Category Archives: France

Steinbruck twisting in the wind…

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German finance minister Peer Steinbrück has made some enemies lately, giving an interview in which he accused the UK of “crass Keynesianism” and complained that it had spent so many years lecturing the rest of the EU about fiscal rectitude. The last bit’s pretty cheeky from a German finance minister, after all those years of Hans Eichel and the Bundesbank directors wagging their fingers at those irresponsible southerners, but let’s let it pass. Steinbrück got called into the British embassy, but very soon he had more serious problems.

Let’s stop and think about this for a moment; what were his motivations? The first thing to remember is that an EU member state spends on average about 20% of GDP on imports from other members. The second is that industrial exports make up a really big chunk of the German economy. So if you’re Germany, and you don’t think the recession will be quite that bad, there’s an argument for sitting tight and enjoying about 20% of everyone else’s fiscal stimulus. Obviously the net leakage will vary depending on the exact details; a consumer-side stimulus like the UK one will probably leak more, a public works one like the French rather less, in so far as it’s labour-intensive and therefore nontradable. If, however, it involves buying a lot of Repower wind turbines, QCells solar panels, or Siemens trains and control electronics, well, perhaps not so much.

And arguably the UK consumer sector is less likely to import from Germany than it is from the world dollar zone, specifically China. The main exception is cars, but new car purchases are almost all on credit, and the sector is currently credit-rationed. So perhaps he was talking his own book? Surely, however, in this case he wouldn’t have attacked the stimulus in general. Another possibility is that he’s thinking of German politics. The more the rest of Europe stimulates, the more pressure on Steinbrück to do likewise – from the coalition partners, from the French, and from the SPD membership. After all, down at the provincial level, there have been rumblings for weeks about the NRW state government buying into the Opel plants if GM goes bust; the car industry is hugely important and it’s in deep trouble.

The French. Well, as Le Monde reports, Germany is being placed under intense diplomatic pressure by France and the UK. It’s a little-remarked on aspect of the crisis that Anglo-French relations have become very good, a continuation of a Blair government trend. Politically, it’s much more acceptable for a German government minister to have a public row with the British – but as the Le Monde article makes clear, there is considerable tension between France and Germany. So much so that Merkel publicly reiterated a commitment to Europeanness in a recent press conference.

So why is he clinging to the point? Probably because he wants to go into an election with a balanced or close to balanced budget as an accomplishment he can stick a big red SPD flag in, and not incidentally, write his name on. This implies he’s thinking of fighting the election across the centre ground, trying to score off the CDU and FDP, rather than trying to regain ground from the Left. But is this at all realistic? In an interview with Der Spiegel, none other than Paul Krugman declared that both Steinbrück and Angela Merkel have underestimated the seriousness of the situation. Der Spiegel also claims that the government is expecting a deficit of 3% of GDP. Elsewhere, on his own weblog, Krugman deployed the ultimate economic rhetorical weapon – The Economic Consequences of Herr Steinbrück, no less. Meanwhile, the chief economist of the OECD chipped in as well.

The upshot? What have we here? A €30bn German fiscal shot is apparently being prepared; note that the work is going on between Merkel’s office, the (conservative) Minister of the Economy, and the coalition partners, cutting Steinbrück and the Finance Ministry out of the process. Of course, he retains the power of the purse, but then, Merkel retains the Richtlinienkompetenz and could stick a directive down his shirt front. (Which appears to be what Nicolas Sarkozy is expecting.) Or he could be sacked. Either course would leave the SPD faced with a choice between its cabinet-level leaders and its membership; fighting for Steinbrück’s authority could involve fighting an election on a promise of fiscal restriction, just as millions of IG-Metall members are terrified of losing their jobs.

After all, down in the microeconomy, BMW is about to offer emergency funding to its suppliers and dealerships in an effort to prevent a wave of bankruptcies. ZF, the gearbox maker, is worried both about its unpaid bills from the car makers and also about the availability of credit to its subcontractors. Today’s meeting at the Kanzleramt looks like it’s going to be tasty, to say the least.

A Fistful of Diamonds

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More like a bag, or indeed several.

Armed robbers pulled off one of the world’s biggest jewellery heists at a famed Paris store, making off with 85 million euros (107 million dollars) in diamonds and valuables, officials said Friday.

