Usha Haley was surprised at the depth of her own reaction when she heard that Sen. Kamala Harris would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president.

An accomplished economist whose centrist politics sometimes tend to the right, Dr. Haley says her response was “really an emotional one,” since there are a number of policy positions she does not share with the former California attorney general.

But as a religious Hindu and Indian American who has been married to an Irish Catholic man for 35 years, she saw in Senator Harris’ life many of the same facets of her own – not only as a woman of color and an immigrant, but also as someone in an interfaith and culturally mixed family. 

“I just felt elated in a way that’s hard to explain,” says Dr. Haley, who holds the W. Frank Barton Distinguished Chair of International Business at Wichita State University in Kansas. “I tweeted everyone I knew, and I even called my mother,” who lives in India.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has said he views himself as a “transition candidate” who would bring a new generation of leaders into his administration. His decision to tap as his running mate the first Black woman and person of Asian descent to appear on a major party’s presidential ticket is a nod to the growing diversity that now defines the Democratic Party. And the complexity behind those specific identities – namely, Senator Harris’ multicultural and interfaith background – reflects a growing reality for many Americans, as the country becomes less white, less Protestant, and less defined by organized religion in general. 

“She is something that many of us now are,” says Samira Mehta, a professor of women and gender studies and Jewish studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. “She is a person who has navigated a complicated, multi-religious landscape and has then identified with a specific community, even while drawing from and incorporating other aspects of her life into that identity [as a Black American].”

The senator’s mother, the late biologist Shyamala Gopalan, was an immigrant from India and a Hindu, who married Jamaican-born scholar and Stanford economist Donald Harris. Senator Harris is now married to Los Angeles attorney Douglas Emhoff, a Jewish man from Brooklyn.

Kamala Harris Campaign/AP

A January 1970 photo shows Kamala Harris (left) with her sister, Maya, and mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, outside their apartment in Berkeley, California, after her parents' separation.

It’s an increasingly common portrait. Since 2010, nearly 5 of 10 Americans who have married have joined a spouse of a different religious group, according to Pew Research’s 2015 Religious Landscape Study – doubling the percentage of interfaith marriages 50 years ago. Overall, about 20% of U.S. adults today say they were raised in a mixed religious household.

“Just by her experience of navigating these many different religious identities, not to mention different cultural identities, Kamala Harris had real life practice in what it means to be part of the American interfaith experiment,” says Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, senior adviser for public affairs and innovation at Interfaith Youth Core, which partners with U.S. colleges and universities to foster interfaith cooperation and leaders in an increasingly pluralistic society. 

“In some ways she represents a very time-old American tradition of different people coming together to meet one another in a new location and forging something new,” continues Mr. Raushenbush, whose great-grandfathers include the famous Protestant theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, who pioneered the social gospel movement, and Louis Brandeis, a Jewish Supreme Court justice and one of the nation’s most influential legal minds.

Over the course of her career, Senator Harris has not always emphasized her culturally mixed background. She’s said that she never put too much thought into how to categorize herself and has never liked being wedged into “this box or that box” of racial or ethnic groups, preferring to call herself “a proud American.” A number of her friends told The Washington Post that they were even unaware that she had a heritage from South Asia.

“[When] I first ran for office, that was one of the things that I struggled with,” she said in 2019. “You are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created.”

Despite the different traditions informing her background, in many ways the Democratic vice presidential nominee simply sees herself as a Black American. After her parents divorced when she was a young girl, her mother raised her and her younger sister, Maya, within the Black middle-class communities in Oakland. 

“From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the Black community,” Senator Harris wrote of her mother in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold.”  “It was the foundation of her new American life.”  

“My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” she wrote. “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”

Both her parents enveloped them in civil rights activities, protests, and salon-like social gatherings where adults “devoured” Black writers overlooked in their educations, including Ralph Ellison, Carter G. Woodson, and W.E.B. Du Bois. 

Her mother exposed her daughters to her Hindu faith, bringing them to India on numerous occasions to meet their extended relatives and experience Hindu worship. But she also decided to ground her daughters in Christianity, sending them each Sunday with a family friend to attend Oakland’s 23rd Avenue Church of God, a denomination with Pentecostal roots, where they sang in the children’s choir.

