Tag Archives: europe

The Strange Case of Odysseas Tsenai

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In the news today the Comission and Spain/Poland are still haggling over the price of the constitution. Meantime from another pole of Europe, a curious story of one young Albanian, and the struggle to assert his elementary rights in his new homeland: Greece. My feeling is that in our current preoccupations, our conception of Europe lies too far to the North and too far to the West. I also think, that when we come to look at the contribution and participation of immigrants in Europe, we all too often forget the adversity they face.

Background: in 1990 the Greek Alabania border opened. Over the mountains and across the sea the Albanians started arriving in Greece. Their numbers were large but never counted: their number still constitutes material for scare stories on popular Greek TV. The actual number is unknown but it might be as high as a million all over Greece (if you include the ethnic Greek Albanians ). The first arrivals came from a country whose isolation was proverbial. They were destitute, blinded by the city lights and the consumer goods, and clueless as to what they could do to earn a living.
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The people you meet on the plane

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You sometimes meet interesting people flying across the Atlantic, and this trip has to just about take the cake for it. On the way from Minneapolis to Amsterdam yesterday morning, my flight was carrying a group of Amish bound for Zurich.

Now, the Amish are perhaps another institution Americans are more familiar with then Europeans. They are not very large in number, but they have enough media presence that most people know who they are. The Amish are a Protestant religious group who, beyond just ordinary adherence to their faith, also live moderately segragated lives from the American mainstream. They speak a southern German dialect commonly but inaccurately called “Pennsylvania Dutch.” They wear a particular style of clothing, the men tend to wear long beards but not mustaches, and the women dress very conservatively and wear small bonnets, as commanded by Paul in the New Testament. They also don’t drive cars and restrict their access to quite a few other modern conveniences.

The Amish are widely seen as more isolated from the world than they really are, and their society is a great deal less idyllic than it is made out to be. Since I’m ethnically Mennonite (a related but more mainstream faith) and spent my college years in a heavily Amish area, I have a bit more experience with them than the average American and I can assure you that the Amish are good deal more connected to the world than they are made out to be. Quite a few leave their communities and join more mainstram life. There are drug problems, and I gather domesitic violence and child abuse are not rare. They are not subsistence farmers; they sell their crops for cash, put the money in banks and buy food at grocery stores. Apparently, roller blades are very fashionable in Amish communities right now, and I remember seeing a lot of horses and buggies at Taco Bell on Sunday afternoon.

Anyway, why would they be travelling to Zurich, and what does this have to do with Europe?
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Europe hors l’Europe

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Since I’m on the subject of things extra-European today, I note that Le Monde is reporting that there will be a referendum in Guadéloupe and Martinique in December over changing the status and government structure of France’s Caribbean colonies. France has a tradition of being a very centralised state, but the last 20 years or so have seen the end of the old regime. Powers are now devolved to regional governments, and the DOM-TOM’s are increasingly autonomous. Corsica’s little set-back recently is, I suspect, just a speedbump in the decline of the centralised French state.

What I would like to propose is the idea that maybe there needs to be some debate on the status of Europe’s extra-European areas as whole.
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Anyone Want to Play Ball With Me?

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Even though it may appear that this post runs along much the same lines as my last two or three, I should warn you: appearances are sometimes deceptive. The origins of what I want to say here stretch back in time two or three days to some comments I made on an earlier post and a subsequent piece which I have entitled the ‘Pele-Ronaldo’ effect. Surprising as it may seem, the topic here is only tangentially football. The real topic is the so-called brain drain, and how our initial intuitions may mislead us. The aforementioned effect is associated with the apparent detail that all those Brazilians ‘heading the ball’ here in Europe have not notedly had a detrimental effect on the rate at which Brazilian football produces outstanding new stars. In fact quite the contrary.

Now here’s the rub: just think of all those Indian IT ‘stars’ working at NASA, Microsoft and the like, and try to imagine the consequences back home in India. Well then try to imagine the consequences of the secondary effect in India on the employment situation in the US and now increasingly in Europe, and we get to the point of all this. We are experiencing a phenomenon which some are calling ‘hollowing out’. This has been noticed in the first place in the US, but with the EU structural reforms, and the relatively high euro, this tendency is going to make itself felt more and more over here. So this is the purpose of the post. To find out what people think.
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From Gunboat Diplomacy to Compassion?

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The sinking of a boatload of Somali immigrants off the island of Lampedusa seems to have set off something akin to a feeling of collective remorse in Italy. (Would that the human tragedy that is occuring on a regular basis just off the straits of Gibraltar could provoke a similar reaction here in Spain!) Indeed Belusconi (always the master of great theatre) appears to have had them near to tears over in Strasbourg.

