Tag Archives: europe

The End of the Dolce Vita?

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Are the good times and the good life still going to continue to roll in the Italy of the twenty first century? This is the core question the Economist’s Europe editor John Peet asks in the latest Economist Survey: Italy, Addio, Dolce Vita. As Peet says:

Italy is approaching a crunch. Rather like Venice in the 18th century, it has coasted for too long on the back of its past success. Again like Venice, it has lost many of the economic advantages which underpinned that success. For Venice, it was a near-monopoly on trade with the East that paid for the creation of its beautiful palaces and churches; today’s Italy has benefited hugely from a combination of low-cost labour and a switch of workers away from low-productivity farming (and the south) into manufacturing (mostly in the north). But such good things invariably come to an end.

Italy badly needed a dose of pro-market reforms, liberalisation, privatisation, deregulation and a shake-up of the public administration, all of which Mr Berlusconi had promised. He even pledged to cut taxes. A majority of Italian voters, backed by much of Italian business, were willing to overlook both his legal entanglements and his conflicts of interest and give him a chance to reform the country. But as the next election approaches, very little of what he promised has been delivered, so many of his erstwhile supporters are feeling disillusioned.
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Thanks, Gerd

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Wasn’t Gerhard Schroeder fun? Didn’t Germany, maybe more than any other big country in Europe, need a leader who enjoyed things? Hasn’t public life gotten just a little grayer this late November Tuesday?

The election in ’98 showed that Germany could actually change governments at the ballot box, and not just through parliamentary maneuvers. One more doubt about German democracy laid to rest. The red-green government changed the terms of public debate about immigration, for which I am personally grateful. And I saw the difference in treatment at the local foreigners’ office in downtown Munich. For this honesty, Germany is better off. The SPD and the Greens sent German armed forces into combat in Europe, and on to missions in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Germany is shouldering its responsibilities as a major nation. For that, all of Europe is better off.

Sure, there were missed opportunities and many things still need to be done in Germany for it to really be ready for the 21st century. But the achievements of the last seven years are not small, and they will not be short-lived.

UPDATE: Another thing. By calling the election a year early, Schröder ensured that her opponents in the CDU would not have time to push Angela Merkel out of the top position. Thus we will not have the insufferable Roland Koch as Chancellor. For the historic first of having a woman as German Chancellor, thanks Gerd.

Multiculturalism vs. “multiculturalism”

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I’m not alone in thinking that our last debate about multiculturalism was marred by the fact that nobody seemed to agree on what the word actually meant. The following bit from a Christian Science Monitor opinion piece caught be eye:

Supposedly [European authorities] were enlightened “multiculturalists” who respected differences; for many, the real reason was a profound discomfort with the idea of “them” becoming “us.” Naively, they imagined they could preserve their nations’ cultural homogeneity while letting in millions of foreigners and smiling on their preservation and perpetuation of values drastically different from their own.

Perhaps we need to distinguish between “multiculturalism” and multiculturalism?
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Then and now

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Billmon, in a very eloquent post, says nothing. All he does is put up a series of quotations. Yet his message couldn’t be clearer; or more correct.

Lest visiting American wingnuts misunderstand me: I do not assert that Billmon is correct in inviting us to infer that Donald Rumsfeld is guilty of war crimes. That question would be decided by a court, in the extraordinarily unlikely event that Rumsfeld ends up before one.

No, what Billmon gets undeniably right is the far bigger and broader and more fundamental idea that (to use the words of Telford Taylor with which Billmon’s post comes to a close) ‘law is not a one-way street’. Whether a government is good or bad is decided by what it does and refrains from doing; not by who its members are or by the justifications they offer for their acts and omissions. That goes for the current government of the USA, and it goes equally for every other government entrusted with the running of a state.
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A Little Archipelago

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If you had long suspected that under the Bush administration the CIA was running secret prisons around the world, now you know. It wasn’t just the one in Thailand, which was closed in 2003, and the annex at the tip of Cuba, closed last year.

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

Which Eastern European countries, you may ask?

UPDATE: FT Deutschland does indeed say more, as does the FT in English.
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Of Demons and Details.

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Tonight, a French friend sent sent me an email expressing his disappointment about the fact that a Eurodistrict comprising the French (Euro-)city Strasbourg and the German regional authority Kehl, which will be officially created by officials from both parties at a signing ceremony tomorrow afternoon, is falling far short of the enthusiasm it was conceived with (some details by Reuters (in French)).

