay, and the United States is a country of Green Bays. As in European soccer, the major leagues could simply be the most successful teams, with the poor performers each year getting relegated to lesser divisions. The University of Alabama would move up, and the Jacksonville Jaguars would go down.

    By those standards, the Los Angeles Clippers would long ago have been demoted to the California league, and their owner, one Donald Sterling, would not today be looking forward to a $2 billion check.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.

    Flickr photo by David Jones: The Los Angeles Staples Center on a good night for the Clippers; they beat the Miami Heat 111-105.

  • Bulgari to Taco Bell: Across China, Buyers Are the Target

    I work for myself, and when I travel to China on business I have the “luxury” of sleeping on trains and in hostels, and getting around during the day by bicycle. This spring I made a circuit from Beijing to Chengdu (in western China), to Wuhan (right in the middle), and to Shanghai (east coast), before heading back to Beijing. Ostensibly I was there to hunt down consumer trends.

    What I saw was:

    • Cars and smog are killing off the grace of the old cities
    • High-rise apartment towers have doomed more village markets than collectivization did
    • Much of China’s continuing economic boom is a currency sleight-of-hand, and
    • Chinese consumers are a lot less interested in Western brands than CEOs of multinationals would have us believe in their upbeat annual reports

    Herewith, notes from the lower berth on many sleepers and the saddle of whatever Giant bicycle I could rent, by which means I covered 3,134 miles in less than two weeks:

    Beijing: For grace and charm, nothing in China beats central Beijing. At night, the lights around Tiananmen Square glow like those along the grand canals of Venice. During the day, Beijing suffers from a carbon dioxide whiteout, China’s equivalent of London fog that has made the city a respiratory health disaster.

    Beijing is also at the uncomfortable crossroads of a political system struggling to accommodate dialectical materialism with emerging consumer pleasures. But the means of production are distant from Beijing power brokers, a reminder of how Marx railed against absentee landlords.

    The biggest contribution that the central bureaucracy has made to the Chinese economic miracle is to depreciate the renminbi to subsidize exports. With an exchange rate of ¥6.25 (yuan) to the US dollar, things that cost $150 in the West, such as a hotel room, are $24 in China.

    That accounts for an economic boom on the export side, but limits the demand for imported western products. If you are a Chinese worker who earns, on average, $900 a month, are you going to spend $150 on imported Air Jordans?

    The currency mismatch feeds the thriving market in Western knockoffs, but another reason for rip-off branding, I suspect, is that the idea of personal space is alien to Chinese daily life. Translated into consumer speak, that may explain why no one cares a fig about copyright laws, patents or trademarks.

    Across China: My train ride to western China lasted more than 24 hours. From my window, beyond the miasma that is Chinese air, were countless high-rise towers, many forty or fifty stories high, where rural residents have been resettled. Someday, China will be the people’s republic of tenement housing. The next revolution will begin when enough elevators are out-of-order.

    In the meantime, local shopping has become as centralized as once was the communist party. Big box stores — from Home Depot to the French supermarket Carrefour — are betting the ranch on making it alongside these brave new world housing complexes.

    The do-it-yourself corporate entities — a big fixture of malldom — have not yet figured out that Chinese women, not men, drive the Saturday afternoon purchases, and that few Chinese have SUVs to haul the stuff home.

    Chengdu: Yet another faceless city of the Asian miracle, Chengdu is clogged with late-model cars in traffic, and dotted with western boutiques and high-rise buildings.

    Cartier and Bulgari are on the best corners, but what attracts local crowds is American fast food, the ideal combination of Asian, on-the-go convenience and international branding, held together with US trans fats. Shares in YUM! Brands — the Chinese franchise owners of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell — are up 600% since 1999.

    South of center city, I biked past the world’s largest building, the New Century Global Centre, about the size of four Astrodomes with the façade of an airport terminal. Part mall, part exhibition center, water park, university, iMax cinema, hotel, restaurant, and office complex, it’s a consumption monolith. Still, it has the feel of an enormous recycling center where government money is, so to speak, washed (maybe at the artificial beach?) into the accounts of the new class. So much for the Chinese economy prospering only as the result of long work hours.

    Wuhan: East of Chengdu, this Yangtze River city is a conglomeration of three Qing Dynasty districts into a modern juggernaut. It saw the first outbreak of the 1911 Revolution, remembered with a few Sun Yat-sen statues and museums (although he was in Hawaii when the first shots were fired).

    Crossing the Yangtze on a ferry — new China as a slow passage through the heart of darkness — the river water was the consistency of crankcase oil, and smog obscured the far shores, no doubt the byproduct of all that Appalachian coal that gets exported to China on Warren Buffet’s trains and bulk carriers.

    Doing my field research on Chinese consumerism in several superstores, including Walmart, and at Starbucks, I was fascinated at how little Western companies cater to Chinese tastes. It’s not only that there’s no Dragon Latte at Starbucks. One of the sins of branding is to add Chinese characters to Western labels, so French supermarkets in China look just like those in Paris.

    Maybe the centrally planned economy is alive and well, but it’s living in exile in places like Arkansas or Seattle? At least I didn’t hear anyone in Wuhan complaining about aisles full of junk made in China.

    Shanghai: Its new reputation is as China’s New York City, a blend of high-rise glitz and coastal sophistication. But that’s if you are in expense-account Shanghai, eating in all those revolving restaurants. I got around on long marches to metro stops and by bus and taxis— China on five traffic-jams-a-day.

    At a food services convention that I had travelled to attend, huge exposition halls were devoted to things like espresso machines and Italian gelato, the budding tastes of modern China.

    From the view at the convention hall, China looks like a treaty port of Western desires, with Mao’s capitalist road running through it. I wonder, though, if shoppers will ever make the switch from street vendors to the Great Mall.

    On the outskirts of Shanghai, a colonial-style shopping center had everything from Pizza Hut to Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. It was awash with French wines, English clothing, American cosmetics, Spanish fashions, and Swiss pharmaceuticals, but, when I was there, few customers. It felt like an ultra-upscale military PX, although the shoppers were as listless as terra cotta warriors. Build it and they will come?