Irony apart, even his old ‘enemy’ – the good-soldier schultz – is quoted as saying he has “the impression that what Mr Berlusconi said came from the heart”. He could not however resist a reference to remarks which were last year attributed to Italian Reforms Minister Umberto Bossi to the effect that he wished the navy would open fire on ships carrying illegal migrants. Schulz is quoted as saying: “We are very happy that it is not those members of your government who want these boats sunk who are responsible for this issue in the (EU) home affairs council.”

Well this is the second time this month I find myself asking whether Berlusconi is having a change of heart. Since I try not to engage in type M speculation, I don’t need to answer this. What we might note is the way Interior Minister Pisanu is making the direct link with Italy’s ageing population and (hence) pension difficulties. After the Greeks tried to raise the question in Thessalonika, we could ask ourselves whether the South of Europe (where the demographic collapse is most profound, and immigrants are traditionally less in evidence) is about to adopt a collectively different approach on this question.
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Some thoughts on borders

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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.

Comment allez-vous?

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From John Vinocur in the commentary pages of the Hairy Trib:

“At its most hurtful and remarkable, and yet perhaps its most honest, there is the start of acceptance by segments of the French intellectual community that French leadership, as it is constituted now, is not something Europe wants – or France merits.” …

“Of all the [current self-critical] books, the current No. 2 on the bestseller list of L’Express, ‘La France Qui Tombe,’ by Nicolas Baverez, has been the focus of unusual attention.

“Baverez, a practicing attorney and economist who has a strong place in the Paris establishment, argues that France’s leadership hates change. Rather, it ‘cultivates the status quo and rigidity’ because it is run through the connivance of politicians, civil servants and union officials, bringing together both the left- and right-wing elites. They are described as mainly concerned with preserving the failed statist system that protects their jobs and status.

“Although he has little patience with the American role in the world (it is branded unilateral, imperial and unpredictable, yet flexible and open to change) Baverez charges that the failure of French policy on Iraq and Europe – resisting the United States with nothing to offer in exchange, and attempting to force the rest of Europe to follow its lead – ‘crowns the process of the nation’s decline’ and leaves France in growing diplomatic isolation everywhere.

“Over the past year, said Bavarez, ‘French diplomacy has undertaken to broaden the fracture within the West, and duplicate American unilateralism on the European scale by its arrogant dressing down of Europe’s new democracies. It has sustained a systematically critical attitude that flees concrete propositions in favor of theoretical slogans exalting a multipolar world or multilateralism.’

“As for Europe, Bavarez maintains that France has been discredited by its reticence to transfer any kind of meaningful sovereignty to the central organization, its resistance to giving up its advantages in the area of agricultural policy and its disregard for the directives and rules of the European Union executive commission.

“He does not stop there. Of a united Europe, Bavarez said, France has ‘ruined what might have remained of a common foreign and security policy, deeply dividing the community and placing France in the minority.’ His country was at the edge of marginalization in Europe and the world, he claimed, because of its ‘verbal pretense of having real power’ that is ‘completely cut off from its capacity for influence or action.’” …

Ouch.

“Now, in response to the Bavarez book, there is public rage from the Chirac camp, which the Bavarez book charges with having neither the courage nor the competence to confront the basic problems.

“But the density of Bavarez’s factual argumentation, bolstered by the presence of the other books, all treating France’s pride-of-rank and French conceits with brutal disrespect, have given the notion of French decline a legitimacy, reality and currency that it lacked before in public debate.” …

“Daniel Vernet, a former senior editor of [Le Monde], wrote, ‘We often irritate our partners because too frequently we have the tendency to want to impose our views, or only to consider as truly European those positions that conform to a French vision, however much in the EU minority it may be.’” …

“The sum of the messages of the books, in French to the French, is that this vision of the country’s current circumstances is not a French-bashing invention from afar, but a home truth.

“For Bavarez, France is threatened with becoming a museum diplomatically and a transit center economically. To do anything about it, it must revive itself internally first, getting away from what he calls its ‘social statist model.’ To advance, it must end the dominant role of a ‘public sector placed outside of any constraint requiring productivity or competitiveness.’

“The reform of the rest of French policy, based on genuine integration into Europe, should follow, he argues.”

Pens?es?

[Complete text of IHT article]

Europe as an economic irrelevancy

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By 2050 Western Europe could be an economic irrelevancy, with its four leading economies, the UK, Germany, France and Italy (note the order?) enjoying a combined output of less than half India?s and a third of China?s. Both Brazil and Russia will be twice as large as any single Western European economy.
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Libert?, Egalit?, Fraternit?. And, of course, Credibilit

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It might not be the obvious comparison, but Scott’s ponderings about the state of transatlantic breast relations and the state of French feminism made me remember another Franco-analogy that recently crossed my mind: I believe the current relationship between many countries, certainly in Old Europe, and the US of A has a lot in common with the relationship between the Third Estate (aka “the people”) and Louis XVI in the time immediately preceding July 14th 1789, the date usually considered to mark the beginning of the French Revolution. And no, I am not attempting to compliment President Bush for his fashion sense…

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