During the heyday of the latest Franco-German governmental rapprochement in early 2003, Chancellor Schröder and President Chirac signed a declaration calling for new forms of European institutional cooperation. But lacking consistent ideational support from the two governments, the regional authorities were unable to overcome different administrative practices, legal concerns, and – problems to fund a bridge. Thus, they will not establish a new form of supranational institution but rather “just another” council for regional cross-border cooperation. And they won’t get a new bridge.
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H5N1

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Like catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, an influenza pandemic is not a matter of if, but a matter of when and how bad. Fortunately, John M. Barry has written books about both. Until the definitive story of Katrina is told, Rising Tide, Barry’s book on the 1927 Mississippi River flooding that left some parts of the Delta a 100-mile-wide swathe of water, will stand as the classic work on power and high water and the Crescent City.

The inevitability of floods in New Orleans is a matter of geography; the inevitability of a flu pandemic is a matter of genetics. The natural reservoir for influenza viruses is in birds.
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The Outermost Regions

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In the comments to a recent post, the question arose of the “natural boundaries” of the EU. Apropos of that, let us briefly consider those parts of the EU that are outside of Europe. Sometimes very far outside.

The EU has a formal name for these territories: they are “the Outermost Regions of Europe”. Officially, there are six of them: Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Réunion, the Azores, the Canaries and Madeira. Four French overseas possessions, two Spanish and one Portuguese archipelago.

I say “officially”, because there are a number of territories that aren’t covered under this. The Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Africa aren’t, presumably because they’re considered part of metropolitan Spain. The Falkland Islands aren’t, because that would be very upsetting to Argentina. And French Polynesia isn’t, because French Polynesia is very confusing. (This is a territory where everyone has double citizenship — French and French Polynesian — and that’s the least complicated thing about it.)

Then there’s Greenland, which is part of Denmark, except not exactly; the Turks and Caicos Islands, whose citizens are British citizens, and so EU citizens, but who can’t vote in EU elections; the Netherlands Antilles… oh, the list goes on.

But let’s keep it simple, and just look at the bits that are absolutely, positively part of the EU: the seven official “outermost regions”, plus Ceuta and Melilla.
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More Bigtime Divergence

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As people may have noted, last weekend Tobias and I were in Stockholm. One of the topics I wanted to post on but couldn’t was the latest Human Development report from the UN. There was plenty of press coverage: here, here, and here

There was even coverage in the blogs, but the tone seemed to be set by Slugger O’Toole who seemed mainly to take issue with Ireland’s rating in the HDI.

Personally I think the issues involved are much bigger than this.
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A modest proposal for CAP reform

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I’ve been in Canada for the last month, getting in my last family visit before settling in to the serious business of either going back to school or collecting unemployment checks. My family is large – Great-Grandpa had 25 children, and Grandpa had 9 – so it takes a while if you go to see my family. Ours is a large, disorganised, occasionally frightening clan who, depending on pure whim, identifies itself as either German-Canadian, Dutch-Canadian, Russian-Canadian or Ukrainian-Canadian. Our tribal language is an obscure dialect of Low Saxon (Platt for the actual Germans out there) spoken primarily in Paraguay, Mexico, Central America and Saskatchewan, and whose most famous speaker is, arguably, Homer Simpson. It’s a long story, don’t ask. It not being much of a literary language, we all just say our ancestors spoke German – the liturgical language of my clan’s particular sect.

In contrast to Europe and the US, Canadians are a lot less disturbed about asking people about their ethnic identities or expressing some loyalty to them. I guess the main reason is that Canada has never really pretended to be a nation built atop an identity, but rather a place where an identity of sorts has slowly built up from the existence of a nation. There is no Canadian myth of the melting pot, and as our soon-to-be new Governor General has demonstrated, no serious demand for nativism in public office. Michaëlle Jean, who is slated to be the powerless and unelected Canadian head-of-state when the Queen is out of the country – e.g., practically always – when she is sworn in on the 27th, is no doubt the most attractive candidate we’ve ever had for the office. And, like her predecessor, she is a former CBC/SRC reporter and talking head.

Ms Jean and I share an endemically Canadian charateristic: We both can and do identify ourselves shamelessly as several different kinds of hyphenated Canadians. She is French Canadian, but that’s hardly strange. She is also Franco-Canadian – Ms Jean has dual citizenship with France, making her the first EU citizen to be Governor General of Canada and the first French citizen to be acting head of state of Canada since 1763. But more unprecedentedly, she is Haitian-Canadian and – as logically follows – African-Canadian.

Yes, Ms Jean is black, and furthermore in an interracial marriage. Well, that’s Canada for you. America puts black folk in squalid emergency shelters, we put ours in Rideau Hall.
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