After Spain’s post-national elections, Poland is shaping up to be another case of post-national democracy in Europe: the Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk turned up in London this weekend to launch a campaign swing pitching for the votes of thousands of Polish expatriates. The polls suggest the Poles are quite narrowly divided; the contribution of [...]

At long last Amazon has brought me something I’ve sought for a long time: Friedrich Reck’s Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten. Reck (or Reck-Malleczewen, as he sometimes styled himself) is a footnote to the history of the Third Reich; but an interesting and important footnote.
Born in Prussia into the minor landed gentry, Reck never quite fulfilled what [...]

Well this is a rather frivolous post about a fairly serious issue. Has anyone seen Trichet? (No, not Kelly, Trichet). I imagine the financial markets would like to know what he thinks. Or rather, maybe they wouldn’t, but they need to.
Basically this isn’t a case of quietly fiddling while Rome burns (and Q2 GDP, and [...]

Chris Dillow (of Stumbling and Mumbling), responding to Gordon Brown’s recent speech to the Labour Party, says that “economic success requires that talent not be unlocked, and remain unused”. So Brown’s call for the development of “all the talents of all the people” is “purest wibble” because “all profits come from power, and this means [...]

Various things about Transnistria that didn’t fit in the previous post. If you don’t find this sort of thing interesting, don’t hit that link.

Read more… or Read more right here… »

1) Transnistria is [...]

As soon as I have some time I shall write a follow-up to Ingrid Robeyns’ post at Crooked Timber on the current political crisis in Belgium and talk a bit about the importance of the Dutch language to Flemish native speakers of Dutch. I am still looking for the right angle to the story and [...]

Jean Baudrillard died recently and the obits - this one in particular - persuaded me to give his writing a try, starting with The System of Objects (1968) which addresses the interaction of the technical and the cultural. In conversation with Steven Poole a few years ago, Baudrillard said - apparently of this book - ‘I did this critique of technology, but I would not do that any more. I am not nostalgic. I would not oppose liberty and human rights to this technical world’.

The System of Objects is aphorism dense. It is also somewhat puritanical. An example of the first:

The fact is, however, that automating machines means sacrificing a very great deal of potential functionality. in order to automate a practical object, it is necessary to stereotype it in it function, thus making it more fragile … so long as an object has not been automated it remains susceptible of redesign …

And an example of the moralising:

… sexual perversion is founded on the inability to apprehend the other qua object of desire in his or her unique totality as a person … the other is transformed into the paradigm of various eroticised parts of the body, a single one of which becomes the focus of objectification.

Quietly, there seems to be a tiny crisis affecting European politics. For a start, there’s the rocambolesque imbroglio making Belgium a generic cynosure. It would be hard to do better than to point again to Crooked Timber, although it’s worth pointing out that Jean Quatremer is doing a good job too. I especially like the [...]

is updated in this post from Ingrid Robeyns.
America’s founding fathers didn’t want the capital to be in New York or Virginia, so they invented Washington, DC. The EU’s founders didn’t their headquarters in France or Germany and chose Brussels. Whether there’s a lesson in there is hard to say.

Spent a weekend in Nagorno-Karabakh last month.
If you don’t know what or where Nagorno-Karabakh is… well, that’s healthy and normal. Most people don’t. But it’s pretty interesting, in a depressing sort of way.
When the Soviet Union broke up, it left a number of unresolved ethnic and territorial conflicts around its old frontiers. [...]