I’ve just finished Günther Grass’s Crabwalk , which which I read partly because it dovetails with some other stuff I’ve been reading (such as Sebald’s Natural History of Destruction ) and partly because I have to give a presentation to my German class about a recent book I’ve read. I figured that if I chose a German book there’s be plenty of on-line material to help me work out the relevant vocabulary.
There’s been much blogospheric concern recently about the resurgence of the German far-right, and that’s very much Grass’s concern. One of the favourite themes of the neo-Nazis is Germans-as-victims and Grass’s underlying thought is that the embarassed silence of the German mainstream about the fate of the refugees from Germany’s lost eastern provinces has gifted the extremists a monopoly of that issue. The novel is centred around the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on 30 January 1945. The ship, a former pleasure cruiser, was carrying as many as 10,000 people when it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Nearly everyone on board perished and it therefore ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters even. The narrator protagonist Paul Pokriefke is a cynical journalist whose mother, a survivor, gave birth to him on one of the lifeboats. His estranged son, Konrad, is a neo-Nazi obsessive who runs a website devoted both to the ship and to the assasinated Nazi functionary after whom it was named. Paul tells us of the sinking itself, of his difficult relationship with mother (a DDR loyalist who cried when Stalin died) and son, and of the assassination of Gustloff himself in Zurich in 1936 by a Jew, David Frankfurter .
One thing that Grass gets absolutely right is the atmosphere of internet chatrooms. The son, Konrad, is forever engaged in hostile-but-matey banter with a “Jewish” interlocutor “David”. Not only are their identities not quite what they seem but he gets the adolescent faux-enemy-I-hang-out-with thing. I won’t say more about this, because I don’t want to spoil the denoument for anyone.
I’m not sure that Grass ends up telling us all that much about the neo-Nazi phenomenon. What he does get across though is a sense that the commitment of all of his protagonists to anything like a liberal democracy is fragile and contingent. Certainly a book worth reading for both its literary and historical interest, though the translation is occasionally clunky.
Two interesting articles in the Financial Times about how changes in internal EU politics are likely to affect the transatlantic relationship. First, Wolfgang Munchau (sub required) talks about how US policy towards Europe can’t just consist of “picking your favourite partner for your favourite mission, and playing one country off against another” as it used to. As Munchau says, there’s a real sense in the capitals of Europe that the EU is becoming a more coherent foreign policy actor - and that the US needs to wake up to this. Stefan Wagstyl’s article on how the countries of central and eastern Europe are adapting to EU membership should be of even greater concern to the divide and conquer school of US policy towards Europe. As Wagstyl says, not only do mass publics in former Warsaw Pact countries seem much keener on EU membership than anyone would have anticipated a year ago - membership is substantially affecting these countries’ foreign policy outlook. Countries like Poland, which many expected to act as an advocate for US interests within the EU, are going native.
The best defence is closer integration with the EU, including on foreign policy and security issues, central Europeans are concluding. Officials say Nato, as a military alliance with an increasingly global responsibility, may be less useful than the EU in confronting non-military threats in Europe. That could imply less reliance on the US as a security partner and more on EU states - even in Poland, often seen as Washington’s strongest central European ally.
Polish officials consider the country received little in return for its support of America in the Iraq war. Warsaw is to bring its peacekeeping unit home from Iraq this year. Marcin Zaborowski, a Polish foreign policy expert, recently published a paper for the EU’s Institute for Security Studies, arguing that “Poland’s Atlanticism is likely to be toned down in future”.
This can also be traced back to the EU’s successful role in supporting democracy in the Ukraine - and the realization by countries like Poland that their membership of the EU is a valuable foreign policy resource.
the Ukrainian crisis was a lesson in the EU’s political clout, as national leaders from the newly expanded club persuaded Mr Kuchma’s side to accept defeat. Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski and Valdas Adamkus, his Lithuanian counterpart, worked with Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, to secure that outcome. But Polish and Lithuanian officials are the first to acknowledge that their presidents’ influence was based primarily on their roles not as local national leaders but as representatives of the whole EU.
None of this is exactly surprising to scholars of the EU, who are acutely aware that it’s more than a traditional international organization, if less than a state. But the ways in which member states become socialized into the “EU club” are poorly understood in the US, where foreign policy experts usually see the EU as just another multilateral institution like NATO. This may have interesting long term consequences. Part of the reason that the US has advocated Turkish membership of the EU is its hope that Turkey will help pull the EU in a more Atlanticist direction. If Poland’s example is anything to go by, the pull may well go the other way - as Turkey becomes more enmeshed in the EU, it’s likely to start identifying more with the European project than with its trans-Atlantic ties.
I meant to blog a couple of weeks ago about the EU’s decision to end sanctions against Cuba and accede to a Cuban government veto on invitations of opposition figures to Embassy parties. Now I see via Jim Lindgren that Vaclav Havel has condemned the EU’s action. Quite right too - but unfortunately the EU seems to have gone rather cool on democracy promotion across at least three fronts at once. In addition to Cuba, there’s the EU’s relationship with Iran. Here, the EU has effectively sidelined demands for greater democracy in favour of concentrating on the nuclear security issue. In its relations with China, the EU is abandoning the post-Tianamen arms embargo for no better apparent reason than to boost trade, and make nice with a rising power. Of course, it’s still interested in democracy promotion in its own back yard (various bits of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean region), where it has a clear selfish interest in stabilizing wobbly governments, slowing down immigration flows etc.
It seems to me that there are three plausible explanations of what’s going on.
(1) Pure coincidence. It could be that this is just a random conjunction of three unrelated events. In favour of this theory - the changes in policy are being pushed by different coalitions of states within the EU. Spain has been pushing the change in Cuba policy, France the change in China policy, and a troika of France, Germany and the UK (with the tacit support of most other EU states) have been reshaping Iran policy. But still, it seems a little odd that these different policies would all change in the same direction within a relatively short period of time.
(2) A sea-change in the EU’s raison d’etre. A large part of the EU’s self-image is bound up in the idea that it represents an alternative order to the wars that ravaged mainland Europe in the first half of the last century, which is based on mutual coexistence and the spread of democratic norms. Critics like Robert Kagan have been telling the EU for a long while that it needs to wake up, and realize that it’s been leading a sheltered existence - its model depended on a unique set of historical circumstances. Maybe the EU is beginning to smell the coffee.
(3) A variant of old fashioned balancing. The EU (and its constituent states) are pushing back against US dominance, by (a) seeking new friends which give it new options vis-a-vis the US, and (b) demonstrating in the process that it isn’t to be taken for granted by the hegemonic power. As a side-effect, this means that the EU is less inclined to push for democracy, except where it’s demonstrably in its own self-interest to do so (i.e. around its own borders, or where it’s not liable to annoy potential friends).
My personal inclination is to plump for (3) as the most likely explanation of what’s going on. Which is personally disappointing for those, like me, who’d like to see the EU to continue to work seriously to promote democracy (it actually did pretty good work in Cuba back in the day). But the other two possible explanations have some merit too (as I’m sure do others that I haven’t thought of).
Update: Quentin Peel has an interesting article on EU policy toward China today (sub. required) - he seems to plump for a mixture of 1 and 3, with 1 dominating.
Today is the 25th anniversary of the German Green Party who, for better or worse, have made a lasting impression on European politics. Der Spiegel (in English) compares the fortunes of Die Grünen with those of the British Greens (founded earlier, but never really made an impression). Deutsche Welle also has a 25-year retrospective .
Smoking gun or no smoking gun, the line going around in Ireland about David Blunkett’s resignation is; ‘Jesus, a Minister who didn’t sort out a visa application for someone he knew should have to resign.’
Plus, is anyone else irritated that the same Jacques Chirac who lazed by the pool while thousands of elderly Parisians baked to death last year ditched his Moroccan holiday for a photo opp with the released hostages Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot?
The Financial Times’s Simon Kuper is always worth reading, and in today’s paper he’s published the best article (by far) I’ve yet read on the anti-Muslim backlash in the Netherlands after the Van Gogh murder.
Nick Confessore makes a self-described crazy proposal.
Imagine an endeavor under which the official Democratic Party sponsored a non-profit health-insurance corporation, one which offered some form of health insurance to anyone who joined the party — say, with a $50 “membership fee.” Since I’m not a health care wonk, I don’t know how you’d structure such a business, or what all the pitfalls might be, or even if such a thing is possible or desirable. But I can think of some theoretical advantages. The Democrats could put into practice, right away, their ideas for the kind of health insurance they think we all ought to have. They could build their grassroots and deliver tangible benefits to members. Imagine a good HMO, run not for profit and in the public interest, along the lines the Democrats keep telling us all existing HMOs and health care providers should be run.
I don’t know enough about health care to comment on whether this would work or not as a policy (I’m somewhat sceptical, but can’t give good reasons for my scepticism). I will note, however, that this is how European Social Democrats (and the Christian Democratic parties who sought to imitate them) generated mass appeal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the days before the welfare state, they provided an enormous variety of services to party members including health, life insurance etc etc. While Confessore’s idea may or may not be crazy, it’s by no means ridiculous.
The British view is that the sight of local youths dismantling the offices and barracks of a regime they used to fear shows they have confidence that Saddam Hussains henchmen will not be returning to these towns in southern Iraq. One senior British officer said: We believe this sends a powerful message that the old guard is truly finished.My London Times link is broken, but the report is reproduced, with attribution in the Daily TImes of Pakistan . As far as I know, there was no denial of this report at the time. Although the US forces aren’t mentioned in this report, it’s clear they were equally supportive of looting, if not more so.
As the various UN officials quoted in the story observe, once you’ve started encouraging looting, it’s going to be difficult to stop, especially in a situation where neither the troops nor their commanders had any idea about what was where. The one crucial site that was secured immediately was, of course, the Oil Ministry.
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.At the time the then EEC had six members, so an expansion to seven or ten (which seemed likely) would fulfil the prophecy and signal the impending arrival of the end times. The Whore of Babylon also fitted in, but I can’t remember how. The EU did have ten members between 1981 and 1986, and I remember speculating that Reagan might be the Antichrist - surviving an assassination attempt was supposed to be a crucial sign (Revelation 13:1-2). But the world did not end after all.
A great sign was seen in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.normally taken to refer to the Virgin Mary. I’d be fascinated to see an apocalyptic Protestant response to this revelation.
As John Quiggin says, the European Commission President has blinked, and backed down in the face of a credible threat from the Parliament to defeat the Commission. The short term result is an (informal) enhancement in the power of the Parliament to control the Commission - what’s likely to happen in the longer term? My predictions:
In the dispute over Rocco Buttiglionie the head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso has blinked, deferring a vote which would have seen his entire panel of 25 commissioners rejected by the European Parliament. Barring extraordinary dexterity, it looks as if he will have to either secure Buttiglionie’s withdrawal or shunt him to a less controversial job.
This is, I think, a win for Henry’s side of the dispute with Dan Drezner. The EU Parliamentary majority has acted exactly as you would expect an ordinary parliamentary majority to act, without any apparent deference to the national governments of the countries whose citizens they represent. The attitudes of the British MEPs were particularly interesting. Not only did Labour MPs disregard any pressure from Blair (famously cosy with Berlusconi, and by implication with his nominee, Buttiglioni) but some Tories suggested they might vote No out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
The other point of interest is that the ‘nuclear option’ aspect of the issue turned out to be a paper tiger as usual. Much was made of the fact that the Parliament could not reject individual nominations, but only the entire proposal. This is like the restriction, found in many bicameral systems, where the Upper House cannot amend some bills, but can only accept or reject them. In practice, though, there’s always the option of rejecting the bill then stating “but we would pass an amended bill of the following form”. The limitation to accept or reject is effective only if acceptance or rejection is final. Conversely, suppose the Parliament had the power of voting on the candidates individually, accepting some and rejecting others. The head of the Commission could get around this by nominating the controversial candidates first, and making it clear that acceptance was all or nothing. In the end, all systems of this kind produce a bargained outcome.
Dan Drezner and I have been conducting a friendly argument over whether or not the European Union is a standard international organization (i.e. a creature of its member states) or something more. The minor crisis surrounding Rocco Buttiglione, incoming Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs should be an interesting data point for our disagreement. The European Parliament has the right to vote no confidence in the European Commission as a whole. Over the last several years, as the Economist notes, the Parliament has assiduously sought to expand this right into the power to make or break individual Commissioners whom it doesn’t like. The Parliament has very cleverly expanded its powers far beyond the intent of the member states, by instituting “confirmation hearings” in which it claims the right to judge whether or not individual Commission members are up to the job. Clearly, it doesn’t think that Italian nominee Rocco Buttiglione is suited for his responsibilities - he’s a conservative Catholic whose personal views on gay rights and single mothers sit rather awkwardly with his responsibility to protect minority rights. A majority of MEPs seems to be willing to vote Buttiglione down; but Italy, a powerful member state, is refusing to back down and withdraw his nomination. The Commission President, who decides the portfolio of individual commissioners, is caught in the middle. As the Economist says, this dispute is a reflection of “a broader philosophical question: where should power really lie in the European Union?”
The Economist’s hopes to the contrary, it seems that the Commission President has decided that it’s more important to please the Parliament than the member states. According to the FT, he’s negotiating a deal whereby Buttiglione would have his powers over human rights and minority affairs stripped away from him. Even more pertinently, the President seems to be contemplating a settlement in which Parliament’s powers vis-a-vis the Commission would be expanded very substantially. This would lead to a very clear shift in the balance of power within the European Union, in which the influence of member states would be weakened, and the Parliament’s relationship with the Commission would start to resemble that between the US Congress and the executive branch. If this comes to pass, it will be very hard (perhaps impossible?) to square with theories of international relations that emphasize the power of states to determine international outcomes - it would be a development that (a) certainly wasn’t anticipated in the Treaties signed by the member states, and (b) clearly wasn’t in member states’ interests. It would also have the incidental benefits of embarrassing Berlusconi’s government, and clipping the wings of a rather dubious potential Commissioner (regardless of his views on gay people and women, his enthusiasm for camps for immigrants should be enough to disqualify him for the job).
Over at Harry’s Place, Gene picks up on the priorities of the European Social Forum, which is about to meet in London. I surfed over to the programme of events and workshops and was disturbed to find that there’s a session devoted to promoting 9/11 revisionism:
Members of the UK 9/11 network will be speaking including Ian Neal and Simon Aronowitz, editor of www.thoughtcrimenews.com plus a screening of 911 In Plane Sight 50 min short film followed by a question and answer forum…..Presenting the evidence supporting US government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, growing 9/11 truth movement and its implications for global peace and development.
I had a conversation last week with a very smart and likeable man from a Middle Eastern country who believes all this nonsense, and assures me that many of his fellow citizens do too. European leftists giving it further exposure, credence and legitimacy is the last thing we need.
