One of the things about living in an island state is that you rarely cross over national borders on land. To get to any other country from Britain you have to fly, sail or travel underground and all these have their various formalities for border crossing and, like most Britons travelling abroad, my travels within Europe in recent years have been a case of going from Britain to another country and then coming back.

So, on a day trip to France on Monday, we took a brief detour into Belgium and crossed a European border on land for the first time in several years. Having spent some time travelling through the US last year, it was quite an interesting experience to notice how little paraphernalia there is to mark the border nowadays, especially compared to the changes you notice on the borders of many US states. A simple ‘Belgie’ sign, a sign telling you the new speed limits and a single police car on the French side of the border are all that marks the transition from one country to another, which is a rather strange state of affairs. There are obvious differences that soon become apparent - the signs are now in Flemish, rather than French, and there are subtle differences in architecture - but the ease with which one can now cross borders within Europe is, in my opinion, one of the great benefits of European integration.

However, even though the physical borders have gone, it does not mean that there has been any homogenisation of the culture across the border. Adinkerk, the first town across the border in Belgium, is still unmistakeably Flemish, even with the large number of shops there selling cheap tobacco to British (and now also French, after their tobacco tax rises on Monday) visitors, and the other side of the border is still clearly French.

Anyway, what I want to do here is open up the floor to our readers for your thoughts on and experiences of travelling across borders. Are there places where the borders are unnoticeable physically and culturally? Where are there still strong border controls within the EU? What do you think the future is culturally for the borderlands of Europe? Will they maintain their identity or will continual cross-border traffic eventually create a homogenous border culture?

And, for a quick consumer travel tip for our readers. If you are planning on travelling between Britain and France then Eurotunnel are currently charging ?39 (approx ?59) to take a car and passengers for a day return trip.

I found this article from Dagens Nyheter (temporary link) very interesting.

“‘If anything, I think we work more effectively now than we did before, even though we’re almost twice as many’ an EU diplomat tells Dagens Nyheter.

‘People stop to think one more time, if what they’re going to say really adds something new or is just a way of [looking good?] in front of their colleagues, says an experienced negotiator.

Since the new arrivals signed the accession treaty in Athens this April they get to participate in the Council of Ministers as observers. They attend all meetings, on all levels. They have access to all documents. They have complete freedom of expression, and may also bring up issues they want to dicuss on their own. In short, they have everything except the right to vote.

The thinking is to give them the possibility to learn what’s on the agenda, and how things are done.
[..]
‘In the beginning it was the same old countries that dominated and the newbies were mostly quiet. But now they’re picking up steam. In questions of importance to them they’re active, and both can and want to influence decisions, even if they can’t be a part in making them.’

The Poles are among those that most often speak up. They’re big, they’re many and they’re hard bargainers. Representatives of the Baltic countries are also fairly active, as well as Hungarians and Czechs.
[..]
With 25 [delegations] around the table, everyone realizes that they can’t be too longwinded. Even if every country only would speak for three minutes there would be an hour and a half of debating. Just to do one item on the agenda.

Negotiations are therefore more to the point. The elaborate flowery language has been cut down, and silence has increasingly come to signal agreement. This is true on all levels, from the working groups to the ambassador’s preparatory meetings to the ministers’ Council meetings.”

(Crap translation by me)

This suggests that people like for instance Chris Bertram were wrong:

“But getting back to enlargement …. My take on this, for what it’s worth, is that it gives the UK everything that lukewarm Europhiles/moderate Eurosceptics have always wanted. EU will now be so large and will vary so much in cultural and economic conditions that a thoroughgoing federalist project is dead in the water. The centre - Brussels and Strasbourg - will be fatally weakened vis-?-vis the component parts of the union because twenty-five (or more) states will find it almost impossible to reach agreement on anything but the most anodyne proposals.”

And that I was right.

And hey, seems I was right about this too. DN writes: “How the countries line up depends more on the issue and where one can get support than old bonds and allegniances.”

Update: Slightly edited.

I’ve added a new blog to the blogroll that has quickly become one of my favorites.

Col Lounsbury is a financier currently in Jordan, involved in Iraqi reconstruction. He’s a scathing critic of the administration’s efforts.

He’s quite bright, extremely knowledgable about Middle Easter culture and society. He’s also a delight to read, with a very distinctive style, and also a very distinctive, larger than life personality.

Give him a try.

