May 24, 2018 – When bishop Michael Bruce Curry spoke these words at Harry and Megan’s wedding, I was in a good place: “Imagine this tired old world when love is the way.” That same day, I had attended a wedding in the Bulgarian city of Varna, situated on the Black Sea Coast. The international group of people gathered there unanimously celebrated love. It can transcend borders and build bridges.

Both of these things are sorely needed in Europe, so I hope that Harry and Megan’s fairytale wedding (as well as the one my Dutch-Bulgarian friends had) can serve as inspiration for the European project. It’s not doing so well, after all: there is little interest in future enlargement, the Hungarian nationalist Orbán is still very much in power, and a peculiar coalition in Italy has made plans for 100 billion euros, but doesn’t actually have this money, causing them to clash with the European partners.

For a minute, the Brits didn’t have to worry about the Brexit, and existed in a state of pure bliss. The royal couple looked smitten, Oprah Winfrey was there, and bishop Curry’s speech was titled ‘The power of love’. Following in Martin Luther King’s footsteps he urged the guests to imagine the seemingly impossible. “Imagine our neighborhoods and communities when love is the way. Imagine our governments and countries when love is the way.”

That’s no easy task for Bulgaria: as of 2018, the country is the poorest member of the European Union. It’s in 100th place (out of 156) in the World Happiness Report, making the Bulgarians slightly happier than the Nepalese, but slightly unhappier than the Cameroonese. Their European marriage does seem to have been beneficial. The standard of living measured in purchasing power has increased from 34% of the European average in 2007 to 53% in 2016. Along with Togo and Latvia, they have experienced the biggest growth in happiness. That may sound like ‘the power of love’, but the country isn’t feeling all that lovey-dovey yet.

The Bulgarians may be suffering from the fact that they once performed much better. About 7000 years ago, the first European civilization developed on Bulgarian grounds. Preceding Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley, gold was mined and processed there. Although European Movement The Netherlands (Europese Beweging Nederland) is celebrating the 70 year anniversary of The Congress of Europe today and tomorrow–considered by many to be the first ‘federal moment’ in European history–the European project is a big question mark. At last week’s Western Balkans Summit, Albanian leader Edi Rama spoke the following words: “We lived for 50 years with a red horizon which we never reached. We don’t want to live with a blue horizon now.”

Love is a two-way street, so a real marriage between the EU and Albania or Macedonia will sadly have to wait for a while. In the meantime, definitely visit Varna.

May 3, 2018 – When I mention my plan to visit all countries in the world, people are typically enthusiastic, and then proceed to ask me whether I’ve visited North-Korea. When I say that I have, I am met with disbelief. Apparently, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has a reputation to uphold: out of all 198 countries, it’s supposedly the most difficult to visit.

Since we were travelling in a group, things weren’t quite so bad, but historically, it’s obvious how this image came about. In as early as the 19th century, Korea was vehemently opposed to any kind of modern influence and closed its borders, only maintaining relations with China. Korea has been known as a kingdom of recluses ever since.

There are now two Koreas. With 51 million inhabitants, the southern part is the world’s eleventh economy. The north isn’t doing as well: with 25 million inhabitants, it’s listed in the 125th position. The contrasts are striking: Seoul is a city of light, Pyongyang barely has any street lights.

I set foot in North-Korea eight years ago. My hotel was located on an island, and my freedom of movement was confined to the hotel halls. Our visit followed a strictly arranged minute-to-minute schedule, supervised by travel guides who seemed to be robots. Almost scarily impressive was a performance by the Arirang Festival. In a stadium with a seating capacity of 150.000, the largest in the world, we witnessed a gymnastic and artistic performance unlike any other. The tens of thousands of participants created mosaic pictures by holding up coloured cards at the right moment. This is how they portrayed the macabre beauty of the individual merging with the masses. After an hour and a half a globe featuring a united Korea was carried onto the field.

The Koreas are back on speaking terms again, and starting the day after tomorrow, they will even be in the same time zone, since North Korea will be putting its clock back half an hour.