“My earliest memories of the teachings of the Bible were of a loving God, a God who asked us to ‘speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves’ and to ‘defend the rights of the poor and needy’,” Senator Harris wrote in her memoir. “This is where I learned that ‘faith’ is a verb; I believe we must live our faith and show faith in action.”

Such grounding in the Bay Area’s Black communities led her to travel east to attend college at Howard University in Washington, D.C., the historically Black university with a rich tradition of legal scholarship and civil rights activism. 

This was a very significant decision, says Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor of political science and Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame, since both Senator Harris’ parents as well as her sister, Maya, received degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. 

“She chose to set out on her own to go to Howard, wanting to be closer to its traditions in the law and become a lawyer, like Justice Thurgood Marshall” – a Howard alum whom Senator Harris has called one of the inspirations of her youth. “And she didn’t just attend Howard, she became very much a part of its social networks,” Dr. Pinderhughes adds. 

Responding to persistent questions about her “Blackness” as the daughter of two foreign-born American immigrants – including “birther” questions about her eligibility for the presidency that have gained new traction on the right despite having no legal basis – Senator Harris said during a radio interview last year, “I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black.”

But it’s the various threads woven into the tapestry of that identity that make Senator Harris’ experience increasingly relatable to many.

Dr. Haley, for example, navigates her own family’s traditions in a fluid way – saying her Sanskrit prayers in the morning but also attending Roman Catholic mass with her husband and 5-year-old daughter. “With our child, she’s exposed to both, and I’m hoping to expose her to Buddhism and Judaism as well, because we’re friends with people from so many different walks,” she says.

Dr. Mehta has had a similar experience. Her father’s family background is steeped in Hindu traditions, but her mother was part of a complicated family that included Unitarian, Presbyterian, and Jewish roots.

“So I grew up as a little kid celebrating both Diwali [the Hindu festival of lights] and Passover,” says the University of Colorado Boulder scholar whose book, “Beyond Chrismukkah: Christian-Jewish Interfaith Families in the United States,” explores the long history of such families. She ultimately decided to embrace her Jewish roots, formally convert, and become a scholar in the field of Jewish studies. “I would say identity is still a lot more complicated than simply a collection of ethnic or religious fractions – it’s also a part of the choices you make.”

For Mr. Raushenbush, the process of shaping an identity is enhanced by interfaith experiences, even when grounded in specific communities or traditions.

“That’s part of what Kamala Harris represents, regardless of politics,” he says. “We are invited to a closer proximity with people who are, you know, very different than ourselves.”

Neal Taparia has found he kind of likes running his Manhattan-based tech company from his home.

When the pandemic began to ravage the city last March, he and thousands of other “nonessential” office workers were suddenly forced to leave their Manhattan conference rooms and cubicles and work remotely, via Zoom and Slack. 

The virus put a sudden halt to what could be called the city’s classic professional lifestyle: the crowded commutes downtown and back; the long, meeting-packed days at the office with meals at your desk; the hard-charging ambition of a city that, as the saying goes, never sleeps.

For Mr. Taparia and many of his employees, the jarring transition, both emotional and professional, was far from seamless as the built-in boundaries between home and work life dissolved. “But once we started establishing sound practices for working from home, it became pretty clear that our employees, and even myself, we loved the flexibility,” says Mr. Taparia, a tech entrepreneur who last year co-founded SOTA Partners, which invests in forward-looking companies, including those rethinking the future of the workplace.

“And because everyone was commuting to the office, they all said, this is just great because they have so much time back in their day,” continues Mr. Taparia, who now runs the SOTA venture Solitaired. “They also touted other things like, this is eco-friendly, we’re not spending money on gas or train passes, we’re saving money, and things like that.” 

“So soon it became pretty clear, why should we even bother with paying all that rent for a midtown office when we’ve been pretty effective at home?” he says.

Courtesy of Sureena Taparia

Neal Taparia, head of the tech startup Solitaired, works at home with his 4-year-old daughter, Navya, nearby on Aug. 17, 2020, in Scarsdale, New York.

A large-scale experiment

It’s been about five months since New York became one of the first regions in the country to shut down its nonessential workplaces and businesses, transforming its streetscapes of glass towers and 19th-century office lofts into relatively deserted ghost towns.

Many white-collar workers have been returning to the office since the end of June, following Phase 2 of the city’s reopening plans, which permitted offices to operate at half capacity. But about 90% of Manhattan’s office workforce remained working from home in mid-July, industry experts estimated. 