A gang of four thieves — two of them disguised as women — on Thursday stole nearly all the jewels on display at the Harry Winston boutique just off the Champs-Elysees avenue, which attracts a wealthy international clientele. …

Or maybe it’s an economic stimulus package?

One Hour, Four Minutes and Ninety Years Ago

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The guns of Europe fell silent as the Armistice took hold.

Not everywhere, of course. Fighting continued in revolutionary Germany and Russia, in the remains of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and in other places whose history I don’t know well enough to cite here.

Death and destruction were meted out on a scale that is still difficult to fathom. On the columns of the memorial at Thiepval are carved the names of more than 70,000 Allied soldiers who fell in the area between July and November 1916, and who have no known grave. I was pointed to the photo by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, whose excellent posts on successive Armistice Days are moving, full of informative links and followed by astute commentary.

Though the events themselves are passing from living memory, the world shaped by the war is still all around us.

Update: Two more from TNH, 2002 and 2008.

Keynesian Sarko

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It has come to this. Does anyone remember Nicolas Sarkozy of a year ago? Back then he was being feted by the anglospheric media as a French Thatcher, a neoliberal wind of change shaking a battery of outdated perceptions to its heart and mixing a few other metaphors whilst they were at it. We blogged a certain amount about how vacuous so much of this was; France, after all, did indeed go through a fearfully tough industrial restructuring in the 1980s, apparently entirely unnoticed by the media establishment. Its economic problems simply are not those of Britain in the early 1980s; anyway, a lot of people are now busy amending the level of confidence they have that those solutions were appropriate at all. (This London Review of Books article is required reading.)

Without the original radical-right dream, which had little enough substance to begin with, the Sarko presidency basically returned to its default settings and ran on under automatic control. Now, however, the banking crisis has given him a new dose of authority, much as it has to Gordon Brown; but nobody is talking about making everyone work more hours, or facing down the trade unions, now. Instead, Sarko has found his inner Gaullist; perhaps it was never so far away. Here’s the German newspaper whose website is slightly better organised these days; the factoid is that the prez wants to set up a state investment fund to buy into “strategic” industries, as part of a broader reflation strategy for which he intends to bring forward a lot of capital expenditure projects and cut taxes on business.

(Remember when “les caisses sont vides!” and scares based on funny figures were the order of the day? As Max Sawicky so wisely put it, there are no atheists in foxholes; we are all Keynesians again now.)

There’s more detail in Le Monde; especially, there’s one specific detail we’ll have to come back to. A lot of people have greeted the news of the fund with a certain degree of nonsurprise. Since when hasn’t the French government taken stakes (and influence) in “strategic” industries? The new fund will be managed by the CDC, the state-owned bank which exists to, well, invest in strategic industries. It’s no great surprise that the Germans, and specifically the CDU, are suspicious to critical at what they probably think is an invitation to put their money into the French military-industrial complex.

There is certainly a very traditional look to some of this proposal; the prime minister has ordered all the 93 prefects to hold monthly meetings with banks and enterprises on their turf to ensure the availability of credit, which as well as being suitably Bonapartist also reminds me of the passage in J.K. Galbraith’s The Great Crash about the importance of meetings that are held to do no business. Handelsblatt‘s blog duly hands out the pious opposition; they even descend low enough to say such things should be left to Russia.

But there’s an interesting detail in the Le Monde version which no-one else seems to have picked up; rather than Alstom, Alcatel, Thales, EADS etc, this new fund is meant to buy into small and medium-sized companies, which makes it considerably less of a classic military-industrial stitchup. That, at least, suggests that this project or perhaps this one might not be beyond its scope.

Over and beyond this, Sarkozy has revived the regular French suggestion of an “economic government” for the EU, or the Eurozone. Now, my problem with this has always been that the EU already has an economic government; it’s called the European Commission. However you cut it, it’s a governmental institution, and the great majority of its functions are economic; which goes double, as the economic functions are the ones in which it has exclusive jurisdiction. The usual suspects are delighted by this, and by the fact that there has been a summit meeting of Eurozone members. Oddly, they don’t seem to say much about the fact it was bookended by full European Council meetings, or that the plan it adopted originated in the UK, although much if not all of its content originated with VOXEU academics.