Is there any hope for the world? You would almost think so, now that (closer to home) Saudi-Arabia is also undergoing some serious change. For the time being, it’s still an impregnable fortress, since the authorities don’t provide tourist visa. New crown prince Mohammad bin Salman finally seems to be preparing his kingdom for the 21st century, however. Women get to drive, starting this summer, which is a big step for a country that has consistently violated human rights, and those of women in particular. What’s more, the Saudis got to go the cinema again last month, for the first time since 1983. What film was on? Disney’s Black Panther, in which a (black) prince transforms his country. What a coincidence.

To crown it all, it was announced that Saudi-Arabia will soon be dispensing its first tourist visa. While other countries are increasingly attempting to close their doors to the big, bad world outside, two kingdoms of recluses are opening theirs. I’m not complaining, mind you.

April 11th, 2018 – When injustice occurs, one can either call for openness or wag their finger disapprovingly. Interesting comparisons can be made between the Brits and the Dutch on this topic.

The United Kingdom and the Netherlands are neighbours on good terms, and Hook of Holland and Harwich are separated only by a 200 kilometer boat ride. There are some stereotypical cultural differences, however: Dutch families practically live in see-through houses, whereas the English attach great importance to their privacy, almost compulsively so. Meanwhile, groups of English youngsters use their stag does to gawk at the sex workers on De Wallen, who only close their little curtains when they are on the job.

We, in turn, get up in arms about those masses of English tourists causing trouble in our capital. We are quite used to living cramped together, and so we have come to think in terms of hinderances. On the opposite end of the spectrum we find the Anglo-Saxon system, which allows for some more space: they think in terms of damage and accountability. On every corner of the island nation one may come across signs warning you about the dangers of slipping, hot liquids, and sharp edges. Personally, this makes me a little aggressive. The times they are a-changin’, however, and a sign has been put up at the Princess Diana Playground in London’s Kensington Gardens, stating that risks have been ”intentionally provided, so that your child can develop an appreciation of risk in a controlled play environment rather than taking similar risks in an uncontrolled and unregulated wider world”.

Of course, I also cycle past the occasional Dutch playground. Every now and then a child will fall off the swings. Danger is part of the deal, so one need not bother asking a Dutch judge for damages. Belgium may be going the same way.

At the same time, the Dutchman has a rather complacent attitude towards the poor position women have on the job market, and this I find slightly less charming. The Netherlands took a nosedive on the World Economic Forum’s annual gender equality ranking, dropping from 16 to 32. What’s more, very few companies actually take action to reach the legally established rate of 30% women on supervisory boards and boards of directors. A law is currently being made to compare men and women in the same positions, and, under the slogan “equal pay for equal work”, fine companies that don’t pay equal amounts. The law takes a normative perspective, and is finger-wagging taken to an extreme.

How do the English manage then, who also have a sizeable pay gap? They go about things quite differently: companies are merely required to be transparent about any difference in income. They are fined only if they do not publish any data at all. The curtains are opened, but there is no pedantic preaching.

Who will exceed our expectations? Or, as the English say, ‘who will beat the Dutch’?

March 10, 2016 – In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the main character finds himself aboard a gigantic spaceship. There he stumbles upon millions of sarcophagi containing the frozen bodies of television producers, insurance agents, HR personnel, telephone cleaners, creative directors, PR advisors and management consultants. These are the people deemed useless to the planet of Golgafrincham. They have been sent off into space by their fellow citizens with some flimsy excuse.

Science fiction is an enjoyable genre that holds up a mirror to all of humanity, making use of a ‘galaxy far far away’ and a healthy dose of techno-babble.

Adams strikes a nerve. These days, middle-skill workers are indeed figuratively being ’shipped off to space’. According to the data collected in sociologist Saskia Sassen’s book ‘Expulsions’, up to 65% of all jobs disappearing in 2008 were middle class jobs, whereas they only make up 25% of all new jobs.

Frans Blom of the Boston Consultancy Group believes that, ultimately, only two types of employees will remain. ‘Those who can keep up with international development’: the technological-creative leaders. And those who offer local, non-tradable services, such as hairdressers, nurses and construction workers. Much of the highly educated workforce will end up not occupying the middle, but the lower segment of the job market.