While it’s still relatively early in New York’s cautious reopening process, the wide-scale experiment in working from home has proved to work on a number of levels for white-collar employers and employees – perhaps signaling dramatic changes to the classic culture of urban-centered professional lifestyles as more and more companies plan to allow at least some of their employees to work from home permanently.

“The expense to the culture of downtown business areas is a significant issue here,” says Deanna Geddes, professor of human resource management in the Fox School of Business at Temple University in Philadelphia. “And there can be a real trickle-down effect if office workers stay home after COVID, because while so-called knowledge workers can work at home, all those who are in the service industries and who expect a large crowd – either in transportation, in retail, or in food – their livelihood is tremendously affected when there is no longer that large group of people coming to their area of business.”

“And, yeah, I do think it’s not unreasonable to consider that the economies of American downtowns may change,” continues Professor Geddes.

The end of the office?

Manhattan financial firms have already announced that most of their employees will continue to work from home through the end of the year, and perhaps longer. “We’ve proven we can operate with no footprint,” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman told Bloomberg. “That tells you an enormous amount about where people need to be physically.”

Major technology firms have gone even further. Google announced most of its employees across the country will continue to work from home until next July. Facebook employees won’t return to the office at least until next year, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company expects up to half its workforce will work from home 10 years from now. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told his employees they could work from home indefinitely, even after the crisis ends. 

The demise of New York City has often been greatly exaggerated, however, and many in the past wondered whether the city could bounce back after the 1918 flu pandemic, the city’s near bankruptcy in the 1970s, and the terrorist attacks on 9/11. It always did.

Facebook nevertheless signed a lease for Manhattan’s iconic, 730,000-square-foot former post office across from Madison Square Garden, part of 2.2 million square feet of office space the company has taken in the city over the past year.

Still, industry experts say New York City may see up to one-third of its 240,000 small businesses close for good, especially those that have relied on Manhattan’s cadres of office commuters, according to a report by the Partnership for New York City. Such businesses have lost about 520,000 jobs as the city’s unemployment rate topped 20% in June.

“My existential question is, how much of the things that we’ve seen in response to COVID are temporary and an immediate reaction to people navigating the uncertainty of this time, and how much of them stand to be permanent?” says Malcom Glenn, fellow in the Future of Property Rights program at New America, a think tank in Washington.

“I’ve always been really bullish about the future of cities,” says Mr. Glenn. “Notwithstanding the social benefits and the fact that you have access to arts and culture, other people with more diverse perspectives of thought and cultural backgrounds, from the perspective of the environmental imperative to have more people sharing resources, I think cities remain more environmentally sustainable.”

“Offices will continue to exist, I think. The human spirit prizes in-person engagement,” he says.

Fleeing to the burbs

Many well-off urban professionals who had been living in American cities have been heading to the suburbs, however, prioritizing more space, private backyards, and even swimming pools. Driven by the realization that their work lives, leisure time, and schooling for their children might remain the new norm at home heading into the near future, they have fueled a gold rush in existing-home sales across the United States.

Indeed, New York City’s sky-high apartment rental market has begun to plunge, even as the National Association of Realtors reports that home sales nationwide climbed a record 20.7% in June. 

“A lot of emotions are tied to COVID,” says Professor Geddes, who studies the roles emotions play in the workplace. “For those who could work remotely, some of those were relief that you can be at home and safe, be relatively secure with your job and your paycheck, and find an increased closeness and patience and love with your family – even though we know that being together for many, many hours can be a mixed blessing.”

It’s been an adjustment for Mr. Taparia, who lives in Scarsdale, a suburb in Westchester County. He arrived in New York fresh out of college almost 15 years ago to work on Wall Street before starting his first company, and he says he misses the intangibles within the rhythms of working in the city, including the walk-and-talk meetings in Bryant Park, lunches with friends and fellow entrepreneurs, and discovering a new restaurant in the evenings after work. 

”A lot of our creative thoughts and best decisions have happened from those conversations,” he says.

But the advantages of working from home – the reduced costs, the flexibility and extra hours in the day without a daily commute, and the productivity of his employees – made the permanent move make sense. 

