How Poland’s government is weakening democracy
A move to bring the Supreme Court under its control is the latest assault
Jul 25th 2017by A.C. | WARSAW

ポーランド政府は民主主義をどのように弱体化させているのか。
最高裁をその管理下に置こうとする動きは最近の試みだ。



POLAND was the big success story of Europe after 1989. Its peaceful transition from communism, culminating in membership of the European Union in 2004, was an example for countries farther east to emulate. But recently, it has been backsliding. Since coming to power in 2015, the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS in Polish) has been weakening democratic checks and balances. PiS has followed in the footsteps of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, whom its leader openly admires. Brussels has struggled to respond effectively. Yet Poland is too big to lose: it is a frontline country on NATO’s eastern edge and will be the EU’s seventh-largest economy after Brexit. What is PiS doing? 

culminating：締めくくる・最高潮に達する
emulate：見習う
backsliding：悪い状態に逆戻り
respond：反応する・応じる

PiS came to power promising change after eight years in opposition. Shortly before the elections, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, its divisive leader, called for “a reconstruction of the state”. In practice, that has meant subordinating it to PiS. The party has used its majority in parliament to push through controversial laws, though it does not have enough seats to formally change the constitution. The prime minister, Beata Szydlo, has little clout. From PiS’s headquarters in Warsaw, Mr Kaczynski pulls the strings. 

Jaroslaw Kaczynski：ヤロスワフ・カチンスキは、ポーランドの政治家。同国元首相。弟のレフと共に、一卵性双生児の政治家として知られる。
divisive：対立を生む
subordinating：従属した
strings：影響力を行使する
Beata Szydlo：ベアタ・マリア・シドゥウォはポーランドの政治家。2015年11月16日より同国首相。法と正義の副党首として大統領選挙、総選挙の2つの選挙を勝利に導いた。彼女はエヴァ・コパチ前首相に続く、3人目の女性首相。女性同士の首相交代は初めて。ベアタ・シドウォとも書かれる。

PiS acted swiftly, echoing earlier changes in Hungary. Its first targets were the constitutional court and the public broadcasters; both have been packed with loyalists. Most recently, PiS has been putting courts under its control; a new law passed last week allows the government to sack the Supreme Court’s judges. The implications could be long-lasting: among other responsibilities, the Supreme Court rules on the validity of elections. (Mr Kaczynski reassured Poles that there will still be “normal” polls.) 

packed：人で一杯の
reassured ：安心させる

Democrats at home and abroad are alarmed. In towns across Poland, tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the street demanding “free courts”. Officials in Washington and Brussels are worried, too. The European Commission has warned that it is “very close” to triggering Article 7 of the Lisbon Treaty, paving the way for sanctions on Poland (though Mr Orban would probably block them). 

alarmed：動揺した

On July 24th Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, said that he would veto the law on the Supreme Court, suggesting that the protests have worked. Yet PiS does not give up easily. The precise nature of his veto is also unclear. Even if the centrist opposition wins the next elections, due in 2019, the damage to Poland’s institutions could take years to reverse. Meanwhile, Poland may set a dangerous precedent, emboldening illiberal leaders in Europe and beyond. The Polish and Hungarian cases suggest that the EU can do little to enforce democracy in countries that are already members. The latest changes push Poland “backwards and eastwards”, said Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, and the country’s prime minister from 2007 to 2014, in a statement last week. If democracy in Poland unravels, it will be felt around the world. Autocrats, from Moscow through Ankara and beyond, will rejoice. 

