Category Archives: History

Does destiny come from geography or history?

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Writing in Sunday’s New York Times, Robert Kaplan writes one of those geopolitical big-think pieces capable of launching a thousand blog posts.  He argues that Greece’s current predicament, and by extension that of Italy, Portugal, and Spain lies in its position on the Mediterranean and in the type of land in contrast to northwestern Europe which was less conducive to oligarchical land-owning patterns.  Religion then formed a crucial overlay on geography –

It is not only the division between north and south that bedevils Europe. In the fourth century, the Roman Empire split into western and eastern halves, with dueling capitals at Rome and Constantinople. Rome’s western empire gave way to Charlemagne’s kingdom and the Vatican: Western Europe, that is. The eastern empire, Byzantium, was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and then by Muslims after the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453.

Now if you’re into a philosophy of history that sees it all as tectonic plates of deeply-rooted influences, this will seem logical.  And perhaps because Kaplan doesn’t want to sound like too much of pessimist, he ends on this note –

Continue reading →

The cruelty of Polish history

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News item – In the village of Gorzno, in northern Poland, the streets were largely empty as people stayed home to watch television.

“It is very symbolic that they were flying to pay homage to so many murdered Poles,” said resident Waleria Gess, 73.

“I worry because so many clever and decent people were killed,” said high school student Pawel Kwas, 17. “I am afraid we may have problems in the future to find equally talented politicians.”

The much over-used word “irony” doesn’t capture the link between a Katyn forest commemoration and the deaths of so many people from today’s government of Poland.  God bless Poland.

Evaluation: Ernest May, Strange Victory

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I’ve just been reading Ernest May’s Strange Victory – Hitler’s Conquest of France, which I was recommended in this thread at Abu Muqawama.

Strange Victory‘s main point is that everything you think you know about the German invasion of France in 1940 is wrong. The French (and British) armies weren’t catastrophically ill-equipped for modern war; the French tank park was almost a third bigger than that of Germany, and the advantage was concentrated in the newer and heavier types – the French had many more Somua S35s and Renault B1s than the Germans had Panzer III and IVs. In terms of quality, the B1 and the British Matilda were the heaviest tanks either side deployed; the S-35 was probably the best all-round tank on the battlefield. The French Army’s historic strength, its artillery, disposed of a huge advantage in big guns.

Similarly, there is no reason to believe that French morale was particularly poor, or worse than that of the Germans. Where they had the opportunity to fight, the French fought; in the Gembloux gap in Belgium, Rene Prioulx’s French Cavalry Corps – actually, a pair of armoured divisions – fought the 3rd and 4th Panzers for four days, covering the First Army’s move up to the Dyle line. They lost 105 tanks to 160 for the Germans; some German accounts suggest that had they kept going, rather than breaking off the engagement once the main force was in place, the whole German front in the north might have collapsed. On the other side of Antwerp, the 9th Panzers ran into another French armoured division, and this time lost another hundred tanks for the loss of five French. May quotes a German cavalryman’s account of their horses screaming in terror as French tanks surged towards their lines, a reversal of every traditional account of 1940.

Even the hapless 9th Army in the Ardennes, May argues, did better than might have been reasonably expected; it was made up of the bits and pieces of the French Army, with a high concentration of the oldest reservists and youngest conscripts, the last pick of equipment, a lot of ageing dug-out officers, and sent to guard a front no-one expected to be important, where it met the very best the Germans had to offer. May argues that it was no worse than the German forces facing the Maginot Line in Army Group C, or the Leeb Museum as the troops called it after its commander and the quality of its equipment. Had they been facing a concentrated attack by Prioulx’s tanks, they might have been routed as the 9th French Army was.

So what happened? How did the Allies end up with the best of their armies, and the whole of their mobile forces, successfully defending positions two hundred miles from the German schwerpunkt? May begins at the beginning, examining the German and French planning processes. It is a commonplace that the Allies did exactly what the Germans were hoping they would. Up until the early spring of 1940, however, the German army was planning to do exactly what the French were hoping they would – to commit their forces to a westwards push across Belgium and southern Holland, something like the Schlieffen plan of 1914.

The Allies planned to counter this with a left-flanking manoeuvre pivoting on the Ardennes, rolling the motorised 1st and 7th French Armies and the British Army, including three French armoured divisions and a British tank brigade, onto a river line running half-way across Belgium. This would provide a shorter line and defence in depth, and would concentrate the Allied strike force directly opposite the Germans’. This was roughly the plan – plan D – that they put into effect on the 10th of May, 1940.