For him, the mixed blessing has been all the extra time he can now spend with his wife, Sureena; 6-year-old son, Kavin; and 4-year-old daughter, Navya. “They’ve gotten so used to me being at home all the time, and they sometimes think that I’m choosing not to spend my time with them when I need to focus in the office,” he says. “They always say, ‘Dad, why are you always working?’”

But he has eased into a new rhythm in his professional life, helping to develop concrete daily protocols for his remote staff, who’ve had to find a balance between their home and professional lives. 

“The first thing we did is, we started creating these flexibility windows for our team,” he says. While he’s been strict with his family about his work time in his home office, there are no staff meetings scheduled from 9 to 10 a.m., 12 to 1 p.m., or 4 to 5 in the early evening. “That has allowed us to support our team so they can take care of their family life and do what they want.”

They’ve also emphasized creating a more goal-oriented culture rooted in mutual accountability, he says. Employees send a 100-word email to the entire team each day, outlining their daily and weekly goals, the daily challenges they’re facing, and what they plan to do the following day.

“It’s worked well because, as long as they set and meet their goals, I don’t really care what hours my employees work,” Mr. Taparia says. “I’m OK with that because I know they have other things to do, kids to juggle, and, God knows, deal with the screaming in the background that happens at my house.”

“But nothing beats just connecting with someone in person,” he continues. “So our goal is, when things are better and we are comfortable with our team traveling again, we can get together maybe once a month, or once a quarter, in Manhattan at a place like Convene,” a business that rents out conference rooms.

“We can spend our money on that, and from time to time gather the team together to have brainstorming sessions, or just have some face time together, or do an office activity,” he says. “But otherwise, being at home, that’s how we see work life moving forward.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, we have removed our paywall for all pandemic-related stories.

Betrayal, tragedy, a stab in the back – Palestinians have used many anguished phrases over the past week to describe the brewing normalization deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but one clearly defines where they find themselves: a crossroads.

For Palestinians, the UAE-Israel agreement looms as more than just a blow to Arab unity and their quest for statehood, but as a reckoning for their leadership and a final nail in the coffin of the Oslo peace process.

Feeling alienated by Arab allies, the United States, and the international community, Palestinians are seeking to redefine their struggle with a renewed sense of urgency.

What is percolating up from the grassroots also is a desire for a dramatic move away from conventional demands and diplomacy and a reliance on their political leadership. Instead of “peace,” or even “statehood,” the rising buzzwords among Palestinians on the street and among activists are “rights” and “resistance.”

The UAE-Israel deal upended decades of Arab consensus that Arab states would withhold normalization with Israel – and its associated economic and diplomatic benefits – until after a comprehensive peace deal for an independent Palestinian state that included Israel’s withdrawal from lands it captured in 1967.

The consensus, formalized by Saudi Arabia in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, was used by Arabs and Palestinians as an incentive for Israel and the international community to stick to the peace process and the two-state solution.  

With the UAE, a regional heavyweight and one of the wealthiest Arab states, now violating that consensus, observers and officials say the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinians are diplomatically and politically isolated.

Further, the deal is evidence that the Palestinians’ tactic of “shaming” Arab players who attempt normalization – previously successful in constraining Israel’s peace with Jordan and Egypt and pushing Israel-Gulf cooperation behind closed doors – no longer works.

Anger at leadership

Predictably, the announcement last week ignited protests in Gaza, Jerusalem, and Ramallah, with protesters accusing the UAE of “treason” and burning photos of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. On the streets and on social media, slogans echoed one call: “normalization is betrayal.”

It is also seen as a mortal wound to the Palestinian Authority, which is faulted for its costly pursuit of a now moribund peace process and which, after being snubbed by the Trump administration, had clung to Arab support as its strongest remaining card.

“Simply, the peace process is a failed framework. The PA under [President] Mahmoud Abbas has solely focused on negotiations and more negotiations when it was clear he should have changed strategy a long time ago,” says activist Diana Buttu, a former PLO spokeswoman.

“Negotiations were simply a tactic, never a true strategy, and now they do not even have the Arabs with them. They have nothing.”

Saeb Erakat, negotiator and secretary general of the PLO Executive Committee, addressed the internal Palestinian debate in an email interview.

“Not all Palestinians think the same, and that’s a good thing. [But] there is an overwhelming consensus when it comes to ending the Israeli occupation,” he says. Is the Oslo peace process “taking us from occupation to independence or is it being used to perpetuate the status quo of occupation and apartheid? This is the real question that has to be answered.”