You could often get the impression that if the conversion of Europe into a single state occurred tomorrow, there are quite a lot of important people in France who would welcome it as a chance to call a Eurogroup summit meeting, such is the obsession. And there is no reason why they shouldn’t have it; after all, as the usual suspects point out, all it amounts to is a “point of contact”. However, one thing the crisis has shown up is that there isn’t a sensible economic distinction between the EU and the Eurozone; problems blow up in one and pass straight into the other, as do solutions.

Of course, the real difference between the Commission and an “economic government” is economic; it’s the member states who have serious money available, the Commission’s budget power being further restricted by its mandates under the CAP. And the upshot has been that no-one has really looked to the Commission for anything much in the crisis; it’s been either the ECB, or else the intergovernmental wiring that gets used. If they want to be relevant, now’s the time to put the Commission’s money where its mouth is and back something like the Sarkofund. If you want a soundbite, perhaps it’s time for it to move from funding the transition to membership to funding the transition…to the future! Corny!

This Weekend in Thrilling European Administration

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There are essentially two basic critiques of the EU’s institutions; one is the classic, Monnet/Schuman house ideology view that its problems are simply because there isn’t enough of it. If it was more like the US federal government, it would work better; and, as we designed it to get more like that, it must be somebody’s fault. The British are usually the somebody, but Italy, Spain, Germany, and the new members are all candidates.

The other one is the classic Eurosceptic or libertarian (genus: north american) view, that all its problems are down to the fact that it exists, because it’s a bureaucratic monster operating a planned economy. (I didn’t say these had to be based on facts.) Usually, the evil monsters are either the French government or the EU itself, presumably meaning the Commission.

These myths meet the standard framework for understanding the EU’s politics at an odd angle. Power in the EU institutions is usually described by the tension between a supranational force, the Commission as the EU high priesthood and executive branch, and an intergovernmental force, embodied more by the European Council – the regular summit meeting – than the Councils of Ministers, the much more regular final legislative bodies. It nearly matches the two myths, in that the Commission and friends always skew to the first myth, following their interests, and the supporters of the second like to blame Brussels (i.e. the Commission) because it’s there.

But the standard model is getting old. For a start, where does the democratic power of the European Parliament fit in? You can’t just blow it off; ask Denis Olivennes and Nicolas Sarkozy what happened to their clever idea. It’s not supranational, it has national caucuses and its constituencies don’t often cross borders. But it answers to no national government, and very good that is too – remember the Kaczynskis’ attempt to unelect Bronislaw Geremek? And so much of its work puts it in the role of a loyal opposition to the supranational power, and for that matter to the national governments as well.

Them. At least the academics did spot the rise of the intergovernmental power; ever since the first European Council was called by Giscard in 1975, the intergovernmental power has got stronger. It used to be that the Commission proposed and the ministers signed off; now, much of the time, the Council takes a strategic lead, the Commission drafts suitable legislation, Parliament amends it, the ministers make a final decision, and then the Commission administers the finished job. Traditionally, it was seen as bad and anti-European that the intergovernmental wing of the union got involved; surely, if all those egos got going, nothing would happen…and something must happen, for Monnet prophesied it!

It was further thought that intergovernmentalism meant inaction. This was shared by both the myths – the true believers insist that we need an “economic government” (whatever one of those is), “reinforced cooperation”, anything so long as the Commission gets to be more like the US Federal Government, while the eurosceptics insist that only national governments acting alone can get anything done, or alternatively that government in general can achieve nothing and therefore it shouldn’t be encouraged.

Now, the Tartars have finally arrived out of the steppes; the crisis is upon us. Of course, the myth fans all find it equally supportive to their own myth. That economic government is trotted out again. This glibertarian nonsense gets another outing. But let us consider the system’s performance. To begin with it looked poor; as the third wave of the bank crisis arrived, everyone still thought bank failures could be handled as individual cases. The UK seized, and immediately resold, Bradford & Bingley; Belgium did likewise with Dexia, and then Fortis, with the Benelux states. The crisis kept up; it looked like no-one had any grip; but then, the mighty federal bureaucracy of the US Treasury Department was if anything even more lost.

In the event, the British announcement of last week pulled in one idea from Ireland (guaranteeing wholesale lending) and another from Sweden (equity recapitalisation), and probably owed quite a bit to the VoxEu paper; but it was the first serious suggestion to apply across the board and offer a comprehensive solution. Once it was out there, it took only one European Council and one Eurogroup meeting over the weekend to get consensus on the plan and press the trigger.

