European Politics

Just after Mary Robinson announced that she was not interested in the EU Presidency, former Irish Taoiseach and outgoing EU ambassador to Washington John Bruton has put his hat in the ring. I know him and like him enormously (he’s a very decent right winger), so I won’t speak to the merits of his candidacy on grounds of manifest personal bias. But if I was a betting man (and there were a contract at Intrade), I’d think him well worth a considerable flutter. He fulfils the informal desiderata (Christian Democrat from a small state), but even more importantly seems like a very plausible compromise candidate. The Germans are likely to veto Blair, while the UK is almost certain to want to veto overly enthusiastic federalists like Jean-Claude ‘I am not a dwarf’ Juncker and Guy Verhofstadt. Bruton is plausibly acceptable to both sides – he is pro-European enough to keep the mainlanders happy, but very well liked in the UK. At the moment, I’m not seeing any other declared candidate who could plausibly get a consensus behind him or her. I’ll try to write more on the candidates as the politicking continues …

The Financial Times has an excellent article summarizing the institutional issues facing the EU if, as expected, Lisbon passes. Read it for the substance. But enjoy it for this suggestion, which I haven’t seen floated before:

However, as became clear this week, many smaller EU member states do not want a high-profile president. Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands circulated a document contending that the first president should be “someone who has demonstrated his commitment to the European project and has developed a global vision of the Union’s policies, who listens to the member states and the institutions, and who is sensitive to the institutional balance that corresponds to the Community method”. Translated from Eurospeak, this means a person with a lower profile than Mr Blair and from a country more deeply committed than the UK to the European ideal. Across Europe there is a recognition that the EU would do its image a favour if it awarded the job to a woman, one possibility being Mary Robinson, Ireland’s former head of state.

Depending on how Vaclav Klaus’s brinkmanship plays out, the new president will have to be chosen pretty soon. It would be very, very sad to see wingnuts’ heads exploding again in just a few weeks time …

So the polls are open in Ireland for the Lisbon Treaty Mulligan referendum. Early reports suggest that more people are voting than the last time in Dublin, but that turnout elsewhere in the country is very low. I’m predicting a win by somewhere in the 6%-8% range (more predicated on ‘No’ voters being discouraged and not voting, than on any great sense of positive enthusiasm for the referendum). Also worth noting in passing that Wolfgang Munchau who suggested last year that the Irish could (and perhaps should) be kicked out of the EU for their impertinence in voting No the first time around now seems to have gone quite cold on the Treaty himself. He fails to tell us whether major European member states are monitoring his shifting beliefs against the likelihood that they might soon have to pull out of the EU and reconstitute themselves in a new organization that would specifically exclude Wolfgang Munchau. Perhaps his column next week will reveal more – in the meantime, feel free to speculate about the vote, provide updated information, opinions etc in comments.

Update: Looks as though I seriously underestimated the swing – the Treaty passed by a 17% margin.

Speaking of how the world needs many more assertive humanists to counter the seemingly irresistible forces of wingnuts and indifference, Chris Patten’s name is in the ring for Europe’s first proper foreign minister. The FT reports that Lord Patten is ‘not campaigning for the job, but would be very positive about it if approached’. Patten would do a superb job.

Patten’s thankless work on policing in Northern Ireland brought about a huge leap forward and must have required no small physical courage on his part. His stint as the last governor of Hong Kong got valuable concessions from the Chinese that someone more worried about their ego and reputation couldn’t have delivered. And Patten’s and Javier Solana’s outwardly amicable and respectful managing of their conflicting EU foreign policy roles in the early 2000’s is a credit to both. Patten is uniquely qualified to be the face (and the brains) of Europe’s foreign policy.

There are other good reasons, too. The FT points out David Cameron’s likely discomfort with a fellow Tory being in such a prominent EU role. Also, putting Patten in as Number 2 may make it all that much easier to refuse Tony Blair the top job. And Patten has proven he can actually do all the deal-making and consensus-building the job requires (even more reason why the member states should think of Patten for President of the union, not least to preserve their own sovereignty).

But here’s my reason. Sometimes the good guys should win. I want someone in the foreign policy job whose judgment, experience and, above all, integrity I respect. Someone who may disappoint in the particulars, but who is sound on the fundamentals. In both organizational and political life, I don’t want to believe that only the cynics and brown-nosers, the bullies and yes-men will come out on top. Patten is living proof that successful leaders can be deeply moral and highly effective. That’s something we can all aspire to.

And think about the book he would write afterward…

Full disclosure: I’ve met Lord Patten a few times at the 21st Century Trust, an organisation of which I’m a fellow and he is the Chair.