Ross Silverman informs me that a NYT story from last year details a multinational multi-million dollar effort by PhRMA to attack price controls on drugs. According to the NYT, the drug industry “is worried that price controls and other regulations will tie the drug makers’ hands as state, federal and foreign governments try to expand access to affordable drugs.” In order to combat this:
The drug trade group plans to spend $1 million for an “intellectual echo chamber of economists — a standing network of economists and thought leaders to speak against federal price control regulations through articles and testimony, and to serve as a rapid response team.”
It seems highly probable that this - or a related effort - is behind the TCS ‘essay competition’ that I talked about on the weekend., which is pretty small stuff in the grander scheme, I suppose. We already know that Flack Central Station is in part funded by PhRMA, and that it publishes articles attacking drug price controls remarkably frequently. More generally, I don’t understand how anybody who wants to preserve their intellectual credibility could voluntarily sign up to participate in the echo chamber, or indeed to be a useful idiot providing it with cover. Some self-proclaimed libertarians clearly disagree (as, in fairness, do some sincere ones, such as Arnold Kling).
I posted a few weeks ago about the bland soggy pap that is EU official art - last week, I found a particularly entertaining and incongruous example of it in the European Parliament’s information center. Troubled Waters is a graphic novel put out by the EP to explain what it does in language that the young uns can understand; it details the adventures of one Irina Vega, crusading Parliamentarian, whose nationality and party identification are left deliberately unspecified.1 Surely, this is destined to become a kitsch collectors’ item in years to come, if only for the contortions that it goes through in its efforts to reconcile a watered-down and slightly incoherent version of the comic book political thriller (evil chemical companies conspire to pollute the water supply and blacken each others’ names), with the legislative minutiae of co-decision, conciliation and voting in plenary. ‘Immiscibles’ is the technical term, I believe. I’ve scanned a couple of pages and PDFed them for the curious - available here and here.
1 Although Corkonian and former president of the Parliament, Pat Cox, is clearly identifiable in some of the drawings.
When doing research interviews in Brussels last week, I was intrigued to come across a free pro-business rag called the “EU Reporter” in several places, and even more intrigued to find that it contained an advertisement from our old friends, Flack Central Station, for a euro 2500 competition for the “best commentary piece” on European Health Care Reform. As the ad describes it:
“Europeans endure long waits for medicines, treatment and surgeries - and pay high taxes for this substandard level of care” says TCS Europe editor, Craig Winneker. “Patients lack choice and access to the best medicines.”
TCS is looking to engage “Europe’s best minds” on the question of how to improve their countries’ health care system. I reckon that it’s a safe bet that proposals to improve European health care by increasing the role of state provision are unlikely to win the 2,500.
I’m intrigued by the increasing frequency of ‘competitions’ of this sort, frequently (but by no means always) funded by right wing lobbies or think tanks. Health care reform is a particular topic-du-jour - the Simon Fraser Institute in Canada has run a similar competition in the very recent past, touting, as best I could understand it, for attacks on the Canadian system of health care provision. I wonder why TCS (which seems to me to be a very US-centric organization) is funding the competition. Given PhRMA’s role in funding TCS, my best guess is that this is an effort to trawl for stories about the horrors of European health care, which can then be used as ammunition in the internal US debate about health care (let me note in passing that the WHO ranks the US health care system as being worse than the systems of all fifteen of the EU’s rich member-states). Other essay competitions seem to me to have the more straightforward aim of encouraging intellectuals and journalists towards certain policy questions (and certain ways of considering those policy questions).
Following up on Montagu’s post about the EU’s accession negotiations in Turkey, the Economist touches on an issue that I’ve been wondering about for the last few days.
The second big qualification proposed by the commission concerns immigration. The fear that, once Turkey joins, huge numbers of poor Muslim immigrants will stream west is probably the biggest single impediment to its membership. The commission has not dismissed such fears. Indeed, Olli Rehn, the incoming commissioner for enlargement, said that concerns about immigration were “more or less justified”. Yet free movement of labour is a fundamental EU principle; and any restrictions in previous enlargements have always been temporary.
The commission goes beyond this for Turkey by floating the idea of “permanent safeguard measures”. These would stipulate that, if Turkish immigration were deemed to be disruptive to the rest of the EU, controls on free movement could be re-imposed. Officials insist that this is compatible with the EU’s fundamental principles. The Turks dispute this.
The issue is this: as the Economist notes, free movement of labour is one of the “four freedoms” that are supposed to be fundamental principles of EU integration. Temporary measures to restrict immigration have been imposed in the past - but nothing permanent. So what happens if the Commission goes ahead and imposes permanent measures on Turkey as a condition of accession? My best guess (I acknowledge that I’m not an expert on EU law) is that this would be justiciable, and that Turkey, once it had joined, could take a case at the European Court of Justice to try and have the condition overturned. Further, I’d imagine that this case would have a very strong likelihood of succeeding. Finally, assuming that the case did succeed, I don’t think that the member states would be very easily able to resist it, however unpopular it might be - the EU is more than a standard international organization, and ECJ rulings are for all intents and purposes the law of the land. Further, as Montagu notes, much of the opposition to immigration from Turkey has a racist subtext - this means that it’s harder to defend in public, especially when a seemingly authoritative ruling has come down from on high.
So if I’m right on all of this, why is the European Commission touting conditions that it knows don’t have much chance of sticking? My best guess is that it’s trying to kick the issue into the long grass. The Commission is trying to soothe the anti-immigration rumblings in some of the member states in the presumption that ten years or so down the line, when Turkey finally does accede, the issue will be less controversial (or at least, a different crowd of officials and politicians will be the ones who have to take the blame).
Maybe someone can help me out here. I idly surfed to some of the far reaches of lunacy last night and ended up at David Horowitz’s Front Page Mag, there I found an interview with someone called Bat Ye’or whom further googling revealed to be quite well-known, though not to me. It also revealed that this character is regularly cited and linked to approvingly by people like Melanie Phillips who, in turn, are approvingly linked to by others …. Anyway, this is Bat Ye’or’s summary of the recent history of the European Union:
Eurabia represents a geo-political reality envisaged in 1973 through a system of informal alliances between, on the one hand, the nine countries of the European Community (EC)which, enlarged, became the European Union (EU) in 1992 and on the other hand, the Mediterranean Arab countries. The alliances and agreements were elaborated at the top political level of each EC country with the representative of the European Commission, and their Arab homologues with the Arab League’s delegate. This system was synchronised under the roof of an association called the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) created in July 1974 in Paris. A working body composed of committees and always presided jointly by a European and an Arab delegate planned the agendas, and organized and monitored the application of the decisions. …. Eurabia is the future of Europe. Its driving force, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, was created in Paris in 1974….
This seems to me to rank alongside the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Faked Moon Landings, Kennedy assassination conspiracies and the like. Yet this person has spoken at a United Nations Commission on Human Rights-organized conference and spoken before the United States Congress…..
A few months ago, when I was doing research interviews in Brussels, I thought about doing a post on EU official art. Nearly every corridor in every building of the Commission, Council and Parliament has two or three examples along its walls - spectacularly bland and uninteresting prints and photographs, always with the twelve stars on a blue flag in there somewhere. The art is contentless and affectless because any strong statement, or even conveyed sense of geographic location, would probably offend somebody in one or another of the member states. There’s something about the EU that seems completely inimical to lively cultural expression.
Not for much longer perhaps. Bruce Sterling, gonzo science fiction provocateur and joint father of cyberpunk, is getting excited by the unlikely subject of the EU’s acquis communautaire.
What if there were two global systems of governance, and they weren’t based on control of the landscape? Suppose they interpenetrated and competed everywhere, sort of like Tory and Labour, or Coke and Pepsi. I’m kind of liking this European ‘Acquis’ model where there is scarcely any visible ‘governing’ going on, and everything is accomplished on the levels of invisible infrastructure, like highway regulations and currency reform.
This sounds like an unlikely subject for sf, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Sterling. At least two-thirds of his Distraction is one of the wildest and funniest sf novels about politics ever written (the final section peters out pretty badly). If anyone can make regulatory international bureaucracy sound exciting, it’s going to be Sterling. And he’s onto something - there’s something deeply weird about the EU. It isn’t (and will probably never be) a fully featured state, and instead is, as Sterling says, for the most part a vast body of transnational semi-visible regulation. It’s incredibly boring on the face of it (partly because most of the regulation concerns dull matters like phytosanitary standards), but there’s something quirky and strange about the fact that it exists at all, and that it operates in the way that it does. I’m going to be interested to see whether Sterling manages to get anywhere with this.
Brad DeLong asks for one of us to explain this rather opaque Perry Anderson piece in the LRB about the reasons for France’s political and cultural decline - I’ll bite. Anderson’s prose is tangled and dense, but there is a thesis lurking there amid the thickets and thorns. His claim is that France is scuppered because the wrong set of intellectuals won. Anderson argues that the prospect of unity between the Socialist and Communist parties in the early 1970s provoked an intellectual backlash - the Noveaux Philosophes and other partisan thinkers did a bang-up job in isolating Communism from the mainstream. This, together with conjunctural choices made by the Communists, meant that the Left had no real ideas left when Mitterand came to power. An “anti-totalitarian” front, in which the centre-left was a distinctly junior partner to the centre-right, came to dominate the intellectual landscape. The French Revolution - primal source of the cleavages in French politics - was rewritten by Furet and others so that its radical implications disappeared. It became a bourgeois liberal revolution that had failed. Thus the mess that France is in - the liberals have triumphed, but in so doing have robbed France of the deeper political arguments that used to drive its politics and intellectual life.
I’m only an amateur of French politics, so I’m not going to comment on the empirical plausibility of this thesis. I will note that it’s a rather idealistic account of the driving forces of French history for a purported Marxist to be coming out with. Anderson seems to be claiming, if I understand him rightly, that the most important conflicts in French politics of the last two decades were fought out in the academy and in the journals of opinion. It’s not an entirely ridiculous argument in itself - intellectuals do play a role in France that they don’t elsewhere - but it’s still very strange coming from the mouth of a historical materialist.
If you believe the conventional wisdom in transatlantic policy circles, a Kerry administration won’t make much difference to EU-US relations. Kerry would differ from Bush more on style than on substance: Europe and the US would still be divided on the important security and economic issues. Whether this argument is true or not (personally, I’m dubious), the transatlantic relationship is likely to enter a period of turmoil regardless of who occupies the White House. The reason: the increasing interest and involvement of the European Parliament in international affairs.
Parliamentary decision-making has traditionally made for awkward international politics. Elected parliamentarians are more likely than diplomats or governmental officials to take strong policy stands that keep voters at home happy, but that make it more difficult to reach agreement on issues of international contention. The US has by no means been immune to this in the past; one can point to items of legislation beloved of Congress but deplored by the administration such as the Helms-Burton Act, which have greatly complicated international politics. Traditionally, however, the EU has been semi-insulated from these pressures - high politics has been the preserve of national governments, while trade negotiations and the like have been carried out by the Commission, which has been partially insulated from political pressures.
Now, however, the new European Parliament is looking around for ways to ingratiate itself with the voters back home (the Parliament is notoriously lacking in popular legitimacy). It’s a safe bet that one of the ways it will do this is by whipping up opposition to deals between the EU and US on security issues, and on politically sensitive economic/trade issues such as genetically modified organisms. This is a relatively cheap and easy way for it to get political kudos, especially given America’s unpopularity with European voters.
The Parliament has some foreign policy powers and is going to be trying to carve out more by pushing its competences as far as they will go. Officially, it has a right to give or withhold its assent to international treaties - it’s starting to try and expand that right into a veto over everyday relations and quasi-agreements between the EU and US in security and economic policy. If the draft constitution somehow passes referendums in Britain and elsewhere, expect the Parliament to try to make the new Foreign Minister more accountable to it, as it has rather successfully done with the Commission’s President. If not, expect the Parliament to use the powers that it has to agitate on issues of concern, just as it’s currently doing in the Passenger Name Record controversy, where it’s taking the Commission and Council to court for exceeding their competences, and (in its view) selling European citizens’ privacy down the river.
Either way, it’s safe to predict that EU-US politics will become a lot more contentious, as the Parliament takes a much more active role on internationally controversial issues. In general, I reckon that this has to be a good thing: more democracy is better than less, even if it has awkward or even bad consequences in individual cases. Still I’m glad that I’m not one of the American or European diplomats who’s going to have to come to terms with the Parliament’s newfound assertiveness over the next few years. It’s going to make for some sticky international politics.
It’s looking increasingly likely that Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach (i.e. Prime Minister) of Ireland will become the next Commission President. This is a mixed bag. On the one hand, Ahern is a very skilled politician and dealmaker. He played a blinder on the negotiations of the EU’s draft constitution, managing to build a real consensus on top of some very shaky foundations. The contrast with his immediate predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, is substantial - Berlusconi seemed to be more interested in reviving his career as a piano-bar crooner than in actually negotiating (more on this soon). On the other, nobody has ever accused Ahern of having much in the way of a political vision. Arguably, he’s the wrong man for the job - the Commission is supposed to deliver on policy implementation, while driving the EU’s legislative agenda. Ahern is neither an administrator nor a visionary - his very real political skills aren’t the skills that a Commissioner needs to have. My preference would have been either Chris Patten (who Maria also likes - a decent right-winger, who knows how to call a spade a spade) if the member states had wanted someone to galvanize the Commission’s political activities, or Antonio Vittorino if they’d wanted a technocrat to run it well. If Ahern does get the job, I suspect that he’s going to be another in an increasingly long line of mediocre Commission Presidents.
Sounds as if agreement has been reached on a draft EU constitution. That was the easy part - now they have to steer it through referendums in the UK and elsewhere. No agreement, however on a new Commission President. More on this as proper news starts to leak out …
are backward and evil and if it is racist to say so…. then racist I must be - and proud and happy to be so.
Far from being a setback for anti-Semitism, the success of the UKIP (and some other parts of the anti-EU right) is arguably a victory. I’m prepared to give Schwarzschild the benefit of the doubt - when he says that the success of the UKIP is “good news,” he may simply not know what he’s talking about. Still, it’s the people whom he’s cheering on, rather than Brussels Eurocrats, who are directly and materially connected with racism, anti-Semitism and the nastier aspects of Europe’s past.
The heads of government of the various EU member states are meeting together this evening to discuss, among other things, who should replace Romano Prodi as President of the European Commission. It’s an important decision - but there isn’t a clear front-runner. For what it’s worth, my estimate of the various candidates’ chances of getting the nod.
Guy Verhofstadt - Prime Minister of Belgium. Due to be nominated tonight as the ‘official’ compromise candidate by Ireland, which holds the EU presidency. Doesn’t have much of a hope though - Tony Blair has indicated that Verhofstadt would be unacceptable to Britain. He’s too federalist, and was a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq (annoying Italy and Poland too). While Britain could be outvoted in theory, in practice, the opposition of one of the major member states is almost certainly enough to scotch Verhofstadt’s chances.