Andrzej Duda：アンジェイ・ドゥダ ポーランドの大統領一覧 アンジェイ・セバスティアン・ドゥダは、ポーランドの法律家にして政治家。2015年にポーランド共和国大統領に就任した。
precedent：先例
unravels：ダメにする
rejoice：喜ぶ

ポーランドの民主主義が危機に陥っている。三権分立が危うい。ハンガリーのオルバンに続いて、この国も専制国家になろうとしている。そもそも国の「再構築」ということで、元首相のヤロスワフ・カチンスキが提唱した。現首相のベアタ・マリア・シドゥウォは実権がない。大統領のアンジェイ・ドゥダがこの最高裁の人事権に対しては反対をしているが、果たしてどこまで出来るのかは疑問が残る。

木曜日。SAP会長の内田さんとの会食。八尺の露口さんの出版記念パーティ。ではまた明日。

A spat about seafood shows the compromises that Brexit will force
Legally complex, hard to enforce and probably bad for Britain: fishing is a case study of the negotiations 
Britain
Jul 5th 2017

海産食品の議論はBrexitが推し進める妥協策を明らかにしている。
法的に複雑で、実施することが難しく、イギリス人にとっては多分良くないだろう。漁業は交渉のケーススタディだ。

spat：口論

BRITAIN’S fishing industry is a tiddler, contributing less than 0.1% of GDP. But the island nation has great affection for its fleet. During last year’s Brexit referendum campaign, a flotilla of trawlermen steamed up the Thames to protest against European Union fishing quotas. On July 2nd Michael Gove, the Brexiteer environment secretary (who claims that his father’s Aberdeen fish business was sunk by EU rules), announced that Britain would “take back control” of its waters by unilaterally withdrawing from an international fishing treaty. 

tiddler：取るに足らない・雑魚
affection：愛着
fleet：船団
flotilla：小艦隊
trawlermen：トロール漁業者

Gutting such agreements is strongly supported by coastal communities. The pro-Brexit press cheered Mr Gove’s bold announcement. But landing a new deal for British fishermen will be legally complex, expensive to enforce, oblige Britain to observe European rules that it has had no hand in setting and, most likely, leave its businesses and consumers worse off than before. It is, in other words, a case study of the Brexit negotiations as a whole. 

Gutting：の根幹を崩す
observe：守る
as a whole：総じて

The EU’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was drawn up before Britain joined, to its disadvantage. But membership has allowed Britain to improve the policy. Countries’ quotas are now set on a basis that is more scientific than political. Unwanted fish can no longer be discarded at sea, which has helped to reverse the depletion of stocks. 

reverse：一変させる
depletion：枯渇

Unpicking decades of tangled legal agreements will be harder than it looks. Mr Gove has initiated Britain’s withdrawal from the London Fisheries Convention. But Michel Barnier, the European Commission’s Brexit negotiator, argues that this 1964 agreement has since been superseded by the CFP. Regardless of these conventions, foreign fishermen may claim historic fishing rights going back decades or even centuries. Many of them have set up units in Britain to buy quotas from British fishermen. Unless the government overturns these property rights by decree, it may face a large compensation bill. 

Unpicking：解く
tangled：もつれた
Convention：協定
superseded：取って代わる
CFP：EUの共通業業政策
overturns：撤回する
decree：法令
compensation bill：補償請求

In any case, Britain will find that, unless it is willing to continue sharing access to its waters, it will lose access to valuable foreign markets. Consider Norway, which as a non-EU member has control of its own waters. It nonetheless co-operates with the EU and other countries over fish quotas in 90% of them, in order to maintain its own fishermen’s access to fisheries inside the EU. 

Of the 700,000 tonnes of fish landed in Britain each year, some 500,000 is exported, two-thirds of it to the EU. Without a mutual deal, which would surely include giving European fishermen some access to British waters, those exports would face World Trade Organisation tariffs of 12%. In the past the EU has responded to fishing disputes with Norway and the Faroe islands by banning all imports. British fishermen would soon find that, to borrow a phrase from the Brexiteers, “we need them more than they need us”. 

Consumers would notice, too, since most of the fish on British dinner plates is imported. A third of it comes from the EU, and British fishermen net about a sixth of their total catch in French, Belgian, Dutch, Danish or Irish waters. 