Judging by a review I read in the New York Times, there is some danger of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe being taken more seriously by some Americans than earlier examples of the Europe-about-to-become-Muslim genre. Matt Carr, writing for the Institute of Race Relations, provides some detailed rebuttal .

So is Tony Blair officially in the running to become President of the Council of member states of the European Union (a new job, that might or might not be quite powerful, depending on who gets it, that will come into being if the Lisbon Treaty passes)? The Financial Times says yes [click to continue…]

I’ve been a bit remiss in not covering the recent shenanigans in Italy:

Appearing on a billionaire’s luxury ship in the Bay of Naples on Monday, nine days before he hosts a Group of Eight summit, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, rejected reports that his government risked falling apart over his personal life. “My government is probably the most safe and secure in the west,” he said. He specifically rejected “foreign” press reports questioning its stability in the wake of allegations by escorts that they had been paid by a businessman to attend parties at the prime minister’s residences and that one had sex with him on the night of the US elections in November.

My acquaintance with Italian society and politics is mostly second-hand these days, and Berlusconi certainly been extraordinarily good at turning bad publicity into good in the past, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the one that finally sinks him. Cavorting with eighteen year old starlet wannabes was probably a mild net positive for Berlusconi, allowing him to project an image of continued virility etc. Over-excited Czech prime ministers bedecked with young women at his private villa not so good – but more awkward than genuinely embarrassing. However the most recent allegation – that he had sex with a prostitute (who claims to have recorded the whole thing) seems to me to directly undermine the image that he wants to project of a debonair and charming, ladies’ man, making him sound like a bit of a loser. Certainly, Berlusconi himself seems worried.

“I have never paid a woman,” Berlusconi said in an interview with the Chi weekly owned by his Mondadori publishing empire. I’ve never understood what satisfaction there is other than that of conquering (a woman),” he told the magazine, according to excerpts sent to Reuters ahead of publication on Wednesday.

I’m predicting (cautiously, and with fingers crossed) that he will be gone within 3 months.

[As an aside, my favorite bit of the story is that the prostitute (who was allegedly paid by a businessman to attend the party), seems not to have asked Berlusconi himself for money “because she was more keen on favors to obtain building permits.”]

Via Arthur Goldhammer, this is a very interesting post.

The French military tortured systematically from the beginning to the end of the war, most spectacularly during the “Battle of Algiers” in 1957. They used all the classic methods: electricity, simulated drowning, beatings, sexual torture and rape. …The FLN’s use of terrorism—in particular their targeting of European civilians at popular clubs, bars, and so on in urban bombing campaigns—served as the rationale for this “exhaustive interrogation” of “suspects.” … The Algerian War was a war of independence, a war of decolonization. In that sense, it cannot and should not be understood as analogous to, or a direct precursor to, the United States’ “war on terror.”

As an American today, what I find really significant about the use of torture in the Algerian War is what it did to France, which underwent a profound crisis of democracy as it attempted to hold on to Algeria. … what torture did do was poison the public sphere: to conceal the fact that the military was torturing, French governments turned to censorship, seizure of publications deemed deleterious to the honor and reputation of the Army, paralyzing control over the movements of journalists, and prosecution of those who nevertheless continued to publish evidence that torture was going on. … The reason all the government censorship was necessary was that a small but incredibly passionate, intellectually high-powered anti-torture movement developed in France from late 1956. … historical comparison can function as illuminating intellectual practice. … cell phone cameras really changed the world. Because the main reason the French torture-defenders didn’t argue that stuff like simulated drowning was no big deal was because they didn’t have to: they didn’t have to admit simulated drowning was happening AT ALL. In the absence of certain forms of highly-circulated, red-handed visual evidence, like the Abu Ghraib photos in Bush-era America, “deny, deny, deny” (even if massive, overwhelming proof actually does exist) remains a plausible public-relations strategy. … Denial that these things happened at all, which will always be the first line of defense, is no longer possible. And that is encouraging, despite everything.

I’ve got a long post in the works touching on some of the same issues as John’s recent piece, which began as a response to Larry Lessig’s recent silliness on socialism (which he has qualified in the meantime) but has since metastasized into something much shaggier and alarming. In the meantime, some speculation regarding a smaller question – is the Pirate Party’s presence in the European Parliament going to change anything? This is something that I wanted to talk about in a bloggingheads debate with Judah Grunstein yesterday, but we got stuck into more general questions of copyright good or bad. Anyway – my answer to the question is yes, plausibly – but around the margins, and depending on what alliances it strikes.
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The Financial Times isn’t the leftiest of newspapers, but it is hard to argue with their verdict on the European Parliament elections:

The centre-right held its ground or advanced, both where it is in power and where it is in opposition. The mainstream left was decimated. This election shows that the social democratic parties have lost the will to govern. At a time when “the end of capitalism” is raised as a serious prospect, the parties whose historical mission was to replace capitalism with socialism offer no governing philosophy. Their anti-crisis policies are barely distinguishable from those of their rivals. The leadership crisis in several European socialist parties suggests their outdated ideas are matched by oversized egos.

