Normative Dimensions of the European Crisis

European Journal of Political Theory

Special Issue: Normative Dimensions of the European Crisis

April 16, 2017

Miriam Ronzoni - University of Manchester

Juri Viehoff - University of Zurich

Introduction: Normative Dimensions of the European Crisis

The project of European integration is arguably currently facing its deepest crisis since its inception. In less than 10 years, what looked like a steady process of political enlargement, institutional consolidation, and economic convergence has come to a halt (or has even shown signs of backsliding). The project is now threatened in its very existence. This is true both for the Eurozone and for the European Union (EU) more generally.

The global financial crisis has exposed the vulnerability of the Eurozone governance structure to exogenous shocks, and highlighted the problem posed by deep economic discrepancies between member states. The crisis has brought into focus the profound and often adverse consequences that current forms of economic and financial integration have for the adequate functioning of both domestic and supranational institutions. Responding to these difficulties, some significant changes have been made to the Eurozone’s mechanisms – initially in the form of conditional lending to indebted Eurozone member states, and subsequently through the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism, the incorporation of evermore stringent rules regarding national debt levels and deficits, and the implementation of debt-brakes through the Fiscal Compact. The Eurozone, however, continues to struggle to find the right balance between further integration on the one hand and protection of the diversity of welfare state arrangements and democratic institutions of individual states on the other.

Moreover, new institutions and practices (including, centrally, austerity programs) have been met with profound popular resistance especially in adversely affected countries. This has led to a grave legitimacy crises of Europe’s now fragile-seeming supranational institutions. Some scholars have suggested that this crisis calls for a further push towards supranational integration which, crucially, must replace austerity and debtor-punishment with genuinely democratic procedures and substantive economic solidarity in the form of an EU-wide redistributive mechanism (Habermas, 2015: 550). Other theorists have argued, to the contrary, that the Euro-system in particular, and the EU’s pro-market economic governance more generally, have failed member states, and that we should therefore revert to a ‘Europe of States’ in order to safeguard (or indeed rescue) both national democracy and national welfare systems (Scharpf, 2015: 394; Streeck, 2014: 272). By and large, however, the Euro-crisis, its institutional responses so far, and the political contestation it has encountered have remained relatively under-theorised by political philosophers – especially when compared to the detailed recent treatments by economists (see e.g. Krugman, 2012; Sandbu, 2015; Stiglitz, 2016).

To make matters worse, the whole EU, over and above the Eurozone, faces a deep legitimacy crisis. On the 23rd of June 2016, the United Kingdom voted in favour of leaving the EU. And as this special issue goes into print, Prime Minster Theresa May is pushing ahead to trigger Article 50 of the EU Treaty, formally giving notice that the UK will in fact exit the EU. Beyond its practical impact on the EU and the UK, ‘Brexit’ has great symbolic significance both in virtue of its modality (a popular referendum, thus symbolising the public rejection of what is largely perceived to be a technocratic, elitist, and undemocratic institution) and because the United Kingdom was already perceived as the EU member enjoying the highest level of autonomy within the Union. Brexit will be a first, and a first whose modalities and ripple-on effects are all but clear. Questioning EU memberships and the very existence of the EU has, moreover, ceased to be a taboo in many other countries, including several founding members like Italy, the Netherlands, and France. The role of policies of austerity, as well as the vitriolic popular debates that have split Europeans into ‘Northern-creditors’ and ‘Southern-debtors’, can hardly be overstated as we seek to understand this larger phenomenon of disaffection with European integration.

The aim of this special issue is to offer a range of perspectives and normative assessments of these recent events and to initiate further research into the fundamental issues raised by recent developments in European economic and financial integration. Specifically, the different articles investigate whether – and if so how – the economic and financial calamities, and the ensuing political crisis, demand a fundamental reassessment of the degree to which supranational arrangements of the kind we find amongst EU(-rozone) member states are (i) compatible with the advancement of social justice and democratic legitimacy within states and (ii) can realistically be designed so as to guarantee free and fair interaction amongst self-determining political communities.

Whilst building on the wealth of existing EU scholarship, the articles assembled here especially advance the existing debate along three dimensions:

First, they are all attentive to the quite profound changes that the Euro-crisis has brought to the project of European integration: Such changes have manifested themselves not merely in rapid institutional reforms in response to the crisis (e.g. massive extension of the mandate of the European Central Bank, highly intrusive prescriptions regarding the permissible level of debt and welfare provisions in Southern states, etc.), but also in dramatic shifts in public perception of the point and purpose of European institutions in more crisis-prone states.

Second, these articles seek to relate the existing normative EU literature both to wider theoretical discussions that have exercised political theorists in recent years (most notably to flourishing debates in international political theory and global justice) and to new conceptual tools that these discussions have made available (such as the practice-dependence approach as a method for assessing the normative performance of an institution; or the concept of demoi-cracy as an normative ideal for supranational institutions that is a genuine alternative to both intergovernmentalism and federalism).