Britons may decide that they are willing to pay higher prices for the privilege of banning foreign vessels from British waters. But such a rule would have to be enforced, at extra cost. The “cod wars” with Iceland in the 1950s-70s saw gunboats deployed to protect fisheries. Some Brexiteers would doubtless enjoy such a muscular exertion of sovereignty. But for ordinary Britons who, since the referendum, have endured a squeeze on incomes comparable to that during the financial crisis of 2008, the fishing industry is a red herring. The aviation business is bracing for a hard exit. The finance industry, which contributes 7% of GDP, is in danger of decamping. Britain’s Brexit negotiators have bigger fish to fry. 

cod：タラ
exertion：行使
red herring：燻製のニシン・人の気を逸らすもの
aviation：航空
decamping：密かに立ち退く
fry：油で炒める

Brexitは業業を例に取るとわかりやすい。イギリス人が食べている魚の３分の一はEUからのもので、６分の一はイギリス人がよそから取ってきたものだ。イギリスの漁業を守るといっても、今までのイギリスの漁業の半分はEUに輸出している。イギリスの漁業はEUによって守られていると言ってもいい。こうしたことが航空業、金融業に展開していったら、目も当てられない。Brexitは撤回した方がいい。馬鹿じゃあないのか。

火曜日。ではまた明日。

Donald Trump has bowed to his generals over Afghanistan
America’s president may not like the idea of strategic patience, but needs plenty of it
Aug 22nd 2017

Donald Trumpはアフガニスタンに対して将軍たちに頭を下げてきた。
アメリカの大統領は戦略的に耐えることが好きでないのかもしれないが、十分のそうしたことが必要だ。



IT WAS an admission of a kind that Donald Trump rarely makes. In a televised address to the nation on August 21st, America’s president, reading carefully from a teleprompter, admitted that he had changed his mind about the war in Afghanistan. He said his instinct, after 16 years of not winning, had been to pull out. But after a thorough policy review he had decided to keep going.

admission：告白
instinct：衝動
pull out：撤退する

That review, undertaken by the defence secretary, James Mattis, and the national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, had been completed by June. But Mr Trump, resistant to its conclusions and egged on by Steve Bannon, a critic of military intervention abroad who was then his chief political strategist, tried hard to find an alternative.

egged：けしかける

One scheme, promoted by Mr Bannon and devised by Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, a controversial security firm, involved replacing American troops with 5,000 mercenaries. But on August 18th Mr Trump finally acquiesced to the plan set out by his national security team to send around 3,500-5,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. The prospect of Afghanistan again becoming a haven for the world’s most dangerous terrorists had overcome his aversion to fighting a seemingly unwinnable war. It may not have been a coincidence that Mr Bannon was removed from his job in the White House on the same day.

devised：考え出す
mercenaries：傭兵
acquiesced：仕方なく従う
aversion：気が進まない事

At first sight, the Afghan strategy announced by Mr Trump appears little different from that of his predecessor, Barack Obama. But it has some important—and welcome—differences, which Mr Trump was keen to emphasise while leaving it to Mr Mattis to decide the exact number of troops to send. Mr Mattis, a former marine general, and General McMaster know Afghanistan well. Both have served there. Mr Trump’s new chief of staff, John Kelly, commanded troops in Iraq and lost a son in Afghanistan. They and other American commanders were frustrated and quietly appalled by Mr Obama’s approach to Afghanistan in which troop numbers were cut to serve a domestic political timetable without regard to developments on the ground.

appalled：ぞっとして

Since the beginning of 2015, when NATO ended its combat mission and handed full responsibility Afghanistan’s security to its ill-prepared forces, the Taliban insurgency has grown in strength. According to a report earlier this year by SIGAR (the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a post created by Congress), the proportion of the country under uncontested government control had fallen during the 12 months to November 2016 from 72% to 57%. The attrition of Afghan security forces, say American commanders, is occurring at an unsustainable rate. In the year to November, 6,785 Afghan troops were killed and another 11,777 wounded.

proportion：割合
uncontested：反対者のいない
attrition：消耗

The Afghan National Security Forces have 370,000 troops and police. Between 2015 and 2016, 19 Americans were killed in action. Mr Obama had hoped to pull out even the remaining 8,400 American military trainers and advisers before he left office, but eventually he decided to leave that decision to his successor.