The Germans were never satisfied with their plan; it was obvious to both sides that Germany could only lose a long war, as Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction recently bore out. And the General Staff plan for the Western Front didn’t offer much chance of a decisive victory. Germany needed a battle that would transform its strategic position. May describes the emergence of the final plan, which moved the main attack from the area around Liege to the southern Ardennes, as a collective product, pointing out that the first person to call it the Manstein plan was von Manstein. He certainly did have a major influence on it, lobbying against the original plan until he was transferred away from Army Group A headquarters to shut him up. But so did many others.

Hitler correctly realised that the original plan wouldn’t do. But he also offered his own inimitable negative contribution – why not decide not to decide where the main attack should go in, and make the decision on the night? Eventually, the debate was settled by a string of major war-games designed to test the three competing proposals. As it turned out, the original plan usually delivered stalemate in Flanders, and occasionally, defeat. Hitler’s proposal reliably resulted in failure, varying between mere fiasco and the French conquest of the Ruhr. The Group A plan usually worked.

That the war games were an accurate simulation was the work of the General Staff intelligence branch, Foreign Armies (West), led by General Tippelskirch, with Colonel Liss in charge of the French desk. One of the duties of this office was to act as the enemy commander during war games. The French and German intelligence services were radically different; France had invested hugely in intelligence collection, with formidable capabilities in photo-reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, and agent-running. Germany, short of cash, was also short of information; however, the Germans had compensated by concentrating on analysis. Tippelskirch’s staff spent most of their time studying what would now be called foreign doctrine – how potential enemies thought about war, how they trained for it, and how they made decisions.

Their conclusions about France was that the French Army relied heavily on centralised command and control, which was implemented through staff procedures that generated extremely detailed written orders and reports. Also, the French communications system was much more effective vertically than it was horizontally – in the name of security, landlines and dispatch riders linking major headquarters were preferred to radio, which meant that French army units had to have very detailed instructions in order to coordinate with their neighbours. One of the few clear technological advantages the Germans had over the French was their Enigma-encrypted mobile radio network – which they had developed to support their own concept of Auftragstaktik.

Therefore, they proposed that the greatest weakness of the French Army would be in responding to unforeseen events. Whatever the final plan would be, it could only succeed by forcing the French to abandon their own plan; if they got to execute their own plans, they would win. When Tippelkirch and Liss got in character for their parts as French generals, they played them as men trapped by their own thoroughness.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to design a plan that would confront the French with an unexpected crisis and force them to abandon their own plans. It had to stay unexpected. French intelligence certainly had the data to find out what the Germans were planning; they identified most of the Panzer divisions from aerial photos and radio intercepts, discovered that two of the four major supply depots in the Western theatre of war were located in the Eifel, just across the border from the Ardennes sector, and analysed German aerial reconnaissance overflights statistically, showing that they were concentrating on a rectangular zone behind the Ardennes and leading towards the coast. They interrogated a shot-down reconnaissance pilot and got him to spill the beans on his targets, which all lay in this area. All this data was written up in careful summaries and delivered to the commander in chief, mixed with a vast quantity of noise and German disinformation.

But the French understanding of intelligence specifically barred intelligence officers from commenting on the content of their reports; rather like traditional journalists, they were not supposed to editorialise or speculate. Judgment about the enemy’s intentions was left to the commander; detailed planning was left to the operations branch. The very quantity of data that the Deuxieme Bureau delivered to Gamelin, Georges, and the rest every day meant that nobody was asking questions about its meaning. As the Germans installed extra railway sidings and temporary bridges in the Mosel valley, put in more telephone lines, and cleared parking space next to the roads leading towards Luxembourg, the French general staff was drowning in reports, endlessly revising the detailed plan for the move into Belgium, and creating an entirely new and ambiguous headquarters shoehorned between the General Staff, the Northern Front, and the Commander in Chief.

One book that doesn’t come out of this well is Alistair Horne’s To Lose a Battle: France 1940. May is scrupulously courteous to Horne, and credits him with providing the definitive account of combat in 1940, but it’s impossible not to revise your opinion of Horne as a result of this book.

For example, Horne doesn’t mention that the French divisions cuirassees, whose role as part of the strategic reserve he discusses at length, weren’t actually armoured divisions in the sense of a unit equivalent to a Panzer division. Rather, they were more like a British Army Tank brigade, a force made up of heavy, slow-moving tanks intended to lead a set piece assault on a fixed front. French doctrine foresaw that they would break through the enemy lines, and then let the “light mechanised division”, which had as many tanks as a Panzer division, pass through and exploit the breach. The DC would move back into reserve and put its vehicles back in order.