    Wandering the aisles of China’s consumption centers, I came to the conclusion that Western sales representatives (with their sample bags) are the new missionaries. They’ve come to the East to preach salvation, based on new packaging for old products, but they’re as rigid in sticking to the gospels of Home Depot as they once were about peddling the Book of Mormon.

    As André Malraux wrote in 1933, as prescient about the Chinese revolution as he was about 2014 consumers, “Europeans never understand anything of China that does not resemble themselves.”

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.

    Flickr photo, in Beijing’s Oriental Plaza shopping mall, & caption by Ming Xia, The Coca Cola Store: “China is a very receptive market to brand extension programs – Playboy clothing and Pepsi sneakers are ubiquitous in the PRC… this looks to me as if it is a test unit.”

  • Ukraine Watch: Kiev in the Media Center Spotlight

    This spring I traveled from St. Petersburg to Kiev, by way of southern Russian and eastern Ukraine. The newspapers were filled with reports of American policymakers gushing over how mobs in Kiev deserved the inalienable rights of freedom fighters and self-determination. Mobs of Russian mercenaries in Eastern Ukraine, who set up automobile tire and sandbag roadblocks, were condemned for threatening world peace.

    I took trains and mini-vans, and crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border between Belgorod (Russia) and Kharkiv (Ukraine), where, at least in the Western press, there are large concentrations of Russian forces getting ready to pounce on Ukrainian independence (I did not see any).

    As I travelled (with my 18-year-old son), I came to view the crisis less in geopolitical terms and more as opportunities for what the Soviets used to call agitprop, from “agitation and propaganda.” Like the agitprop theatricals of the 1920s, this war serves as the extension of public relations by other means.

    Ukraine is tailor-made for show business: it’s a folk opera, one of those performances in native dress you have to endure on package tours around Europe. The storyboards of an evil Vladimir Putin play well, even to an American electorate unsure if Donbas is a region or a dress designer.

    From any microphone in the world, President Obama can threaten “additional sanctions” against the Russian oligarchy. Vice President Biden can jet into Kiev with messages about how “the American people stand with the people of Ukraine, ” while Secretary of State John Kerry intones high moral dudgeon.

    For Putin, saber-rattling over Ukraine is a better media opportunity than even the winter games. It’s a chance to dominate the world stage and be taken seriously without having to put up another Olympic village for $51 billion.

    Day-to-day in the Kremlin, Putin presides over an empire in decline. For Russian men — awash in tobacco and vodka — the average life expectancy is about 64, and Potemkin’s village is now the glitter around Moscow, covering up the grim reality of the provincial cities.

    Economically, Russia’s trade zone with Belarus and Kazakhstan cannot compete with Europe, and China’s economic boom makes Russia, by comparison, look like a collective farm. For that reason, it’s doubtful that Putin needs to annex another coal region with high unemployment, although he’s happy to claim it if local militants drop it in his sphere of influence.

    As the avenger of the 1854 Crimean War, Putin can, at least, lay claim to Empress Catherine-like greatness, although the word on the Moscow street is that he took Yalta and Sebastopol so that Russian oligarchs can cash in on the bourgeois pursuits of gambling and casinos.

    Even the provisional government in Kiev has an interest in using the crisis to promote its competency. It came to power not through elections, but from street demonstrations, which were funded by sources as diverse as local oligarchs, nascent political parties, foreign intelligence agencies, the Catholic church, and neo-fascist elements. Each tent represents a marker in the great game.

    The freedom fighters still encamped around Kiev’s main city square, Maidan, look less like Jeffersonian democrats exchanging copies of Montesquieu’s treatises and more like those second-amendment militias in Montana, to whom all governments are evil.

    Dozens of tents are pitched in the square. The occupants, many dressed in thrift shop army fatigues, have the angry, down-and-out look of the 1890s Coxey’s Army of the unemployed, rather than of delegates to the Continental Congress.

    The Kiev protesters overthrew one government and are standing by—chopping wood, grilling sausages, listening to music, stacking bricks—to see what happens in the May 25 presidential election. To be clear, the February martyrs of the Maidan (about 110 were killed), whose pictures line makeshift altars around the square, were not paid to give their lives in political opposition.

    They took to the streets against the government of Viktor Yanukovych, which they saw as corrupt, dictatorial and ready to consign Ukraine to a Putin revival of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon. But in the chess culture of Ukraine, knights and bishops go forward with different goals than pawns.

    The Kiev government is struggling and divided. About 20 candidates have declared for the presidency, and at least eight parties are represented in the parliament. What could be more uplifting for them than solidarity phone calls from President Obama or pep talks from the US vice-president?

    The problem with the American embrace is that it validates the Russian belief that NATO, the EU, and the United States want Ukraine in their sphere of influence. Otherwise, why would the director of the CIA have come to Kiev during the recent crisis? Imagine the American reaction if an interim government in, say, Quebec welcomed the head of the Russian secret service, the FSB.

    The extent to which the crisis is being waged by the media can be seen in Kiev’s Hotel Ukraine, a dreary Intourist relic of the Soviet era overlooking the Maidan that, during the street demonstrations, allegedly rented out rooms to government snipers. Now that tourists rarely visit Kiev, the hotel is headquarters for something called Ukraine Crisis Media Center, a slick public relations operation where journalists can stop by for a quick coffee and a quote.

    On paper, the group is staffed with patriotic volunteers, there to keep alive the martyrdom of the Maidan and to warn about the evils of Russian aggression. In practice, the “media center” has the look of serious American front money.

    The day I was there it featured short, introductory remarks by the US ambassador to Ukraine and a press conference from the ranking minority member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Bob Corker (R-Tennessee).

    For these thirty minutes, Ukrainians, like homespun Tennessee constituents, were simple, hardworking folks who needed American support to throw off the Russian yoke. Yes, there was the local problem of corruption, but that was “a remnant of the Soviet-era,” much like the plumbing, I guess.

    Corker explained that he had come to Kiev to “show support for the people of Ukraine” and to applaud their courageous right to “self-determination”. For its aggression, he said, Russia and its president needed to “pay a price.”

