Author Archives: Scott Martens

About Scott Martens

Scott is a US-raised Canadian living in Brussels with his American wife. His political background is well to the left of centre, even for Europe, and is very interested in immigration, cultural integration and language policy issues. He is presently working against a deadline on his doctorate in computational linguistics and is on hiatus. Wrote Pedantry, also on hiatus.

Peace in our time

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Osama bin Laden’s new taped message has been getting a lot of airplay. I can’t quite see why. The only thing I find interesting about it is that he sent it to Al-Arabiya as well as Al-Jazeera, suggesting that he’s broadening his media channel. The idea that he had any intent or power to offer Europe any kind of truce, or that there there was ever any real prospect of European nations going along with it, is just too silly for words.

The core, essential, fundamental truth about terrorism is that it is a media strategy above all else. If terrorists could actually strike strategic targets, they wouldn’t have to be terrorists in order to further their aims. Von Clausewitz said that “war is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.” Well, terrorism is also the continuation of politics by other means. Both are about the application of violence to gain political goals, but while ordinary war is about the direct effects of organised violence on the military, economic and political structures of the state, terrorism is about the psychological effects of violence, particularly through mass fear.

A lot of people do get that, but they don’t seem to understand that this same logic applies to anti-terrorism. It is no less a matter of media strategy than terrorism is.
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Quand Jimmy Dit…

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Quand Jimmy dit what’d I say?

I love you baby!

C’est comme qui dirait

Toute la province qui chante en anglais

Brussels’ newspaper of record, the centre-right Le Soir, is running a series of articles in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of rock. Among other things, they’ve published lists of their choices for the best rock albums ever, divided into two time periods: 1954-1979 and 1980-2004.

I have a lot of sympathy for those music critics inclined to think that rock died with the break-up of the Beatles and it would be better if we forgot about the “Rock revivial” of the 80s and called the rest of the stuff labelled as “rock” something else. But, that doesn’t seem to be the common usage. Rock seems to mean pop music that isn’t folk, isn’t country, isn’t rap or hip-hop, and isn’t disco, dance, techno or electronica. It seems to include punk and grunge according to Le Soir.

Okay, it’s fuzzy definition. I can live with that. But what struck me is that on the entire list – over 150 albums – all of three are not in English: Serge Gainsbourg’s L’histoire de Melody Nelson, Noir Désir’s Tostaky and The Buena Vista Social Club. The last one I wouldn’t even have thought was rock.

Good ol’fashioned Rock’n'Roll was very much an Anglo phenomenon, but if they’re going to include some of the stuff on that list as rock then we’re not really talking about classic rock, we’re talking about a broad swath of pop. And, if that is the case, there ought to be some more music from outside of Anglo-American pop. I mean really – Noir Désir’s worst album is still better than Terence Trent D’Arby, who still makes the list.

Since we’re something of a Euroblog here, I think we ought to try to promote European culture. So, I’m putting out a call to our readers: We at AFOE are looking for the best in post-war non-Anglo music. Go look at the lists at Le Soir name a few albums that at least are primarily in a European language other than English that were reasonably popular and well known at least in one country in Europe and deserve to be on a best albums list.

Since rock is so hard to define, I’m willing to loosen the criteria to anything that is genuinely well known. Readers should be able to come here and make a shopping list if they want exposure to the best outside of “international” anglo pop.

Let me start with some nominations off the top of my head:

L’Autre and Ainsi soit je.. – Mylène Farmer
The No Comprendo – Les Rita Mitsouko
Mademoiselle Chante… and Scène de Vie – Patricia Kaas

I mostly know French music from my distant and misspent youth and don’t actualy have very much of it. What I want to see is a list of the very best albums that you’ll have a hell of a time getting at a record store outside of continental Europe, so that I and any other interested readers out there, can buy them if they’re interested. Think of it as the opposite of the Eurosong contest – a search for Euro-non-schlock.
 

The non-threat of an Islamic France

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Randy MacDonald has dropped a line pointing to an excellent and well-researched post on the demographics of Islam in France. You can read it at his livejournal site. In particular, he does something interesting in this debate – actually goes to INSEE (the French census and statistics office) and gets figures. I note particularly the following:

If [the French Muslim] population grew for the next 50 years at a rate of 2% per annum (a high rate, and one that doesn’t seem to be supported by signs of an ongoing demographic transition), while the remainder of the population shrunk at a rate of 0.5% per annum (also a high rate of decrease, and one that doesn’t seem likely to be achieved for a while given generally high French fertility rates), at the end of this 50 year period the total French population would have shrunk by 9%, and France’s Muslim population would amount to roughly one-fifth of the total. You’d have to wait for a century to approach a position of parity between the two populations, assuming the same unrealistic growth rates. This is definitely not any sort of imminent threat [...]

[Translated from an INSEE report in French] As in 1990, foreigners living in France in 1999 have on average three children. The Spanish and Italians have fewer children than Frenchwoman, and Africans remain the most fertile. The older the immigration, the closer the behaviour of the foreigners is close to that of Frenchwomen. Like the French, the foreigners become mothers later than before. The schedule of births of Algerians and Moroccans, already close to that of Frenchwomen, has changed little. That of Tunisians approaches that of Frenchwomen. [...]

French Muslims can, in theory, respond to the erosion of their ancestral cultures by trying to create a self-consciously “French” Muslim culture, trying to counterbalance the need for religious solidarity and respect for tradition with the need to deal with French culture. Indeed, the French government’s promotion of community religious organizations is part of an effort to construct just such a community. Still, building a culture from scratch is always more costly than assimilating into a culture that already exists and pervades your lives, like that of mainstream France.