Third, and related, they advance the existing debate by assessing the most pressing moral questions not merely in terms of the prevailing conceptual notions used in EU scholarship, many of which focus on questions of democratic procedure (viz. ‘democratic deficit’). Whilst questions of supranational democratic procedure must continue to play a prominent role in our normative assessment of European institutions, there is also room for assessing these institutions in light of other values, most obviously those bearing on political and distributive justice within and between states. These articles are therefore meant to update, advance, and enrich the existing political theory of European integration.

Andrea Sangiovanni and Juri Viehoff address the second and especially the third dimension, by exploring the compatibility of specific policies with relevant ideals of social justice, distributive fairness, and solidarity at the European level. But along the way, they also put forward arguments that are relevant to the first dimension, providing reasons in favour or against institutional proposals currently under discussion. Sangiovanni discusses, and rejects, the permissibility of in-work benefits, the welfare reform which David Cameron negotiated with the EU in the Winter of 2015/2016 in the hope of convincing the United Kingdom to remain in the EU after all. To make his case, Sangiovanni surveys and applies recent philosophical theories of discrimination, and marshals his own account as a justice-based objection to illegitimate differentiations between EU workers. Viehoff defends the idea of a European social minimum (a largely unconditional welfare contribution paid to each EU-citizen) as the object of a possible consensus among different relevant normative perspectives – i.e. as something which European federalists and intergovernmentalists, internationalists, and cosmopolitans about justice could all agree to. Stressing the particular urgency of such a proposal in the face of monetary integration, his case relies at least in part on recent Eurozone developments.

Inspired by recent applications of neo-republican thinking to questions beyond the state, Richard Bellamy takes by the horns fundamental questions about the EU’s institutional structure, asking in particular which model of sovereignty the EU should embody. The EU is often characterised as having challenged the sovereignty of the member states in ways that are both necessary and desirable. Bellamy disputes both these arguments, by defending state sovereignty as both functionally necessary and normatively desirable if citizens are to be able to reason publicly about issues of common concern, and to resolve their reasonable disagreements in a free and equal manner.

Finally, Francis Cheneval, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, and Miriam Ronzoni discuss the merits of the recently developed idea of demoi-cracy, according to which the EU does and should constitute an alternative to both federalist and intergovernmental institutional model. Drawing on the value of non-domination between heavily interdependent democratic states, Ronzoni offers a sympathetic reading of the normative ideal of demoicracy, but then introduces the distinction between institutional and normative ideals to raise doubts about whether demoicracy can be a distinctive institutional third way. In the final contribution to this issue, Nicolaïdis and Cheneval seek to move the recent scholarship on demoicratic theory a step further by exploring what they refer to as the social construction of the demoicratic reality. In so doing, they propose a conceptual framework for understanding how popular sovereignty could possibly be exercised concurrently by several rather than just one demos.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1474885117704593

The Future of Western Democracies

Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley

Ralf Fuecks, President, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

May 3, 2017

China Rewrites the Global Rules

Despite worries over the end of the Chinese economic miracle and harder times because of the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis, global rebalancing is happening — and quickly.

by Philip S Golub

The International Monetary Fund’s executive board announced on 30 November that the Chinese currency, the renminbi (RMB) or yuan, would soon be included in the basket of currencies that make up its Special Drawing Rights (SDR), beside the US dollar, the euro, the British pound and the yen.

The decision recognised the growing role of the Chinese currency in international trade settlements. Since the launch in 2009 of a pilot programme for cross-border RMB trade settlements in Asia, the share of Chinese trade settled in RMB has risen from 3.2% to 25%, and should, according to the Financial Times, soon reach 46% (1). Offshore centres clearing the currency have been set up in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, London and Frankfurt. The RMB is still far from world reserve status, requiring full convertibility and complete capital market liberalisation, which China is not ready for and carries significant risks. But the RMB’s rise is a “momentous event in [...] international finance”, according to a former IMF economist (2) — the beginning of a slow shift towards a tripolar world monetary system no longer exclusively centred in the West.

“Great powers have great currencies,” says Robert Mundell (3). Like the gradual rise of the dollar to reserve status in the early 20th century, the internationalisation of the RMB is part of the larger story of China’s re-emergence as a semi-autonomous core of the world economy, and as the primary driver of the movement of East-West and North-South rebalancing that is a key feature of current world politics. China’s share of world GDP, in purchasing power parity (PPP), has risen in 40 years from less than 2% to over 16%, ahead of the US. Though Chinese economic growth declined with the “great recession” after the 2008 crisis, average per capita GDP (PPP) is now expected to increase within a few years (from $9,800 to $16,000, against $250 in 1980). Longer-range projections, which showed a growth trajectory similar to Japan in the late 20th century, suggest that per capita GDP will reach current Japanese or European levels by the mid-21st century. China is gradually regaining a position in the world economy in keeping with its demographic weight.