Jean-Claude Juncker - Prime Minister of Luxembourg. A likely choice - he’s very popular among his fellow heads of government, although the British are a little luke-warm. However, he’s been swearing blue that he’s quite happy in Luxembourg, and doesn’t want the job. There’s a lot of speculation that he might be persuaded to take the Presidency for the good of Europe, but nobody seems to know for sure, and his repeated disavowals have meant that some of his support has shifted elsewhere.
Bertie Ahern - Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland. Another “reluctant” candidate, but one who has apparently been hinting to the back-benchers in his party that he would answer the call if his fellow heads of government insist. However, he may just be trying to deflect criticism by encouraging speculation about his future - his political party has done deplorably badly in recent local and European Parliament elections. Ireland holds the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, which means that Ahern has difficulty in promoting himself directly - but he would be an acceptable choice to all the member states, including Britain.
Chris Patten - Commissioner for External Relations. A bit of a dark horse. No-one would have rated his chances much a few days ago - but he’s now emerged as the preferred candidate of the centre-right European People’s Party, the largest party in the European Parliament (EP). The Parliament ratifies the appointment of the Commission President, and votes for the Commission as a whole by a vote of confidence - it has been assiduously trying to push for something vaguely resembling a traditional parliamentary system in the EU, in which the dominant party in the EP would play an important role in deciding on a candidate for the Commission’s Presidency. Given the indecision among the member states over who to go for, the EP may just about get away with it, and in so doing, perhaps set a very important precedent for Parliament-Commission relations. He’s British though, which means that the French and the Germans are likely to oppose him (especially because his French-language skills are at best functional).
Pat Cox - outgoing President of the European Parliament. Cox has made no secret of his ambition for the job, and would be viewed by most member states as a safe pair of hands. However, in the absence of strong support from Ireland or any other member state, his chances are marginal.
Antonio Vittorino - Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs. Universally popular among the member states - and informally viewed by many of them as the best candidate for the job. He’s Portuguese, and the Portuguese government would like to see him in Brussels, both because it would be a coup, and because it would keep him out of national politics in Portugal for a while (he’s the most talented figure in the Socialist opposition). An extremely long shot though; it’s highly unlikely that a Socialist would get the nod, even one like Vittorino who’s well liked by the center-right and liberals.
The success of Eurosceptic parties like the UK Independence Party, has contributed to generally negative coverage of the recent EU Parliamentary elections. Although I disagree with UKIP, I think its success is a good thing.
From my perspective as a sympathetic outside observer, the biggest single problem with the EU is the "democratic deficit" arising from the fact that the European Parliament isn't really responsible to voters, though it is no longer a rubber-stamp for unelected officials. Most voters vote for national parties on the basis of national issues.
By contrast, the UKIP is running on a specifically European issue, and putting forward a legitimate viewpoint, though apparently one held by only a minority of British voters. It's up to those who disagree to respond in kind.
One obvious response would be for candidates to run under the banner of their EU Parliamentary grouping instead of, or in addition to, that of their national party. The obvious objections to this course of action don't, in my view stand up to scrutiny.
The first is that these parties would be unfamiliar to voters. But many European countries have experienced the rise of new parties at the national level or the renaming of existing ones without the electors collapsing into a state of confusion.
The second, related objection, is that this course of action would alienate core supporters. No doubt there are some supporters of, say, the German Social Democratic Party who would be less inclined to vote for the European Socialist Party. But surely there are far more German voters with broadly social-democratic views who wanted to give Helmut Schmidt Gerhard Schroeder a kicking, and took the opportunity in the EU elections.
Going further, the history of the rise and decline of parties is that a fundamental challenge on a new issue tends to force previously opposing parties into coalition or fusion. As far as European issues go, the differences between pro-EU socialists, social democrats, liberals and moderate christian democrats are less significant than the difference between all these groups on one side and the Eurosceptics on the other.
Update Josh Chafetz disagrees, on the basis that the UKIP is filled with "racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and homophobes" and compares the outcome to Le Pen's successes in France.
I'm not surprised that the UKIP would attract the kinds of people Josh writes about, but I don't accept his point. Whereas Le Pen openly runs on a platform of racism, the stated policies of the UKIP represent a legitimate viewpoint. Since there's little danger of the UKIP obtaining executive power, the personal character of its members isn't a critical concern.
To carry the point a little bit further, I've cast votes in the past for "protest" parties such as the Nuclear Disarmament Party, knowing that they were at least partly controlled by Trotskyists using tactics of "entryism". I don't see any reason not to do this if I support the stated platform of the party and judge that there's no danger that my vote will somehow produce a Trotskyist government.
To recapitulate though, my main point is that European Parliamentary elections should be about European issues, and if it takes the success of UKIP and like-minded groups to bring this about, so be it. Matthew Yglesias has more
Euro elections tomorrow, and I, for one, am still at a loss for what to do. Here in the UK’s south-west constituency (bizarrely including Gibraltar!) we have full slates of candidates from all three main parties plus the fascist BNP, the Greens, the “Countryside Party”, UKIP, and RESPECT (the unprincipled alliance of Gorgeous George Galloway, the Socialist Workers Party and the Muslim Association of Britain). I’m definitely not going for any of the fringe parties, nor for the Tories, so it is down to Labour or the Lib Dems. I usually have no time for the Lib Dems, but I’m tempted this time. I’m tempted because Blair has clearly reached his sell-by date, and I think that’s largely independent of how history will judge him. Time for a swift and painless transition to Gordon Brown as party leader, and a bad Euro result may do the trick.
This is an eventful weekend. From a distance, I’m following the festivities surrounding Hungary’s EU membership. Locally, I’m taking part in the 125th anniversary celebrations of my School and look forward to the debate in a couple of hours by alum members of our dozen national championship winning Debate Team on “Resolved: That John Kerry should replace George Bush in the White House.”. (By School I mean the School of Communication, the University is older than that.)
John has already mentioned the significance of this day for the EU, but I had to comment myself given that in the CT crowd, I’m the one most immediately affected by this event. I remember back in the early nineties hearing that perhaps Hungary would join the EU by 2004 or 2005 and thinking that those years seemed so immensely distant they would never come. It is hard to believe that we are finally here.
I started writing a much longer more reflective post on all this, but I have decided to table that for another day. I am happy to remain in celebratory mood for the day and postpone some more critical comments for another time.
Those in Chicagoland should come join in on the School of Communication birthday events this weekend!
John makes a commonly heard argument - that the problems at the root of the European Union’s governance system revolve around the weakness of its Parliament.
The central problem with the EU is the lack of democratic accountability arising from a structure with a powerless parliament, under which all decisions are effectively made either by the unelected European Commission or by national governments in the Council of Ministers. The solution is either to keep the EU relatively weak and ineffectual, by maintaining national vetos over most issues, or to make the system more like a bicameral legislature, with some form of majority voting in both the Parliament and the Council.
I reckon that both analysis and solution are arguable. The Parliament isn’t nearly as weak as it’s reputed to be, thanks to the beefing up of the so-called “codecision” legislative procedure, in which both Parliament and Council have an effective veto over major areas of policy. Indeed, the common complaint heard around the Commission these days is that it doesn’t have much of a role - the European Council is increasingly usurping its agenda-setting powers, while the Council and Parliament stitch up deals together on important items of legislation. The European Union is increasingly looking like a bicameral legislature - but this hasn’t done much to solve the famous democratic deficit. As the Parliament has gotten more powerful, it has found itself being sucked into the Council’s traditional, rather secretive, way of doing business, and informal deal-making. Because voters don’t take the Parliament seriously (they often use European Parliament elections to punish their national governments), it’s easy for members of the European Parliament to get away with this. Thus, the problem is less a weak Parliament, than a Parliament which has accrued substantial power without serious electoral accountability. This is a much trickier problem to solve.
Every so often I read a prediction on the op-ed pages of certain newspapers or in the ravings of some blog or other that France or even the whole of Europe is destined to become a province of Islam due to a combination of low fertily among the natives, high fertility among immigrants and Muslim immigration. Randy McDonald does a sterling job of swatting away this silly idea via a sober assessment of the demographics . (Hat tip Scott Martens )
Once more I find myself writing a post about something I didn’t think I’d need to write a post about, because I thought it was so obvious that everyone would have written about it. But no, so here goes. It’s an observation about the real meaning of the Spanish election result.
I’ve commented elsewhere about the general tone of a lot of comment (particularly in the USA) on the Spanish elections. But reading through Airmiles’ latest column today, I was struck by the fact that nobody in the USA seems to realise that in at least one important sense, the fact that the Socialists won in Spain is, well, about them.
OK, look at it this way, and in doing so, please be aware that I’m reporting the facts as I see them, not necessarily endorsing any particular point of view. But think about it this way; the reason that the Bush campaign have been going all-out to portray Kerry as the candidate that “Osama wants to win”, is that they know that there is a big section of the population that will, whatever else they believe, seek out the candidate that they think is Osama’s favourite and vote the other way.
So why didn’t the Spanish electorate think the same way, given that they had huge reason to do so? Potentially many reasons, but here’s one that hasn’t received nearly enough airplay; perhaps they did. Perhaps that same tendency which I described in American politics above, found its expression in Spain in the form of a big group of swing voters who decided that they would seek out the candidate who was Bush’s favourite and vote the other way. Is it not at least possible that a big factor in the Spanish elections was anti-Americanism? Anyone who thinks that this is just out of the question, simply hasn’t spent much time in Europe recently.
So why might European voters have such a big thing against America? Well, I don’t know in the sense of having a definite answer, and it’s only a bit of speculation anyway. (I presume that the paragraph which says “I don’t know in the sense of having a definite answer, and it’s only a bit of speculation anyway” is the one that gets cut out of Friedman’s column when he submits it every week, btw). To be honest, good old-fashioned stupidity is likely to be a big part of it; to blame the Americans for everything is a staple of windy old nationalistic bores who don’t like the fact that their country isn’t as important as it used to be, and Europe isn’t exactly short of those. But there are also a number of more substantial reasons.
Here is, in the true Airmiles style, a list of points which might bear thinking about.
I could go on but I won’t. I think that this is a real problem in the world, and it is one that I would categorise as serious (“serious” problems, in my informal system of classification, are those which materially increase the probability of me getting killed). If the population of Europe are prepared to hand out propaganda (and potentially substantive) victories to Al-Quaeda simply out of pique with the USA, then that’s pretty serious.
I think that a lot of analysis would stop at this point, and just use it as an opportunity for another sermon about the moral decrepitude of Old Europe. But I think that’s really the wrong way to look at this. When you get a conflict like this between crowds of people and governments, it’s very rarely the people who are entirely in the wrong. After all, John Kerry is picking up a load of flak for boasting about his endorsements from foreign leaders and guess what? Over here, you lot are foreigners. If Friedman ever happens to stop over in London on the way from one stage-managed encounter with popular opinion to the next, and if I bump into him in the business class lounge in Heathrow, I’ve rehearsed what I’m going to say.
“Look, mate, this isn’t a joke. Your current management are destroying your brand. It’s not that anyone thinks you’re evil. You’re justembarrassing. You’ve set up a global enterprise that so far has provided a global policeman who can’t keep the global peace, a war for oil that left oil at $32/barrel and a WMD operation that doesn’t even have the wit to plant the evidence. Now you’re wandering round the world asking why the USA’s endorsement is electoral poison? For Christ’s sake, tell your leaders to get their act together or elect someone who will. Or, in a very real sense, the terrorists will have won.”
1If anyone made a commemorative plate with an image of the 1997 election count in Putney, I would probably buy it.
There’s an interesting poll by Pew, which suggests that anti-Semitism has actually declined significantly in France and Germany since 1991. I imagine that much of the decline, especially in Germany, can be traced to older anti-Semites dying as time progresses. Even still, the percentage of Germans who view Jews “unfavorably” is unacceptably high, at 20% of the population. I’d like to see a breakdown of the difference between former East and West Germany (some 500 people were polled - probably enough to make a decent first attempt at identifying sub-national differences). My suspicion is that there are substantially higher numbers of people from former East Germany with anti-Semitic views. They missed out on most of the collective self-recrimination about Germany’s behaviour towards Jews in the 1933-1945 period (the East German regime preferred to propagandize the martyrdom of Communists in the concentration camps, for obvious reasons). Via Norman Geras.
1. We enjoy the benefit of some very smart, very civil conservative commentators on this site. I’d be honestly interested in their answer to this question:
Regarding the war on terror, what policies or actions are you afraid that President John Kerry might actually adopt that could reasonably be described as “appeasement”?
2. For interested U.S. citizens, The Poor Man is holding a fundraising competition between former Clark supports (aka “the Jets”) and Dean supporters (aka “the far, far inferior Jets”). Give generously, or the terrorists win. (I kid!)
3. The Spainish election has been blogged heavily, not least by my my fellow Timberites. There have been a good deal of ignoble slurs on the subject that I’m pleased to ignore. On a more reasonable level, a number of people have made the argument that, even if we grant that Spaniards have done nothing wrong, the results will nonetheless incentivise terrorists. They will be convinced that terrorism can be effectively used to change the results of elections. This knowledge can only lead to more terrorism. (Jane Galt, for example, makes it here.)
This argument seems to rest on the premise that the terrorist attack did, in fact, change the results of the election. But for the train bombings, Aznar’s incumbent People’s Party would have remained in power.
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on Spanish opinion polling, so I can’t make a claim for the significance of these polls. But according to this post, the Socialists were in the lead before the bombings, so the terrorists didn’t change the results. Doesn’t the argument take a severe blow?
3b. The argument that the right is showing contempt for democracy by decrying the results of the Spanish election is silly. If I had had a blog when Jorg Haider or Kurt Waldheim enjoyed electoral success in Austria, I would have complained, and I wouldn’t have been alone.
4. September 11th, 2001, was the worst day for the United States in my lifetime. I’d have a hard time choosing second place. But we all remember the way that the nation, and the world, pulled together in sympathy and support. I don’t want to get too sentimental, and we all have enough memories of those terrible days. But I’ll never forget sobbing as members of Congress stood on the steps of the Capital and sang “God Bless America” off-key. We were at our best, and it was easy to believe that we were all basically on the same side.
Fundamentally, I still believe that. But watching how people reacted to last week’s events in Spain has been deeply depressing. If there is another major terrorist attack on the U.S. in the next few months, I suspect that it would tear this country apart. May God have mercy on us all if it happens.
When I first started blogging, I struck up a fairly cordial on-line relationship with Iain Murray of The Edge of England’s Sword despite a pretty wide gulf in our politics. I’m afraid I’ve not read much I’ve liked by Iain in quite a long time (especially on global warming). So it was a pleasant surprise to find that Iain has a column on the Spanish elections published in that bastion of lunacy TechCentralStation. Despite working with a Rumsfeldian New/Old Europe framework the column is a very useful corrective to some of the foaming at the mouth which we’ve endured from US-based commentators and bloggers over the past few days (see Matthew Turner for some of the worst examples ). Credit where credit is due.