Well it certainly seems to have gone eerily quiet over here. Meantime the Intergovernmental Conference has been working its weary way onward. Perhaps it’s a measure of the magnitude of the boredom that no-one has felt sufficiently inspired to get down to writing about it. This definitely hasn’t been the case with fellow blogger Eurosavant, who has a substantial piece reviewing the response across some parts of the European press. His principal conclusion on the progress: there hasn’t been any. His feeling: that we Europeans need to ‘be more decisive’. Maybe he has a point. He certainly is right that pragmatically this might have been better sorted-out if things had been done before the membership expansion. I suppose in the end we will ‘muddle through’. I don’t share the disintegration perspective, I don’t really think there’s anywhere else to go in an increasingly interconnected world, but equally I don’t really suppose we have missed an opportunity to inspire the world with our dynamic and vigourous European leadership. I don’t think things ever were going to pan out in that direction. The future is looking as if it’s going to have a decidedly Asian flavour about it.

The Economist has a couple of useful pieces this week ( here and here ) comparing the politics of immigration in the US and the UK. Meantime US economist Richard Freeman has an NBER paper where he argues we should “Stop spending so much time thinking about the WTO. Technology transfer, international migration, and financial crises have orders of magnitude more important impacts on human welfare and the state of the economy”. In other words globalisation is not after all so much about trade as about labour migration and capital movements. And just how is Europe shaping up to the challenge? Well, by all accounts, not very well. But a surprising proposal has just surfaced from a very unexpected quarter. Immigrants in Italy may (eventually) get the right to vote. Even if this is a very limited proposal, it is certainly a positive one. I am just very surprised by its source.

1978
Pierre Trudeau
Val?ry Giscard d’Estaing
Helmut Schmidt
Giulio Andreotti
Takeo Fukuda
James Callaghan
Jimmy Carter
Leonid Brezhnev
John Paul II

In order to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the Franco-German friendship treaty, on January 22^nd the French newspaper Liberation and the German Berliner Zeitung linguistically unified the two countries and created La Fran?allemagne. This Friday, the European Council will witness another day in this beautful country.

Both Chancellor Sch?der and Foriegn Minister Joschka Fischer have to leave the two day Brussels meeting late on Thursday because the German Bundestag is voting on a crucial reform bill this Friday. Their presence in Berlin is indeed important, and most likely not only symbolic: Someone from the SPD’s loony left might need some hand holding in order to avoid a last minute hold up of the coalition’s slim majority, and, of course, the two men need to vote themselves.

As civil servants aren’t allowed to represent their countries in the European Council, Chancellor Schr?der, according to Spiegel Online (in German) and various other news sources, asked French President Jaques Chirac last Sunday to help him out and also take care of German interests in this Friday’s (supposedly not too important) Council meeting. Chirac agreed. German civil servants will only be present just in case urgent need for consultation with the Chancellor should arise.

A French President speaking for Germany… talk about powerful Euro-symbolism.

Over the weekend, the final group matches of the qulaifying tournament for the 2004 European (football) Championships took place, while the draw for the final five play-off matches took place today.

“When the proposed Constitution issued from the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, Alexander Hamilton foresaw that opposition to it would be great, and though he thought the document would probably be adopted he couldn’t be sure. Three members of the Convention, all of them prominent, had refused to sign it, and others, including Hamilton’s two fellow delegates from New York, had left before the end of its deliberations. Indeed, the form in which the Constitution was approved gave it the appearance of unanimity: the delegates subscribed to it in the name of their states. This covered over defections and absences; for example, Hamilton alone signed for New York, and at least one delegate would have been unwilling to subscribe in his own name.”

So begins my edition of The Federalist, the collection of 85 essays written by Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay under the name Publius. (The authors went on to become the new nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, fourth President and first Chief Justice, respectively.) The essays were written at a speed that would put many bloggers to shame and distributed by the most advanced technology of the time. They address the toughest criticisms leveled at the proposed Constitution, from the charges that a unitary government would trample citizens’ rights and well-established prerogatives to the supremacy of federal law to the separation and blending of powers.

The title of the final essay sums up the argument: “Not perfect but good. Should adopt and seek to amend.”

Europe has had its Convention, and Europe’s governments are now having their Conference. Soon, there will be referenda, with high stakes and uncertain outcomes.

Where’s Publius?

As told by the Associated Press:

CARSON, Calif. — Germany won the Women’s World Cup 2-1 over Sweden on Nia Kuenzer’s header in the eighth minute of overtime Sunday.

A substitute who came on 10 minutes earlier, Kuenzer soared high to deflect Renate Lingor’s long free kick over the outstretched arm of goalkeeper Caroline Joensson, who was brilliant all day.

The German players mobbed her and rolled together on the ground, while Sweden’s beaten players were motionless and stunned. Much of the crowd, which was decidedly pro-Sweden, cheered the Swedes even as the entire German team stood on a podium, jumping up and down as they received their championship medals.

Germany’s first women’s world title came in the same fashion as it beat Sweden in the 2001 European Championship final - on an overtime goal. …