                                           Key South-South actor

It has become the core of South-South trade and investment linkage, supplanted Japan and the US as the leading trade partner of nearly all East Asian countries, and become a crucial actor in South American, African and South Asian trade. China is now Brazil’s leading trade partner, ahead of the US. There are similar trends in Chile, Argentina and smaller South American economies. South Africa’s export share to China has risen from 1.8% in 1998 to over 12%, while imports have risen from 3% to 15%. Indian exports to China have risen from 2.9% to over 10%, and imports from 2% to 12%.

This points to a re-patterning of the geography of world trade, and an East Asia-centric South-South trading system, with China at the core. Thanks to new regional and transcontinental linkages centred in East Asia, South-South trade (SST) has expanded more rapidly over 20 years than global trade. In 2013 SST was 25% of world trade, 21% of manufacturing exports, and 25% of exports of manufactures with medium and high technological intensity. Trade between developed countries fell from 46% to less than 30%. The result is a reduction of traditional single-market dependency in Latin American, sub-Saharan and Southeast Asian countries on Europe and the US. This has been accompanied, particularly in East Asia, by industrial upgrading: the “developing” world’s share of manufacturing value-added has risen from 8.8% to nearly 30%, and of merchandise trade from 25% to 47%.

China’s re-emergence has begun to alter the vertical North-South relations of the age of western empire and industry. This generates new dependencies: when China sneezes, emerging country partners catch colds — as with the current downturns for exporters of primary goods because of China’s slowing growth. The impact of the global crisis on China evinces the need for a sustainable development strategy focused on domestic improvements rather than export growth. Even so, we are witnessing a structural change in the global economic and political hierarchy.

                                       Bye-bye Bretton Woods?

Politics has lagged behind economics, but a gradual reordering of world politics is visible in the growing voice of the South in organisations and clubs (G20), its activism in world politics, and new international institution-building efforts bypassing traditional centres of authority. Frustrated by the slow pace of change, notably in the IMF and World Bank, China has been leading the effort of global South countries to create a new system to govern the world economy. In 2013 Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the BRICS) set up the New Development Bank (NDB),headquartered in Shanghai, with a capital base (money paid in and pledged) of $100bn; this will combine investment and monetary functions, serving as a lending institution for infrastructure development projects as well as a reserve facility for balance of payments issues. In 2014 China founded the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which, like the NDB, has a $100bn capital base (the Japanese-led Asian Development Bank has $160bn, the World Bank $220bn).

Full-text available at:

https://mondediplo.com/2016/02/08china

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

Angus Deaton, Winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics

The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations. In The Great Escape, Angus Deaton--one of the foremost experts on economic development and on poverty--tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress, opening up gaps and setting the stage for today's disproportionately unequal world. Deaton takes an in-depth look at the historical and ongoing patterns behind the health and wealth of nations, and addresses what needs to be done to help those left behind. Deaton describes vast innovations and wrenching setbacks: the successes of antibiotics, pest control, vaccinations, and clean water on the one hand, and disastrous famines and the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the other. He examines the United States, a nation that has prospered but is today experiencing slower growth and increasing inequality. He also considers how economic growth in India and China has improved the lives of more than a billion people. Deaton argues that international aid has been ineffective and even harmful. He suggests alternative efforts--including reforming incentives to drug companies and lifting trade restrictions--that will allow the developing world to bring about its own Great Escape. Demonstrating how changes in health and living standards have transformed our lives, The Great Escape is a powerful guide to addressing the well-being of all nations. Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. His many books include The Analysis of Household Surveys and Economics and Consumer Behavior. He is a past president of the American Economic Association. Reviews: "If you want to learn about why human welfare overall has gone up so much over time, you should read The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality."--Bill Gates "[O]ne of the most succinct guides to conditions in today's world. . . . The story Deaton tells--the most inspiring human story of all--should give all of us reason for optimism, so long as we are willing to listen to its moral."--David Leonhardt, New York Times Book Review "[A]n illuminating and inspiring history of how mankind's longevity and prosperity have soared to breathtaking heights in modern times. . . . [Deaton's] book gives a stirring overview of the economic progress and medical milestones that, starting with the Industrial Revolution and accelerating after World War II, have caused life expectancies to soar."--Fred Andrews, New York Times "[A]n engaging and sure-footed guide to the 'endless dance between progress and inequality . . .'"--Martha C. Nussbaum, New Republic "Is the world becoming a fairer as well as a richer place? Few economists are better equipped to answer this question than Angus Deaton of Princeton University, who has thought hard about measuring international well-being and is not afraid to roam through history. Refreshingly, Mr Deaton also reaches beyond a purely economic narrative to encompass often neglected dimensions of progress such as better health. . . . [T]he theme requires a big canvas and bold brushwork, and Mr Deaton capably offers both."--Economist "[E]loquently written and deeply researched. . . . For those interested in world poverty, it is unquestionably the most important book on development assistance to appear in a long time."--Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate Table of Contents: Preface ix Introduction: What This Book Is About 1 1 The Wellbeing of the World 23 PART I LIFE AND DEATH 2 From Prehistory to 1945 59 3 Escaping Death in the Tropics 101 4 Health in the Modern World 126 PART II MONEY 5 Material Wellbeing in the United States 167 6 Globalization and the Greatest Escape 218 PART III HELP 7 How to Help Those Left Behind 267 Postscript: What Comes Next? 325 Notes 331 Index 351 http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10054.html