From the Irish
Most terrible was our hero in battle blows:
hands without fingers, shorn heads and toes
were scattered. That day there flew and fell
from astonished victims eyebrow, bone and entrail,
like stars in the sky, like snowflakes, like nuts in May,
like a meadow of daisies, like butts from an ashtray.
Familiar things, you might brush against or tread
upon in the daily round, were glistening red
with the slaughter the hero caused, though he had gone.
By proxy his bomb exploded, his valour shone.
If there were a British general election tomorrow I’d probably vote Labour, as I nearly always have done. I’d think about Iraq, the “war on terror”, Northern Ireland, the EU constitution, asylum seekers, taxes, prisons, higher education policy, Tony Blair, poverty, the environment, local government and a whole host of things. And I’d probably still vote Labour. If there were a terrorist attack which killed 200 of my compatriots, and the government, suspecting Al-Quaida, chose nevertheless to spin a story that the Real IRA were to blame, I might, just might, change my mind. But I’d still probably vote Labour. I certainly wouldn’t take kindly to commentators from other countries — themselves basically ignorant of my country’s politics and history — telling me that my task, in casting my vote, is to “send a message” to Osama bin Laden or anyone else. I’d be upset if such pundits told me that voting other than they way they recommended amounted to dishonouring the dead . And if a Spanish person, encountering such a commentator were to punch them on the nose, I’m not saying they’d be right, but I’d understand.
The unexpected defeat of the Spanish Popular Party government has been attributed in part to the belief that by joining the US in the war in Iraq, Aznar raised Spain’s profile as a target for Al Qaeda ( which now seems most likely to have set the bomb)1. The same claim is being debated in Australia.
While there’s probably an element of truth in this, it misses the main point. Australia, Britain and other US allies were wrong to participate in the war in Iraq, not because it made us more prominent participants in the war on terrorism but because the Iraq war was irrelevant, and in important respects actively harmful, to the struggle against terrorism, represented most prominently by Al Qaeda.
1 This isn’t the only way in which the handling of the Madrid atrocity affected the outcome. The government’s rush to the judgement (seen as politically more favorable) that ETA was responsible was criticised by many, and contrasted with the refusal of the Socialist leadership to score political points.
The irrelevance of the Iraq war to the war on terrorism was evident to most observers even before it started. Even the Bush Administration, while it took every opportunity to insinuate that there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda never made a categorical claim to that effect, by contrast with its clear assertions about WMDs.
The pursuit of irrelevant goals at the expense of urgent ones is harmful in itself. The Iraq venture has tied up much of the military resources of the US and its allies, which could have been used to follow through the initial victory over Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Instead that country has been left to relapse into warlordism and, in some areas, Taliban control. More importantly, the Iraq war dissipated the huge resources of goodwill and credibility that were generated by the September 11 attacks.
But there has also been more active damage. The Iraq war, and the triumphalist and anti-Islamic attitudes of many of its supporters, particularly in the United States, played directly into the hands of the Al Qaeda propaganda machine, ever eager to claim direct continuity between the Western world and the Crusaders. Combined with the failure to apply any serious pressure on Sharon to settle the Israel-Palestine dispute (intense pressure was applied to the other side, resulting, among other things in the creation of the new post of Prime Minister, with the objective of sidelining Arafat), the Iraq war policy has greatly assisted the terrorists in collecting new recruits2.
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Worse still, the desire for war with Iraq has led the Bush Administration to make political decisions not to go after terrorists and their backers and arms suppliers where the result might be inconvenient for the coalition of the willing. This was pretty clearly the case in relation to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In the case of Pakistan, the situation was already tricky enough, between nuclear proliferation, the weakness and dubiousness of the regime and the near-certainty that bin Laden was hiding somewhere in the provinces but the need to secure support for, or at least acquiescence in, war with Iraq has meant that, until recently, little has been done on either front. The causes of the Administration’s softness on Saudi Arabia are many and varied, but again, unwillingness to risk an open breach before the Iraq war was clearly important.
Finally, and most disgracefully of all, there is the case of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the terrorist most probably responsible for the Karbala atrocity a week or so ago. For well over a year after the S11 attacks, Zarqawi’s group Ansar al-Islam was operating from a base inside the Kurdish controlled zone in Iraq, which was also part of the no-fly zone. The Pentagon drew up numerous plans for attacks on Zarqawi, but they were all vetoed on political grounds, according the NBC story linked here. There are various hypotheses about the precise grounds, all highly discreditable, but the most plausible is that a watertight plan would have required co-operation between US air forces, and Kurdish ground forces. This would have been most unpalatable to the Turkish government, which was being courted, up to the last minute, as a partner for the Iraq war2. So nothing was done, and by the time the camp was attacked at the beginning of the war, Zarqawi and most of his followers were gone.
To sum up, the key element of the case against Blair, Aznar and Howard is not that they’ve stepped to the forefront of the war against terrorism when prudence would have dictated leaving the Americans to fight it by themselves. Rather it’s that they’ve aided and abetted the Bush administration in its decision to use the war against terrorism as a pretext for settling old and unrelated scores, and that by doing so they’ve increased the danger facing both their own citizens and everyone else.
2 It’s true that bin Laden doesn’t care about the Palestinian cause, or approve of secular nationalists like Arafat, but he still benefits from the general view that America is an agent of the oppression of the Palestinians
3 Regular commenter Sebastian Holsclaw contributed part of this explanation, though he may well not like the way I’ve used it.
It’s now almost certain that I was wrong when I suggested a couple of days ago that Al Qaeda was unlikely to be responsible for the horrible bombings in Madrid. This is worrying, not only because of what it means directly, but also because it may spur a very unpleasant cross-European backlash against immigrants. Even if US perceptions of rampant anti-Semitism in Europe are overblown, support for the far right is growing in many European countries on the back of anti-immigrant - and often, specifically anti-Muslim - sentiments. It’s not only the far right either; ‘mainstream’ European conservatives too are muttering dire imprecations about the enemy within. Witness, for example, Niall Ferguson channeling Oswald Spengler two weeks ago, in his sub-Huntingtonian ruminations about European cultural decadence and the minarets being raised amid the dreaming spires of Oxford.
Europe’s relationship with its non-European immigrants is an open sore, and it has been for decades. My worry is that the bombings are going to give succor to the far right, and make anti-immigrant arguments more respectable in mainstream political debate. We’re also likely to see more policy measures that purport to combat terrorism, but are really aimed at making life tougher for illegal immigrants. Europe already has a bad record on many civil liberties; I fear that it’s going to get substantially worse over the next couple of years. Even if the left wins today in Spain, as seems likely, there may be a pronounced general shift towards the nastier aspects of right-populism over the longer term.
The first answer is; no one can be sure until the evidence is in. The second one; no one can be told until the votes are in.
Aznar’s government seemed to point out the culprits of the Madrid bombings last Thursday morning with an unseemly haste; ETA had done it and would be punished. The Justice minister expressed no doubt at all, even in what must have been appalling confusion in the immediate aftermath of the bombings. Aznar himself was careful not to name names, but clearly inferred that ETA was responsible. Even today, election day, government ministers are sticking to the party line. Ana Palacio, minister for foreign affairs, is still saying ETA is the ‘strong suspect’. Though, in a statement probably meant to clear the way for a future one blaming Al Qaeda, she does allow that ETA could have cooperated with Al Qaeda, as anything is possible in the dark world of terrorism. Meanwhile, rumours swirl around Spain by email and text message that the security and intelligence services have no doubt that Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda alone, is responsible.
What is going on? An election, and one that may not give the right an overall majority. Here is Aznar’s calculation. If the bombings were done by Al Qaeda, the 90% of the Spanish population that opposed the war in Iraq will feel that Aznar brought it on them and vote for the opposition. (rightly or wrongly, but it’s a fair calculation.) If the bombings were done by ETA, it’s a death blow to the organisation that will help rally many undecided voters to the rightist governing party.
In this situation, the decent thing to do is say we just don’t know who did it. The smart thing to do, absent proof or knowledge, is to blame ETA. Although a reaction to the government’s unfounded certainty has gathering pace in the last 24 hours, it is probably too late to affect the election. The government has the upper hand and the opposition is powerless to resist. Suspending campaigning helps the government - ministers must still make public statements and in doing so effectively campaign for the government by blaiming ETA.
The opposition are reduced to expressing the country’s pain, but moves to challenge the reigning view on blame will be seen as politicising the national grief. Today, already, the government has condemned that a protest about the clampdown on information about the culprits is contrary to the suspension of the political campaign. The opposition is hamstrung, and it knows it. And in the moment of grief, it’s not even the most important thing;
Today’s Observer reports:
“Socialist leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is reported to have told his party to avoid any debate on ‘a cover-up’ while the dead are being buried and some of the 266 in hospital are still fighting for their lives.
One senior Socialist said: ‘I have been biting my tongue all day in the face of such lies and deceit while there are 200 dead people.’ “
The only decent thing to do in the face of cynical manipulation is to let it pass.
We still don’t know who is responsible for the bombing. It could indeed have been ETA. But actions speak louder than words. The London Tube is on high alert, and the Paris Metro is plastered with notices to report suspicious packages and the like. Outside of Spain, nobody seems to have been fooled.
There’s a lot of confusion about the perpetrators of the Madrid terrorist bombings, with a letter, purportedly from Al-Qaeda, claiming responsibility, and leaders associated with ETA disclaiming it. There’s evidence pointing both ways and, of course, it’s possible that more than one group was involved. Meanwhile, another letter, also purportedly from Al Qaeda, disclaimed responsibility for the even bloodier atrocity in Karbala last week.
I don’t think it’s necessary to come to a conclusive finding as to who set up which bombs. All groups and individuals that embrace terrorism as a method share the guilt of, and responsibility for, these crimes. Both in practical and symbolic terms, terrorist acts by one group provide assistance and support to all those who follow in their footsteps. The observation of apparent links between groups that seemingly have nothing in common in political terms (the IRA and FARC, for example1) illustrates the point.
This point isn’t only applicable to terrorists. For example, governments that engage in, or endorse, torture in any context share in the guilt of criminals like Saddam, whether or not they were directly complicit in particular crimes.
Whether or not the official leaders of ETA and its political counterpart were directly involved in this attack, they deserve condemnation for it unless they are willing to repudiate terrorism and abandon those who would continue it.
1 Both the IRA and FARC have issued partial and mutually contradictory denials of the accusation that IRA members provided explosives training to FARC. But denials of particular accusations are beside the point unless they are accompanied by a renunciation of terrorism.
As more news filters through, it looks as though the Madrid train-bombings are going to be one of the worst terrorist atrocities in modern European history, if not the worst. More than twice as many people have been killed as in the Bologna train station bomb; there are nearly an order of magnitude more casualties than there were in the Birmingham pub bombing. If ETA is responsible (as it almost certainly is, Glenn Reynolds’ speculations to the contrary), it’s a move born out of desperation. Paddy Woodworth, who knows as much about the Basque country as any English speaker, suggests that ETA have been in trouble for a while. Their political wing’s support among voters was cut in half when ETA went back to terrorism, and many of their established leaders are in jail, so that the current active leadership is young, radical and politically inexperienced. It’s hard to imagine how they could have more effectively discredited a cause that was hardly very creditable to begin with.
Update: This may turn out not to have been an ETA attack after all, in which case my arguments above would be quite beside the point - there’s some evidence pointing to Islamic terrorists. I should also note that Glenn Reynolds, in fairness to him, is now sounding considerably more equivocal about the likely perpetrators.
Like Chris and Daniel, I’ve been nonplussed at the nastiness of much rightwing US commentary on Europeans. If we’re not a clatter of cowardly Saddam fancying invertebrates, we’re a sinister cabal of jackbooted anti-Semites. While France’s behaviour over Iraq was unimpressive, and there are quite real problems of anti-Semitism, many of Europe’s critics have a rather transparent agenda. They seek to imply that any European criticism of the war or of Israel is automatically suspect, by virtue of its source. It’s the mirror image of Adbusters’ insinuations about rightwing Jews’ support for Israel, and not very much more intellectually respectable.
Mirabile dictu a right wing pundit devotes a column today in the Washington Post to praising Europe. You might expect that I’d be pleased. Not on your life.
Jim Hoagland, one of the slimier members of the commentariat, suggests that the French and British governments have started to tackle the internal threat of Islam head on. He calls for greater US understanding of the way in which the Europeans are responding to the terrorist threat - through internal security and policing measures rather than invading other countries. Indeed, he suggests that the US has a lot to learn from Europe, just as Europe can learn from the US.
What exactly can the US learn? Hoagland doesn’t quite come out and say it, but it seems that he’s keen on surveillance, police harassment and discrimination against Muslims in the public sphere.
The piece is entitled “Europe: The Enemy Within” - I don’t know whether Hoagland chose the title, but it captures the flavor of his argument. If the Americans are going after the enemy abroad, European governments are going after the enemy at home; their unassimilated Muslim minorities. In this context, all sorts of nasty domestic policies can be justified. The French law banning headscarfs is an understandable measure intended “to reassure the French that their government was not afraid of confronting Muslim fundamentalists at home.” Pervasive identity checks are supposed to make members of the bourgeoisie happier, by telling them that “if we are treating you like this in an upscale quarter of Paris, think about what we are doing in the Arab ghettos that you fear.” David Blunkett, Otto Schily, and above all Nicolas Sarkozy, are heroes in this war on the home front.
This is creepy stuff, creepier by far than pervasive anti-Europeanism. It also reflects a belated recognition of political realities. For all their differences over Iraq, the French and US governments have a lot in common. Both are right wing governments with the same whiff of corruption and dirty dealings hanging over them. Both have penchants for autocracy, statism and quasi-authoritarian justice and home affairs policy, although Sarkozy and Chirac have been able to get away with a lot more than Ashcroft and Bush. Now that their disagreements over Iraq have been rendered moot, their common interests and predilections will become more visible and apparent. Soon, we may be positively nostalgic for the days of right-wing France-bashing; it’s infinitely preferable to slackjawed admiration for the more repugnant aspects of French domestic policy.
No one much has noticed, but what will probably turn out to be the biggest geopolitical event of the year took place last weekend. I'm referring to the announcement by Kofi Annan of a referendum on the reunification of Cyprus to be held on 21 April this year. There's still room for something to go wrong, but I'll present my analysis on the basis that the referendum will be held and approved, which seems likely at present.
Why should settlement of a long-running dispute on a Mediterranean island, with no recent flare-ups, be so important ? Let me count the ways.
First, this is another victory for the boring old UN processes so disdained by unilateralists.
Second, a settlement of the Cyprus dispute would mark the end of hostilities between the modern states of Greece and Turkey that go back to the achievement of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire 200 years ago. Taking a longer historical view, the predecessor states of the modern Greece and Turkey have been at the frontline of hostilities between Islam and Christendom for 1000 years or more. By comparison with this dispute, the troubles in Ireland are of recent vintage.