    At no point was any mention made of other causes of the current crisis: NATO designs to push its military frontiers to Ukraine and Georgia, despite earlier assurances from President Bush (Sr.) not to advance NATO east of a reunited Germany; the US seeing Ukraine as a fertile market, not just for its intelligence services, but for its gas exports and energy companies; Ukraine’s kleptocracy that has left the post-Soviet economy stillborn since 1991; and elements of the non-elected government having spoken with the same reverence about fascism that earlier citizens accorded their Nazi liberators in 1941.

    In Washington’s press releases, the masked men in the East are Russian proxies in a renewed Cold War. To Moscow, the encampments around the Maidan are the spiritual heirs of the army of the Bay of Pigs.

    My own view is that that the liberators of Eastern and Western Ukraine, despite having different ideological mentors, are the homegrown dissidents of a failing state, one with high employment, cornered markets, governments with Italian-like instabilities, and few profits that have trickled down to ordinary citizens.

    Before leaving Kiev, we thought about visiting the vacated house of the former President Yanukovych, who departed in a hurry for his Russian exile, leaving behind his gilded furniture and private zoo. We were told the house is being transformed into a Museum of Corruption. Admission costs 20 Ukrainian hryvnia, although you can also get in by paying 10 hryvnia to one of the guards.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published. He first traveled to the former Soviet Union in 1975, and over the years has been to many of its then-constituent parts.

    Photo by the author: Tents in the Maidan.

  • Crimea and Ukraine: What Putin Could Learn from Yugoslavia

    While American government officials respond to the Russian Anschluss in Crimea by mobilizing their Twitter feeds and making the rounds of the Sunday morning meetings of the press, the Moscow government of Vladimir Putin reinforced its occupation forces around Simferopol and Sebastopol, perhaps at some point passing out small Russian flags to local sympathizers, who can wave them gratefully when the symbolic gates between Russia and Crimea are thrown open.

    To paraphrase a quote that circulated in the 1930s: “The West likes to spend its weekends in the country, while the Russians prefer to take their countries in a weekend.”

    The reason the Russians have chosen this moment to move against Ukraine and its Western patrons is not difficult to reconstruct. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the United States, NATO, and most recently the European Union have treated Russia as little more than a Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

    The moment it could, when the Soviet Union was in liquidation and Russia was weak, NATO pushed its military frontiers into Poland, the Baltic States, Slovakia, and even Georgia. At international conferences such as the G7, it sat Russian presidents at the children’s tables. In the Middle East, the United States and its allies blew away Russia’s man in Baghdad — Saddam — and is now doing the same with Assad in Syria.

    In Libya, despite giving Russia assurances that the no-fly zone was there to protect citizens trudging to markets with their donkeys, it was expanded to justify killing Qaddafi and reserving the sweetheart oil contracts for western corporations. No wonder Russia had its doubts when the US and the EU started hinting that Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yushchenko, had stolen more than was necessary.

    More immediately, Putin felt humiliated when the Western press comically treated his Olympics as though he was Comrade Kane, staging a $51 billion snow opera for his girlfriend.

    Putin did not become president-for-life of Russia by giving fundraisers in Napa Valley or interviews to Esquire. By nature intensely competitive, he still smarts from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, especially the loss of Ukraine.

    Short of reviving the 1854 Crimean War coalition (Britain, France, and Turkey, with Austro-Hungary and Prussia neutral) and besieging Sebastopol, there isn’t much that the West can do, or will want to do, to evict Russian troops from Crimea. Will Russia now take up the fallen mantle of the Soviet empire? Will it work?

    By invading or partitioning the Ukraine, Russia sets itself up as the Yugoslavia of the 21st century—Russoslavia? Like Slobodan Milosevic before him, Putin is a former Communist war horse who champions the nationalist cause of disenfranchised Russians cut adrift after the dissolution of the Soviet Union — Yugoslavia on a grander scale, with the same hodgepodge ethnicity. Ukraine becomes the Bosnia of the 21st century.

    Yugoslavia was a 19th century political ideal, to pull together a number of smaller, vulnerable Balkan states from the encroachments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the north and the Ottomans to the south. It came into being at the end of World War I, although by that time neither the Austro-Hungarians nor the Turks were powers in southwest Europe.

    Almost immediately, without the common threats, the countries of the Yugoslav federation fell out, although the country lasted, officially anyway, until the 1990s. To be a Serb living in Bosnia or Croatia was fine until those republics went for the exits of Yugoslavia, when to be Serb became to be a symbol of a failed central government or, worse, a second-class citizen living in a new country.

    Russia’s role in the Soviet Union was not unlike the position of Serbia in Yugoslavia. It had the largest population, was the seat of the central government, and, later, had the most to lose when constituent states of the federation decided to secede and take with them large blocs of Russian citizens.

    With the Soviet devolution, Russians became a lost tribe of the Cold War, stranded with few rights and much contempt in places like Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Belarus, and Latvia.

    When I have traveled in Russia or the ex-Soviet Union, I have met many who say, for example, “My father was from Moldova and my mother was Russian, but during the war we were moved to Uzbekistan, although later I went to school in Riga.”

    Putin is their archangel, much as the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was their philosopher-king, writing in 1995, “Russia has truly fallen into a torn state: 25 million have found themselves ‘abroad’ without moving anywhere, by staying on the lands of their fathers and grandfathers. Twenty-five million — the largest diaspora in the world by far; how dare we turn our back to it?? Especially since local nationalisms (which we have grown accustomed to view as quite understandable, forgivable, and ‘progressive’) are everywhere suppressing and maltreating our severed compatriots.”

    While there is a rationale for Putin speaking up for the lost rights of the Russian diaspora, the last thing he needs, in exchange for the liberation of Donetsk, is a Muslim Risorgimento in Tatarstan, Chechen agitation, a separatist movement in Siberia, or rebellion from the two million Ukrainians living inside Russia.

    Like Yugoslavia, Russia has a lot it can lose in playing the nationalist card, because it risks a series of border wars if it tries to impose Greater Russia not just on gleeful former citizens, but on less enthusiastic minorities, who want nothing to do with a Russian restoration.