The European Crisis

Michael Walzer, Dissent Magazine

September 11, 2015

The crisis in Europe today is felt most dramatically and most painfully by tens of thousands of refugees. They are indeed in critical need of help, and many of them will die if their needs are not recognized and met. But this is also a crisis for the people of Europe, for they are the ones, right now, who must recognize and meet those needs, and if they fail to do that, the idea of Europe will die. The dream of a new kind of commonwealth, a commonwealth of mutual responsibility and liberal values, will be over; we will wake up to a grim day.

In 1938, in an earlier European crisis, with refugees clamoring to enter France, Leon Blum, the leader of the Socialist Party and the prime minister of the short-lived Popular Front government of 1936, gave a speech whose key sentences are worth repeating today. This is what he said:

Your house may already be full. That may be. But when they knock on your door, you will open it, and you will not ask them for their birth certificates or criminal records or vaccination certificates.

What a joy it would be to hear a Socialist leader in Europe today speak like that! François Hollande came close: “It is the duty of France, where the right to asylum is an integral part of its soul, its flesh. . . .” But he then announced that France would admit 24,000 refugees over the next two years—too few, given the numbers knocking on the door.

Blum in ’38 went on to say that the refugees would not necessarily stay in France. A more general solution to the crisis was required, as it is today, permitting the return of people to their homelands or their resettlement in different countries, which would share the burden of providing for them. But they needed a place, they need a place, right now: “How can you refuse them shelter for a night?” Blum asked. In Europe today, only the Germans and the Swedes have opted strongly against refusal; Italy and Greece are overwhelmed and eager to help the refugees on their way to other places. The EU as a whole is once again, as Europe was in the 1930s, a world of borders and refusals.

Faced with the desperate plight of the migrants, the countries of Europe (and other countries, too—I’ll come to them) face a clear choice: they can help stem the tide, by confronting the poverty, civil wars, and predatory governments that produce it, or they can take people in for the night and for many nights. I guess it isn’t actually a choice; some version of both is morally and politically necessary. Let me say something, very briefly, about each of them, starting with the second.

The immense task of providing shelter for a night has fallen on countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, where several million refugees are now housed or tented in camps with inadequate, most often radically inadequate, shelter, sanitation, and health services. Even for this, the costs are enormous, and richer countries, most of whom don’t want to see these people at their borders, have nonetheless failed to help them, or to help them enough, where they are. Men, women, and children are fleeing the camps, on a very dangerous journey to those European borders, which are mostly closed to legal crossings. Illegal crossings are now a big business, which, like other businesses in our neoliberal world, produce many casualties. Stories of injury and death at the hands of traffickers have become commonplace, and they move us, though not very much. But the people won’t stop coming, so the crossings must be made legal and help provided on a scale that matches the wealth of the providers. Your house may be full. It doesn’t matter.

European leaders, led by Germany’s Merkel, have talked about dividing the burden by assigning quotas to each member state of the EU: so many refugees for you, so many for you. The numbers discussed have been too small, but as of this writing, no assignments have been made or accepted. Iceland has done better.

And what about the United States, where Liberty lifts its torch to welcome the huddled masses? There isn’t much of a welcome these days. We have taken in very few of the refugees from Iraq, very few even of the people who cooperated with U.S. occupation and whose lives were therefore in danger, and even fewer from Syria.* Our politicians are vying with each other in their enthusiasm for keeping out Mexicans, so why would they open the door to people from so far away? We should be assisting Europe or, better, embarrassing Europe, by taking in significant numbers of people—especially from parts of the world that we have helped to ruin. It should be easier for us, an immigrant society, than for the Europeans who persist in thinking of themselves, against a lot of evidence, as a land of anciently rooted and entirely homogeneous populations.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Ross Douthat counseled prudence: advocates of opening the door are “blind to the realities of culture, the challenges of assimilation, and the danger and inevitability of backlash.” He is right, of course, about the realities, the challenges, and the danger, but what follows from being right? In the 1840s, the United States took in tens of thousands of Irish Catholic peasants fleeing the potato famine—immigrants who, our nativists insisted, would never learn the virtues of democratic citizenship (only Protestants could do that). And, yes, we got the backlash of the Know-Nothing Party, which was briefly a majority party in parts of the northeast. But sometimes dangers have to be met, not avoided.

