Category Archives: The European Union

Is the Latvia intervention team assembling?

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So we’re in the new era of the Swedish presidency of the European council.  Insh’allah this will be the last country presidency under the rotating system once all that Lisbon messiness is sorted out.  The Swedes have the advantage of taking over from the politically hobbled Czech presidency and they begin with a slick website and very much with the times there’s a Twitter feed.  So what do we learn is getting the Swedish presidency twitterers excited? –

02/07 14:39 Mårten Wierup: 1st meeting went well-the most exciting thing that happened was that Latvia’s excessive budget deficit was added to the Ecofin agenda (7/7)

One’s first reaction might be to be glad that there’s someone in the world who finds Ecofin agenda items exciting.  One’s second reaction might be to wonder: what’s the need for yet another rap on the knuckles for Latvia?  Our twitterer is indeed correct that Latvia did not appear on the original draft agenda, so what’s the urgency?  Well, Edward had the relevant background a few days ago.  The IMF and the European Commission appear to be not on the same wavelength regarding the Latvian rescue program, not least on the role of the exchange rate peg therein.  If there is a split (especially within the European institutions), it might well be the kind of thing that would get sent to the ministers to sort out.   One thing this suggests: since Ecofin doesn’t meet till next Tuesday, don’t hold your breath waiting for the next installment of the IMF loan to Latvia.

Meanwhile in New York and Georgia

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The Russian judge was unimpressed by both the technical merits and the artistic program of the UN resolution to extend the observation mission in Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 0.0 all around, or Géorgie, nul point.

Since 1993, UN observers had worked both sides of the lines to keep tabs on troop movements and other aspects of security in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. With local tendencies toward explosions and pot-shots (see here, here, and the end of the page here), precisely the kinds of things that preceded last summer’s war, monitoring by a reasonably neutral group gives cooler heads a chance to prevail. Their current mandate expired last night at midnight, and the resolution would have kept this function going. The Security Council vote was 10 in favor, four abstaining (including China) and Russia exercising its veto.

“We need to get rid of this apparition [of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as parts of Georgia],” Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told the council after casting the veto. “Our partners, however, prefer poison to medicine.”

Apparently that’s diplomatic language in Putin’s Medvedev’s Russia.

[Churkin] had offered to extend the mission’s mandate for one month on condition that the Security Council agree to delete all the “offensive references” in the resolution to names and sovereignty

Because Abkhazia and South Ossetia are regarded as independent by Russia and the overwhelming majority of the international community that consists of Nicaragua.

Russia has also forced the end of the OSCE observation mission in Georgia.

The only governmental monitors left are those from the European Union. EU monitors, however, do not have a mandate that gives them access across the administrative boundaries. They can peer into Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but cannot go and see for themselves.

One fewer support for stability. It’s almost as if one major player isn’t interested in stability.

Not so socialist Europe

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In case you’re wondering why there’s such an rightwing dominance in the first place (and it’s pretty much always been that way in parliament elections): Some countries aren’t polarized between a leftwing block and a rightwing block, which has meant nonsocialist parties are dominant.

Some, like Benelux countries and Finland, have centrist supermajority coalitions and aren’t unusually rightwing in policy. Ireland and Poland and the Baltics are a different story.

Then there’s the Lib Dem’s, and various other left-liberal parties that belong to ALDE in the European Parliament.

The caucus groups are fairly important, and sometimes vote as a block. So even if from one perspective, the rightwing dominance is an illusion, it does give rightwingers a bit of a structural advantage in the Parliament.

The new parliament: A bit like the old one

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By some wonderful magic, all media reports of an event tend to go with the same storyline, often kind of off. The storyline after the elections was “The right and anti-immigrant parties win big.”

Figuring out if it was accurate took some work, because some parties, for example the Tories and the Italian Democratic Party, plan to change caucuses and the official results site counts them as unattached. I had to do a lot of very tedious counting and adding up to make this post, the kind of thing journalists need us bloggers to do. I’ve assigned most nominally unattached parties to a group. This is based on known plans plus a few educated guesses, but the guesses mostly involve tiny parties.

