Maria

A while back, I read Mark Leonard’s ‘Why Europe will run the 21st century’ . I enjoyed his defense of the insidious usefulness of soft power, even if I found myself feeling a lot less sanguine about its potential limits. A short piece about Uzbekistan in yesterday’s Financial Times snapped those limits sharply into focus.

Next Monday, the European General Affairs and External Relations Council (GAERC) will formally impose sanctions on Uzbekistan, almost five months after the massacre of protesting citizens in Andijan. What devastating blow will the GAERC deliver to the regime that slaughters protestors in their hundreds and boils dissidents alive? We will reduce the tiny amount of aid we now give Uzbekistan (about 8 million Euro p.a.), impose an arms embargo (though we sell them hardly any already), and stop issuing visas for ministers’ wives’ shopping trips to Paris. Soft power indeed.

The FT quotes a European diplomat saying “We’ve taken strong and determined actions which leave the Uzbeks in no doubt as to the strong feelings of the EU.” However, the Uzbek government already knew just how strongly the EU feels about its most recent actions and long decline into unapologetic authoritarianism. And it has known for a very long time that the EU has no bargaining or coercive power to effect any real change in Uzbekistan. [click to continue…]

The European Parliament has just launched a fantastic new website that should be a model for any similar organisation. It has a snappy design, great navigability, and the breadth and depth to accommodate casual surfers and political hacks. The news page is particularly inviting and informative, and gives a sense of the sheer range and volume of vital issues going through parliament at any given moment. You can look up MEPs’ motions, resolutions and reports (a feature sorely missing from the old website), and also get a live video stream of the main parliamentary events of the day. There was a roundtable discussion on blogging on Monday that looked interesting – but they don’t seem to be archiving this stuff yet (I’ve emailed a question to the webmaster and will post the response in the comments thread if I get one soon enough.). Oh, and it’s available in 20 languages too.

I hope the EP can keep up the work to sustain this enormous but beautifully user-friendly website. It’s a huge step in keeping the institution closer to the people it serves. Next time you meet someone who says it’s all just too complicated and impossible to follow, give them this url. There are no more excuses for being unengaged.

Update: Oh dear, the English version homepage of the website is unavailable – teething problems, I presume. Deep links still work, so I’ve replaced the two links in this piece to the EP homepage with one to an internal page.

The Hurricane Katrina disaster and looming political crisis aren’t easy for an outsider to decipher. But we do have one advantage; not having believed in many American myths in the first place. For starters, the myth that the US is a generous and free country where anyone can achieve almost anything. [click to continue…]

As I was sucking back my daily dose of Starbucks and Ask Amy this morning and feeling amiably distant from all things European, I came across a problem that Amy described as Dickensian. The dilemma – a comfortably-off American couple with no grandchildren who wish to lavish affection and a college fund on their cleaner’s daughter – is in fact more accurately in the mode of Jane Austen. Then, scrolling down the page, I found another letter to Amy from no less a personage than the president of the Jane Austen Society of North America who congratulated Amy for recommending Emma to a previous reader. If Amy had taken her own advice, and read Mansfield Park before she advised the petitioning would-be grandmother to get counseling, she might have answered differently.

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Belle is rightly indignant about fathers put off sex by witnessing the birth of their children, and asks if there is such a thing as childbirth porn. There is. Well, in the sense that Mills & Boon and other softly-softly girl-targetted erotic fiction can be called porn, there also exists an analogous form of childbirth porn. I should know.
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Today’s NY Times and Washington Post both carry prominent articles saying London is, and has for some time been, a hot bed of terrorists. Let’s leave aside for today all the arguments about how to fight terrorism in a democratic state. Implicitly blaming London and Londoners for last week’s atrocity is in rather poor taste. Yes, there’ll need to be analysis, discussion and perhaps further refinement of how the UK deals with domestic terrorism. But for today, let’s put the shoe on the other foot. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, people who tried to blame the US for attacks against it were rightly condemned. So let’s have a little equal treatment, please, a little respect. At least till the bodies are buried.

Les rosbifs ont gagne! London has beaten Paris to host the 2012 Olympics. I’m amazed at how happy this makes me. The last two cities I lived in were London and Paris, so for a while there I couldn’t decide which I preferred for the games. Before this week, I was a firm supporter of the Paris bid, believing the city to be far superior to London in infrastructure and the centralised sheer force of will it must take to pull off this event with real panache. I thought (and probably still think) that the construction and transport hell London’s bid involve make it a painful undertaking for Londoners – but no better city to get behind every obscure new sport, every under-dog, and make it an event the whole city mucks in to, with more colour, more culture, a few sharp edges and a hell of a lot more fun.

Dervala has the most beautiful, true and hair-raisingly universal (if you’re Irish) essay on the Leaving Cert, the quintessentially Irish right of passage, the Murder Machine, or, as I knew it at the time, The High Jump. I did the Leaving the same year Dervala did, and I could have written this piece myself. Except that I couldn’t. It’s just so well-written it feels like that, capturing hauntingly what it was to be 17 and have your dreams channelled through the points system and your entire life blocked off by an enormous obstacle/national obsession. And the sheer finality of it all:

“For two years we consumed seven subjects. Over a June fortnight, we regurgitated this knowledge into thirty hours worth of essays and proofs. The first day, we might dispatch Yeats, Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, and Shakespeare for good, and then choose from a list of titles the last original essay composition we would ever write. The next day, we would think about calculus, trigonometry, and quadratic equations—intensely, for six hours, and for the very last time.”