What about other countries, where the dangers might be less threatening than in Europe? India and China seem sufficiently crowded, but Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Brazil, Argentina—surely these countries have room for some number of desperate people. The countries most responsible for the Syrian disaster—Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia—have taken in none at all of its victims; they should be welcoming Syrians by the thousands. Indeed, in all of these countries, and ours too, an influx of immigrants would, over time, strengthen the economy and enhance the culture. And, not to worry, if there is ever peace in their homelands, many of the refugees will go home.

Is there any way of bringing peace to their homelands, or of reducing poverty, or of replacing predatory rulers? Besides taking people in, we have a responsibility to help them where they are. Not having helped them where they are, and sometimes having hurt them, Europeans and Americans, and others too, must take them in. But, still, it would be a good thing to change the conditions that drive so many into exile. People don’t leave their homes willingly; it takes a disaster to produce large numbers of refugees, looking for a better place or just a place to rest for a while. A serious, sustained policy of investment, substantially funded but carefully and locally focused, could begin to reduce poverty in, say, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. But politics is probably a more common cause of disasters than economics is, and wars, warlords, and tyrants require a more forceful intervention. We are rightly leery of anything like that. Overthrow a tyrant, like Qaddafi, say, and you get a chaos of thugs and zealots—and then thousands of people fleeing. What ought to be done?

I have a utopian solution, which is also politically incorrect. There are countries in the world today that ought to be, for a time, not-independent and not-sovereign. What the world needs, and what the UN might provide if it were the organization it was meant to be: a new trusteeship system for countries that are temporarily unable to govern themselves. The old mandate system of the League of Nations was not a great success, but it did not produce, and perhaps it prevented, disasters like the ones we are helplessly watching today. For the last decade and a half, Kosovo has been a kind of NATO trust—again, not a glorious example, for refugees are still fleeing, but at least the killing has stopped. So perhaps it isn’t crazy to suggest that Libya and Syria ought to be UN trusteeships, with some coalition of countries, different in each case, taking responsibility for maintaining law and order and providing basic services to the population—under strict UN supervision. I hesitate to suggest the countries that might serve as trustees, since I wouldn’t want to vouch for any country’s trustworthiness. But great virtue isn’t necessary, only a readiness to stop the killing, get rid of the killers, and provide enough stability for the citizens of the war-ravaged countries to begin rebuilding. That has to be their work.

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Full-text available at:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/michael-walzer-european-refugee-crisis

Summer Readings

Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality, Andrew Delbanco

Public Research Universities: Why They Matter, AAAS

The Pope and the Planet, Bill McKibben

What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?, Edmund S. Phelps

The Mystery of ISIS, NYRB

China: The Superpower of Mr. Xi, NYRB

Dual Enrollment: Is High School the Future of Higher Education?, AHA Forum 

What Does It Mean to Think Historically?, Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke

How Long to the PhD?, Robert B. Townsend

How Do We Learn from History?, James J. Sheehan

After Waterloo, Marco D`eramo

The Failure of the EU’s Technocrats, AI

Escaping the Civil War Trap in the Middle East, K. M. Pollack and B. F. Walter

The Colors of Earth (XXXVI)

The Colors of Earth (XXXV)

On Happiness and Serenity

T. Byram Karasu, M.D., is the Silverman Professor of Psychiatry and University Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Psychiatrist-in-Chief of Montefiore Medical Center. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the seminal Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders and The Art of Serenity, a New York Times bestseller. He is editor in chief of the American Journal of Psychotherapy and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Karasu is a scholar, renowned clinician, teacher, and lecturer, and the recipient of numerous awards. He lives in New York City and Connecticut.

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(Barnes & Noble.com) In an interview with his publisher, Dr. Karasu talks about his latest book, The Spirit of Happiness.

Why did you write The Spirit of Happiness?

I have practiced psychiatry for the last thirty-five years. I have written many articles and books about psychological care and sought out factors that might help people to be happy. I've studied the works of many psychologists and philosophers, and I have read the popular books that explore sources of happiness and the meaning of life. They deliver advice on self-actualization, success at work, relationships, marriage, worldviews and philosophies of living. The proliferation of these "self-ultimacy" books validates my conviction that the answer to the human dilemma can't be found in the realm of the mind. The works of secular gurus demonstrate again and again that making the mind of man its own center generates only personal confusion, unhappiness, and communal disorders.