As a result, they didn’t have the mobile logistics or supporting arms of an armoured division and couldn’t manoeuvre like one, no matter what the high command wanted of them. This – not specific French incompetence or cowardice or Communist infiltration – explains why they were frequently in the wrong place, and why the 2nd DC could be caught with its tanks on one side of Rommel’s 7th Panzers and its soft-skinned vehicles, including all the fuel, on the other. It is true that the French never succeeded in using the three DCs effectively. It is also true that their tanks simply had to move to the battlefield by rail.

And there is far too much national-character stuff in Horne. May takes a much harder line with himself on this. Also, he is more able to recognise that a lot of postwar Gaullist writers wrote the way they did because they were politically on the Right and in the grip of the prejudices of the pre-war era. There is simply too much cheap frogbashing in the world to add to it. You can often hear the effort being made to resist it in Horne’s prose, but too much leaks through.

This story has a sort of tragic duality. The Germans won because they had been able to plan more like a democracy than democratic France or Britain – they constantly questioned their assumptions, criticised superiors, and threw out bad ideas – but they would never do so again, precisely because of their triumph over France. Hitler rapidly convinced himself it was all his own work, and the independent authority of the army was permanently destroyed. The technology – tanks, close air support, and mobile radio – and the doctrine of Blitzkrieg had been validated. Many people concluded that fascism itself had also been validated – they had seen the future, and it worked. The prestige of the Nazi Party and of Hitler rose to a degree that finally saw off any hope that the military would depose him; at the same time, the generals were faced with the possibility that Germany had a combination of technology and operational art that might actually win. Between Hitler’s triumph, and their new status as potential world conquerors, the generals’ opposition to Nazism faded, and any hope of limiting the damage went with it.

The ArcelorMittal Orbit

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The ArcelorMittal Orbit is compared by its sponsors to the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, two nineteenth century French constructions. I think a better comparison is with the Atomium, left over from the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958. The Atomium is accessible to visitors, and gives the kind of view of Brussels you’d expect from its peripheral location in Heysel Park, north of the city, with the addition of a hundred metres or so of elevation. Originally, of course, it gave a modestly elevated view of the World’s Fair. Show us what you can see from a hundred metres above a suburban festival park, plus lunch: it’s not a strong brief for a project, but in that something like the ArcelorMittal Orbit or the Atomium can be said to meet a practical purpose at all, this is that purpose. The Statue of Liberty? That gives you a view of the Manhattan skyline from across the water of New York Harbour; not life-changing, perhaps, but notable. The Eiffel Tower? That gives you a view over Paris from the city centre, plus an excellent lunch (if you can afford it). At the time of construction, the Eiffel Tower was the world’s tallest structure (taking the title from the Washington Monument, surprisingly). If – as is not the case with the Orbit – your pointless project can claim a compelling location and at least one superlative, you’re off to a reasonable start.

Beyond function, though, lies the issue of icon-icity. The ArcelorMittal Orbit is supposed to do the cultural job of a Statue of Liberty or an Eiffel Tower; It’s supposed to be a draw, simply in virtue of its design. Here, my tone is snarky, but I actually do think we have something that doesn’t just fall short, we have a wreck. I’m going to try to say why this is, and why it matters.

Many pubic artworks get a beasting, of course. People have come to love Gormley’s Angel of the North after hating it. I don’t think this will happen with the ArcelorMittal Orbit.

First, there’s a problem of resonance. What connections are we supposed to make when we experience the Orbit? The Atomium – my preferred comparator – is defiantly ahistorical. It’s said to represent an iron molecule; if we were to think sufficiently airy thoughts about the Atomium, we might say that it stood as a metonym for its own substance: steel, mostly. Materials science: very 1958. You have to try that bit harder with the ArcelorMittal Orbit. The designers talk vaguely about the idea of structural instability and the Tower of Babel (intending the Breughel painting, I’d guess, but it’s possible that they got in a muddle and were actually thinking of the Monument to the Third International). Now those are odd choices: the confounding of language, the scattering of nations, things falling over; is there a cautionary intent here? Are we celebrating these things? As for what’s unstated, I suppose the creative team would be pleased if spectators were to think of any of the following clever things (in no particular order): Klein bottles, Calabi-Yau manifolds, trombones, flayings. But the ArcelorMittal Orbit also calls to mind the dull precedents of Wembley Stadium (the tubular latticing) and the observatory towers of the New York World’s Fair of 1964 (the round observation deck). I don’t think the designers intended those associations; I think they just stumbled into them.

