Tell Me Why

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Tell me why I should be bothered about ‘x’. This is an agument you often hear when proactive policies are proposed in connection with looming problems. Well a good example comes to mind today. The arrest in June on a Belgrade railway station of Abdelmajid Bouchar, a Moroccan, wanted by Spanish police for alleged involvement in last year’s Madrid bombings draws attention to the way some Balkan states can be used as ‘safe havens’ by would be terrorists. Of course there are many reasons why we need a Balkans policy in the EU, but if self-interest is what moves you, then here’s an important one.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

2 thoughts on “Tell Me Why”

  1. If you are really serious about counterterrorism you must withdraw. A foreign army maintaining anything close to decent humanitarian standards will never be effective in a role that essentially depends on intellegence.

  2. Umm, the reason there is no coherent Balkan policy in the EU is because the different Balkan countries want different things. For example, Greece and France are very pro-Serbian and anti-Muslim, so they want certain things, but this brings them into conflict with Germany and Austria who are more pro-Croatian and pro-Muslim.

    Until this essential viewpoints are resolved, there can’t be a common, proactive EU Balkan policy. Note that the reactive EU Balkan policy worked reasonably well in Macedonia.

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