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.
From the category archives:
European Politics
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:
bq. 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 )
“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000662.html points to this developing “story”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059479073692&p=1012571727102 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.
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?
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?
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”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1939979 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”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1936286 to Glenn Reynolds, who may wish to revisit this snarky and unpleasant little “post”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/009356.php#009356 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”:http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004306.html 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”:http://www.repubblica.it/2003/h/sezioni/politica/economist/azionilegali/azionilegali.html 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”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2003/07/07/talking_bloggocks_2.php, this “piece”:http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/003862.html#003862 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”:http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/1853/sw185312.htm 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”:http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp98-2.pdf 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.