Mohamad Torokman/AP

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas gestures in a meeting with Palestinian leadership to discuss the United Arab Emirates' deal with Israel to normalize relations, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Aug. 18, 2020.

Even before the UAE deal, Palestinians’ support for their leaders was in decline.

According to a late June survey by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 81% of Palestinians perceived the PA as corrupt, 52% saw it as a “burden,” and 62% demanded the resignation of the aging Mr. Abbas, whose mandate ended in 2009.

On social media and on the street, Palestinians also point to their leadership’s refusal to reform or include a younger generation.

The last legislative elections for the Palestinian Authority were held in 2006; the PLO itself has not had internal elections since the 1990s.

“We are in a place where we can no longer say that the strategy pursued by the PLO 27 years ago in Oslo is legitimate, and it is impossible for people to say that this Palestinian leadership is legitimate,” says Ms. Buttu.

Abandoning Oslo … and statehood?

For a generation that has grown up in a post-Oslo era of restrictions, security walls, expanding settlements, and home demolitions, the Israel-UAE deal has accelerated an evolving shift in thought on the two-state solution and a peace process many now say was dictated to them.

According to the June survey, nearly two out of three Palestinians, 63%, believe the two-state solution is no longer practical or feasible, and half oppose it. Only 45% expressed support for two states.

Additional surveys show one-third of Palestinians supporting one-state with equal rights, despite not a single Palestinian faction promoting the concept.

“The discourse is becoming less about this standard vision of a purely Palestinian state with particular borders, and more about pushing for self-determination and sovereignty, whatever form that takes,” says Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

“It could be a binational state or a federation, there are different potential versions,” she adds. “But having sovereignty and self-determination at the crux of your demands means” rejecting carving up Palestine into isolated islands inside Israeli-controlled territory. That’s true “no matter if the international community is playing a role or not.”

Palestinian activists and observers say they will increasingly turn to “popular resistance” to express their demands.  

Such resistance would go beyond economic boycotts and could include general strikes, mass demonstrations, and disruptions to daily life in Israel and the Palestinian territories to put the media spotlight on their struggle.

“Palestinians have learned a lot from popular resistance as a tool to convince the international community that they are the ones who want change and should be addressed, not other Arab states or undemocratic bodies such as the PA who no longer represent them,” says Nijmeh Ali, a Palestinian researcher and analyst.

A recent precedent would be the mass mobilization of Palestinians in Jerusalem in 2017, which prompted Israel to walk back a move to place security cameras at the entrances to the Al Aqsa Mosque. Activists say such coordination harks back to the first intifada in 1988.

On social media, Palestinians have pledged to physically prevent Emiratis from entering Jerusalem’s Old City or to pray in Al Aqsa, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Palestinians are also reaching out to activists in the Gulf to organize joint action to pressure other Arab states not to follow the UAE’s lead.

Some Palestinian institutions have read the anger and are racing to get out in front.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Muhamed Ahmed Hussein, warned Arabs Tuesday that “it is not permissible … for any Muslim to come through normalization processes to visit Al Aqsa.”

Regional clout

Nevertheless, the UAE’s clout in the region is already being felt.  

On Wednesday, a Sudanese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Khartoum, heavily influenced by Abu Dhabi, is open to entering into peace talks with Israel, and rumors rumble in some Arab capitals that Bahrain will soon follow.

The Arab League has refused to hold an emergency session or even issue a statement on the UAE-Israel deal despite several petitions by the Palestinian Authority, reportedly due to Emirati pressure.  

Arab states allied with the UAE have been urged to repress any domestic public criticism of Abu Dhabi and Israel in their home countries – despite their own citizens’ outrage and personal misgivings.

Arab and Palestinian officials privately admit another weakness: the presence of over 200,000 Palestinians who live and work in the UAE and a further 200,000 across the Gulf.

Palestinian leaders and commentators are wary that strong words or protests could lead to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the Gulf, a blow to families and the economy. Gulf Palestinians’ remittances back home account for 16% of the Palestinian territories’ GDP.

“Today the UAE has mobilized all its propaganda tools, including some vicious anti-Palestinian comments and censorship of anti-agreement voices, including ours that they are supposed to be ‘helping,’” Mr. Erakat says, noting that the Palestinian leadership has been reassured by other Arab states that they will not follow Abu Dhabi’s lead.