Third, and most important, the positive role played by the Turkish government, until now the sponsor of the separatist government in Northern Cyprus, will greatly strengthen Turkey's case to become a candidate for admission to the European Union. Admission of Turkey, which could be expected to follow by around 2010, would dramatically change the dynamic of Middle Eastern politics. Iraq, Iran and Syria would all have borders with Europe. With membership of the EU, Turkey would provide a model of a secular, democratic and increasingly prosperous state in a predominantly Islamic country. By comparison, the replacement of the odious Saddam Hussein with an imperfectly democratic Islamist government dominated by Shiites (the most plausible current outcome for Iraq) would fade into insignifance.
A decision by the EU to reject Turkey, despite its dramatic progress towards a fully democratic system of government, would be equally significant, but in the negative direction. The advocates of rejection, most notably the German Christian (!) Democrats would correctly be seen as being motivated primarily by anti-Islamic prejudice. This would be a big setback in the struggle against terrorist forms of Islamism.
I didn’t blog much last week because Peter Katzenstein, a famous international relations scholar, was workshopping a book manuscript over three days at the University of Toronto; it was a fun and interesting discussion, but quite time consuming. One of Peter’s observations struck me as blogworthy - he was trying to get at the reasons why many US right wingers, and especially conservative legal scholars, have a visceral dislike for the European Union and all its doings.1 Part of the explanation is surely power politics, and the perception of the EU as a potential rival, but surely it goes beyond this. Much American debate gives the impression that the European Union is somehow worse for American interests and world peace than Russia or China. Peter’s take on it was that much of the animus derives from the hostility of the US right wing to internationalism in all its forms, and in particular to the idea that international law should take precedence over national law under certain circumstances. If, as Peter argues, the EU’s fundamental identity involves the primacy of public international law within the jurisdiction of its member states, then it’s easy to see why strict constructionists and others who believe in the primacy of the (US) constitution, would view the EU as abhorrent. On this account, the problem that the EU poses for the US right isn’t that it’s an incipient rival, or even a spoiler like France. It’s that if you take a certain stance on the relationship between international law and domestic sovereignty, the EU appears to be an abomination, something that shouldn’t exist. It’s not a state - nor is it likely to become one anytime soon. Nor is it a simple international organization. Instead, it’s something between the two - an unnatural hybrid of sorts, in which national policy makers increasingly become entangled in a supranational legal order. It’s enough to give Robert Bork hives.
1 For the record, Peter also had some hard words about anti-Americanism in Europe.
It is a great pity that so much of the media is disappearing behing subscription-only walls. This includes the Financial Times where the estimable Simon Kuper has a subscription-only article debunking the common American perception of a rise in European anti-Semitism. Some facts from the article. Kuper reports on two opinion polls conducted by the Anti-Defamation League in Western Europe in 2002. These found that roughly a quarter of Europeans had some anti-Semitic attitudes. This compares with a similar ADL survey in the US in the same year which has 17 percent of Americans espousing anti-Semitic views. Not a great difference, and one brought further into perspective when we learn that most anti-Semitic Europeans are over 65 whereas age is not a good predictor of such views among Americans. True, there has been a significant increase in anti-Jewish violence (especially by young Muslims in France), but in the US the FBI recordes 1039 hate crimes against Jews in 2002. There also doesn’t seem to be a very good correlation between attitudes to Israel and anti-Semitism: 7 per cent of the Dutch population are judged to be anti-Semitic by the ADL which is a lower figure than anywhere else in either Europe or the US, but 74 per cent of the Dutch view Israel as a threat. Attitudes to Israel are pretty mixed though, with Europeans more likely to blame Israel than the Palestinians for the current situation (but only by 27 per cent to 20, with the rest presumably “don’t knows” or distributing blame equally). 86 per cent of Europeans see no justification for suicide bombers. None of this is reason for complacency, of course, but the view peddled by US-based commentators such as Thomas Friedman and their blogospheric echo-chamber of Europe as a seething cauldron of ancient Jew-hatred is plainly garbage.
A proposed ban on religious symbols in French state schools could include a ban on beards, according to the French education minister. Luc Ferry said the law, which will be debated in parliament next month, could ban headscarves, bandannas and beards if they are considered a sign of faith.
UPDATE: According to Le Monde , Ferry invoked Saussure’s principle of the “arbitrary nature of the sign” in defence of the policy. We’re not going to hear any think like that from a minister in London or Washington any time soon!
Interesting times for the European Union’s Growth and Stability Pact, according to an Economist story that touches on a disagreement between Dan Drezner and I. Over the last couple of years, big member states such as France and Germany have been flouting the terms of the Pact, which is supposedly binding. It’s looked as though they were going to escape any punishment for doing this.
Dan has argued here and here that the shambles over the Growth and Stability Pact provides evidence that the EU is just a standard supranational organization: i.e. that it’s under the control of its member states. In Dan’s words:
Neither the European Commission nor the European Council seems prepared to punish France for defecting. In other words, at present the European Union, for all of its supranational characteristics, remains an ordinary international organization.
I’ve argued here and here that Dan’s wrong - the real evidence that the EU is not the mere plaything of its more powerful member states can be found in the rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The ECJ has succeeded in effectively ensuring the primacy of EU law over the law of the member states, which is not something that you would expect if the European Union were a simple international organization. Even big member states such as France and Germany, have complied with ECJ rulings that went against their interests.
On Thursday, the European Commission took an action in the ECJ against the member states (the Council of Ministers) for violating the terms of the Growth and Stability Pact. The Economist describes this as perhaps the most important ruling that the ECJ will ever make. So, what does this say about the nature of the EU? More immediately, what’s likely to happen?
It seems to me that there are three plausible outcomes.
(1) The ECJ rules against the member states, but the more powerful member states refuse to accept the ruling, and aren’t punished
If this happens, it’s strong (and perhaps overwhelming) evidence that Dan is correct. It would show that when the ECJ makes a ruling on a subject that is of vital importance to big member states, the big member states will refuse to comply and get away with it. It would suggest that the EU’s legal framework will only be implemented when it matches the broad preferences of powerful member states. People like Walter Mattli, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Karen Alter, Alec Stone (and, rather less prominently, I), who’ve argued that EU law is binding on powerful member states, will suddenly have a lot of explaining to do.
(2) The ECJ rules against the member states, and the more powerful member states accept the ruling
This would be strong evidence that I (and the more distinguished scholars whom I rely on) am right. In a matter that touches directly on the vital economic interests of large member states, these member states will subject themselves, however grudgingly, to the power of EU law. If this happens, expect a sudden resurgence of academic interest among IR scholars in the niceties of the EU legal system.
(3) The ECJ finds some way to duck the issue, on procedural or technical grounds
Sadly for international relations scholars, this is much the most likely outcome - and the most ambiguous from the point of view of the theories that Dan and I are interested in. On the one hand, Dan could very reasonably argue that this result would show that the ECJ is not prepared to take the member states head-on, when there is a clear clash of interest, in which the court is likely to come out second best. On the other, I (and people who share my position), could point to the rather particular circumstances that the ECJ faces in this case at this time. The proposed European Constitution, which is now in limbo, proposes in Article 10.1 that
The Constitution, and law adopted by the Union’s Institutions in exercising competences conferred on it , shall have primacy over the laws of the Member States.
This clause has received very little debate, perhaps because it simply ratifies in formal terms the standing legal doctrines of the ECJ, and (more or less) the various court systems of the member states. But if it is adopted by the member states, it will provide the ECJ with a cast-iron guarantee of judicial supremacy, and the considerable legal and political influence that goes along with that. The last thing that the ECJ wants at the moment is a large-scale political controversy over its role and competences, which might cause the member states to have second thoughts. Thus, it’s not unreasonable to expect that the ECJ will kick this case into the high grass, but will become much more activist when and if the Constitution is finally accepted and ratified. At that stage, there wouldn’t be much that the member states could do about it (they need unanimity to reverse Constitutional changes), and the ECJ would have carte blanche to assume a more prominent role. This isn’t good news if you think that courts shouldn’t be in the business of making politics.
While I believe that taxes in many countries could probably be used better and for more things than they are currently, I do think there should be limits to how government spends its tax payers’ money. A recent decision by the Hungarian government seems to suggest that some see no limits. The state has decided to spend $4 million sponsoring a driver for participation in Formula One next year. If this happened in a country with adequate social services and few people living in poverty then perhaps one could contemplate its legitimacy. But in a country with as many social problems as Hungary, I find it hard to swallow. Read it and weep.
Those following recent French debates about the proposal that the ostentatious display of religious symbols in schools should be banned, may find this article from Le Nouvel Observateur by sociologists Jocelyne Césari et Jean Baubérot enlightening. As they point out, French law is actually rather close to the liberal view of these matters. But there is a mismatch between what French law requires — as reflected in successive decisions of the Conseil D’Etat — and a commonly held view of the principle of secularism which charges the state with the aggressive promotion of Enlightenment rationalism. It all seems a little odd from this side of the English Channel. I had a conversation with a French researcher last year who declared herself shocked to have seen a newsreader on the BBC wearing a small crucifix round her neck. I had to say that I’d never noticed such a thing, wouldn’t have cared if I had, and that I’m sure that most British people wouldn’t notice: in a country with an established church hardly anyone cares about religion.
One oddity of the French media’s representation of this issue: the controversy centres on the common Islamic practice of women covering their hair with a headscarf. Of course, in some Islamic societies rather more is covered: women are veiled or enclosed in outfits like the burqua. The French secularists object to schoolgirls wearing headscarves that cover their hair — and the word “foulard” is appropriate here — but often the press reports refer to the “voile” and sometimes this is absurd. So the the caption to photograph accompanying this article (again from the Nouvel Obs) reads “Lors de la manifestation des femmes voilées” but the women in the picture are not veiled.
Today’s FT devotes almost half a page to the Irish presidency of the EU, which starts on January 1st and will be accompanied by a collective sigh of relief at the end to Berlusconi’s embarrassing ‘reign’ which “began with him comparing a German MEP to a Nazi camp guard and ended with the collapse of the stability pact and the diastrous EU summit in Brussels”.
The FT hits on a subject close to my heart; the big role that smaller countries play in greasing the wheels of the European machine. They also interview Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen, who contradicts recent reports that the Irish would kick the stalled constitution talks into the long grass. (I can’t find that one in the online FT - it’s on page 3 of the European paper edition though.) Brian Cowen, who is widely acknowledged to be very smart and very astute, says that the team Ireland brings to the presidency has recent and deep experience in the extremely tricky negotiations on Northern Ireland. We also bring to the table a prime minister, Bertie Aherne, who, while no great visionary, is a superb deal-maker. And (cleverly, I think), Cowen says straight off the bat that any verbal deals struck with Berlusconi will expire with the Italian presidency on 31 December. The Irish will start with the constitution in its current draft, and a clean slate. So, if negotiations can be re-started soon enough, it’s possible that Ireland just might deliver the constitution.
But what do small countries bring to the EU decision-making process in general?
The FT readily acknowledges that the worst presidencies in recent years were Chirac’s and Berlusconi’s. Small countries, e.g. Ireland, Denmark, Finland, etc. have had extraordinarily successful EU presidencies the last few times, and manage to get through lots of difficult institutional business that might otherwise remain stalled. Which is why getting rid of the rotating presidency was such a bad idea. Without it, a lot of high-level EU business simply would not get done.
What do the small countries have going for them?
First off, they’re not competing with the big players, and so manage the ‘honest broker’ role far better than France, Germany, UK, Spain or Italy can. Smaller countries don’t have the major strategic interests of the big ones, and they’re not running off in triumvirates, or quadriviates or what have you every 5 minutes and declaring themselves the engine of Europe. And, probably because multilateral institutions are small countries’ only means to have any say, we work doubly hard to make sure these institutions actually work.
Secondly, most of the small countries (let’s pass swiftly over Belgium) don’t have the the colonial baggage that tends to complicate both EU and external affairs. Nor do they have the accompanying perceptions of themselves that demand obeisance from the enlargement countries and others. It helps you to keep clicking through the agenda when you haven’t already annoyed everyone in the room by simply turning up and clearing your throat.
So there are strategic reasons why the small countries do such a good job of ‘chairing’ Europe. But led me add a few intangibles to the mix.
It’s impossible to imagine a leader with the breath-taking arrogance of a Chirac, Giscard d’Estaing or Berlusconi emanating from a country where everyone knows you failed 2nd Arts and only got the nomination because your older brother had better things to do. Small country leaders are simply unable to become so removed from the reality of every day life, and the expectation of simple good manners, because in small countries it’s much harder to insulate yourself in this way. (fewer degrees of separation, less of the lavish trappings of power) Having an elevated view of your own personal importance, and that of the country you lead, is a severe handicap when it comes to chairing a meeting to general satisfaction and actually getting things done.
Then there’s the experience internationally of being the leader, or a senior minister, of a small country. Every concession you get is hard won, but is achieved through persuasion and quick manouevring rather than the banging of fists on tables. When it comes to managing the egos and work programmes of an EU presidency, the ability to swim like a minnow around and between the big country whales and sharks of Europe is absolutely invaluable.
Ireland has done a particularly good job of having a big say for such a small country, and not just in the EU. It helps to be just about the only wealthy, white, English-speaking country in the world that everyone still seems to think is an oppressed, if charming, minority. A friend of mine also insists that the Irish have done so well internationally because there is nothing like growing up in a large family to teach you how to think and act tactically and strategically. (if so, our falling birth rate will put an end to that.) Certainly, the Irish have never seen an international institution they didn’t like, and wouldn’t want their friends and family to join. We pop up all the time on the lists of over-represented countries in international organisations.
But I hope I’ve managed to show there are lots of practical reasons why small countries are so essential to grease the wheels of international juggernauts (setting aside for the moment whether it’s a good thing that these institutions work or work well). And let’s not forget, that as of 1st May next year, small countries will be in the majority of EU member states. We’re loud, we’re proud, and we’re here to stay…
Your thoughts are enthusiastically solicited - especially views that perhaps paint a less benign picture of small countries’ role (begging bowl anyone?) as I’m hoping to help the 21st Century Trust organise a conference in Ireland in early 2005 on the international role of small countries.
Daniel Davies lives in the south east of England and likes Brahms.
There, I’ve said it.
Now, how much could I be fined for breaking data protection law? If I also mention that, perhaps, one of Daniel’s legs is longer than the other, or that he’s a poor sleeper (invoking protections for sensitive medical data), I may be liable for a 450 euro fine.
Sounds crazy? Well, the European Court of Justice handed down last week a ruling about a Swedish parish council that should put the fear of god into bloggers who make comments about us Europeans and our hobbies.
In 1998, Mrs. Bodil Lindqvist of Alseda in Sweden put up a web page that included information about people in her parish. It included variously information about people’s jobs, hobbies, and in one case the fact that one person had injured her foot and was working part-time as a result. She was then fined 450 euro for failing to notify the data protection authority that she was processing personal data, and also for transferring said data to third countries by putting it on the world wide web. Mrs. Lindqvist’s appeal went all the way to the ECJ and a ruling was issued last week, partly upholding the original finding.