There’s a real sense in which the value of the EU is simply in getting into the habit of cooperation, and getting over the coordination/trust problems. Beyond that, it strikes me that the “laboratory” argument for federalism applies very well here.

The monopolarist recession

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For a while now I’ve had a private theory about the way our world used to work. It goes like this: although communism may have been bad for the people of Russia (and of the Soviet satellite states), it did a useful job in keeping the west honest through negative example. Free speech? Yes, we in the west have that. Imprisonment without trial? No, that would be evil and wrong. Peace through international treaties? Naturally. As long as communism was going on, a sense that it would be better to be on the side of the angels permeated western society, its institutions, and its way of conducting relations abroad.

Anyway, I don’t expect that this suggestion won’t be falsified through multiple counter-example, and all to the muffled sound of laughter. But I thought it might give some colour to the background of this week’s events. For one, we have the French president in Moscow, brokering some sort of deal in which the Russians agree to (mostly) stop moving their tanks in the direction of the Georgian capital. Today we have the German chancellor meeting Medvedev in Sochin. And Condoleeza Rice, the US foreign policy chief, is in Tbilisi to show the Aghmashenebeli the surrender document he doesn’t know he’s already signed. It looks more like peer cooperation to me, and not so much like the dismal, chauvinist picture of a monopolar world that kept getting pushed our way circa Iraq.

The Revolution is Over

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It seems clear they done it; for God knows what reason – arrogance, hoping beyond hope, misjudgment – Georgia started something it couldn’t finish. The Russians, for their part, were playing for it for years; the harassment campaign, the motor-rifle regiments parked up on the southern road. But however wrong they were, I’m saddened by it; they believed in the European dream, in joining Sweden and Venice, far more seriously than they did in America in any practical sense.

Russia has Ledeenised the situation – they picked up some crappy little country and threw it against the wall to show they meant business. Vladimir Putin, who presumably spent the autumn of 1989 cursing in the mess at Yasenevo, turned up to take pseudo-charge in the field; the US advisors exited via the pool at the Sheraton. Isn’t it always the pool, at the Sheraton?

As with Ledeenisation 1.0, we didn’t really offer an alternative nor any resistance. Worryingly, a range of other ex-Soviet states lined up to offer their support to Russia; not that they needed Kazakh divisions, but it’s not hard to see which way this is going. Nicolas Sarkozy would have come off this the worst – he flew in, at last, the Western support, and recommended surrender on terms the Prussians of 1870 would have considered tough, but not before making profile with jet, grin, grip etc as the war went on. Worse, he doesn’t even seem to have checked that the terms were sufficiently humiliating before setting out. He didn’t even deliver that. Carlo Levi’s remark that nothing came from Rome but tax collectors and speeches on the radio comes to mind.

It’s a tale of ugliness and failure, all right. I said Sarkozy would have come off this the worst, but then….Bush administration bungling/stupidity/callousness is nothing surprising any more. But this is truly impressive. One of the good things about NATO, after all, is that it’s a lot harder for two member states to a) not tell the other the Russians are coming or b) not tell the other they’re coming for the Russians.

What now? Well, every wind turbine is a vote for independence. And perhaps Hezbollah should start offering military advisors; after all, they know a thing or three about dealing with an enemy on the other side of a hilly border with many tanks.

The German Plot Against French!

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An interesting post at Language Log, about the position of minority languages/dialects in France. Traditionally, France before the Revolution was more of a geographical expression than a state in the modern sense, to adapt the famous phrase about pre-Bismarckian Germany. Highly diverse regions, with little in common except allegiance to a distant Parisian king; the revolution changed all that, or more specifically, the 19th century did, with the army’s numbered, nationally-recruited regiments, the uniform school curriculum, the administrative structure of prefects and subprefects all answering to the same ministry in Paris.

So, the very idea of a minority speech is quite a difficult one for a state that is still very, very centralised. Just how difficult this is for some people can be measured by the response of Jean-Claude Monneret, a member of the Academy, no less:

… [T]outes les langues n’ont pas la même dignité. […] [O]n ne peut mettre sur le même plan ce qui est une grande langue de culture et un dialecte appauvri. Existe-t-il un Rousseau en occitan, un Tocqueville en basque, un Balzac en ch’ti …, un Stendhal en breton, un Montesquieu en catalan? (“All languages do not have the same worthiness. […] We can’t put on the same level a great language of culture and an impoverished dialect. Is there a Rousseau in Occitan, a Tocqueville in Basque, a Balzac in Ch’ti …, a Montesquiue in Catalan?”)