    In its attempts to hang on to its cordon sanitaire in the past, Russia became the patron of bizarre breakaway republics, such as Transnistria (a Russian enclave between Ukraine and Moldova), Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Nagorno-Karabakh in Armenia. An Autonomous Republic of Crimea, run by shady commissars flitting around in SUVs, would fit well with these no-man’s lands, dressed up for the Kremlin masquerade.

    Most likely the Ukraine crisis will end with the same vagueness that has characterized so much of international diplomacy since the end of the Cold War. In most cases, Moscow has ended up as the guardian of a series of rump states, the latest of which might be Crimea.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published. He first traveled to the former Soviet Union in 1975, and over the years has been to many of its then-constituent parts, usually by train.

    This post is a different version of a longer analysis at NYTimes eXaminer.

    Flickr photo by Alexxx Malev: Sevastopol 187

  • Will London Embrace the Monaco Model?

    London’s goal — admirable for any city of medieval invention — is to drive the private car underground and replace it with a web of mass transit, suburban trains, bike lanes, taxi stands, and walkways. All of those are well calibrated to an urban grid that consists of mews, squares, and quirky side streets with names like Shoulder of Mutton Alley.

    Despite the winds and rains, I recently pedaled all over London and came to the conclusion that it has an excellent chance to get past the automobile era. It could be Europe’s city of tomorrow, one that moves forward with its work/life balance on a human scale. Its future as Europe’s finance center, though, and its real estate forecast, as well as the outlook for its pubs, remain open questions.

    I enrolled in Mayor Boris Johnson’s shared bikes — it took a few credit card swipes — and headed off to the City, London’s financial district, which lies north of London Bridge.

    Will London remain one of the world’s top finance centers? The continuing economic crisis, the threat of the U.K. pulling out of the European Union, Scottish independence, and strict new regulations could all spell doom for its merchant banking.

    The City’s accommodating genius is that while it is as established as the House of Lords or the East India Company, it is, among other things, a go-go offshore financial center — the Cayman Islands with bowler hats.

    Neither continental European nor American nor Asian, London straddles all three markets, funneling money from one part of the globe to another. By comparison, Frankfurt, Paris, Zurich, and Amsterdam are staid regional financial centers. Only New York can give it a run for its money.

    At G8 meetings Prime Minister David Cameron bemoans corporate-shell tax dodging and come-by-chance balance sheets, but when he gets home he might as well don a visor and leather sleeves. London is a casino cashing in the chips of a capital-intensive world.

    During the Crimean crisis, London has been all for economic sanctions, provided, however, that they don’t hurt the City, where Russian oligarchs still get their phone calls returned.

    While I was there, London experienced its wettest January since 1670. But one of the city’s virtues is that it copes well with bad weather. Houses and hotels are short walks to shops and trains. In most London neighborhoods you will pass many restaurants, drug stores, newsstands, and pocket supermarkets. On television, England was sinking; in London, it was business as usual.

    The pleasure of London on a bike is that its very quickly reduced to an overlapping series of small towns, with such well known names as Chelsea, Fulham, Soho, Sloane Square, Lancaster Gate, and Hampstead Heath.

    Fewer pubs were in evidence. I read later that about 1400 have been closing every year around England, victim to archaic licensing laws and restrictive franchising, not to mention the iPhone culture that does not cozy up with a pint to dank interiors with ersatz slot machines and pinball games. Industrial Britain has become a service economy, and the servers prefer bistros, bars, and Pret A Manger.

    A downside to London is that the world’s happy money has made its property market an international savings bank, where apartments routinely sell for $6 million and some hotels (not mine) cost $700 a night.

    Nevertheless, the excellent Tube, buses, commuter trains, and Boris bikes make it easier to stay in less fashionable quarters and connect to the bright lights. London has spent billions on upgrading its railroad stations, which soon will be the iron standard in Europe. By contrast, Moscow is choking on its gridlocked exhaust fumes, Paris prefers tourism to trade, and Berlin still has a hole in its heart.

    When I lived in London in the 1970s, King’s Cross had the air of New York’s Port Authority bus terminal, and St. Pancras appeared only to offer connecting service to The Slough of Despond. The renovated St. Pancras International, where Eurostars depart for Paris, Brussels, Lille, and Avignon, is alive with spoken French, fresh croissants, trendy restaurants, and a five-star hotel. With a soaring glass interior, King’s Cross could be an Asian airline terminal.

    The East End and Canary Wharf still feel like warehouse districts, although now the only cargoes are winking screens in trading rooms. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine in the next fifty years a second London growing up around the Thames docklands. It has the infrastructure in place — trains, an airport, businesses, nearby housing stock, and open spaces — to support a major city, one part Venice with canals, another part Shanghai with skyscrapers.

    The risks to London’s future are political. Insular Tories could lead Britain out of the European Union, the British pound could become a second-tier currency, and the city’s cost structures could make it only an amusement park for Russian oligarchs and Arab sheiks, not the working or middle classes. Call it the Monaco Model.

    Still, I would bet on London’s sustainability at all levels of a city’s food chain… if only because it is so eccentrically welcoming to bikes, banks, brokers, and bookstores.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.

    Photo of King’s Cross by Matthew Stevenson

  • Switzerland: Why EU Immigrants Were Headed Off at the Pass

    The only time the Swiss make US headlines, other than with the occasional Olympic biathlon medal, is when a majority of the voters exercise their franchise by voting down minarets or, as happened this month, banning free immigration from the European Union.

    As the most democratic country on earth — major political questions are submitted to a popular vote — Switzerland allows what are called popular initiatives on any issue that can muster 100,000 signatures on a petition. It’s the only country in Europe that operates like “The Gong Show”.

    Popular initiatives on the ballot arise from signed petitions. Referendums, on the other hand, although voted on in the same manner, sometimes give citizens the right to approve or disapprove legislation that has already passed.

    In a country of almost eight million people, getting one percent of the population to sign off for a ballot initiative on the outrage of the day isn’t very challenging. Then, when the vote is scheduled, the Swiss, including me, say yes or no to all sorts of questions.