As it turns out, PES+greens+commie parties will go from a combined 38, 3% of seats in 2004 to 36,2%.

If we count the liberals (reasonable-ish in the Parliament context), the present mainstream right went from a combined 55,0% of seats to 56,2%.

By my count, 2% of the old parliament’s non-inscrits were extreme nationalists, and 3,1% of the new parliament’s.

Results by group:

EPP-ED+UEN parties (including the Tories and ODS and Law) 44,2% of seats. (42,3% in the old parliament)

Counting them separately is pointless since they’re about to merge and split. This process of musical chairs tend to happen after every election.

* ALDE/ADLE: 10,9%. (12,6%).
They’re the liberal group (well, basically). The members parties mostly line up as center-right domestically, but some are center-left or just vaguely centrist.

* PES 25,2% (27, 6%)
Worse than it seems, because all parts of Italy’s Democratic Party, which didn’t exist in 04 is included in my count.

*Greens/EFA 7,1% (5,5%)
Impressive considering the many countries with no green representation

*GUE/NGL 4,5% (5,2%)
This is the far left

ID, the eurosceptic group went from 2, 8% to 2, 6%

So the storyline’s not flat wrong, but the changes aren’t very dramatic.

UKIP Takes Second Place, Labour Third

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Possibly not the best result for a sitting government.

(That’s how British people do understatement, right?)

It also shows at least one of the perils of writing headlines. UKIP did well in 2004, so this result gains them one additional seat in the European Parliament. The Conservatives, who placed first, also gained only one seat, as did the Liberal Democrats. The British National Party gained two, the biggest seat gain of any UK party. Labour lost five seats on a decline of 7 percent in votes.

Election Night

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The antiliberal collective have a good data thread going on; it’s been interesting listening to the BBC Radio feed on one brain interface and reading actual data on another, an experience that reminds just how conventionalised the news experience is. Based on the numbers, it looks like the EPP-ED parties have held their own and gained a little (this is “a triumph” in mediaspeak), some of the social democrats have suffered – notably the French and British – and the Greens and some extreme-rightists have done well.

But the UK Tory blowout hasn’t happened yet. The Tory speakers on the BBC were trying to make out that their results from places like Norfolk, West Dorset, Elmbridge, and Richmond were spectacular, which sounds good until you realise that all of these are areas which have never had any statistically significant Labour support in the history of democracy. Labour has had one stinging experience, the election of a BNP member in Yorkshire.

I’m sorry.

Well, like most BNPers in office, he’ll probably crash in flames in months. Knowing how some of them managed to fail as local councillors, I really wonder what he’ll do with the financial possibilities of being an MEP. He is giving a truly bizarre speech about the D’Hondt system as we speak.

In France, meanwhile, the Socialists’ ego wars have had their impact, and as expected, the Bayrou wave was a flash in the pan. The PS is down as far as 17%, and the Greens had a blowout night, especially in Paris. This suggests that the wing of the party that supported Dominique Strauss-Kahn has swung Green, an interesting result; he did say back in 2007 that “il faut preparer l’apres-petrole”, I suppose. On the comedy wing, one seat has moved from the FN to the Hunting, Fishing and Traditions Party.

Hungary really has seen a disquieting burst of hard-right voters; the quite ugly Jobbik got almost 14%. And Sweden saw both a Socialist majority and a seat for the Pirate Party, which won hugely in the youth vote. The organised hackers/sinister nazi copythieves, depending on media version, are planning to align with the Greens.

The really weird story, though? The British Tories have won big in Wales, where they have no history or support and whose autonomy they opposed. They’ve shut up about that bit lately.

Update: The Scottish Nationalists are claiming to have won heavily.

Update 2: The BNP MEP: not the disaffected ordinary man they would like, but a long-term neo-nazi maniac.

Update 3: German results: CDU 20 points ahead of the SPD, who are down 3 points. That group is equally split between the Left, the Greens, and minors.