By all accounts, they respond enthusiastically to opportunities of assimilation. INED’s fascinating statistics on language dynamics in France demonstrate, for instance, that most speakers of Arabic and Berber don’t pass on their languages to their children. The rising generation’s lack of native fluency in languages other than French isn’t a bar to communication with the wider Muslim world, given la francophonie and the possibility that Arabic might be learned by these French Muslims as adults. Language, though, is something critically important to the retention of ethnic identity; indeed, Islam places the highest importance on Muslim believers learning Arabic, so that they can understand the sacred texts of Islam.

Randy goes on to point out that the so-called threat of Islamisation is even weaker in the rest of Europe. I recommend going and reading the whole thing.

My only point of difference is that I think the French Muslim community is likely to sustain itself as a constructed French Islam, one with fewer elements of an ethnic identity and more along the lines of France’s other minority religions. In modern France, someone who wants, for whatever reason, to be religious is only being barely more contrarian by choosing Islam instead of Catholicism. Thus, I expect to see children and grandchildren of mixed-background homes adopting Islam. I think that one of the things that is different about the 21st century is that while Randy is right to highlight the cost of building new cultural frameworks rather than assimilating, I think the costs are far smaller than they were a generation ago.
 

Joogling and lexicological engineering

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A number of blogs – enough that I doubt that I need to link to them – are trying to modify the top result of Google searches for the word Jew by pointing to the relevant entry in Wikipedia rather than the previous top response, an anti-semitic website which we will not be linking to.

I doubt that I will face any objections from the other bloggers here by joining in. By all evidence, the effort has been successful.

However, I should note that the problem is primarily lexicological.
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Means and Ends

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I have not had a lot of blogging time lately, as a check of the archives will reveal. Since taking the King’s coin to do translation research, I’ve been waist-deep in the ugly, practical, code-in-the-compiler end of algorithmic information theory. What I had taken to be a very clean and simple application of a very elementary mathematical proposition, on which I hung some bells and whistles to make it look impressive, has some actual programming consequences which are quite challenging.

It’ll all work. My math is sound and my preliminary returns are excellent. This is, after all, a reseach project. Doing this is how we find out what we didn’t think of when we started.

But, in conjunction with my class load, this means I have not been able to blog much, or even follow the news closely. I apologise for this to all my comrades in blogging here at AFOE. However, my long commute has given me a good deal of time to read. I am currently reading a fascinating but long out of print book which I have tried for quite a long time to find and recently acquired through Ebay: The New Class by Milovan Djilas.
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Regional Elections in France: The UMP takes a hit

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Yesterday was regional elections day in France. France has not traditionally had any strong local government structure – one of the first acts of the revolution was the abolition of the old provinces and their replacement with purely administrative “departments.” However, the last 20 years have seen radical changes in the way French government is structured and the EU in particular has been a big force in decentralising the French state. The creation of the regions in 1982 was motivated by a desire to create institutions able to participate in partnering programmes with German Länder, particularly programmes subsidised by the EU. However, they have since taken on a life of their own. France is a quite diverse country on the ground and it has a number of long-standing problems related to regional differences.

So, although the regions are still not very powerful in comparison to the central state, they have been growing in power, particularly in areas that are culturally or economically outside of the core of the French state – Corsica, Alsace, Brittany and the overseas territories in particular. A number of significant powers over regional economic development and education are shared with the regions.
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Poland to withdraw from Iraq

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AP is running a report that Poland’s president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, will withdraw Polish troops from Iraq.

President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a key Washington ally, said Thursday he may withdraw troops early from Iraq and that Poland was “misled” about the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

His remarks to a small group of European reporters were his first hint of criticism about war in Iraq, where Poland currently has 2,400 troops and with the United States and Britain commands one of three sectors of the U.S.-led occupation.

“Naturally, one may protest the reasons for the war action in Iraq. I personally think that today, Iraq without Saddam Hussein is a truly better Iraq than with Saddam Hussein,” Kwasniewski told the European reporters.

“But naturally I also feel uncomfortable due to the fact that we were misled with the information on weapons of mass destruction,” he said, according to a transcript released by the presidential press office.

Earlier in the day, Kwasniewski said Poland may start withdrawing its troops from Iraq early next year, months earlier than the previously stated date of mid-2005. He cited progress toward stabilizing Iraq.

That’s two allies in two weeks for George W. Bush – and in the run-up to the election too. So much for support from “New Europe.” Spain and Poland are the only non-Anglo nations sending any meaningful number of actual troops.
 

Les chercheurs n’y ont rien ? perdre que leurs cha?nes.

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The great leftist protest movements of the past have often involved a certain questionable division of labour. The workers march and the academics think. Well, I guess France has always been a bit different.

First, Les Inrockuptibles circulates an Appel contre la guerre ? l’intelligence (Petition against the war on intelligence), accusing the Raffarin government of dumbing down French society and offering, among other things, the headscarf debate as an example. Now, it seems that the French primeminister has bugged enough of France’s academics that they are now planning on doing some marching of their own.
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At least no one can accuse me of being knee-jerk pro-French

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My goodness, talking about the headscarf law has brought up some interesting discussion on the blogs. It appears that my mistake was to think that this was ever about improving the lives of Muslim girls. From the responses there is one thing that is clear – this law is about legislating conformity.

For example, from Lilli Marleen:

So who is wetting their pants about what French do in their schools and Germany – hopefully – will do soon after? The girls can go to school, all they have to do is to behave like anyone else.

I’m sure that will make a stirring addition to the EU constitution: You have the right to be just like everyone else, especially if you’re under age. Any failure to take advantage of this right will be punished in the law. It is exactly this sentiment that leads people to think xenophobia towards non-Europeans is a deep seated problem.
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