Does this fact make these people less valuable? As the poet Lucebert stated: “Everything of value is defenceless”. Perhaps we ought to contradict Lucebert and help make everything of value more resilient. The question is: how do we accomplish this?

At the start of the 19th century English Luddites believed the rejection of all technology to be the answer. I would argue the opposite: only by fully embracing technology can we create the jobs of the future. Human beings are at their most inventive when making use of technology, as chess competitions show: it is not the grandmaster or fastest computer that wins these, it is the team made up of both a human being and a computer.

In order to achieve this, we must not try to compete with computers, but remain our human selves. The notion of ‘Bildung’, as introduced by the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) can help us realize this. According to Humboldt, a combination of knowledge, moral judgement and critical thinking should suffice to prepare a young person for his or her future. Modern day advocates of Bildung in education, amongst whom is Minister of Education, Culture and Science Jet Bussemaker, point to the topical interest of the notion: Bildung can serve as a contrast to the ’pigeonholing’ mentality that seems to be predominant in our current educational system and economy.

Problems (and their solutions) of the middle are a fascinating topic. They do not belong to the realm of science fiction, but to that of non-fiction, and serve as material for philosophers to ponder. Robots of the human-loving kind will play a large part in these scenarios.

December 1, 2016 – It may be lonely at the top, but life is hardest in the middle. This has been shown in an amusing research project conducted by the universities of Manchester and Liverpool, which took the academics several trips to Chester Zoo. The object of their study was the great apes living there, and more specifi cally, their expressions of dominance and passiveness. So, what were the researchers’ fi ndings? The apes in the middle of the hierarchy had both their superiors and inferiors to fear, and turned out to be the most stressed out of all of them.

In case you haven’t yet made the connection with human beings, the researchers have. ‘Middle managers’, as they were referred to, have to get along with both those higher and those lower in the hierarchy. Which is stressful. It’s not that pleasant in the middle, and it’s not just the middle that knows it. All of the middle class – the engine fuelling the post-war economy – is experiencing serious oppression.

A related study was published this month, and it’s in equal measures interesting and worrying. According to ’Europe’s Disappearing Middle Class? Evidence from the World of Work’, released by the International Labour Offi ce, the European middle class has decimated by 2,3% in the period between 2004 and 2011. This would be a great feat if it were due to the rise of the upwardly mobiles, but it isn’t. The gap between poor and rich is growing bigger due to the gradual disappearance of the middle. The study states that the middle incomes in Germany and Greece are in the most danger.

Perhaps sadly, the slump the German middle class is going through is – for once – not due to the economic crisis, as is evident from a slightly older report by the Bertelsmann Stiftung. According to their research, the middle class has been shrinking from 65 to 58% during 1997 and 2010. Germany’s working classes have since grown by four million people, while another half million people entered into the German upper class.

Something similar is happening in France, with the rise in rent for apartments in Paris being a harrowing example. You may be able to book a cheap Airbnb in the popular neighbourhood Marais, but living there for a reasonable price is nigh on impossible. It’s not unusual for Parisians to have to travel 60 or 70 kilometers to work every day. Are you a resident of Zoetermeer? Refer to your hometown as ‘a suburb of Amsterdam’ the next time you’re speaking to a Frenchman, and you’ll fi t right in.

The demise of Joe (or Jane) Lunchbucket may well also be the demise of our current political economy. The optimism has been short-lived: only one generation could count on upward mobility and the white picket fence that goes along with it. So what do we have to offer to the next generation? This is something to think about long and hard.

April 21, 2016 – When I happen to be just walking past a pond and picking up on a drowning child’s cry for help, I will leap into the water and save the child without giving it a second thought. It is, after all, my moral duty. Do I have a similar duty to help people that are in trouble, but happen to be elsewhere on the globe? Quite a pressing matter, given the hundreds of refugees that drowned in the Mediterranean Sea this week. American philosopher Peter Singer believes so. In his 2009 book ‘The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty’ he defends utilitarianism, a theory in ethics that measures the moral value of an action by judging whether it maximises utility.