    My favorite initiative, a while back, was whether the animals in each canton (county is the closest English word) needed a lawyer to handle their days in court. A cat man, I voted yes. My neighbors, in the majority, said no, implying that the laws of the jungle were all the animals needed.

    In the case of European Union (EU) immigration, the Swiss People’s Party — called the UDC locally and dominated by right-wingers, Swiss Germans, and farmers in rural cantons — asked for a vote to restrict EU immigrants from entering Switzerland, and to restore an earlier edict that Swiss job applicants have precedent over foreigners.

    While Switzerland is not a member of the EU, during the last twelve years it has agreed to a number of bilateral treaties that give Europeans unfettered access to Swiss job markets and to establishing local residency here.

    With the European economy flat-lining since 2008, many in the EU have drifted across the border into Switzerland to work in a variety of skilled and unskilled jobs. With paychecks in Swiss francs, the work offers better returns than, say, looking to catch on as a hedge fund manager on the Greek island of Mykonos.

    Now that the Swiss have voted to put quota limits on EU immigrants, what exactly will happen?

    The way the initiative system works is this: just because a question is accepted by popular acclaim doesn’t make it law. It does, however, give the government — in this case the federal parliament in Bern — three years to draft and pass a law that complies with the spirit of the resolution.

    The way the law is written over the following three years, however, doesn’t necessarily conform exactly to what has been voted up or down in the popular initiative.

    In the case of the immigration vote, I would imagine that many caveats will be written into the deportation orders so that foreigners holding down jobs in Switzerland will not be driven to the border, and that future immigrants will continue to find Swiss places to live and work (although the needed paperwork will increase).

    When I moved from the US to Switzerland in 1991, it was before the existing open immigration policies were in place. To hire me, my employer had to write the job posting in such a way that only one person on earth, me, had those requisite skills. It took me six months to get a work permit and begin my job.

    In much news reporting about the current immigration vote, the subtext is that the Swiss are racist in wanting to boot out foreigners and that the country suffers from “too much democracy” by allowing citizens to vote on questions as though everyone were a parliamentarian.

    I’d answer the racism charge by saying that the Swiss are about average in terms of tolerance for immigration. Unlike the US, for example, Switzerland does not have a fence along its southern border. Nor does it fingerprint foreign tourists at the airports.

    To my mind, the immigration vote was less about racial intolerance, and more an expression of Swiss anger at Brussels and even Washington for routinely beating up the country over such issues as Libya, banking secrecy, minarets, the strong Swiss franc, and bilateral trade agreements.

    Swiss critics — and there are many around Europe and the world — argue that Switzerland wants all the benefits of the adjacent EU, such as access to its rich markets, but without incurring any of the costs, for example, those run up in bailing out the insolvent Greeks.

    There may be some truth to this, but, nevertheless, there are also both historical and modern reasons that Switzerland refuses to join the EU. The 1815 Congress of Vienna, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and a subsequent Treaty of Turin enshrined the idea of Swiss neutrality as one of the cornerstones of the European peace.

    No single major power, it was argued, should hold sway over the Swiss alpine passes and the trade flows of Europe. Two-hundred-year-old political traditions die slowly.

    The recent reasons that Switzerland has not joined the EU have to do with its federalism, rooted in its communal and cantonal governments, including things like initiative and referendum voting. All political power in Switzerland is local; everyone is a communard.

    Many Swiss feel that if the country were an EU member, their communes (really villages) would become hostage to German edicts or French heavy-handedness, not to mention bureaucrats in Brussels.

    In practice, Swiss democracy most closely resembles Thomas Jefferson’s constitutional theories, in which well-educated farmers and small business operators (not career politicians) run the villages and the towns, and all abhor centralized power, be it in Bern, London, Paris, Brussels or Washington.

    By contrast, the US likes to boast that it is the greatest democracy on earth, even though the Senate is a millionaire’s club, Congress is a gerrymandered closed shop of incumbents, and the presidency is a legalized monarchy. (If in doubt, compare the court of Louis XIV with the 700 people in President Obama’s traveling entourage, which includes speechwriters, chefs, and food tasters.)

    Between incumbency and the Electoral College, many US votes “don’t matter,” and they only happen every two or four years.

    For sure, letting every Swiss over age 18 play the role of parliamentarian every six weeks has its risks (I still think we should have voted in those animal-rights lawyers). But the major reason I became Swiss in 2009 was so that I could vote every six weeks on the issues of the day.

    My family is composed of six voters, and what’s amazing is how we have completely different views on each ballot question. I vote for business and bike lanes and against taxes, while I suspect my wife of either syndicalism or maybe what the French delightfully call gauche caviar, (the local equivalent of ‘limousine liberalism’).

    The children spread their votes around between the greens and fiscal no-nonsense, so that a dinner during an initiative vote reminds me of the last scenes in Lawrence of Arabia, when various tribes swarm the pan-Arab Congress, all waving large flags.

    Yes, referendum democracy makes mistakes. The vote to prohibit minarets, to give just one example, was a lose-lose proposition, and it only went on the ballot to humiliate the government. But without these ballots — even those that propose marching immigrants to the border — our dinners would be sadly quieter, and our politics would be, too.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.

    Flickr photo by tomgeens

  • Derailing Europe’s Bike Trains

    In a fit of what now appears to have been madness, over the last ten days I attempted to live the life of a small plastic figure in an architect’s model community. I wheeled my bike through railroad stations, and took eco-friendly cycle lanes. The goal was to use only a combination of trains and my bicycle to attend a series of meetings in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. I hoped that the harmonious state of the European Union, not to mention the environmental friendliness of both trains and bikes, would allow me to whiz between Bordeaux, Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam and then pedal the last kilometers to my hotels. Is this not the dream of European planners who have banned cars from many historic downtowns, and annually vote some €40 billion a year in railroad subsidies?