And you thought you couldn’t have colonialism in one country. Of course, Montesquieu and Rousseau lived before the Revolution, so didn’t do their army service or go to one of Jules Ferry’s schools by definition. And Rousseau was Swiss; so what kind of French did either of them actually speak, as opposed to writing? I don’t know; but this seems incredibly anti-scholarly, as if we just assumed Shakespeare spoke BBC English.

Cette question des langues régionales en Europe est aussi à penser dans le cadre d’une géopolitique bruxelloise d’inspiration germanique. Il y a aujourd’hui en Europe des groupes d’intérêt qui militent pour un reformatage de l’Europe sur un modèle politique impérial. La manoeuvre qui consiste à encourager la reconnaissance de toutes les langues minoritaires n’est qu’un leurre, une stratégie oblique qui vise en fait à déconstruire, à détricoter les nations européennes autres que l’Allemagne, qui toutes incorporent des groupes d’appartenance linguistiquement minoritaires.

Ainsi, subtilement, on ne s’attaque pas frontalement aux États, mais on commence par une reconnaissance linguistique. C’est très «démocratique», ça semble n’engager à rien. Mais à partir de là, c’est le toboggan.

(“This question of regional languages in Europe should also be considered in the context of a German-inspired geopolitical initiative in Brussels. Today in Europe there are interest groups who agitate for reforming Europe on an imperial political model. The manoeuvre of encouraging the recognition of all minority languages is just a decoy, an oblique strategy that in fact aims to deconstruct, to de-knit European nations other than Germany, who all include groups belonging to linguistic minorities.

Thus, subtly, one doesn’t attack the member states directly, but one begins with linguistic recognition. This is very “democratic”, it doesn’t seem to amount to anything. But after that, it’s a slippery slope.”)

Wow. That’s pretty damn crazy…but the interesting bit to me is the assumption that Germany is linguistically homeogenous and a centralised, unitary state. To believe that, you need to know absolutely nothing whatsoever about German, German history, or the current German state. It is not difficult to find bits of Germany where you might need to ask people to speak hochdeutsch; it’s happened to me. And Germany is the most federal state in Europe after Switzerland; even the Wilhelmine empire was so federal that each Land had its own army, even if this didn’t mean much in practice as only the Prussians had a general staff.

Particularism is still a major force in German (and EU) politics today; the minister-president of Baden-Wurttemberg practically ran his own foreign policy through the European Convention, as I recall. So what planet is this guy on?

Horrible European Surveillance Proposals

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What fuckery is this? It looks like the French government, having failed to impose an awful record-industry inspired snooping act at home, is trying to policy-launder it through the European Union. The so-called “3 strikes” law foresaw that ISPs would be required to cut off service to anyone who was found downloading or distributing copyrighted material three times – which of course implied that the ISPs would be expected to filter all traffic by content, a wildly grandiose, authoritarian, and insecure idea. (Wonderfully, Nicolas Sarkozy outsourced his Internet policy to a committee led by the owner of a chain of record shops; a little like putting the manufacturers of candles in charge of street lighting.)

But the legislation failed in France; so here it is, coming straight back via the European Parliament. The odd bit, though, seeing as it’s a French idea chiefly backed by the EPP (=European Conservative group), is that it’s being pushed by the British Tories in Brussels – half of whom don’t believe there even should be a European Parliament. Specifically, according to Heise.de (German link), it’s the Tory MEPs Malcolm Harbour and Sayed Kamal. Kamal is responsible for possibly the most egregious tagnut of a clause in the whole thing, which would permit essentially unrestricted telecoms surveillance for the (naturally undefined) “security of a public or private communications system”, and Harbour for the copyright/content-sniffing bit.

This raises some interesting questions. For a start, let’s get this out of the way: here are detailed instructions on who to phone and shout at. There are more at the bottom of the ORG post referenced above. You have until the 7th of July.

But since when has EU-sponsored mass telecoms snooping and censorship been the policy of the Conservative Party? Perhaps fortunately, they’ve been out of power since the Internet has been an issue, so this has never really been tested; David Cameron certainly didn’t say anything about this, the lying turdwit.