Worse, the design is conceptually weak. This isn’t an accusation to be tossed around casually, but I have reasons. Early sketches show a continuous, looping line or thin tube of constant thickness. Apparently the team then attempted to force a lift, a stair and a viewing platform / restaurant into that form, distorting it in the process. What’s more, the designers didn’t apply a ‘language’ to these new but essential items; instead, they used ordinary geometry and neutral colours. This suggests a wishing away. Most architects recognise (eventually) that wishing away won’t work and learn to integrate what’s needed within the framework of a concept that’s developed in anticipation.

There’s also compromise in the proposal’s major expressive component: the looping tube(s). In other pieces by Kapoor, tubes appear as you’d expect tubes to appear: as continuous surfaces. In the ArcelorMittal Orbit, though, the tube(s) is realised as an open lattice. This contradicts the design team’s formal choice. Now there are good structural reasons for using a lattice; triangles are very rigid and surfaces offer more wind resistance than open frames. Wind forces on tall structures are significant. One major structural concept selected for the Eiffel Tower aims to optimise for wind overturning; this concept gave the tower its tapering profile. (I say ‘aims to optimise’; it may in fact not be optimal.) But there’s no such alignment of thinking in the Orbit. It looks instead as though a decision was made – cynically – to maximise the use of steel componentry. The project’s sponsor, of course, is Lakshmi Mittal.

Finally, and worst of all, the ArcelorMittal Orbit is literally repulsive; it’s blood red, it looks biological, like intestines. Here, we leave the Atomium far behind: the Atomium doesn’t disgust. I don’t want to speculate on human psychology but it’s conceivable that disgust responses are ‘hardwired’, as they say. If this is so, then even if the current cohort learns to love the ArcelorMittal Orbit, having mastered its own shock reaction, there’ll be future generations who’ll be disposed to hate it.

Some say they enjoy being shocked. Some film directors know this. In his War of the Worlds remake, Spielberg has his aliens keep humans in steel cages slung beneath the rear of their tripods; when the aliens get peckish, a round hatch like a camera iris gapes open (cue horrible screaming) and a large hollow blood red tentacle comes out and has a good feel around for a flailing limb. Once it limpets on, it sucks the victim into the tripod interior. You see this and you think: OK, Mr Spielberg, you got us, that’s truly disgusting. You are the master here. Anyway, the point is that the ArcelorMittal Orbit reminds me of that scene. You too, most likely. So visitors to the 2012 London Olympics are going to get to enjoy something that resonates with gore. You might wonder if that’s what they will have been wanting.

Any public benefit / disbenefit point is of course arguable. Like most, I think we’re better off with a permissive approach to public art; one that steers well clear of entartete kunst thinking. But we’re not talking about your run of the mill art project. To the extent that the ArcelorMittal Orbit is supposed to represent Britain – not that Britain asked to be represented in this way – it looks to me like a bad mistake to pull out something like this. Obvious interest-promotion; a failed attempt at cleverness; laziness; provocative sourness, even. Probably not what you want in an official culture, if you’re going to have one at all.

About that Greek public sector

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Charlemagne, over at the Economist blog, can be… uneven. But this recent post about Greece’s public sector is IMO top notch. It puts the creation of Greece’s huge, poorly paid, inefficient public sector in historical context:

Take the painful question of the huge public sector, and all those civil servants with jobs for life, and unusually generous retirement packages. The existence of those jobs for life is not a cultural quirk, in which Greek officials simply like coffee and backgammon too much to do any work. It is the end result of a brutal, multi-decade power struggle between the left and the right: a struggle that got people killed within living memory…

The Greek civil war, and the bloody score-settling that followed, is a living memory for many Greeks. Any consideration of Greek nepotism or clientelism needs to be seen in that light. So for example, it is not enough to say that Greek civil servants enjoy jobs for life, and that is a big problem. (Though it is a big problem, not least because many Greek civil servants are paid pitiful wages—partly because there are so many of them. That means they will resist austerity measures all the harder, because they feel like victims in this crisis, not fat cats.) But the bloated public sector is also a function of history… Continue reading →

The last man in East Germany

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What must it have been like to be a Stasi case officer in the autumn of 1989? What did they do? The answer, in this fascinating piece in Der Spiegel, was that they kept going to the office. In fact, they kept on going about their spooky business – questioning detainees, trying to recruit informers – until the evil day when the mob stormed their headquarters in the Normannenstraße. This weird transition is captured in the testimony of the last prisoners left in the MfS detention centre.