    Like many utopian schemes, my model week of travels worked better on paper than in practice. I made a large loop from Geneva to Bordeaux, Paris, and Amsterdam, and stopped long enough in many other cities to ride around the “centreville”. When it was over, I came to the conclusions that European rail transport, and perhaps even the larger European Union, remain Balkanized, and that taking a bicycle on a business trip involves the same logistical planning as departing on a Crusade.

    While getting on and off thirty trains (on the weekends I made detours to historic sites), I learned that many European railroad companies hate bicycles, especially on crack express trains, and that bikes are largely exiled to insignificant “milk” trains that go nowhere at slow speeds.

    More distressing, national borders — largely in disuse on auto routes across Europe — are alive and well whenever you attempt to bring a bicycle across state lines on a train, as that opens up the possibilities of more fees for rail companies, or at least the chance for conductors to deliver nationalistic rants.

    Between Amsterdam, Brussels, Lille and Geneva, for example, I paid out more than $60 just to bring along a bike, although on many trains I had to stand with it in the vestibule. The EU’s motto, “Unity in Diversity,” might as well read, “What makes you think you can put your bike there?”

    Herewith is a not-at-all comprehensive guide to bike-training around Europe. Be particularly mindful if you believe the Community is a happy jamboree of continentals singing hymns to Brussels:

    France: Bikes are allowed on some high speed TGV trains (Train à Grande Vitesse), but only after a passenger has physically gone to a station and paid for a reservation. Online bike reservations are not possible (that would make it too easy).

    Local TER trains (Transport Express Régional) welcome bikes aboard at no extra charge and have convenient hooks and bike carriages. Except for a few long distance “Intercités” trains, TER is local, which is why it took twelve hours and numerous train changes to travel with a bike from Geneva to Bordeaux, the first leg of my journey.

    I changed in Bellegarde, Lyon, and Saint-Pierre-des-Corps before heading to Bordeaux. Later, I made whistle stops in La Rochelle, Poitiers and Tours. Nearly all the cities on my route were a delight to see on a bike, as, of course, was Paris, which is as bike-friendly as any large city, although Parisian cyclists ride as though they inhabit some wild Expressionist painting.

    Belgium: I went from Paris to Lille and then across Belgium on several trains, all of which took my bike, but few of which had any place to store it.

    Nor is the French fee paid to transport a bike recognized in Belgium. So much for the common market. Belgium imposes its own set of arcane rules for passengers trying to sneak a bicycle across the border.

    Even though I had passes for the trains and my bike, there was always some reason I ran afoul of the Belgian conductors, who in torrents of Flemish, French, or English would berate me for the temerity of traveling in their country.

    Mao would have called these encounters “struggle sessions,” and I grew to dread being asked for “self-criticism” every time I boarded a Belgian train. A few of the conductors were kindly, but some in Flanders were so bitter over what appeared to be nothing that I wondered if their rage wasn’t part of a larger crackup, maybe one involving the entire country?

    I did love my rides around Brussels, Antwerp and Ypres, but was shocked at the contrast between wealthy (Germanic) Flanders and depressed (French-speaking) Wallonia.

    Flanders has wealthy farms, an industrial base, global trade via the Rhine, inflowing tourist dollars from Bruges and Ghent, and the European Union in Brussels.

    Wallonia is the dowager of a forgotten Belgian empire (maybe lost in the Congo?) — with abandoned coal mines, lots of subsidies from the north, lazy union work rules, and a sense that the future isn’t what it used to be. It does not even have Brussels, which floats along the uneasy divide: linguistically part of Wallonia; legally attached to Flanders.

    If the Flemish politicians are anything like their train conductors, I can easily imagine them throwing the Walloons off at the next station, with a long lecture about their failures as an economic entity or their lack of sufficient documentation.

    The Netherlands: The Low Countries are celebrated for their bicycle culture; bikes in Amsterdam careen like split atoms. That affection ends at the doors of the train, on which bikes are a regulated industry.

    I loved biking across the bridges over Amsterdam canals, especially at night when the Christmas lights were lit and the city had the feel of a Venetian carnival. Nevertheless, on the rails, a bike became an albatross, subject to myriad rules about the difference between a “national” and “international” bike pass, and regulations that prohibit bikes on certain trains during rush hours.

    Because of a tunnel fire, my bike and I were waylaid in the Hague’s damp air for more than an hour. When finally rerouted to Gouda and Rotterdam, I was told in a scolding manner that I would have to get off the trains for another two hours during peak travel times, even though the cars were empty. So much for those newspaper articles about modest Dutch royalty tooling around the country on their bikes.

    It took almost eight hours to travel with the bike from Amsterdam to Lille, France. These cities are three hours apart on high-speed trains, although none of those trains allow bicycles.

    ***

    The answer to these frustrations, of course, is for me to buy a folding bicycle — although a good one costs more than $1500 — if I wish to persist in the dream of getting around Europe by train with a bike.

    A “folder” may be worth it, however, because European cities are best seen over handlebars. Sadly, while a folding bike can be snuck aboard fast trains as “normal luggage,” the other, perhaps larger problem of the European bike-train dream is that international train journeys have become the travel choice largely of the expense-account crowd.

    For example, one-way train fare from Geneva to London is $350, but don’t even think about taking along a bicycle. Or, you might get it from Geneva to Paris on a TGV (add $15 more to the ticket), but Eurostar’s bike policies (add another $35) are more arcane than the Treaty of Westphalia: Bikes over a certain size go as registered luggage, but sometimes travel on different trains, making connections convoluted.

    So fly, rent a car, sit in traffic, and sleep in motels near auto route interchanges. In other words, so long as you don’t try to see the continent with a bike and by train on the same trip, or on a budget, the state of the European empire is fine.

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.

    Flickr photo by K Paulinka: Bike Storage at Leiden train station parking lot, Netherlands.

  • Biking New York City: The Handlebar Tour

    In case it has been a while since you have ridden a bicycle around Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn or Queens — as I have in recent weeks — here is a shortlist of some developments around New York City: midtown sidewalks are overflowing with tourists and too narrow for the pedestrian flow (especially around the many Elmos posing in Times Square); the South Bronx, while still very poor, has an emerging middle class; cruise ships dock in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on the same piers that were once the provenance of gangland; potholes and deteriorating asphalt are everywhere, despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s reputation for elevating the city’s infrastructure; and Queens is still struggling with all the Robert Moses expressways and bridges that make traffic patterns there a maze of dead ends, even on a bike.