In my book, The Art of Serenity, I identified six tenets of soulfulness and spirituality as the basic requirements for happiness: The Love of Others, The Love of Work, The Love of Belonging, Believing in the Sacred, Believing in Unity, and Believing in Transformation. I emphasized that a secular person may cultivate these extraordinary tenets but it will be difficult to maintain them without divine inspiration.

This book begins where the Art of Serenity ended, with the belief in and the love of God. This book will guide you to the next and final step: To become godly.

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To believe -- to have faith -- in God means trusting that there is a reason for the existence of everything in this world and beyond, and that there is meaning in its mystery. It means believing that there is a Holy Purpose. To be godly means to resonate with God's Holy Purpose, to bring all your personal and mundane purposes under its umbrella. If you not only have faith, but also become godly, you'll be a recipient of God's help, friendship and boundless generosity in every aspect of your life.

In this book I use the Bible as the only source of reference. Throughout the centuries, men and wisdom have praised the Bible's guidance for truthful living; its cheerful urgings of love and compassion; its eternal lessons of serenity amidst the tribulations and adversities of the world; its tender teachings of the mysteries of life. As Heinrich Heine says in Ludwig Boerne (1840), "Great and wide as the world, rooted in the abysmal depths of creation and rising aloft into the blue mysteries of heaven...sunrise and sunset, promise and fulfillment, birth and death, the whole human drama, everything is in this book. It is the Book of Books, Biblia."

I am not a man of the cloth, merely a student of the human dilemma. Any theologian who reads this book will easily see the hand of a layman at work and I hope will forgive any of my shortcomings. With that proviso, I will present how you can find God's Holy Purpose and become godly. I will describe what godliness means in all aspects of your life, ranging from your career to relationships with your spouse, children, friends, colleagues and even strangers.

Only by being godly can you be strong and successful, find joy and happiness, and live an extraordinarily meaningful existence while leading an ordinary life.

What is your definition of happiness?

Happiness is a state of serenity, an inner peacefulness that is the culmination of six factors which I describe in the book: 1) the love of others; 2) the love of work; 3) the love of belonging; 4) believing in the sacred; 5) believing in unity; 6) believing in transformation.

How is happiness in adulthood different from the happiness commonly associated with the lost paradise of childhood?

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The happiness that we associate with childhood is related to a sense of omnipotence, immortality, and an unbridled self-entitlement. It derives from an infantile return to blissful merger with mother, a regressive union without self-boundaries or responsibility. In adulthood, these same sentiments only bring unhappiness (frustration, fear, rejection). Instead, adults need to strive for reciprocity, compassion, realism and coming to terms with one's mortality. It is cultivation of others' gardens.

Your book revolves around the concepts and actions of soulfulness and spirituality. Could you explain what you mean by being a soulful and a spiritual person?

The soulful person is one who is patient, generous, forgives mistakes of others, accepts his loved ones as they are, who protects their privacy and solitude, values their interests, celebrates their peculiarities, and seeks no perfection in others. The soulful person is committed to this work energetically and enthusiastically. The ones who harness themselves to their work are like an "ox to a heavy cart;" they burn like a good bonfire, not like a "smoky fire." The soulful person goes down uncharted roads in order to grow full and strong.

The spiritual person "kneels at the feet of all creatures," values everything but holds them loosely. He seeks simplicity and the wisdom of ordinariness. The spiritual individual gratefully wants what he already has and smiles with a sacred optimism.

The spiritual person believes that we all share a common well, a divine womb. In a state of feeling oneness with the universe, he doesn't capture things but beholds the world as one might look at stars. His or her love is a love with no object. It is just love. By such love, passion is transformed to compassion, with joyful recognition that no seed ever sees its flower.

The spiritual person believes in continuity, that we are finite in our presently expressed form, eternal in all other potential forms, that humans, animals, and vegetation all are one product, that eternity is living everywhere and everything.

Why is self-love the first step toward true joy? What distinguishes this vital quality from self-serving narcissism?

Benign self-love is self-recognition and self-acceptance. Without that, one cannot love others. Loving others begins with the internalization of being loved. Self-serving narcissism is not self-love but self-doubt, if not self-hate. Such persons would go to any extent to be the center of attention at the expense of others, including drowning them in their own pathology. In contrast, self-love goes beyond the self; it is egoless.

What are some of the key mistakes men and women make in their quest for a soulmate?

Some of the key mistakes incorporate the erroneous belief that the other person must compensate for one's own sense of failure or unhappiness, must somehow supply what is felt to be missing. Such mistakes manifest themselves as blaming each other, never apologizing, enmeshment with each other, not forgiving (and forgetting) discretions and mistakes, demanding that the other person be like himself (or herself) i.e., normal; not tolerating their peculiarities, never mind the celebrating their differences.

Given today's unstable economy and competitive pressures, work has become a source of anxiety for workers across the board. Is it possible to find real satisfaction in any job?