Not only will that number now be increased by 50%, but the restrictions on what they can do will be lifted. To minimise American casualties, Mr Obama had set rules that confined advisers to bases far from the action, instead of allowing them to be embedded with front-line combat units where their presence could create what John Allen, a former commander in Afghanistan, calls “an upward spiral of professionalism.” At the sharp end, battle-hardened trainers can help inexperienced officers become competent leaders and develop the skills needed to win fire-fights, among them the ability to call in air support and direct it accurately.

lifted：解く
confined：制限する
embedded：組み込む
air support：航空支援

Such skills will come in handy—it now looks as if American commanders will have much more freedom to deploy air power than they were allowed by Mr Obama. Mr Trump declared: “Micromanagement from Washington, DC, does not win battles. They are won in the field drawing upon the judgment and expertise of wartime commanders and front-line soldiers acting in real time, with real authority and with a clear mission to defeat the enemy, we must ensure they have every weapon to apply swift, decisive and overwhelming force.”

in handy：役に立つ

A third improvement on Mr Obama’s policy is that Mr Trump has heeded the advice of Mr Mattis that no time limits should be set on the duration of America’s mission in Afghanistan and that any changes in deployments will depend on conditions there. That is of critical importance. As long as the Taliban knew that all they had to do was wait for American and NATO soldiers to pack their bags and go home, there was no incentive for them even to consider political negotiations with Afghanistan’s government. With an open-ended commitment by America, the Taliban’s calculations could change.

heeded：耳を傾ける

But it will remain very difficult for America to reach a point where it can reasonably claim success in Afghanistan. Mr Trump’s insistence that he is not in the business of nation-building is all very well. But without progress by the dysfunctional Afghan government in delivering security and basic services, the Taliban will retain a bedrock of support in the Pushtun south and east of the country.

insistence：主張
bedrock：根底

Nor is there much prospect of enlisting the help of Afghanistan’s meddling neighbours. Mr Trump is right to take a tough line on Pakistan’s provision of sanctuary to the Taliban. But cutting off military aid to Pakistan would be a blunt instrument; in the past, withholding it has had little effect on the country’s behaviour. For all its interest in exploiting Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, China is reluctant to get involved. Perhaps most worryingly, Iran and Russia, always on the lookout for opportunities to undermine Western interests, are now working together to fund, arm and shelter the Taliban. Mr Trump may not care for “strategic patience”, but when it comes to Afghanistan he will need plenty of it.

enlisting：求める
meddling：干渉する
blunt：露骨な
instrument：手段
withholding：差し控える

トランプがアフガニスタンへの派兵を決めた。しかもオバマのときと違って、前線に兵士が出ていく。しかもその期限を決めていない。タリバンはアフガニスタン全土を支配している。ベトナムと一緒だ。彼らは定着している。アメリカがどう関与しても、勝てるわけがない。無謀としか言いようがない。何故そんなことがわからないのだろう。大統領のガニが管理できるのはカブール周辺だけだ。

月曜日。今日はいつものランチがある。ではまた明日。

“So we’ve all got dirty laundry, to be brought up if they want to shut you down,” says the aid worker. “The fact is, it doesn’t matter how compliant we were, whether or not the law was clear or not, every single NGO working here has broken laws at some point. Some inadvertently. Some because there was no law in place to tell us how to do it, [like] the transfer of money.” 

dirty laundry：個人的な秘密・内輪の恥
compliant ：人の要求を入れる・言いなりになる
inadvertently：無意識に

After-effects of the coup
The restrictions on INGOs come as Turkey still reels from the aftermath of the coup attempt last July, which has seen a purge 140,000 Turks from government jobs, the arrest of nearly 50,000, and a state of emergency which enables closing any NGO without reason. 