Take the case of Manfred Haferburg. Haferburg, a reactor engineer from Greifswald who was a shift supervisor on East Germany’s only nuclear power station, was arrested in May, 1989 trying to flee the DDR via Czechoslovakia. His Slovakian girlfriend was in the next compartment on the train and got away. He, however, was extradited back to East Germany and dumped in a secret prison. It was within the Hohenschönhausen detention centre in Berlin, but the prisoners were deliberately kept in ignorance of where they were. The lights were switched on and off at 15 minute intervals, 24 hours a day. One day, in November, he was dragged from his cell, punched in the guts, and thrown into a van. He expected to be shot, but eventually he was left on a street corner to ask passers-by where he was.

There is a classic Berlin joke about the drunk who gets lost and asks a policeman where he is. The cop tells him he’s on Leipzigerstraße, Berlin-Mitte. Spare me all the details, he says – can you just tell me which country? In fact, he was in the Köpenick district of Berlin, but the first passer-by he asked of course gave him the street name, and he had to press them to find out he was in Berlin, thus playing out the joke for real.

Round about the same time, another prisoner suddenly received a TV set in his cell. Uwe Hädrich had been arrested for attempting to emigrate on the 13th of September, 1989. The TV could only be tuned from outside the cell, so he could only watch official TV; of course, the famous press conference with Günther Schabowski was very official indeed. But that didn’t affect the charges against him. The wall gone and the borders open, he remained detained, accused of espionage and illegally crossing the border, subject to constant interrogation and solitary confinement. (Hädrich was an executive with the DDR’s consumer goods system, and therefore presumably a show-trial candidate.) Eventually, on the 7th of December, the new Modrow government announced that there were no political prisoners in East Germany.

Except for Herr Hädrich, of course. He was suddenly released that afternoon, as if he’d been forgotten about in all the excitement and only now remembered. According to the files, he was the last political prisoner. He went home; back in jail, the Minister of Security himself, General Erich Mielke, had just been booked in and assigned the very cell Hädrich had left.

But the revolution, the emptying of the jails, and the mere arrest of its chief didn’t stop normal operations at the Stasi. At precisely eight o’clock the next morning, a Stasi case officer called on Hädrich to ask him questions about whether he had contacted the Federal German embassy in Hungary. Every day, the case officer arrived to quiz Hädrich, and presumably wrote up his findings back at the office.

Hädrich’s family had begun to go shopping in West Berlin. But Hädrich didn’t dare cross the line, still less refuse to speak to the case officer. The further questioning carried on deep into December, after citizens’ committees had moved into some of the regional Stasi directorates to stop them destroying the files, while Hohenschönhausen itself filled up with disgraced communists. The East German PTT was renting mobile phones to journalists, devices they had to borrow from Deutsche Telekom’s Berlin operation, and whose very existence in East Germany would have been unimaginably illegal a few weeks before. Every day up to and including the 22nd, the Stasi man made his clockwork appearance and Hädrich answered the questions.

There is something grimly theatrical about this setting. In a sense, Hädrich and his interrogator were the last men still living in East Germany.

Finally, four days after the sack of the Stasi headquarters, he moved to southern Germany and never came back. Well, he did come back once, wishing to speak to the diligent case officer. It turned out that the last spook was now running a souvenir stand on the Alexanderplatz. Hädrich couldn’t speak to him.

AFOE’s trip on the Orient Express

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How did we not blog this earlier? The Orient Express has made its last trip. In fact, this is one of those events that has happened and re-happened; the last train that actually made the trip from Paris to Istanbul/Sirkeci did it in 1977, and most people will now associate the name with the luxury London-Venice cruise train that Sea Containers set up in the 1980s. But the one we’re talking about is the one that actually had the title attached to the path in the railways’ working timetables.

By the finish, it only did Paris-Budapest and then only Paris-Vienna, which is fine but hardly the Orient. (Seat61 informs me that the through Paris-Budapest and Paris-Bucharest cars were dropped in June, 2001.) To do the full route, you had to make a connection in Budapest, which could be harder than you think as that city has almost as many conflicting major railway stations as London. Also, trains from the West frequently arrived at the Southern Station there, just as the late Orient Express used the Westbahnhof in Vienna.