Update 4: Oh dear, yer man from the BNP is on the radio. Apparently he thinks that the test of Britishness is “anthropological”, and specifically “like the population after the war”. Fucking idiot. He mentions the voluntary repatriation clause in the 1971 Immigration Act. Ha. Some people used to request voluntary repatriation under the Act, take their air ticket to Jamaica, and take a holiday – because the Act’s drafters set up that any such action was without prejudice to one’s immigration status. He doesn’t seem to know that.

Update 5: Suggested UK figures – Tories 20-odd, UKIP 17, Labour 16, Liberals 15.

Update 6: Results for London. 2 Tories, 2 Labour, 1 Liberal, 1 UKIP, 1 Green. ‘Kippers in fifth place. A good point from Liberal London chairman Simon Hughes – BNP in Yorkshire has only gained 2%, Greens have doubled their share in the UK.

Update 7: UKIP aristocrat babbling on the BBC about Marta Andreesen. “Wouldn’t sign the EU’s fraudulent accounts”. The UK’s national accounts aren’t externally audited, but then, it was never about that. It looks like she beat Tim Worstall though.

Update 8: Jesus wept, Griffin’s in. Can’t wait to see how often he shows up, how much money goes missing, and what happens when he has to shake hands with Danny Cohn-Bendit.

Five thirty-eight plus twenty-seven

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Rendard Sexton, writing at fivethiryeight, offers a handy intro to next month’s elections to the European Parliament. The comments are well informed and also offer corrections to minor missteps in the post.

For aficionados, the main value is a link to efforts from a global communications company to forecast the outcome. The short version: little difference from the EP elected in 2004, with the biggest changes coming within coalitions rather than between them. Conservatives plus liberals will be enough to elect the next president of the commission, unless the liberals switch sides, in which case the whole of the left plus liberals and greens will be needed. A bit like Germany, actually.

Anyway, voting starts next week. Isn’t everyone excited?

A Dirty Europeanism from Beneath

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I have just been reading Misha Glenny’s McMafia. It is excellent; an intelligent tour through the criminal landscape that emerged since the late 1980s, driven by a combination of globalisation, un-globalisation, technical change, and the usual things that fertilise big crime. We hear about the early history of the modern Russian mafia, how the UN Security Council created one of the world’s most effective criminal networks by trying to deny the former Yugoslavia cigarettes, and much more.

Some points that stand out:

1 – Networks

A common trend in all the criminal systems Glenny covers is a shift from hierarchical structures to decentralised ones; the four dons who controlled the Bombay underworld up to the late 1980s are replaced by a shifting confederation, mostly independent, vaguely loyal to Dawood Ibrahim in his Dubai fastness. The traditional prison gang hierarchies of Russia and South Africa are replaced by flat networks of crooks. The multi-criminal smuggling route through the Balkans, once authorised and taxed by the Bulgarian secret police, warps into a complicated weave of different ones open to every thug in southeastern Europe.

2 – The Great Shift

Everywhere Glenny went, both cops and thieves always said the same thing in the same way; in the early 1990s, they were in control and then “something odd happened”. New forms of crime; new actors; new communities; new drugs. Similarly, traditions and habits that kept things roughly in limits and facilitated both illicit and licit business were suddenly torn apart. Grand old yakuza chiefs were murdered in their beds; the harbour suddenly filled with shiny speed boats with unusually deep and thoroughly reinforced cockpits. And wham! Nothing was normal ever again.

3 – Fake Police and Police Fakes

So much of this proliferating mayhem was driven by the people who were meant to oppose it. In Russia and Eastern Europe, a major force was the sheer number of spooks and wrestlers looking for a job, and for that matter, the existing smuggling systems set up by people like East German STASI Colonel Alexander von Schalck-Golodkowski to raise hard currency. But even more important were the strategic decisions taken by world powers, which often created the legal barriers around which criminal profit grew. The economic blockade on the former Yugoslavia was one; the drugs war another.