Wednesday evening, Fatah and its rivals Hamas and Islamic Jihad began discussions for coordinated mass protests to keep up with grassroots calls for mobilization.

In this new phase, without the support of Arab states or the international community, Palestinians say they are increasingly ready to take matters into their own hands.

“Palestinians on the ground feel like they are stuck and backed into a corner by every party,” says Dr. Ali, the analyst. “The only response will be to push back and act, and this time it will come from the grassroots and not from above.” 

John Thys/AP

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks with French President Emmanuel Macron (center) at an EU summit in Brussels on July 20, 2020. The two leaders are scheduled to meet Aug. 20, 2020, in France.

The European Union’s two preeminent political leaders will sit down this week in an imposing medieval fortress off France’s Mediterranean coast. And a lot more than croissants and canapés will be on the menu.

What they’ve be chewing over for some time is more substantial: the prospect of what might be called a “new Europe.”

For decades, European countries have been key partners of the United States. Yet with France and Germany taking the lead, the 27-member EU seems to be grappling its way toward a more assertively independent identity.

The extent to which this happens – whether the EU, the world’s largest trading bloc, will become an equally cohesive political force alongside the U.S. and China – is likely to become clearer only in the months ahead. Yet the two leaders meeting at the Fort de Brégançon this week, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are bound to play a key role.

There are already signs of loosening bonds with Washington. In part, that’s because in recent years, U.S. eyes have increasingly looked eastward, away from the old Cold War rival, Russia, toward a rising China. But under President Donald Trump – who has sharply criticized European members of the NATO security alliance, and wielded trade sanctions against EU states – there’s been a palpable erosion of trust in the alliance with America.

Mr. Trump has also pulled out of international initiatives that the U.S. actually helped lead alongside its European allies: the Paris climate accord, and the deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program in exchange for removing sanctions.

In a striking sign of the new tension, France, Britain, and Germany last week abstained on an ultimately failed U.S. attempt to get the United Nations Security Council to extend the international arms embargo on Iran.

Fresh urgency

A range of other catalysts have been lending fresh urgency to EU efforts to redefine itself. They also seem to have narrowed differences between Germany and France on the way forward: between President Macron’s vision of something like a United States of Europe, and Chancellor Merkel’s past preference for a looser, primarily economic union. 

And Ms. Merkel has been readier to exert German political influence within Europe, something modern German leaders have been reluctant to do in awareness of the country’s World War II legacy. That heightened profile is especially significant now. Not only is she in her final term in power, but Germany has just assumed the rotating, six-monthly presidency of the EU.

Two of the change catalysts – both of them also factors in a closer Franco-German entente – have come close to home. The first was the decision by Britain, a key European economy and Europe’s most important military power, to end its decadeslong membership in the EU. The other was the pandemic, and the huge costs it has placed on EU countries, especially the more economically vulnerable southern member states.

The pandemic response has offered a dramatic sign that the EU could be headed toward major change. With Mr. Macron among the prime advocates, Ms. Merkel departed from years of emphasizing the need of each individual EU state to look after its own fiscal probity, and her reluctance to see the stronger economies in effect bail out more fragile ones. Instead, she helped convince the clearly reluctant wealthier states to agree on a historic economic recovery package. It created a nearly $900 billion fund that, though needed disproportionately by the southern EU countries, will be backed by borrowing that is jointly guaranteed by all member states.

The question now is whether this new economic solidarity will be widened to forge a similarly strong new geopolitical identity. On that front, there have also been catalysts for change. 

NATO is under unprecedented strain. One member, Turkey, sent troops into Syria last year against Kurdish forces who were allies of the U.S. in defeating the Islamic State. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also agreed with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy Russian anti-aircraft weaponry. And in recent days, he has been in a naval standoff with fellow NATO member Greece over natural-gas rights in the Mediterranean.

The Turks are also at loggerheads with another NATO state, France, with both sides backing opposite sides in the battle between rival political leaders in Libya. And on the natural gas dispute, Mr. Macron is now siding with Greece, beefing up France’s presence in the Mediterranean and warning Turkey to stand down.

There, and on the broader question of future Europe-U.S. ties, Ms. Merkel is likely to play an especially critical role. That makes their informal summit, at the French president’s official seaside retreat, particularly timely.