I took the train in 2002, taking advantage of a rare moment of reduced poverty to visit my partner and her dad in Paris; Paul Theroux, who did the full Paris-Istanbul trek in 1974, remarked that it was indeed murder on the Orient Express. I wouldn’t be quite so harsh, although had you asked me on the outward trip I might have been. Showing up in good time at the station, I found the train, a gaggle of Hungarian rolling stock, lurking in a dark corner and immediately went to look for things to eat, drink, and read during the trip – it didn’t look promising. I had a bunk in a couchette; on the way there, I noticed the route card on the end of the carriage read “EN-262: Orient-Express” and cheered up somewhat. (In fact, I’ve still got the route card. The Austrian Federal Railway can sue me.)

Actually, that version of the Orient Express was hitched to the evening Vienna-Salzburg as far as Salzburg, so there was in fact a dining car and it made reasonable speed. The problems began when I tried to sleep; there was actually a cello in the compartment, and Americans kept getting on and off the train at every intermediate stop in Germany. Outside, in the corridor, there was a Balkanish type who wanted me to share his first-class sleeper. It was not a good night; after it was over, somewhere in the Champagne, a long announcement was made in French about all the good things that were available for breakfast from the steward. Then, the voice repeated this message in German. This is the exact text of the translation:

Paris. Ende station.

And good morning to you too. Then, of course, the sinister long mobilisation-grade platforms of the Gare de l’Est, and enough coffee to get alert enough to poodlefake her dad.

On the reverse trip, things were more spartan, there being no food except for sausages from the steward and Austrian lager, so I spent the evening eating käsekrainer for their nutritional value and drinking beer with various people who all turned out to know people I knew at Vienna University and to be interested to find out what had happened with the demo that weekend (a riot, as it happened – it was a good weekend to be out of town). Eventually, the steward opened a empty compartment for the corridor party to move into. I recall someone carrying a copy of a book called Das Schwarzbuch der Menschheit, which struck me as impressively even-handed but rather depressing – hey, even plants have tried to kill the world. Sleeping Car Guy was on the train, but he didn’t recognise me, or perhaps he did and kept his trap shut.

I even got a wink or two of sleep, and we pulled into the Westbahnhof in good time and a small rainstorm. Good times.

The reason why the service is being withdrawn is optimistic; the high-speed trains now go so far and so fast that you can get from London to Vienna in a day by rail (although, rather you than me – it leaves at 0827 and arrives at 2322 with connections in Brussels and Frankfurt, a long day’s train ride by anyone’s standards). And, of course, if they have power sockets, WLAN, and a rail to hang your jacket on, like the business sections on Swiss trains, you’ll be able to conspire just as much if not more.

Thinking about it, the experience wasn’t something that foretold the future, but rather a hangover from the recent past. Sleeping Car Guy, like the huge, filthy Südbahnhof in Vienna with its parallel network of long distance buses into the Balkans, was a leftover of immediate post-Cold War Europe – something of the spirit I tried to convey in this post. Like our Transition and Accession category, though, that’s now done.

Are the Germans taking over Romania?

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Not quite those Germans.

What’s happening in Romania, then? Handelsblatt reports. It’s time to pick a president, and the Social Democratic candidate looks in a strong position – although he finished second by a few points in the first round of the French-style presidential election, he’s got promises of support from several other parties, notably the Liberals and the Hungarian minority.

Fascinatingly, though, as part of the agreement with these groups, he’s promised to appoint the independent mayor of Sibiu – Hermannstadt in German – as prime minister. That’ll be one Klaus Johannis. Yes; he’s a Transylvanian German, the first time that a member of this minority will head the government. Of course, Romania has a hell of a lot of problems; the economy’s going to shrink between 7.5 and 8 per cent this year, there’s an IMF requirement to cut the public sector deficit to 7.3 per cent of GDP at the same time (ah, the IMF – never an institution to risk popularity by changing its ideas), and the country’s elite is full of old spooks from the Ceaucescu years.

But I can’t help but be amazed at the idea of a Romanian government that includes the Hungarians and is headed by a German, within 20 years of the revolution and 5 years of the CIA operating a secret jail in the suburbs of Bucharest. Well – non- or quasi-revolution might be more like it, which just adds force to the point. There are other reasons to be cheerful; HaBa also points out that there is some €32bn in EU funding heading that way in the next few years, which ought to help. If you want an inspiring European story, it’s right there.

However, they also note that the Renault Logan car factory accounts for 2 per cent of GDP and 15 per cent of net exports. I guess they can’t really be criticised for pinning their hopes on export-led growth when the UK and Germany are doing exactly that.