    Here are some observations from my handlebar social survey:

    Uptown: The nicest neighborhood I discovered is what realtors now call South Harlem, from about 145th Street south to Central Park. The crime rates are down, the bistros are up, and the wide sidewalks and relatively quiet streets make for lovely strolling or, in my case, bike riding.

    Because the scale of the neighborhood is often limited to four-story brownstones (East Harlem has more projects, but also a Target and a PetSmart), gentrification has spread like a wildfire. A mansion on Strivers Row, the once and future dream of Harlem homeowners, costs about $1.8 million. One-bedroom apartments on West 116th Street and Lennox go for about $350,000.

    On the Waterfront: It’s sixty years since unionism, pilferage, and mob violence killed off New York’s ports, eventually sending cargo ships and containers to Baltimore, Norfolk, Newark, and Boston. The city has now reclaimed its rotting piers and empty warehouses with waterside parks, ferry stops, exhibition centers, and cruise terminals, including the one in Brooklyn that’s large enough to tie up the Queen Mary.

    Especially on the West Side of Manhattan — with fewer mobsters gasping at the ice picks in their backs — the piers are part of an expanding and vibrant dockland scene, complete with picnic tables, skateboard jumps, arboretums, and restaurants, all of which have splendid views of the Hudson River.

    Gridlock: One of the downsides of New York’s continuing prosperity is that it risks becoming a gridlocked city of Asian proportions. One Sunday I biked the length of Fifth Avenue, stunned at the number of cars clogging the streets and the bad quality of the pavement.

    Coming into Manhattan across the East River bridges is free, and New Yorkers love their cars with a demolition-derby passion. I even saw motorcyclists popping wheelies down Fifth Avenue, to the indifference of the police, who clearly weren’t in the mood to confront biker rebels without much of a cause.

    The Freedom Tower: The new One World Trade Center looks like the cookie-cutter office buildings in Shanghai and Hong Kong, or perhaps an enormous shower stall. It is long on defiance but short on urban grace.

    The city would have done more for downtown if it had returned the blocks and cross streets lost to the footprint of the first World Trade Center development, improved the rail network, and allowed the Battery Park and Wall Street areas to flow together into a vibrant neighborhood.

    The Freedom Tower is more a symbol than a practical city project. Four billion dollars (with myriad subsidies loaded into the budget) will be spent essentially for a large, mostly public, office building at a time when everyone prefers to work from home.

    The Mayoral Race: In the November election to replace Michael Bloomberg, the Democrat Bill de Blasio (public activism) defeated the Republican Joe Lhota (Harvard MBA). Neither had a large political base before the primaries, although both have been active in city politics for the last generation.

    Lhota was a disciple of former mayor Rudi Giuliani and ran the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for Bloomberg, but despite managerial competence had no chance of winning. New Yorkers want it all: neither higher crime or taxes, nor stop-and-frisk and budget cuts (“fuhgeddaboudit”).

    Critics of de Blasio say his feel-good liberalism will set New York’s clock back to 1977, when television announcer Howard Cosell told America from Yankee Stadium: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning,” which is also the title of a book on the low water mark of New York’s urban decline. His supporters say he will bring a degree of social justice to what is otherwise a capital intensive city.

    The Bronx: Also in 1977, President Jimmy Carter went to the smoldering South Bronx, to publicize the extent of New York’s decay. Ronald Reagan went during the 1980 campaign, to highlight that Carter had not done anything to haul away the rubble and fill in the vacant lots.

    By the time Bill Clinton got there in 1997, the heavy slum lifting had been done (thanks to New York city and state officials), and all he could do was bask in the success. Despite or because of the presidential grandstanding, Charlotte Street, which became the South Bronx’s signature photo op, is now a suburban enclave, with 89 single-family houses and graceful fenced lawns.

    More than anything else, however, what brought back the Bronx was a wave of immigrants in the final decades of the 20th century. They came to wealthy New York looking for jobs, and needed affordable neighborhoods where they could raise their families.

    Queens for a Day: I rode from Randall’s Island, a splendid oasis in the East River, through Astoria and Flushing to College Point and Whitestone. Even with some new bike paths, Queens suffers from too many highways cutting across its underbelly. I got lost near Citi Field and rode 500 yards on the Van Wyck Expressway.

    My destination was the old army base at Fort Totten, once the Gibraltar of Long Island Sound (built to keep Confederates out of New York harbor), now a forlorn park and reserve training center, although with stunning views of the water and the New York skyline.

    The future of Fort Totten could be another bellwether of New York City. Should its dilapidated historic houses — from the genteel, 1930s U.S. Army base — be renovated and sold off, part of a mixed-use plan to get more families into the lovely park and historic base? The same decisions need to be made about Governors Island and parts of Ellis Island. Or should all private development in historic areas be banned, even if the parks remain shabby without enough public money for renovation?

    Because I grew up in and around the New York City that for much of my life was deteriorating, I view most recent development around New York (except for the ugly destruction of Pennsylvania Station) as positive. To me, Fort Totten should be both a park and a place for families to live. Why leave a waterfront partly in ruins?

    Will it happen when Bill de Blasio is mayor? Somehow I doubt it. I wouldn’t think a mayor could win reelection with privatization projects in a faraway Queens park — although I never thought that the Bronx would again be thriving, South Harlem or Red Hook would be safe, or the West Side piers would become part of a stunning city revival. All of this has been accomplished with a blend of private and public money.

    Conclusions? As Woody Allen said, “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?”

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.

    Flickr photo by Charles16e: East River Bicycle with Fishing Rod Attachment

  • Is America Flying Europe’s Flag?

    Consider the recent government shutdown as a disagreement about how much influence Europe should have on the continuing American revolution. Who would have predicted that, more than 237 years after the United States threw off the English yoke, disagreement over European approaches to life and government would be strong enough to shutter the democratic experiment, or downgrade the nation’s credit? And yet, Congress is divided, as it was in 1797, between Royalist Republicans and Jacobin Democrats, arguing about which model of government best suits the young and restless American republic.