While Ms. Merkel, too, wants Mr. Erdoğan to pull back from confrontation with Greece, she’s been hoping to avoid overtly taking sides, and instead to pave the way for a negotiated resolution.

Still, she does seem increasingly to share Mr. Macron’s view that in the longer term, Europe must define itself and its policies more independently from Washington.

She and other politicians in Germany were especially vexed by the Trump administration’s sudden announcement last month that it was withdrawing 12,000 U.S. troops from the NATO presence there. And for her, like other EU leaders, U.S. trade sanctions have reinforced the view that Europe also needs an independent trade policy. 

Germany is backing a gas pipeline project to bring supplies from Russia despite Mr. Trump’s objections, for instance. But Ms. Merkel has also taken a tough line on geopolitical issues like Mr. Putin’s intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

And there are differences as well on China – formally defined by the EU this year as a “systemic rival,” but also still a key trading partner.

Given the number and complexity of issues involved in any international repositioning of the EU – not to mention the likelihood that on many geopolitical issues, European and U.S. interests are apt to continue to overlap – defining a “new Europe” will take far more than a single meeting between the German and French leaders, however important their roles within the EU.

And the main focus of this week’s talks is likely to be not on the long view, but on issues like the immediate risk of open conflict between Turkey and Greece.

But the political context is broader: part of an intensifying, ongoing dialogue around questions concerning the future shape of the EU, questions that both leaders acknowledge have become increasingly pressing.

Joe Henson/Courtesy of Penguin Random House

Author Isabel Wilkerson appears with her book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”

The word racism does not appear in “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” says Isabel Wilkerson of her bestselling 2010 debut, an epic account of the 20th-century Great Migration of 6 million African Americans from the South to the North. “What they were experiencing was more comprehensive, more repressive, which is why I thought ‘caste’ was the more appropriate word.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s riveting second book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” builds on that insight to argue that racism alone does not explain America’s social divisions. Ms. Wilkerson makes the persuasive case that the United States instead ought to be understood as having a race-based caste system, one whose hierarchies, though artificial, are remarkably enduring. She recently spoke with the Monitor.

Q: Why haven’t we thought of the U.S. as having a caste system? Most people hearing “caste” probably think of India.

Once you look into it, you realize how appropriate it is for understanding how our society works. [The word was] primarily the preserve of academics but did not filter to the mainstream. Anthropologists and sociologists were using that term to [describe] what they were documenting when they studied how the Jim Crow laws and culture worked in the South.

Q: Can you say more about the relationship between caste and race?

Caste is the underlying structure of hierarchy that exists in many cultures. The cue can change with whatever society we’re talking about. For some it might be religion, for others geography. In the United States, the overarching instantaneous signal of where a person belongs is what a person looks like in terms of what we call race. Caste is the bones, and race is the skin.

Q: How does class fit in? 

Class is the education, the clothes, the accent: the changeable things we have some measure of control over. If you can act your way out of it, then it’s class. If you cannot, it’s caste. 

Caste is those things that we cannot see, that we have so absorbed that we don’t even question. I’m putting language to what we as people born to a hierarchy know in our bones. We’ve absorbed it for so long that we don’t think about it.

Q: You write about how the lowest members of the dominant caste are invested in the system. How does that dynamic play out?

When people feel under threat, that they have little to rely on other than whatever advantage might accrue based upon where they happen to be [in the hierarchy], then they will hold fast to that.

Q: How does the election of President Donald Trump look when seen through that framework?

The question is: Which interests are people voting for? People who are in the dominant caste but working class might resist policies to help working people, out of a sense that they might help those who have been deemed beneath them. Looking through the lens of caste, they actually are voting in their own interest if maintaining standing over time in a hierarchy is the priority.

Q: How do those you refer to as the middle castes, say, Latinos and Asians, navigate the caste system in America?

I would posit that Indigenous people would be considered literally outside of the caste system because they were violently forced off their land, essentially exiled from the framework that I’m speaking about. African Americans entered the system at the bottom as enslaved people. Then there’s the dominant group, which has been in position from the beginning but whose composition has changed over time depending on who fit the definition of who could be considered “white” in the United States. 

The middle castes are the people who fall in between. That’s also a changing group depending on how immigration is unfolding at any given time. Those in the middle have to navigate a preexisting order.