Greens triumphed where the traditional left failed. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who knows a thing or two about critiques of capitalism, appealed to voters willing to consider fundamental social change. As one of few groups to fight on pan-European issues, the Greens also proved that not all voters are deaf to Europe-wide politics. But the crisis has most benefited the strand of the European right that was never against regulating the market economy. By arguing that the crisis is a result of excessive “Anglo-Saxon” policies, centre-right parties have presented themselves as the most trustworthy stewards of a safer, European-style capitalism. Voters agreed.

My own take on the failures of European social democracy a few months ago was more or less identical. I’d love to be convinced that I was wrong though. Or, in the absence of a compelling counter-claim, at least get a better sense of why European social democratic parties have become empty shells. One first-approximation guess is that this had to do with the largely successful efforts by social democrat ‘reformers’ to replace the old anti-capitalist ideas and language with more market-friendly stuff, which succeeded just in time to leave these parties completely unprepared to deal with the demise of actually existing capitalism. A second is that current day social democrats are much less able than their 1930s-1950s predecessors to meld nationalism and market constraints. Other possible explanations?

This FT article is the best piece I’ve seen on the intra-Europe battles over ECB policy, but it could go deeper still.

When Angela Merkel ended a long and otherwise unremarkable speech about economic policy this week with a vitriolic attack on the world’s three mightiest central banks, the German chancellor was writing a minor chapter of her country’s political history. No previous chancellor had dared attack their, and others’, central banks so frontally – saying the US Federal Reserve, Bank of England and European Central Bank should all row back on their unconventional recent ways of propping up economies. …

So I’ve been thinking that I ought to do more posts on stuff that is happening in Italy, Germany and France but that isn’t being covered well in the English language newspapers. Such as, for example, this story about how Italy’s minister of defence, Ignazio La Russa, has gotten into trouble for saying some offensive things about the United Nations, and the UNHCR representative in Italy (who has been critical of the Berlusconi government’s nastiness to aliens). But I’m being distracted from this high minded mission by La Russa’s quite extraordinary resemblance to a left-over special effect from classic Rodenberry-era Star Trek. It’s juvenile of me, but there you go. I’m figuring him for a Romulan-Klingon hybrid, but I’m not really a Star Trek buff (haven’t seen the show in two decades or so), so am prepared to bow to superior wisdom should such exist out there on the Interwebs …

So, because I was in Europe last week, I didn’t post to my bloggingheads with Dan Drezner, talking about the joys (and limitations) of the European (for which read Dutch – EU member states differ dramatically in their provision of social services) welfare state. This was all riffing on a piece in the NYT which talks about the kinds of stuff that insurance covers in the Netherlands.

insurance covered prenatal care, the birth of their children and after-care, which began with seven days of five-hours-per-day home assistance. “That means someone comes and does your laundry, vacuums and teaches you how to care for a newborn,” Julie said.

I thought that this sounded great myself, having gone through the ‘oh my god, they’ve sent us home with a baby and what the hell are we supposed to do now’ panic with our firstborn. Dan, not so much. Matt Yglesias and Matthew Continetti discussed the same article a few days later. Diavlogs below …

I was at a conference in Italy last week, where I read as much as I can about last Saturday’s meeting, brokered by Giorgio Napolitano, Italy’s President, between the widows of Giuseppe Pinelli (who, after three days of interrogation without food or sleep, either fell to his death from a window in the Milan magistracy or was pushed) and Luigi Calabresi (the magistrate who was interrogating Pinelli, and who was himself murdered a couple of years later). This hasn’t gotten any attention in the English speaking press that I can see. Still, it was a very significant event in Italian politics – an attempt by some of the parties at least to draw a close to Italy’s ‘years of lead,’ in which leftist unrest, kidnappings and murders went together with brutal state repression and tacit state help for fascists who organized large scale terrorist bombings to create the enabling conditions for a coup.¹ And it is particularly interesting to me because I’ve just finished reading Phil Edwards’s fascinating account of one very poorly understood aspect of this period – the birth of the Autonomist left, and its relationship both with terrorist groups (my term, not Phil’s) and the Italian Communist Party. This is, to say the least, a very well timed publication (although Manchester University Press’s decision to print it only in an expensive and difficult-to-find hardback edition, is arguably rather less well judged). [click to continue…]