    Never far from the lips of Tea Party stalwarts is the accusation that the Obama administration is bent on importing European socialism to the fair shores of free enterprise.

    The Republican right sees supporters of the health care act, immigration reform, and deficit spending as the equivalents of English levelers, idle Greek pensioners or French syndicalists. They fear that as these ideas anchor in the lee of the Statue of Liberty, it will perhaps soon be rededicated as Our Lady of Communal Redistribution, Occupational Safety, and Bureaucratic Oversight.

    Democrats, too, have fears inspired by their transatlantic neighbors. Many believe that only additional legislation can keep the United States from turning into another constitutional European monarchy, rife with income inequality, sweetheart tax breaks for the aristocracy, and enough gated suburban Downton Abbeys to impress even the noble lordships on Fox & Friends.

    I spend much of my time shuttling between Europe and the US, and thought it might be useful to see if there is any rationality in the fear that the Monroe Doctrine might no longer be strong enough to hold off creeping European influence. Here’s a short, idiosyncratic list, not at all definitive, of a few of the divisions between the continents:

    Store Hours: In many European countries, shops are closed whenever management has the sense that someone might want to buy something. In Italy and in parts of France it is not uncommon to find restaurants that close for lunch, and few establishments in Europe are open between Saturday afternoon and Monday lunchtime. In the US, AM/PM and 24/7 set the retail bar.

    Vacations: Europeans live for them. They take time off for Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, and a raft of saint days, not to mention their entitled four weeks of work leave and the occasional long weekend or bank holiday. By contrast, Americans fear time off from work more than they fear trade unions or, well, family vacations.

    Political parties: In the US, third or independent parties hint at irredentist change. In Europe, most countries have dozens of political parties, from communists, socialists, and greens on the left to near fascists on the right. Nevertheless, neither multiparty Europe nor two-party America can escape parliamentary paralysis, in part because both are dealing from insolvent decks.

    Suburbanization: Around many European cities suburbs have never taken root, and it is not unusual for the last stop on the metro (as in Munich or Geneva) to leave passengers in the wild. In the US, major cities have the qualities of a sprawling suburb, where cars are needed to shop or get to school. Even Spanish Harlem now has a Target.

    Churches: Except for the spread of Islam in countries like the United Kingdom and France, organized religion is on the wane in Europe. I bike a lot in France, and pass dozens of shuttered churches that appear to have neither a congregation nor a priest. Italians love the papacy a lot more than they do morning mass. In the US, however, many new churches need lots for overflow parking.

    Religion: Americans have married their love of promotion, organization, and public faith to create all sorts of new sects and churches, and with them religious academies, summer camps, bible study groups, cable channels, and ecclesiastical conferences. In Europe, the established religions — Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Judaism — hold the most sway; the only holy rollers are Bentleys.

    Television: In America, the village square is its community of television programs, which have now wormed their presence into portable handsets. There, gossip, information, advertisements and entertainment are shared at all hours. In England, France, and Germany — to name a few — the daily newspaper remains competitive.

    Lunch: In the US — as Gordon Gekko says in Wall Street — the business lunch is for wimps, while in Europe you still count yourself lucky if the noontime meal lasts less two hours.

    Dinner: Americans take their suppers (standing up) with Coke Zero in front of the TV, while Europeans take their evening meals (seated) in the company of wine.

    Getting Around: Usually I drive more on a two week trip to the States than I do all year in Europe, which has buses, trains, and bike lanes across most countries and cities. In Switzerland I often go to a small mountain village where 36 trains stop daily at its tiny station. For comparison, the city of Houston has two trains a day.

    Militarism: Save for the British hanging on to their lancer regiments, Europe’s armies are home guards and dads’ armies. The US, meanwhile, is dispatching aircraft carriers to the seven seas and branding its navy (at least on Monday Night Football commercials) as “a global force for good.”

    Adultery: The French may still disconnect their cell phones between the hours of five and seven PM (“cinq à sept,” as the phrase has it), but an extramarital affair will never cost anyone a job or political office. Even the lascivious French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn is plotting his comeback. In the US, adultery is a bigger barrier to political office than foreign birth.

    Sex: In the US it is welcome as a sales agent — Mad Men Über Alles — but somewhat less forgiven when it mixes with politics. If only Anthony Weiner had the good sense to confine his online dalliances to a reality show (The Onanist?), he would be accepting an Emmy Award for best actor. Because he chose the stage of politics, he was seen as Pee-wee Herman running for mayor from the back of a virtual theater.

    Marriage: Americans marry to have children. Europeans have children so that later they can get married.

    Education: Most European universities, except for those in the UK, are free, provided you can make the grades. In the US, acceptance and graduation rates are more a function of capital allocation. Americans choose their aristocracy from privately-funded academies — costs at many four-year colleges are approaching $250,000 — while Europe prefers a meritocracy that combines public universities blended with a fading aristocracy.

    Healthcare: Although many Americans think all medicine in Europe is socialized, few countries have the equivalent of Britain’s National Health Service. Obamacare most closely resembles the Swiss system, which requires all citizens to buy health insurance from private companies, although in Switzerland deductibles are so high (to reduce premium prices) that most families never see a dime back from their insurance payments, unless they are dragged by a truck.

    Transatlantic Balance Sheet: I would say that the US fosters more inventive thinking, creative entrepreneurs and capital markets. And it is always open for business (including on Christmas).

    Europe has better public schools, infrastructure, railroad networks, and work-life equations. Of course, it has many drawbacks. No continent can fight wars for four hundred years or have an Iron Curtain down its middle and not have residual side affects, notably unresolved ethnic conflicts and crammed cemeteries.

    But the next time you have to work through lunch or vacation, ask yourself if you would rather be weathering the economic crisis in Detroit, or on a Mediterranean beach.

    Flickr photo: Brussels, by Eszter Hargittai

    Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical travel essays. His new book, Whistle-Stopping America, was recently published.