reels：動揺する

The public vilification of INGOs intensified after the coup attempt. For example, the pro-government Sabah newspaper last August ran a story with the headline, “Foreign NGOs are fanning the flames of chaos.” It claimed that aid agencies crossed into Syria with “bags” of money to fund and divide Syrian opposition groups. 

vilification：中傷

This March, Sabah claimed INGOs were funneling cash to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Syria from Hatay province, with the assistance of cadres of Fethullah Gulen – the US-based cleric whom Turkey accuses of ordering last year’s coup attempt. 

“The aid agencies in Hatay are full of spies,” ran Sabah’s headline. The story claimed that INGOs were not trying to help people, but lay the groundwork for civil war in Turkey. 

“It’s not that they hate foreigners, but they worry about foreigners. They think that everyone is not doing good for Turkey,” says the Syrian who works with the aid community. The rules for work permits for Syrian staff have become clearer, he says, but weeks ago one local Syrian NGO delivering food applied for 30 work permits, and got only two. 

“Of course, no NGO can run with two people,” he says. NGOs “aren’t doing something bad; they are still helping people. Why are [Turks] making their work as difficult as it as difficult as it is now? There is no excuse for that.” 

Corruption investigations
Shutting down the INGOs and raising pressure on others has shaken the relief community, which senior Western relief workers say grew too fast the first years of the conflict, with uncommonly large US and EU-funded budgets applied in chaotic situations. 

Turkish officials and media have been given grist for complaint by the US Agency for International Development’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). Since 2015 it has been investigating alleged fraud schemes that involve “bid rigging, collusion, bribery, and kickbacks,” which have led to the suspension of $239 million in program funds among four NGOs in southeast Turkey, according to OIG data released March 31. 

grist：大量のもの
fraud：詐欺
collusion：結託

Three of those were identified as big players global organizations – IMC, the International Rescue Committee, and the Irish group Goal – in a May 2016 investigation by IRIN, a media venture once run by the UN that focuses on the relief world. 

IRIN noted that all three INGOs grew quickly as the Syria crisis took off. IMC funding more than doubled, for example, to $232 million, from 2011/2012 to 2014/2015. Goal’s funding for Syria leapt 94 percent from 2013 to 2014. 

Those increases mirror similar expansion by the UN, which saw the value of goods and services procured in Turkey alone jump from $90 million in 2012 to $339 million in 2014, reports IRIN. 

The impact is sizeable: Though the Inspector General’s office says that just one IMC staff member lost their job, IRIN reports that 800 people “involved in IMC contracts in Turkey” were let go because of the USAID aid suspension. “NGOs tend to think that we have this irrefutable positive impact,” says the senior Western aid worker in Gaziantep. 

sizeable：かなり大きな
irrefutable：誤りであると否定できない

Turks are “looking at what they see as a security threat in all these foreigners around, who maybe were or maybe were not spies, maybe were having an impact, maybe weren’t following the rules, maybe were helping the enemy,” says the aid worker. 

“Is it worth it to take all that risk to have 30 NGOs registered, of all shapes and sizes? Or is it better for them to narrow the field to ... 10 or 12 NGOs that have not really over-stepped in the ways that matter?” asks the aid worker. “I just think the Turks have said, ‘Enough.’ ” 

over-stepped：度を越して

トルコにおけるNGOがクーデターを支持しているというトルコ政府の憶測がある。その為、シリア難民を支援しているNGOの大半が許可を取り消されている。そのため、難民支援に支障をきたしている。たしかに、欧米支援のNGOの流入している資金は中途半端ではない。それなりの規模なのでスパイ活動をしていると疑われる可能性はある。

日曜日。今日は小野さんのイベントが有る。一日だ。ではまた明日。