The LC marks you for life. I still dream every few months that I’m repeating it, especially when the weather starts to get warm and over-achievers’ happy little thoughts are inexplicably tinged with guilt.

Speaking of the weird things people do when summer finally comes to Belgium, two friends recently went to a community fair in one of Brussels’ rougher communes; Schaerbeek. Instead of jam stalls and face painting, they found tables full of rifles for purchase by all comers. Not Very European! And for family entertainment – one man was covered in heavy padding and put in an enclosure while another goaded a german shepherd with a stick and set him on the first man. Everyone clapped.

The fairs in the city are much nicer, though – and on a Sunday here you can’t walk half a mile without encountering one. Or a tiny, hidden park, or a humbly gorgeous art nouveau facade in an un-prepossessing street. I’m starting to think that Brussels, not Paris, is the true city of the flaneur.

EU Foreign ministers decided today in Luxembourg to recognise Irish as an official language of the European Union. Why, oh why? I won’t rehearse last year’s arguments for how pathetic and grasping this makes us look. But I will ask; how many of our MEPs now plan to change from using English to Irish in the European Parliament?

The only sensible part of the Fine Gael press release – which mostly gloated that a concession made by Fianna Fail in 1972 had been won back – was the following; “We must not be deflected from the challenges and difficulties facing the Irish language, as indicated by recent surveys and reports, and regardless of its status at EU level, preserving the language has to begin at home.”

Pity they didn’t think of that before chomping rudely into this piece of overdone pork.

Why I’m a little irritated with France:
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Via my eagle-eyed (make that obsessive) little sister Nelly, here is the fantastic news that George R. R. Martin has finally finished the long-awaited 4th book in his Ice and Fire series. Kind of.

Feast is now too long to publish in one book, so it’s being cut in half. But instead of going half way through the story with the full cast of characters, Martin is taking half of the characters (the Westeros based ones) through the whole story and then publishing the other half’s (Dany & co. and probably Tyrion’s) stories in the next book. This should make things even more interesting, I think, and even a tad more post-modern.

Much of the fun in this series has been in re-reading and discussing the books to piece together the real story from what’s unsaid or only hinted at in each narrative. The key elements of the plot-driving back story are either assumed by all and never stated, or known only to dead characters. This time round, the wait for the other half of the same story will be madly tantalising and great speculative fun as we are frog-marched half-blind through the book, wondering what is happening in the other camps. Martin is still only half-way through the second installation, which gives the opportunity for some nice play between the storylines. No better man for it.

But first. The Economist’s new venture is “an inspirational lifestyle magazine which instead of helping readers make decisions in their professional life, helps them do the same in their personal life”.

“Take white-collar boxing – the latest stress reliever for Wall Street and City elite. Tired of punching a bag at the gym, they have now moved on to punching each other in front of a paying audience. If smacking around your colleagues doesn’t sound appealing, how about brushing up on your space travel tips so you can be first in line to book your space flight? If all that sounds too strenuous, check out the dos and don’ts of selecting massage therapy. Other articles include the latest on gadgets, health innovations, luxury items and how to order your own bespoke car.”

I suppose they forgot the first rule, that we don’t talk about fight club. And also the part about status-seeking through rampant consumerism being a bit of a trap. Especially if you just acquire the same crap everyone else has. Which you will if you buy this magazine. Worth noting if you’re one of today’s busy global managers and hoped Intelligent Life would give you an executive summary of all that culture stuff.

Just by the by, commenters on last week’s Exit, voice, loyalty thread who wanted to be deleted from the baptismal register of their churches may be interested in a 2003 ruling by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. A man contacted the parish priest asking to have his name removed from the baptismal register, saying he had been enrolled in the church against his will and did not want the church to keep any of his personal data.

The priest found no record of the baptism – the man was living in Holland and seems to have had bad information – but suggested that a reasonable solution would in any case be to add a note to the record saying the man no longer wished to be associated with the Catholic church. The Data Protection Commissioner agreed, finding the priest’s suggestion both appropriate and considerate, and noting that the register was a factual statement of an event. Which seems fair enough from the data protection point of view, but probably no consolation to people baptised as Catholics who do not wish to be counted as such.

As to myself, I figure I’m better off inside the tent, pissing in. I did perform an act of protest, though. The day after Benedict XVI’s election as pope, I took out my shortest skirt, pulled on my highest heeled FMBs, and flounced the mile and half to work. It was one just as (in)effective as anything else I could think of and made road-crossing surprisingly easy.

So, let’s assume for a moment that you had a real personal stake in who became next pope and are beyond horrified at the ‘election’ of Ratzinger. Let’s also assume you go to Mass on a fairly regular basis (though maybe you haven’t been to confession since you were a teenager…), and know that from now on, you’ll be asked every week to pray for his holiness, Pope Palpatine, sorry, Benedixt XVI. And that’s the easy bit.

I’ll take it that you know there is no way for a mere lay person, and a woman at that, to have any real voice in the doctrinal decisions of the church. And also that loyalty can only mean the lie of silent apostasy. Is exit the only option?