The absence of work generates depression, lowers one's self-esteem and weakens one's immunological system. Descarte's motto, "I think therefore I am," should be replaced with "I work therefore I am." Without work, a person not only may not be able to survive financially but is also psychologically bereft. Our work provides a framework for our usefulness. In that sense, cleaning streets or teaching students share the same commonality.

On the other hand, there are people who have jobs but are unhappy in what they do or where they do it. It is true that some jobs are easier or better paying than others or better located. However, these factors do not determine one's happiness or unhappiness at work. Such people need to self-reflect, to tease out the unsatisfactory aspect of the job as they perceive it from their personal disposition for dissatisfaction. Some people who complain about their jobs tend to be simply less competent in their specific tasks (thus not rewarded or praised by their superiors) or/and less competent in interpersonal relationships (thus either rejected by their co-workers or frequently in conflict with them). Therefore, inevitably unhappy, they will have the same situation no matter what job they take.

Some other people expect their jobs to provide everything that is missing in their lives, including the meaning of life. They complain about the "meaninglessness" of their work. There is no meaningful or meaningless work; there is only work. The meaning is extracted from any type of work by making a full commitment to it. Meaningfulness is a by-product of one's engagement with one's work. The magical process of transmuting ordinary work into something of true merit requires love of one's work (even seemingly unlovable work) and putting one's signature on it with full energy and singular attention. Such people, whether a doorman or a CEO, have glitter in their eyes. This is the glitter of self-love and self-confidence because as Thomas Moore says, "the love that goes out into your work comes back as self-love."

Why is a sense of belonging crucial to happiness? How can people who live in a guarded suburb or fragmented city far away from their families and close friends begin to create a sense of community?

One can't be happy in isolation. We are social animals; we cannot survive alone. Without a bounded mooring, we are too anxious to be happy. The amorphous threat of the infinite from without and from within has a disorganizing effect on the mind. The basic structure of community imposed upon the individual (no matter how much we complain about it) provides the security of belonging. Cut flowers don't last long. Communion makes our sorrows bearable, offers the salvation of restraint and an alternate psychological home when needed.

People in fragmented communities have to make even greater efforts to belong. The cohesiveness of their immediate family becomes even more important for their wellbeing. Through various media, they have to attempt to establish contact with their extended families, schools, social clubs, and/or religious affiliations.

How can life's greatest challenges -- failure, illness, loss -- actually bring people closer to experiencing lasting, joyful serenity?

Failures are as ephemeral as successes. Both are simply blessed illusions. It is like falling down and getting up. It is still you. The failures validate not only one's limitations but also one's potentials.

Losses are partly self-losses. There is no comfort and consolation needed. The divine light is embedded in the darkest shadows that can transfigure that unbearable pain into quiet serenity. Each person who comes through this world is called upon at some time or other to bear some of the weight of the pain that befalls the world, says Gary Zukav. You must learn to hurt better and you must be worthy of your suffering. Illnesses are just extensions of one's health. Everyone gets sick sooner or later. It is the most beaten path. Illnesses are also sacred signals, telling us of our need for realignment and giving us the opportunity to reframe our lives. They may contain messages from the depths of one's psyche that one may be on the wrong track, in the wrong profession, in the wrong relations, in the wrong town, etc. The person must first shift the valence of his life from suffering to calling. One must also focus on not what is wrong with one's body, but on what is right; not with what is broken but with what is not, and remain in harmony with one's divine discontent.

But what happens when one does not tolerate life's challenges well?

Those who do not adjust well to life's challenges excommunicate themselves. They would be alienated from their families, their colleagues at work and their friends. Their nostalgic preoccupations and chronic frustrations are depressive and contagious. Therefore, people tend to avoid them in self protection.

What do you see as the toll of our national loathing of old age? What advice can you offer for aging gracefully, in body and in spirit?

Youth and beauty are definitely praiseworthy for their age-specific criteria. Old age gets loathed if viewed by the same criteria. The old people's self-loathing is partly responsible for this. We do not have a coherent philosophy of aging. Instead of a dignified melancholy of aging resonating with old age, we angrily fight it and slip into a kind of neurosis of aging. Acceptance of aging brings some ripe sadness and light anxiety, which could bring out the depth and flavor of one's character. Aging gives weight and density to one's personality. It distills the various lifelong experiences into a meaningful whole. It allows one's thoughts, beliefs and values to coalesce into a life philosophy. Now that is worthy of praise.

Why do nature and history matter to personal happiness?

