Say hello to another 1,276,000 inhabitants of the EU in 2003, bringing the total to 380.8 million people on January 1st 2004. Most of them were immigrants, out of the total increase of 3.4 people for every 1000 inhabitants, 2.6 was down to net migration while only 0.8 was accounted for by natural increase (births minus deaths).
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Category Archives: Life
Europe’s love affair with diesel
Latest figures from Automotive Industry Data (AID) show that in 2003 diesel accounted for 44% of the West European car market, up from just over 20% ten years’ ago. In some markets, such as Austria, Belgium and France, diesel penetration is now 60% to 70%, while in Sweden it is under 8% and Greece only 1%. Might this have major implications for global politics?
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That Monocultural Thing
So there we were in the corner Italian restaurant — not staffed by Italians mind you, though maybe the cook is, but by Hungarians and Croatians — wondering why Swedish mystery writers (crime novelists, to some) are so big in Germany, and so much better than most German practitioners of the genre.
Not that we figured it out, any more than we solved the riddle of Lawrence Norfolk’s popularity here.
GM JP III?
One of the things that I do in addition to ruminating about ‘Europe’ is to report on the biotechnology industry in Germany and Austria. One of the tools that I use to make the job easier is Google’s News Alert service. And sometimes the service turns up surprising articles.
Placement
One thing that I’ve often heard in a half decade or so living and working in Europe is that Americans have no sense of place. Sometimes the idea is asserted that crudely, sometimes equally crudely in a different form: America is too young to have real history, thus Americans have no sense of history and are lacking the deep rootedness of many Europeans. Sometimes it’s a bit more subtle: A great many Americans are visibly more mobile throughout their lives than a great many Europeans. People move away for jobs, for family, for love, and often enough just for want of a change. They’re clearly not making lifelong attachments, and thus not as attached to a place.
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Unless you feel, naught will you ever gain (Faust, J.W. Goethe)
Europe is now a place where diversity is celebrated. Where it has become the cornerstone of a developing common identity. Sometimes this is hard to understand. Sometimes it is hard work. But sometimes, it just comes naturally.
The Kettle Called Conrad Black
Slate has a delightful piece on the board of Black’s company, Hollinger International. It seems the directors, such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle, had little serious business experience and basically rubber-stamped Black’s plans.
Daniel Gross writes, “Most of these more or less honorable folks were basically idle directors. They showed up at meetings, ate lunch, rubber-stamped corporate plans, and cashed their checks.”
And the business types weren’t necessarily top notch either: “But Black seemed to have a genius for recruiting CEOs with legal issues, as Steven Pearlstein noted in Wednesday’s Washington Post. A. Alfred Taubman, the former CEO of Sotheby’s, remained on Hollinger’s board even after he had been convicted of violating antitrust laws. Dwayne Andreas, the paterfamilias of Archer Daniels Midland, the agri-business giant that in 1996 pleaded guilty to price-fixing, was also a longtime board director.”
“Given this cast of characters, it should come as no surprise that over the years the stock of Hollinger International has failed to keep pace with the broad market indexes and many of its peer media companies. After all, putting a bunch of right-wingers with occasionally dubious foreign policy credentials in the position of directing a profit-making business seems almost as illogical as putting a bunch of right-wingers with occasionally dubious business credentials in charge of foreign policy.”
Zing!
The World in 1856
A few months ago I came across an old book that my grandmother had been left by her grandmother. Called ‘Geography for Children On A Perfectly Easy Plan’ it dates from 1856 (first printed 1848) and is a British geography school textbook, educating children on each country in the world, its inhabitants and its economy. What follows is presumably therefore how British schoolchildren viewed Europe and Europeans in the mid-19th century. It bares a remarkable similarity how the British tabloid press views Europe and Europeans today.
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Sometimes, the bad get their comeuppance
Conrad Black – quite possibly the worst newspaper owner in the history of Canada – has agreed to resign from his chairmanship at Hollinger International, essentially ending his career as a political figure and opinion-maker. Hollinger, the owner of the Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post, used to own a number of Canadian newspapers, including the fishwrap known as the National Post.
As an unending source of American right-wing propaganda abroad, Black had a reputation as a blowhard who was largely out of step with the actual residents of the places he published newspaper. Mark Shainblum, author of the Canadian political comic Angloman, one portrayed him as one of the triumvirate ruling Torontorg, a parody of the Star Trek aliens the “Borg”, along with his wife Barbara “feminism is totalitarianism” Amiel. “Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.”
Conrad Black, a British-Canadian dual citizen prevented temporarily from receiving royal honours by his nemisis Jean Chrétien, has been forced to resign because of his involvement in US$32 of “informal” executive pay outside of the knowledge of Hollingers’ audit committee.
He is survived by his creation, the Hollinger Group. Hollinger, once owner of much of Canada’s print media, suffered a debilitating crisis in 2001 which saw the loss of Black’s personal project – Canada’s National Post and the bulk of the newspaper group’s assets. Hollinger stock is up 18% on news of his departure.
Beware of Greeks bearing scripts
According to today’s Guardian, a recently rediscovered (and to some degree reconstructed) Aeschylus play about the Trojan War is to be performed by the Cypriot national theatre company.
Aeschylus’ take on the Trojan War took the form of a trilogy of dramas of which only Agamemnon was thought to have survived. Out of 90-some plays Aeschylus is thought to have written, only seven survived into the modern age. Most of the texts were lost in the torching of the Library at Alexandria. However, apparently partial copies of this play, Achilles, were retrieved from a mummy’s coffin in Egypt. It seems that mummies were frequently packed in loose paper and somebody used a copy of the play with their dearly departed.
I would think this to be the longest period between performances of a play in theatre history.
The whole thing brings to mind the image of some future archeologist rediscovering the lost works of L. Ron Hubbard by digging through boxes of unwanted Christmas presents, but that’s just me…