The law in question is the European general data protection Directive 95/46. The Directive defines ‘data processing’ very broadly to mean ‘anything anyone has ever thought to do to personal data, or ever might’, or words to that effect. So, putting people’s personal data on a web page would count as processing. But if the processing was done as a purely personal or domestic activity, it would not be captured by the Directive. The ECJ found that something Mrs. Lindqvist did clearly as a hobby, and with no commercial motive, did not count as being purely personal or domestic.*
This is extremely troubling. The implication of the ruling seems to be that if you refer in a published website to an EU citizen by name (or by using other data which reasonably infer who the person is), you should register as a ‘data controller’ and be prepared to have your data processing controls found wanting. While people who blog generally do so as a personal hobby, this seems to be no protection against being fully responsible for complying with data protection obligations. (the question of extra-territoriality is much contested and way beyond the scope of this post…)
Now, I think it’s fair to say that the original drafters back in 1995 did not mean to capture enthusiastic church members or bloggers who link to each other and discuss each others’ political beliefs (also ‘sensitive’ data). And one bright spot in the ECJ ruling was the observation that the Community legislature would not have intended to apply the expression ‘transfer of data to a third country’ to the publication of websites. The ECJ’s remit here, as I understand it (and pointers are welcome) was simply to make sure the Directive is properly implemented and enforced. But a first principles approach to Mrs. Lindqvist’s case might sensibly have asked, ‘what data protection goals or values can possibly be upheld by requiring online referers to individuals to register as data controllers?’ Surely, if people don’t like what is said about them, they have recourse to libel or slander laws. Or does data protection now mean that even mentioning someone online is to be a controlled activity?
The directive was up for its scheduled review this year, and many of the people and organisations who provided input asked that the directive be brought up to date to deal with the realities of the internet. Another criticism made by many was that notification requirements create administrative burdens while doing nothing to actually protect privacy. But the European Commission walked through the consultation process and did just as the Commission wanted - i.e. allowed for no amendments. In fact, the ‘for and against the amendment of the directive’ section of the Commission’s report is almost laughable in that it contains no reasons ‘for’ and a page and a half of ‘against’. So, no chance of any sensible changes there.
What’s needed now is for the Article 29 Working Party, a committee of all the European data protection authorities, to come out and clarify what people publishing websites are and are not required to do. But the chances of this are slim. WP 29 seem to exist on a separate plane from the rest of us and engage in closed, theological discussions that have little relevance to common sense and day to day life. I exoect it will be a long time before we see the white smoke rising on this issue.
Dan Drezner claims that France’s flouting of the rules governing the euro is proof that the European Union is just a standard international organization; I’m not any more convinced than I was when he made the same argument a couple of months ago. I simply don’t see how this particular case provides a definitive test of whether or not the EU is a standard international organization (which is incapable of disciplining its more powerful members) or a truly supranational organization.
The key test-case isn’t the EMU, which is, more than most other elements of the European Union, a political arrangement; it’s EU law, as interpreted by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The ECJ has asserted that European Law supersedes national law, and has direct effect in the member states, and it has gotten away with it. Member states don’t try to challenge it.
The ECJ’s role was the subject of a controversy in the pages of International Organization, the dominant international relations journal, back in the 1990’s. On the one side, Geoffrey Garrett argued that the EU was merely an international organization, and that the ECJ consistently reflected the preferences of the large member states, as Dan’s argument would predict. On the other, Walter Mattli and Anne-Marie Slaughter argued that the ECJ could - and did - consistently override the preferences of larger, more powerful member states, and that these member states acquiesced when it did so. Time - and empirical testing - have not been kind to Garrett’s arguments. Even under the most strained interpretation of “member state preferences” and legal outcomes, it’s hard to argue that the court consistently kowtows to large member states, or that large member states defy ECJ rulings when it doesn’t. This suggests that the EU is not simply an especially powerful international organization. There’s something else going there.
The EU is neither fish nor fowl, neither conventional multilateral organization nor conventional state. Nor is it likely to evolve into either the one or the other any time soon. Which means that it will continue to perplex international relations scholars like Dan and I, who like to categorize international actors, and assign them to neat, well organized boxes. The EU doesn’t fit well into any of them; it’s easy to say what it isn’t, but not so easy to say what it is.
There’s a jaw-dropping line in today’s Anne Applebaum column in the Washington Post:
“According to another opinion poll, more than a third of the Germans now think of themselves as “victims” of the Second World War — just like the Jews.”
Applebaum might be correctly representing the results of a real poll question, but I’m amazed. I’d be especially amazed if the question asked Germans to compare their WWII-related victimization to the victimization of the Jews. I don’t know what question was asked, and I was unable to find a corroborating story by Googling. There are some very smart people reading this blog. Does anyone know anything about this?
UPDATE: I emailed Anne Applebaum about this, and she was kind enough to email back. She says that the source was the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, and that the question was “Do you think Germans were victims of the war just like Poles and Jews?” 36% of Germans said yes. She doesn’t have the newspaper article in front of her, but she’s having it faxed to her tomorrow. I can’t read Polish, so I’ll never be able to find it on the Rzeczpospolita site.
In comments, pg links to this story, which is almost certainly the same thing. 57% of Poles said yes. I don’t know what to think of this.
Simon Kuper has an interesting piece in the FT on the importance of the Islamic electorate in Europe. Though the piece is mainly about Europe, I was amused to read the following (which everyone else probably knows already):
the Muslim bloc vote first appeared in the US, home of the ethnic lobby. A fortnight before the 2000 election, the American Muslim Political Co-ordinating Council, a political action group, endorsed George W. Bush for president. The council said he had shown “elevated concern” about the US government’s profiling of Arab-Americans at airports, and about its use of secret evidence against Arab and Muslim immigrants. (Bush had mentioned this issue in a debate with Al Gore.). Bizarre as it now sounds, Bush’s concern for the civil rights of suspected Islamic terrorists possibly won him the election. It is estimated that more than 70 per cent of American Muslims voted for him, and that in the crucial Florida election he polled at least 60,000 more Muslim votes than Gore.
I’d planned to do a number on Paul Johnson’s extraordinary rant against Europe, but Mark Kleiman has beaten me to it. I don’t have much to add, except to say that Johnson is a dreadful old fraud, even as superannuated Tory farts go. And his prose style is wretched; the sort of sub-Burkean lugubrious sententiousness that conservatives are liable to mistake for profundity when they’ve overdone the port a bit.
Still, there’s good news for those of you who think that Johnson’s right about Europe’s economic backwardness. Silvio Berlusconi has just launched a new marketing effort, encouraging foreigners to invest in Italy. As Berlusconi describes it:
“Italy is now a great country to invest in… today we have fewer communists and those who are still there deny having been one … Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries… superb girls.
It’s a cliche to say that you can’t make this stuff up. But you can’t. You really can’t.
Dan Drezner has a new piece up in Tech Central Station. He suggests in passing that the EU, which used to be considered a trade liberalizer, is now an economic and political mess.
Policy processes that generate illogical macroeconomic rules, incoherent foreign policies, insane agriculture subsidies, and interminable constitutional proposals have not showered Brussels with economic glory.
Fair enough. But what about US ‘policy processes’ under the Republicans?
In theory, the EU should find it much easier than the US to make a mess of things. It’s composed of fifteen argumentative sovereign states, each with its own turf to defend. But appearances deceive: US Republicans to be labouring under no comparative disadvantage at all. They’re screwing things up with quite extraordinary vigour and gusto. Kudos. I seem to remember that once upon a time, people thought that the Republicans too would be trade liberalizers. Word on the street is that they’re not only protectionists, they’re incompetent protectionists. Anyway, I’d take eurosclerosis any day of the week, if the alternative were the shambling monstrosity that is Bush’s macro-economic policy.
Maria’s post on the Adam Smith Institute blog1 reminded me of an old joke from the ASI’s halcyon days of the 1980s when Sir Keith Joseph was at the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s government pushing a serious Hayekian agenda. In those days, the role of the ASI was described as “taking ideas from the edge of lunacy to the edge of policy”. I only thought of this joke after reading Thomas Friedman’s latest effort in the New York Times (I actually read it by mistake; I thought that Krugman had shaved off the bottom half of his beard and if you look at the two photos side by side it’s an understandable error).
Time was when a man who seriously talked about the likelihood of imminent uprising by the French Muslim population and called articles things like “War With France” could safely be laughed at, or at least confined to the WSJ’s increasing eccentric online editorial supplement. Time no longer, apparently. Oh dear. Friedman is possibly wrong, by the way, in claiming that “France, with its large Muslim minority”, would necessarily see its “social fabric” hugely affected by Islamic militancy; as a French acquaintance pointed out to me recently, the Islamic population of France is heavily concentrated in metropolitan Paris and Lyon, and France is actually a country of small towns. But mistaking Paris for France is a common enough error (particularly by Parisians) so I’ll let that pass.
No, what really struck me as stand-out stupid in the Friedman piece was the moral indignation against France’s unwillingness to stick its hand in its pocket (still less, to put French soldiers at risk of death) to finance the consequences of a war it never wanted. For crying out loud. It is a fundamental and fairly sound principle of public finance that one should not write cheques from the public purse without maintaining some control over how the money is spent. If someone thinks that things are different in the case of Iraq, and I can see how a case could easily be made, the onus is on Friedman to make it. And it is usually rhetorically effective to tone down one’s high-handed moral condemnation of someone while one is asking them for money.
Friedman is right on one thing, however. The French proposal for some half-baked Chalabi/UN arrangement to govern Iraq is pretty laughable as a policy proposal. What he doesn’t seem to realise, though, is that it isn’t a policy proposal. It’s a diplomatic fig-leaf put up in order to allow the Americans to save some face from a situation which is, at its base, a blunt refusal. The French don’t want any situation to arise in which they end up committing money or troops to the Iraqi occupation.
“Why don’t the French want to help the Iraqis?”
The question is ill-posed. You might as well ask “why don’t the French want to support the International Perpetual Energy Machine?”. There is no proposal being offered by anyone for the French to help the Iraqis.
What do I mean? Look at it this way. As a decent first approximation, every troop committed by France allows an American soldier to be brought home. One can argue about the need for new troops, but there are no actual proposals to increase troop numbers in Iraq, so this approximation holds for the time being. Also as a decent first approximation, it is fair to assume that every dollar of financial assistance committed by France would allow the US budget request for money to finance Iraq to be reduced by a dollar. So, one would account for the net effect of France committing $2bn and 2,000 troops would be as follows:
France: debit cash $2bn (Iraq), debit troops 2,000 (Iraq)
Iraq: credit cash $2bn (France), credit troops 2,000 (France)
Iraq: debit cash $2bn (USA), debit troops 2,000 (USA)
USA: credit cash $2bn (Iraq), credit troops 2,000 (Iraq)
You do not have to be an ace designer of tax schemes, or even a qualified accountant, to see that the Iraq transactions cancel in this case; Iraq is being used as an “off-balance sheet vehicle” for a transfer of blood and treasure to the USA. This is the problem. It looks very much to the naïve outsider as if France, the EU, and the rest are not being asked to provide help to Iraq; they are being asked to provide aid to the USA, to reduce the political cost of a decision they advised against, to an administration that does nothing but insult them.
The French, that ultimate nation of realists, are unlikely to be under any illusions on the subject of whether they have any real prospect of material involvement in the post-war environment. All that’s going on, is that they object to picking up the tab.
1Who, remaining on the topic, appear to have removed a reference to France in their post on EU agricultural subsidies but declined to publish the comment I made on their “moderated” board explaining why it was ignorant, thanks guys.
Update: Yer man from the ASI has just got in touch and reasonably fairly pointed out that the comment would have looked pretty weird once they’d changed the offending passage. He also informs me that I am the only person to have had a comment blackballed by the ASI blog so far! How badass is that?
A few years ago, two friends of mine were walking with a Danish friend through Copenhagen one evening. As they passed the parliament building, a vaguely familiar man walked out. Their Danish friend smiled and said ‘good night’. The man responded in kind, and headed for a bus stop. It was Nyrup Rasmussen, the prime minister of the day.
The queen of Denmark is regularly to be seen walking alone through the main shopping thoroughfare of Copenhagen. Sweden is similar. In the country that gave the world Ombudsmen, part of government openness means that senior politicians walk openly and freely amongst the public, and generally disdain body guards.
Another anecdote; a journalist friend described interviewing Chris Patten when Patten was with the Northern Ireland office during the 1980s. The conversation continued as Patten walked to his car, got down on his knees and thoroughly examined the underneath, before standing up again and opening the car-door. All the time speaking as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Imagine incorporating that kind of personal risk (and risk to your family) into your daily routine.
Anna Lindh, Sweden’s rising political star, did not survive the multiple stab wounds she received while out shopping with a friend on Wednesday afternoon. As she was someone who championed openness in government, it will be a terrible shame if her legacy must be a distancing of Swedish politicians from the people they represent.
Open Democracy has an essay from a political commentator and long time friend of Lindh. The Economist considers how her death will affect the euro referendum in Sweden.
Last Sunday, the Archbishop of Paris sent a letter to be read out in every parish Mass. It remembered the thousands of people who died in last month’s heatwave, reminded us of our obligations to the weak and the marginalised in our society, and asked us to pray for the souls of the dead. It added pathos to the now difficult to grasp number of dead; 15,000. The unclaimed dead were buried by the state in simple but respectful civil ceremonies. But many Catholics (and presumably those of other religions too) who had been regular churchgoers were buried without religious rites because their bodies had not been claimed in time. Parish priests who knew their parishioners well did not have the right to insist on Christian burials. This is probably as it should be. But somehow, the idea of people dying at home, alone (as most of the dead in Paris did) without the last rites, and not being received into the arms of their churches on death, made it all seem even sadder.
I’ve only ever attended Catholic and Protestant funerals, so can’t speak for the comfort of other rites of death. The night before a Catholic funeral, the body of the dead person is received into the church during a short ceremony. In Ireland, the ‘removal’ is usually very well attended (mainly because it’s in the evening after work, and people come who can’t take the next morning off). Irish funerals seem to combine being large, public events where anyone with the slightest link to the deceased or their family attends, with an intimacy which is probably born of the familiarity of the ritual and the renewal of old ties. Anyway, the removal has always felt a little like a homecoming to me. It just seems desperately sad that those feisty old Parisians, who might have expected the sacraments of their churches to book-end their lives, were as alone in death as they were in dying.
Chris has blogged thoughtfully about the complex sociological causes of this ‘natural disaster’. And the truth is that every one of us in France is culpable, in both small and big ways. But some in the blogosphere have used France’s tragedy to score cheap and nasty political points and trot out the usual old national tropes. As in everything else, I suppose, the vindication of a mean-minded idea is something that can only be felt at a distance.