Challenging inequality is not just a duty, however: it is also very much in our own self-interest. In last week’s issue of this newspaper, Kim Putters, director of the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (‘Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau’), stated that when wealth leads to an increase in polarisation between those with a high level of education and those with little or no education, the mutual distrust will also increase. This is why Putters advocates a ‘new social contract for our society’.

Putters does have a point. In an article in the American Economic Review three authors, amongst which the Dutch Maarten Goos, professor in ‘Institutions and Economics’ at Utrecht University, discuss the ‘job polarisation’ occurring in three sections of the job market. In the years between 1993 and 2010 the number of work hours in high and low salary incomes developed quite differently from those in medium level salary incomes.

While the high and low incomes noticed an increase in work hours, the hours in middle income jobs decreased with a total of 7%. The white collar worker, at one point the economy’s propellingforce, was left behind. Due to robotisation and artificial intelligence the middle class’s position will likely only deteriorate further.

The middle of the job market is a very dangerous place to be at the moment. As Margaret Thatcher once said: ‘Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous: you’ll get knocked down by traffic on both sides.’

There is some good news, too: we have plenty of money to fix this. Just a few pages from Putters’ plea the newspaper announced that the state made a sum of 875 million euros in just seven minutes’ time by reopening the thirty year loan, including an effective profit of 0.99%. Those are the types of opportunities I would like to see in the campaign programs that are now being composed.

The government needs to invest in making the middle classes more futureproof by educating future generations and reeducating current generations in new skills and knowledge, including selfknowledge and the capability to change. The effects should be such that the costs will turn out to be negligible. An investment like this is a fantastic opportunity to construct a new societal balance. Both Kim Putters and Peter Singer should be pleased.

April 7, 2016 – Back in the day, corrupt politicians and drug lords stored away their billions on the Cayman or Virgin Islands. The man in the street had not a clue. Nowadays, it appears to be as easy to come up with some dubious financial construction as it is for an amateur investigator to uncover scams like these. So prove the Panama Papers. Former football player Clarence Seedorf turns out to have been rather creative with this money, and churned out a sum of 6k. Not a particularly shocking amount, and yet all of us are up to date on all the ins and outs of this particular case.

Much the same happened when the nail bombings in Zaventem, Belgium occurred on 22 March 2016. It took a long time for both CNN and Belgian national television to broadcast footage of the terminal. When they finally did, it was shot from the outside, making it hard to even make out anything, and repeated endlessly. Through the app Periscope, however, one was able to log into the live streams broadcast by people inside the terminal, who were recording with their mobile telephones. 

The old state of affairs, in which the few hold the means to control the many, is akin to the panopticon devised by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In its essence, the panopticon is a prison. It is a circular structure, with prisoners’ cells stationed all around its perimeter. At its centre is the prison guard’s inspection house: he watches (-opticon) over all (pan-).

French philosopher Michel Foucault describes the panopticon as a metaphor for power, with video surveillance in public spaces being a notable example. In Edinburgh one might even be reprimanded through a speaker by a police officer noticing your criminal offence via such a camera.

Both the Panama Papers and Periscope expose the panopticon’s weakness. More and more often, the many can see the many: a new arrangement I would like to call the ‘diopticon’. The ancient Greek prefix ‘dia-‘ means ‘through’ or ‘across’ and emphasizes the importance of connections between individuals. These are quicker to emerge as we are becoming less dependent on time and place, mostly due to technological innovation. On Instagram, Timbuktu is no further away than Dordrecht. A freelancer working on his or her laptop in Amsterdam, may in fact be operating on a European and global scale at the same time. 

The diopticon presents a challenge for the government. Systems devised to dispense work permits no longer serve their purpose, millions of freelance workers manage to work without relying on collective agreements, while companies (including small scale ones) look all across the globe to score the optimal deal.

According to the annual report released by the Council of State the Dutch government is quick to look for public support before even considering what is possible and permissible. This is a threat to the constitutional state. In the diopticon, on the other hand, citizens are able to model society to their own wishes. The government is more suited to upholding regulations. If the many watch the many, the government has to return to its roots.