Happiness cannot occur in isolation from one's fellow beings or from nature. The self is best experienced by being part of a greater universe, by blurring of boundaries between human, nonhuman, light and space. In a great chain of beings all is continuous and homogenous. We are happy if nature is happy because we are part of nature. The communion with nature is a sacred source of joyfulness. As to history, our state of mind is influenced by our personal as well as our archetypal past -- the collective unconscious, which is multigenerational and always preempts the personal one. Our collective past frames our individual present. Our myths are our mutual philosophy. Without them we are alone. History provides continuity with our past and the prospect of learning from it for the future.

What words of wisdom can you share for coping with the ultimate fear – dying? How can the terminally ill and their loved ones still find happiness in life?

The fear of dying is universal because of the uncertainty, pain and loss associated with it, as well as our not being able to comprehend the idea of "no longer being." This fear is intensified and becomes a dread when one's sense of self is too closely identified with external factors. That is, the less one knows oneself, the worse the fear. The process of dying must be lived. Commonly, not having lived preempts that experience of dying.

It is difficult to find happiness at the time of one's own terminal illness or that of a loved one, if the person has not cultivated a philosophy of life and death earlier in his/her life. Such a philosophy can be highly personal or communal, i.e., religion. My personal philosophy is as follows: "eternity" -- permanency -- is the result of a combination of transitory factors; becoming "nothing" is the path to being everything; primordial dissolution is the ultimate serenity. Life is an eternal recycling. We are finite in our presently expressed forms but eternal in all potential forms. Meanwhile, I would suggest that you should not waste time by despairing in thinking of your end, just come to terms with it, and drink deep from the well now.

In your book, you make a powerful case for the importance of religion. Why can't a person live a good and genuinely happy life without adhering to any church's doctrine?

A person can live a good and genuinely happy life by being soulful and spiritual without adhering to any religious doctrine. Religions serve many purposes, including those of providing a congregation, identity, and a ready-made paradigm for living. They promise continuity with the past and the future, and eternal belonging. Religion is a communal matrix. It is very difficult to formulate an individual paradigm to meet all of one's needs. Some can make it and even flourish; most others need to be planted next to a stream of religion for survival. Even secular spirituality rests on the tenets of religion.

Why do you believe that people all over the planet overwhelmingly and innately believe in God?

When you look at the enormity of a starry night in which time and space seem interchangeable, or you think of the myriad of transmitters and hormones that control your body, you are awed and frightened. Then you wonder: does all this represent the visible programming of the universe by an invisible force? Jung says that we are wired for God, the programmer. It is an instinctual yearning. We need to relate our existence to a greater force, especially at times of the impending loss of a loved one or during severe illnesses. We believe, therefore we are. This innate belief in God infallibly ties all loose ends, frames our lives, gives aim to our existence, provides meaning for our God-like behavior -- caring, compassion, mercy, goodness, justice, etc. God is love, God is truth, God is humility, God is accountability. We want that. God is an ascetic surrender and sum of all virtues that we long to emulate. We want to receive the reward of having little to apologize for or to repent of at the end of our lives.

What would you most like readers to gain and put into daily practice from their encounter with The Spirit of Happiness?

I would want them to make a quantum leap to reframe and enjoy their lives by being godly: learn the nature of real love and holy relationship; learn how to extract meaning from seemingly meaningless works; learn how to knit ourselves into a convivium (living together) with others and in nature; explore a reality other than that of our five senses; happily experience the God within, and tap the underground river of spirituality -- to be optimistic and serene.

Ultimately, I would want them not to be afraid of illnesses, despair, losses or death, to give an aim to their life (fortunes as well as misfortunes) and death. This is a wonderful world!
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In the winter of 2003, T. Byram Karasu, M.D., answered some of our questions"

What was the book that most influenced your life?

A biography of Albert Schweitzer. Here was a man, an accomplished musician, writer, and professor of theology and philosophy living in the comfortable civilized world of Strasbourg, who decides to become a physician. He leaves everything behind him and goes to Africa to help natives without any conventional gains associated with it. If anything there would be all sorts of losses: financial, health, and even danger to his life. For example, he was detained in an old French mental hospital as a prisoner of war during World War II. This was the first time I heard of someone intentionally serving others without any obvious benefit for himself. That totally confused me. I was only 11 years old and just learning the nature of reciprocity in human relationships. Schweitzer's behavior betrayed common sense. Some adults explained his behavior cynically: "He must have been running away from something!"; "He might have wanted to be famous!"; "He was having a sort of nervous breakdown!", etc.

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Full-text of the interview available, click here.
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B. Karasu's Books:Psychotherapy for Depression, 1990Wisdom in the Practice of Psychotherapy, 1992Deconstruction of Psychotherapy, 1996The Psychotherapist's Interventions, 1998The Psychotherapist as Healer, 2001The Art of Serenity, 2003The Art of Marriage Maintenance, 2005The Spirit of Happiness, 2006Of God and Madness: A Historical Novel, 2006

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http://www.barnesandnoble.com/writers/writerdetails.asp?z=y&cid=1034846#interview

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