Henry’s and my grandmother and last surviving grand-parent died last year. And my breath still catches when I spot on the street or in the metro the back of a white, curly head. Eilis lived through the Easter Rising, war of independence, a civil war that divided her family, and two world wars. She witnessed, and played her part in, an Ireland changing from a colonial outpost into a robust and striving part of Europe. Her generation lived through times we can only, thankfully, imagine. The 15,000 French dead were born amidst the slaughter of World War I, looked for their first jobs during the Great Depression, and, when they were the same age as most bloggers today, bore children in a France over-run by Nazis. In their lifetime, Europe has been transformed from the bloodbath of the 20th century to a prosperous (if rather selfish) place where war is no longer an inevitability for each successive generation.
Please, let’s not dishonour their memory.
Looks as though Berlusconi has outed himself as a moral relativist; he’s told two interviewers that Mussolini wasn’t such a bad chap after all. Berlusconi is quoted as replying to a question comparing Mussolini and Saddam by saying:
Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday in internal exile [a fare vacanza al confino].
He’s now backtracking, saying that he never intended to signal a ‘re-evaluation’ of Mussolini, and was merely defending Italian national pride and honour.
I wasn’t re-evaluating Mussolini; I was acting as a patriot. As an Italian, I wasn’t accepting a comparison between Mussolini and Saddam.
Berlusconi is crying unfair. He claims that it was an informal interview and that the journalists had promised that he could vet the interview before publication. Maybe so; but equally likely, he thought he was talking to ideological friends, and could get away with a certain amount of indiscretion. The two interviewers work for the Spectator, a Conservative rag in Britain; one of them, Boris Johnson, is a Eurosceptic Tory MP (and occasional amiable buffoon on the BBC’s Have I Got News for You).
Whatever. Berlusconi’s now on record as defending Mussolini and downplaying his reprehensible behavior as a Fascist dictator. As the Guardian reminds us, Mussolini not only had various opponents bumped off; he also oversaw the introduction of racial laws, forced labour and internment camps for Jews. Which, to put it mildly, don’t count as ‘holidays’ in my books.
I’ll be interested to see whether the various people who denounce ‘Old Europe’ as a snakepit of jackboot-fancying anti-Semites have anything to say about this. Various figures on the right jumped to Berlusconi’s defence a couple of months ago, over the various corruption allegations he’s dealing with, and his previous Nazi-related gaffe in the European Parliament. Michael Ledeen, for example, described Berlusconi as a ‘passionate freedom fighter,’ cheering him for having
the courage to speak the truth when the rest of the Eurocrats were cowering behind the conventional wisdom.
William Sjostrom, among many others, concurred, dismissing criticisms of Berlusconi as the carping of ‘crybaby leftists.’
How will Berlusconi’s erstwhile defenders react to his latest statement? If Chirac or Schroeder had said anything like what Berlusconi said, I imagine that these commentators would be all over it, trumpeting it as further evidence of anti-Semitism and nostalgia for Fascism in Europe. Will they apply the same standard when the apologist for Fascism is a Bush ally, and strong supporter of the Iraq invasion? I very much hope so.
Update: translation retweaked, thanks to Andrew Chen.
In today’s FT, Samuel Brittan reviews John Gillingham’s European Integration, 1950-2003 : Superstate or New Market Economy?. One interesting snippet, which I knew about but deserves wider publicity:
Readers may be more surprised to find the name of Frederich Hayek given as the source of the alternative neoliberal interpretation. For most of today’s self-proclaimed Hayekians view everything to do with the EU with intense suspicion. Indeed I was sufficiently surprised myself to look up some of Hayek’s writings on the subject. Although he played no part in the post war institutional discussion, he had written at some length on the problems of federalism in the late 1930s. Hayek was among those who believed that some form of federalism, whether in Europe or on a wider basis, was an important step towards a more peaceful world. In a 1939 essay, remarkably anticipating the EU Single Market Act, he argued that a political union required some elements of a common economic policy, such as a common tariff, monetary and exchange rate policy, but also a ban on intervention to help particular producers.
Iain Murray blogs approvingly on a recent Robert Helmer speech. Helmer claims that federalism in the European Union doesn’t have much in common with its American equivalent; it isn’t democratic, and it isn’t really federalism either. He’s trying to square a rather inconvenient circle for the righties - by and large, right-wingers in the UK and US approve of federalism in the US (more rights for the states), but disapprove of it in Europe. Helmer’s basic argument is that federalism is only legitimate if it applies within a single nation-state, where people share a common national identity and common sympathies. Thus, EU federalism is Bad - there’s no such thing as a European national identity. However, US federalism is Good - after all America is ‘One Nation under God.’
There’s one small problem with this argument. Any half-way intelligent reading of American history will tell you that it’s utter nonsense. 150 years ago, the US bore a remarkable resemblance to the EU today; a scattering of loosely affiliated states without all that much of a shared national identity. Then, from the Civil War on, it began to centralize. If Helmer and Murray are right, then, the modern American political system is at best a massive mistake, and at worst, a democratically illegitimate usurpation of powers by a centralizing federal government.
Helmer claims that
federalism can deliver a model of limited, democratic government within a nation. It cannot do so within an association of distinct nations.
Democracy is more than simple arithmetic and majority voting. Democracy presupposes a group of people who feel that they are in the same boat, that they are part of a common enterprise. … Clearly, these conditions apply in the USA. Equally clearly, they do not and cannot apply in the 15 (soon to be 25) diverse nations of the EU.
But the US in the early 19th century was very probably just such an association of diverse nations. As Daniel Deudney argues1, the US had little to nothing in the way of a common ethnic identity.
The least important feature of identity in the Philadelphian system was ethnic and national. … First, the British colonies that claimed independence in 1776 were filled with people whose language, ‘race,’ religion and political differences were not very different from those of Britain. … Second, sectional identities were strong, and the southern states that sought to achieve independence in the war of 1861-64 claimed to constitute a separate nation, and met many of the criteria normally associated with a nation. … Third, the differences of national identity between Canada and the United States do not appear as great as the difference among Americans. Either the United States was part of a multistate nation or the United States was a multinational union (215-16).
Americans were united more by a ‘republican civic identity’ (a bit like the ‘constitutional patriotism’ that Habermas proposes for Europe) than by a shared sense of nationality.
Second, Helmer claims that
When we, loosely and mistakenly, describe European integration as federalist, we are speaking of a continual transfer of powers to centralised institutions. … Valery Giscard d’Estaing may pretend that his Convention has drafted an EU Constitution which bears comparison with the US Constitution, but it is wholly different. … Federalism in the USA is a workable model for democratic accountability in a single nation. The EU Constitution is a model for the subjection of historic nation-states to unaccountable centralised institutions which are not, and cannot be, democratic.
But the development of the US political system involved precisely the kind of transfer of powers from independent states to a centralized federal authority that Helmer doesn’t like. As Deudney documents it, the antebellum US political system was more like a loose collectivity of semi-autonomous states than a federal state in the modern sense of the word. Not only was there little in the way of a common US identity before the Civil War; the states within the US weren’t all that dissimilar from the states within the EU today.America’s founding fathers feared that states without some form of intimate connection would be likely to go to war with each other; thus, they created a “union [which] … fell far short of a complete merger.” The central government was constrained from going to war on its own accord. Police and law enforcement were left almost entirely in the hands of the states. As Deudney nicely describes it, the US “had a government, but was not a state.”
Nor did the US have much in the way of an integrated economy. As Kate McNamara documents at length, the US had little in the way of a unified monetary system before the Civil War; even though the federal government issued gold and silver coins, state and local banks issued their own paper money, leading to monetary chaos, and widely varying internal exchange rates for dollars from different banks.
In the wake of the Civil War, the US developed a proper unified currency, and then, over time, a more powerful centralized government. The central institutions of the US, over time, developed into the conventional trappings of the state, including most prominently a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within the US. The federal system that Helmer likes so much is a result of this push towards centralization.
All of which means that Helmer’s argument rests on a basic contradiction. On the one hand, he can argue that the EU is illegitimate, because it involves the centralization of authority in an association of distinct nations. But this means that the creation of the modern US federalist system was just as illegitimate - it too, involved such a centralization of power among semi-autonomous states without much in the way of shared sense of nationality. And by force to boot. Or, alternatively, he can argue that the current US federal system is legitimate - but this implies that EU integration processes are potentially legitimate too. He can’t have it both ways.
1 Daniel Deudney, “The Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control and Balance of Power in the American States-Union, Circa 1787-1861, International Organization 49,2 (Spring 1995), 191-228.
The US is not the only place where political dissent is considered a reasonable basis to prevent individuals from travelling freely. If the Italians have their way, all of Europe will be a no-go zone for anti-globalisation protesters, anti-war demo organisers, and a whole slew of objectors to the current soft-authoritarian right that prevails around the Mediterranean.
The Council of Ministers dealing with Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) is unburdened by the transparency requirements of other EU Councils, and is subject only to a cursory and non-binding consultation with the European Parliament. It is an ideal, and increasingly used, means for member states to introduce controversial measures bearing on policing and the human rights of citizens.
Statewatch reports on the latest attempt by a member state to launder policies through the JHA Council. The Italian Presidency has proposed a resolution (a measure which requires no consultation at all with the European Parliament or national parliaments) to crack down at border controls on those likely to threaten ‘public order’ in the country being entered. The draft resolution says that;
“Member States (of the originating country) shall supply that (destination) country with any information of relevance in identifying individuals with a record of having caused disturbances in similar circumstances”,
and the information supplied may:
“include names of individuals convicted of offences involving disruption of public order at demonstrations or other events”.
Remember that public order offences range all the way from violent soccer hooliganism to simply participating in a sit-down protest. Apparently, any individual with a ‘record’ (not necessarily even a conviction) can have his or her personal data transmitted without knowledge or consent to the police in an other state, and then be targetted and refused at border controls.
Thankfully, the Dutch are calling a spade a spade, saying that refusal of EU citizens at borders should be exceptional and not routine, the public order criteria need to be fully elaborated, the proposal should be made in such a way as to receive domestic and EU parliamentary scrutiny, and it should fully respect the European data protection Directive 95/46.
This isn’t the first time the Dutch have objected to the use of ‘security measures’ to cull political opposition. Last year, they privately objected to the inclusion of non-violent political groups in a list of ‘terrorist organisations’ whose members were targetted for immediate extradition to the US. (What had started as a means to round up potential terrorists was seized as an opportunity for some European governments to put radical opposition parties on the Most Wanted List.) The Dutch didn’t get very far then, but still, points for effort.
At least this time around, the Dutch will be able to use the threat of veto power in the JHA Council to send the Italians back to the drawing board.
The latest figures from France suggest that there were up to 10,000 excess deaths in France’s recent heatwave. Chirac has called an emergency cabinet meeting and there will be an inquiry into the state of France’s medical services. As always, some kinds of people died more than others:
Half the victims are believed to have died in old people’s homes, many operating with fewer staff during the August holidays. Many hospitals had closed complete wards for the month and were unable to offer sophisticated, or sometimes even basic, treatment to victims. About 2,000 people are thought to have died in their homes from the effects of dehydration and other heat- related problems while neighbours and relatives were away.
I’m a bit surprised that no-one covering this in the media has yet called on Eric Klinenberg whose analysis of the Chicago heatwave 1995 - in his book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago - showed that what was at first thought of as a natural disaster had complex social causes. (UPDATE - thanks to Chris K for the link - big media in the form of today’s IHT have a piece by Klinenberg )
Here’s a snippet from an interview with Klinenberg:
The death toll was the result of distinct dangers in Chicago’s social environment: an increased population of isolated seniors who live and die alone; the culture of fear that makes city dwellers reluctant to trust their neighbors or, sometimes, even leave their houses; the abandonment of neighborhoods by businesses, service providers, and most residents, leaving only the most precarious behind; and the isolation and insecurity of single room occupancy dwellings and other last-ditch low-income housing. None of these common urban conditions show up as causes of death in the medical autopsies or political reports that establish the official record for the heat disaster.
Klinenberg found that although, on the basis of the natural-environmental facts more women should have died than men, the opposite happened because old women have better social networks than old men. He also found very significant ethnic and racial differences in mortality, again attributing this largely to social networks. It would be very interesting to see the ethnic and gender breakdowns for France.
(See also an article in the Guardian by Klinenberg, from almost exactly a year ago.)
Dan Drezner points to this developing story in the FT as an important test case for the EU. Under the “Growth and Stability Pact,” which lays down the rules for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), all participating EU member states have to fulfil certain criteria in their national macroeconomic policies. Among other things, they’re not supposed to run a budget deficit over 3% of GDP, except in situations of dire emergency. It now appears that Germany is going to exceed this limit for the third year in a row. Ironically, it was Germany that pushed for tough rules on budget deficits in the first place - the German central bank was terrified that Italy and other ‘less responsible’ member states would go on spending sprees after they joined the EMU club.
The European Commission is making noises about keelhauling the Germans for their bad behavior, which Dan sees as a key test case for EU integration theory. International relations scholars who study the EU have traditionally been divided into two camps - those who believe that the EU is a standard international organization, with no independent power to do anything that its more powerful member states don’t want it to do, and ‘supranationalists’ who believe that it’s something more than the sum of its members. Dan is sympathetic to the former point of view; I tend to adhere to the latter. Dan thinks that the Commission is likely to back down on its threats, so that Germany, which is the most powerful member state, prevails - he believes that this will provide powerful evidence that the supranationalists are dead wrong. I think Dan’s prediction as to the likely empirical outcome is right - but I don’t think that this tells us very much about the bigger theoretical questions that Dan (and I) are interested in.
Why not? Simply, put, the Growth and Stability Pact is a botch. The Commission has been muttering for years that it has been put in an impossible position - under the Growth and Stability Pact, it acts as whistleblower when EMU participants behave badly, but doesn’t have much real power to sanction them (the final decisions on punishments rest with the member states themselves). Furthermore, the standards that the Commission is supposed to enforce make no sense at all in economic terms, and indeed are likely to have perverse, and sometimes quite nasty, economic consequences. And the Commission itself has argued this: Romano Prodi, the Commission’s President gave an interview last year in which he baldly said that the Growth and Stability Pact was ‘stupid.’ He was promptly howled down by various member state governments, all of whom tacitly agreed with his argument, but didn’t want it bruited around too much in public. Thus, what we’re seeing at the moment is less an effort by the Commission to bring Germany to heel, than a ritualistic exercise in face-saving. The Commission is embarrassing Germany a little, but knows quite well that there isn’t the scintilla of a possibility that Germany is going to be punished by the other member states. However, it still feels that it has to go through the motions of reproving Germany, in order to maintain some minimal level of credibility.
There is a lot of interesting stuff happening around EMU - but it’s not the kind of development that gets newspaper headlines. EMU participants are increasingly coordinating their economic policy with each other through various informal processes. Over time, this might lead to the kind of deep integration that would convince realist skeptics of the EU - but it’s not happening yet. Where there is strong evidence that the EU is more than the simple sum of its member states is in another area of the European integration process - legal integration. Andy Moravcsik, whom Dan rightly cites as a strong proponent of the EU-as-international-organization theory, admits that his theory doesn’t account for the actions of the European Court of Justice, which has been extraordinarily effective in independently creating a body of law and precedent to which member states are subject. European Union law has direct effect in member states, so that EU law overrules domestic law, even in cases where a member state legislature hasn’t actually passed a particular piece of EU law as domestic legislation. The EU is far from being a super-state in the making, but nor is it simply a membership organization like NATO or even the WTO. It’s likely to go on perplexing international relations theorists for a good while yet.