Q: You studied India’s caste system and that of Germany’s Third Reich. What stands out?

I found many parallels to our own country, even though of course all three countries are wildly different. There was this through-line of how hierarchy manifested itself in the impulses to rank, to enforce, to maintain the purity of the dominant group.

What brought me to Germany was really Charlottesville, a moment in our country in which the symbolism of the Confederacy and Nazism converged. How is it that the ralliers there connected these two disparate cultures? I was stunned to discover that German eugenicists were in dialogue with American eugenicists in the years leading up to the Third Reich. The books written by American eugenicists were big sellers in Germany. The Nazis actually sent researchers to the United States to study the Jim Crow laws, to study how the United States had subjugated African Americans, its subordinated class.

Q: Do you have hope that America’s caste system can be dismantled?

My goal was to put a light on it; there’s no hope of fixing it unless you can see it. None of us alive created it, but once you become aware, then what are we going to do to recognize how these man-made divisions have kept us apart? I have hope for people being openhearted enough to see how much we have in common.

Reuters

Silymane Hiyan Hiyar, an ex-rebel and leading member of the peace committee in Agadez, Niger, sits at his home's courtyard.

When Washington created the U.S. Africa Command in the mid-2000s, one motivation was to help African militaries prepare for threats of terrorism. The Pentagon’s concern was that “ungoverned” spaces left the continent vulnerable to jihadist groups. African leaders bristled over that term. The continent is divided into clearly defined sovereign states. Where, they asked, are the ungoverned spaces?

A better term might have been “under-governed,” but the hypothesis proved to be correct. Violent attacks attributed to militant Islamist groups in Africa have risen sixfold since 2011. Most of that increase has occurred in the western Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, Somalia, and northern Mozambique – predominantly Muslim regions where weak institutions and insufficient government services undermine stability and public confidence. In the 12 months ending June 30, such events rose 31% from the previous same period and numbered more than 4,000 for the first time.

Since then security has continued to deteriorate. Six French aid workers and their guide and driver were killed earlier this month in a suspected jihadi ambush near the Niger capital of Niamey. Last week affiliates of Islamic State captured a port in Mozambique near natural gas projects. Last Sunday 16 people were killed and scores injured in a bombing and gun attack by Al Shabab militants in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

African military responses to jihadist attacks, bolstered by U.S., French, and other international troops, have mostly exacerbated the threat. National security forces have frequently rounded up and executed local men and boys they suspect of supporting the militants. This in turn has become a driver of radicalization. Grieving and embittered townspeople are easy recruits for groups like Islamic State.

The human toll from these conflicts has escalated sharply. Burkina Faso has seen a 92% rise in the number of internally displaced people over last year. More than 2 million have been forced to flee their homes there and in neighboring Mali and Niger. Nearly 8 million people in northern Nigeria will need emergency humanitarian aid this year.

The resulting crisis of confidence in faltering governments in the region deepened yesterday when the president and prime minister in Mali were removed from office by mutineering soldiers. That followed weeks of growing popular protest over corruption, economic decline, and the government’s failure to suppress violent Islamist extremism in the north.

It is time for both national and international leaders to focus more on solutions that are working. These include communities where local leaders have brokered their own agreements to address the region’s many problems, such as jihadist violence, climate change, and lately COVID-19. Local solutions help reduce tensions among rival ethnic groups competing for scarce resources like water and pasturage.

In Abala, Niger, for example, traditional leaders have forged an agreement to reduce the causes of conflict between their communities, such as cattle rustling and control of transportation corridors. They promise to work toward a shared and more stable coexistence.

But they did not stop there. They raised expectations for national leaders, too. The pact calls on the governments of Mali and Niger to build better water infrastructure, create job training programs for youth, and install local financial institutions. Since adopting the agreement, there has been a noticeable drop in violence and less political or economic incentive to unite with jihadists.

Shoring up faltering states in Africa requires a well-balanced mix of security, development, and democratization. Military tactics alone cannot contain Islamist extremism if governments lack credibility. There is an urgent need to build that credibility from the ground up, village by village. Local leaders need to be encouraged to hold constructive dialogue with radical Islamists and to mediate a sharing of resources. An inclusive and local approach can rebuild vulnerable communities and offer a viable end to the rise in violence in Africa.