4 – Complicity

The great spree would never have been possible if so many people hadn’t been customers, to say nothing of direct corruption. Japanese banks, during the great bubble, were delighted to cooperate with yakuza thugs; the tobacco industry saw nothing at all unusual in shipping absurd quantities of cigarettes to tiny Swiss cantons, from where they were re-exported on ex-Soviet cargo aircraft that invariably needed to make refuelling stops in Montenegro, during which the ciggies and the export papers vanished. The cigarettes crossed the Adriatic in wild-arsed powerboats into the hands of the newest Italian mafia, the Sacra Corona Unita of Puglia, and went from there to everywhere in Europe. The aircraft went on to the ex-Soviet Union, to Slovakia’s ZTS-Osos and Bulgaria’s KINTEX arsenals, and brought back arms for the Balkan wars, bought with the government’s share of the profits.

Similarly, the iconic European industrial achievement, GSM, used huge quantities of rare minerals from central Africa and the ex-Soviet Union, which arrived on some of the same aircraft, backloaded from further arms shipments after the Balkan wars were over and the region became an arms exporter again. It’s worth remembering that the secret police of Yugoslavia were well aware of arms dealing, having been a big exporter before the Balkan wars. And, more broadly, millions used prostitutes, smoked dodgy cigarettes, and took cocaine.

5 – The Boss Fallacy

So many cops Glenny quotes had the same experience; they finally caught the Big Boss, but everything got worse afterwards. Once the old sheikh was nailed, they expected the crime rate to fall, but instead something odd happened; all hell broke loose. It wasn’t just that the crooks fought among themselves, which the cops usually welcomed. It was that they competed harder, and that the rules and traditions and habits that usually constrained them were torn away with the traditional hierarchy. Suddenly there were no rules, or rather, there was a savage fight to set the new ones.

And killing the hierarchy changed things more subtly. The structure of the underworld changed; it became decentralised, federal, anarchist. The old hierarchies were repurposed to legitimise the new gangs, which meant that their mythos of leadership and of terror could be extended to anyone whose outfit joined the confederation. Arguably, the new structures were not just more survivable but more efficient and more scalable than the old ones.
On the other hand…

Looking across this shady landscape, though, there are some bright spots. There is something inspiring about the vigour of it all, the refusal to listen to the government, the company, the Big Don, or any other authority. The European Union was very keen to talk revolution in the East, much less to open the doors. But long before they were opened in 2004, unofficial Europe was working hard. And, in fact, it had been at it for years; Ameisenhändler at the Bahnhof Zoo, gastarbeiter from Yugoslavia working all over the continent, InterRailers, university system administrators hooking up X.25 and IP links. I remember that one day in 1995, cheap smokes and Czech lager and high-powered German fireworks suddenly arrived in our valley in the Yorkshire Dales, sold weekly in one of our local pubs. The bus route from Leeds to Osnabrück, a subsidised liberty-bus for BAOR soldiers, was also a clubber-transfer link before the arrival of EasyJet.

Practical Europe, of a sort. Crime is nothing if not practical. One of the telling things about McMafia, as it applies to Europe, is just what a society Europe could have been in the last 15 years with a little more courage early on. And we did pretty well anyway.

Don’t Get Carried Away Now!

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As Paul Krugman recently pointed out, one of the central points they made in the latest IMF World Economic Outlook was that recessions caused by financial crises tend to get resolved on the back of export-lead booms, with countries normally emerging from the crisis with a positive trade balance of over 3 percent of GDP. The reason for this is simple, since consumers are so laden-down with debt from the boom period, they are naturally more obsessed with saving than borrowing during the initial crisis aftermath. So much then for the typical crisis, and the typical exit. But musing on this point lead Krugman to an additional, rather disturbing, conclusion: since the present financial crisis is truly global in its reach, the habitual exit route to recovery will only work after we are able to identify another planet to send all those exports to (shades of Startreck IV). The joke may seem a rather exaggerated one, in poor taste even, but behind it there lies a little more than a grain of truth. Continue reading →