Helen Szamuely reacts in EU Observer to Jan-Werner Muller’s reaction in European Voice to the Habermas/Derrida manifesto on a European identity. (pause for intake of breath) Muller’s article can’t be got at unless you’re a subscriber to European Voice, which is a shame - he seemed to be saying that Habermas was calling for a kind of historicism that would have Benjamin spinning in his grave. I have a special hatred for articles that end with that hoary old chestnut ‘we need a debate’, but as Muller’s piece is unobtainable by the masses, Szamuely’s is worth checking out.
By the by, I can’t bring myself to fork out for a subscription to EV. It costs almost as much as the Economist but often reads like a provincial gossip sheet. EU Observer is only available online and seems to draw on a wider pool of commentators.
Statewatch has issued an alert about a proposal of the Italian Presidency under the Schengen accord to use plainclothes police and unmarked cars to deport expelled illegal immigrants. I’m often in agreement with Statewatch’s criticisms of undemocratic and often downright nasty decisions taken under the EU’s Third Pillar of Justice and Home Affairs, but this piece seems hyperbolic and unnecessarily shrill. If a migrant is unlucky enough to be deported, does it really matter if there is a police insignia on the van?
The question is, how to deport from the EU people whose appeals etc. have been heard and who can no longer legally remain? It’s not about immigration policies per se (and I share Statewatch’s general view that these should be more transparent, open, and basically humane than they are.) And it’s not about Justice and Home Affairs Council decisions being secretive, undemocratic and opportunistically used to couch anti-immigrant measures as fighting terrorism. (Altough they often are.) Statewatch is objecting to people being driven to ‘safe’ countries outside the EU in unmarked police vans, and the police being allowed to use reasonable force to prevent them from escaping. But when immigrants are deported on both scheduled and chartered flights, or by other forms of public transport, objections seem just as strong;
“As we going to see people shackled to their seats on public trains and coaches or perhaps trains with “cattle trucks” chugging east, reminiscent of another time?”
In an effort to sell these rather technical legal issue to journalists, it’s understandable that Statewatch indulge in a little hyperbole. But am I alone in finding this allusion over the top and even offensive?
The press release goes on with the kind of soundbite that gives NGOs a bad name;
“This proposal is indicative of a wider question, it is said that the EU tracks the whereabouts of every cow that leaves the Community to counter fraud but it has no idea where those expelled end up, whether they are alive or dead , free or imprisoned, fed or starving. Under this proposal responsibility ends when “the third country national has been finally removed from the territory of the Member States”. Does the EU care more about cattle than people?”
So what is the alternative - to tag people like cattle and track their movements? Obviously not. But this kind of illogical hyperbole draws attention away from the real problem - that political asylum seekers and the stateless are cast into the outer darkness of impoverished ‘safe’ countries - and directs it at a total red herring. Statewatch’s cheap shot makes their criticism easy to deflect.
It is of course true that EU countries are cooperating more and more on immigration (or rather on anti-immigration measures), and forceable deportation is part of that. And it is undoubtedly true that civil society organisations are sidelined when these decisions are taken. But isn’t deportation an inevitable part of having an immigration policy? There are of course valid concerns about the use of unreasonable force and the countries where people are effectively abandoned. But it seems to me that Statewatch won’t come out and say that all deportation is wrong and should be stopped, so instead it makes over the top allusions about the aesthetics of being expelled.
Then again, maybe I’ve missed the point here, and there is something objectively worse about this manner of deportation. But it seems to me that the essential difficulties are with our immigration policies themselves. Don’t blame the messenger, guys.
A puff for one of my other collaborative projects: Imprints. The latest issue is now out and contains much of interest. The online content this time is an interview with Michael Walzer which ranges over many issues: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the morality of humanitarian intervention, Israel and Palestine, anti-Semitism, memories of Rawls and Nozick, the permissibility of torture, blocked exchanges and commodification, the narcissism of Ralph Nader, and much more. Read the whole thing - it is both enlightening and provocative.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing Goodbye Lenin!, especially because I’ll be interested to find out how far the film tallies with my own (admittedly brief) experience of the GDR. I spent a week there in 1984, staying with some medical students in Leipzig whom my girlfriend had made friends with in Hungary on an earlier holiday. They’d been very interested that we thought of ourselves as Trotskyists and we, in turn, were keen to discover what a “deformed workers’ state” (to use the official Trot jargon) was like. At the time (early Thatcherism) Britain was in a real mess, and the claim was frequently made that the GDR had a higher per capita GDP than the UK. So we went there expecting both a somewhat repressive society and one where living standards were similar to our own. So what did we find?
The population, so far as we could tell, was neither fanatically pro-regime nor pro-Western. I remember an elderly woman hearing us talking in English in a cafe and striking up a conversation. She told us that she had spent the Nazi years in Leeds, only returning to Germany with the end of “fascism” as Nazism was universally referred to. I’ve blogged before about our experience of playing a game of Monopoly with our hosts. They certainly didn’t have the capitalist ethos (near bankrupt players could depend on their comrades to bail them out!) and we Western socialists thrashed them easily! At the time, the people I talked to said that they wanted more democracy and political freedom, but not Western-style capitalism. They all seemed moderately hostile to the regime and I remember that there were jokes about people from Dresden being orthodox communists because the Western tv transmitters didn’t reach that far. East Germans were both proud and ignorant of their own history. Leipzigers in particular were proud that their town had witnessed the defiance of Dimitrov, later secretary to the Comintern, who was put on trial by Goering in 1933 (and won). But though they new about the high points of Communist history, they didn’t know much about the lows. My friends knew nothing of the history of the KPD (the pre-war Communist Party) before the Stalinist Thaelmann faction took control in 1927. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were known, of course, but as icons rather than as thinkers (their ideas would have been too radical for the GDR).
The public face of the regime was, of course, everywhere, with many banners and posters vaunting the achievements of the regime and the benefits of “Peace”. We didn’t get to see East German tv until I was in West Berlin (as our friends didn’t have a tv set, and when we did, we saw two programmes: a long (a really long) speech by Chernyenko and a drama about sabotage in a factory making agricultural machinery. As for political repression, I really have very little to say. We know now, of course, that the Stasi kept tabs on pretty much everyone (so I’m sure there was a little file on me somewhere). We misread the conditions of our visa and failed to report to the local police until three days after our arrival. But when we did go, full of trepidation, the policeman was very friendly and relaxed and stamped our passports without making a fuss. One of my student friends, who had been required to read “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (not one of Lenin’s best IMHO) told me that he had asked at the library for a copy of the work to which Lenin’s was a reply (Kautsky’s “The Class Struggle, I think). Although the work was in the catalogue, he was told that he was not permitted to inspect it, let alone borrow it. The same friend also displayed a certain wariness when out in public with us, and on one occasion, when we visited a bar, asked that we remain silent and not speak in English.
It was evident, almost immediately, that East German living standards were way below those of capitalist Britain.There was a terrible selection of consumer goods. There really was not much worth eating in the shops (and endless bottled vegetables), though many East Germans grew their own produce on allotments. Having heard our hosts moan about the difficulty of getting decent food, we were amazed to find a wide range of cheeses for sale. Or so we thought. In the shop, there were packets advertising Rocquefort, Camembert, Brie, Gouda and many other varieties. We bought many packets and took them home to general hilarity: all the packets contained identical processed cheese. Oranges from Cuba did seem to be plentiful (though they were a horrible brown/green colour) and on a trip to the zoo we discovered animals chewing through enormous quantities of turnips. Back at our friends’ place we looked up “turnip” in the German-English dictionary to find it rendered, literally as “animal food”. Clearly there was room for Anglo-German cultural disagreement on what counted as “food”.
The impression of generally poor living standards seemed to extend to housing. Our friends lived in the only inhabited apartment (on their staircase) in a condemned tenement block. One thing that took some getting used to was the toilet facilities. To go, one had to step out into the corridor and into what looked like a cupboard where there was a bench and what seemed to be a saucepan lid. On lifting the lid one was presented with a shute running straight down to the cesspit several floors below from which rose a most appalling stench. I was constipated for days! Apparently, a modern, flushing wc had been scheduled for installation, the parts had been delivered on day 1, but had been stolen by the time the workmen arrived on day 2. Nevertheless, the official records stated that the apartment had been modernised (in this respect, anyway!) and since the records must be right, nothing could now be done.
One day we visited Wittenberg (the town where Luther did all that nailing-to-the-door stuff) and spent a whole morning thinking there was something strange about the place. There was - the silence! Since East Germans had to wait many years to acquire a Trabant (the little state-manufactured car powered by a 2-stroke engine) most did not have one. There was no traffic, and so no traffic noise. On the same day we met an East German teacher of English and her teenage daughter, who were amazed to see Western tourists. I have to say that the teacher’s English was not especially good - but since she had never visited and never could visit an anglophone country, that was not surprising.
There was a definite edginess in the streets in the neighbourhood where our friends lived. We dressed oddly by East German standards and were shouted at by strangers on one occasion. We also witnessed a violent confrontation in front of the main railway station between football fans and police. When we saw gangs of fans in other areas later, we felt pretty nervous.
There are many other things I could mention (the pollution and how bad it was, for one). The main thing to say, though, is that though the GDR was a shoddy and poor place, it was not, at least for most of its history, a place that matches the dystopian fantasy imaged of the communist bloc that one sometimes finds in the blogsphere. There were not, as far as I could tell, widespread disappearances, torture or any of that stuff. Rather, people adjusted, adapted, whispered and grumbled and hoped for better times (though all thought that the wall was there for the rest of their lives). Grim and depressing, sometimes, but this was not Leningrad 1937. It was also a place where people could, on the whole, be pretty certain about the shape their lives would take. Sometimes this meant compromise. My doctor friends wanted to be together and get married, but they knew that there was a danger that once they had passed their exams they would be assigned to different cities. There was some flexibility in the system: you could say where you would prefer to practise. If thet put down a popular city like Berlin, then the likelihood was that they would each be sent to random towns, perhaps at opposite ends of the country. So they chose to go to Chemnitz (or Karl-Marx Stadt), guessing, correctly, that there would be few volunteers for that grim industrial Saxon city. They were right, and they got to stay together.
ADDENDUM: The Financial Times has a review of recent books on the GDR.
Just a quick note; I’ve dumped on the Economist a couple of times in the last few weeks, so I should say that it has an excellent open letter to Silvio Berlusconi on its website today, with a detailed dossier on the various legal controversies that Mr. Berlusconi has become embroiled in. I especially recommend the discussion of Berlusconi’s attempts to smear Romano Prodi to Glenn Reynolds, who may wish to revisit this snarky and unpleasant little post from a couple of months back.
This is something I hope to blog about at greater length sometime in the next few days, as the story develops. Megan McArdle speculates that the Economist’s dossier will cause “a lot of consternation in Italy.” Sadly, I suspect that it won’t have much political effect. Berlusconi’s disinformation machine which has already described the Economist as a Communist publication (sic) after it published a previous article on his shady dealings, and gotten away with it, seems to be gearing itself up again. His company’s lawyers are describing the Economist article as “more of an affront to the true facts and journalistic decency than to the honorable Mr. Berlusconi.” Since Berlusconi has a lock on both public and private tv, his people will be able to spin the dossier as an attack on Italy’s national pride rather than the damning litany of facts that it is. More on this as it develops.
So, Italian tourism minister Stefano Stefani has finally fallen on his sword and apologised for his anti-German comments in defense of Berlusconi. Except that it’s not really an apology at all;
“I love Germany,” Mr Stefani wrote to (German newspaper) Bild. “If, through my words, a misunderstanding resulted for many Germans, I would like to hereby apologise many times.”
Just like his boss, Stefani merely ‘expresses regret’ that the thick headed targets of various insults - ‘Nazi guard’ or “stereotyped blondes with ultra-nationalist pride” who have no sense of humour and pass their time with belching contests - actually interpreted these comments as offensive. It takes a certain amount of pig-headedness to issue an apology that offers fresh insult, but I suppose that’s inevitable when the apology is triggered by political necessity and not genuine remorse.
Marina Warner, in a series of essays for Open Democracy, examines the history and politics of another kind of political apology; the currently trendy apologies made by leaders for long past acts, an easier task than a heartfelt mea culpa for last week’s gaffe. She notes that direct apologies for recent wrongdoings are the only ones that really count, but that they’re mostly in the female preserve. The grand political gestures - Blair’s apology for the Irish Famine, Pope JP II’s millennium apology to women and Jews - may help bind modern day identity politics, but rarely amount to more than words;
“Apologising represents a bid for virtue and can even imply an excuse not to do anything more about the injustice in question. Encurled inside it may well be the earlier meaning of vindication. So it can offer hypocrites a main chance. It can also, as in the case of the priestly self-fashioning of some political leaders, make a claim on their own behalf for some sacred, legitimate authority.”
So it seems that we may have to wait a century or two for our friends at Forza Italia to (hypocritically) bend the knee.
Via Harry Hatchet, this piece by Libertarian Samizdata’s Andy Duncan on the new European Union (EU) requirement that all businesses with more than 50 employees have work councils. Duncan (and Perry de Havilland in comments) see this as a step on the path to compulsory workers’ Soviets, and the subjugation of employers to their paid employees. Compare this however, with the Socialist Worker Party’s rather different take on the EU. The SWP claims that the EU is all about creating a “bosses’ Europe,” which allows “market forces to let rip.”
Now clearly, both can’t be correct. Either the EU is a worker’s paradise in the making or it’s a playground for global capital. So who’s right? In one sense, of course, neither; they’re both exaggerating for effect. But the Socialist Worker crowd are probably closer to the truth than the British libertarians. Like it, or like it not, the European Union’s driving force is market creation.
Wolfgang Streeck provides a good account of the reasons why, in this paper on industrial relations in the EU (readers be warned: Streeck has a distracting fondness for italics). As he says, major changes within the European Union require the consensus of all fifteen member states, especially when they touch upon sensitive issues such as workers’ rights and the organization of companies. It’s rather difficult for all fifteen to reach agreement on any but the most anodyne proposals in these areas (the workers’ councils in the Directive are rather limp by comparison with their German equivalents). In contrast, member states do usually agree that market integration is a good thing; they’re more likely to reach consensus quickly on measures that promote liberalization. Thus, proposals for works councils and the like get trapped in the legislative pipeline for decades, and finally emerge (if they do emerge) as pale and stunted things, blinking in the sunlight. Proposals to liberalize markets, in contrast, are usually (though not always) easier for member states to reach agreement on; they come out of the process as altogether beefier creatures. The bosses don’t have much to be worried about.
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