Author Archives: Nick Barlow

About Nick Barlow

Nick is on hiatus from AFOE. A Brit who lives in Colchester. Member of the Liberal Democrats. More here. Writes What You Can Get Away With, also contributes to The Sharpener.

Waiting for Extase

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The always readable Timothy Garton Ash has another good column in today’s Guardian discussing how Europe’s inability to speak with one voice on the international stage weakens its impact. As he points out, the sheer number of people waiting to meet with President Bush this week help to show what the problem is:

Who knows what is Europe’s agenda for the world? The question always attributed to Henry Kissinger – “You say Europe, but which number should I call?” – remains posed. The baffling multiplicity of people the American president had to meet in Brussels, including heads of large-minded small countries and small-minded large countries, as well as those of competing institutional parts of the EU, not to mention Nato just up the road, shows how far we still are from an answer.

However, the situation isn’t quite as bad as that might make it seem. On some issues, there is unity and focus of action:
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Old questions reawakened

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Europe’s history is littered with questions, some answered, some left unanswered for centuries. For those of you interested in the Schleswig-Holstein question, Randy McDonald has an interesting post on how the remaining Danish and Frisian minority in Schleswig-Holstein could hold the state’s balance of power after Sunday’s elections and how that could affect the politics of Germany as a whole.

Iberian update

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Only time for a wuick update, but in case you haven’t been paying attention over the weekend, Spanish voters have voted in favour of the Constitution in a non-binding referendum. This now means that Zapatero will put the Constitution up for a vote in the Cortes – he had said he would only do so if the voters approved of it.

And Portugal has a new government after the opposition Socialists won an overall majority in their election at the weekend. As well as meaning that President Sampaio will work alongside a fellow Socialist, it also means that Europe will have a country led by Socrates – Socialist leader Jose Socrates.

Sometimes it’s who you don’t vote for that counts

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As many Fistful readers will be aware, it’s widely expected that there’ll be a General Election in the UK this May. Of course, because of the way our system works, no one can say for definite when it will be until the Prime Minister actually goes to the Queen and requests that she dissolve Parliament but all the signs on the Magic Political 8-Ball point to an election on 05/05/05 (for once, a date we can all agree on regardless of how you order days, months and years).

The UK remains the only country in the EU to use the First Past The Post electoral system which means that, thanks to the vagaries of the system, we can have electoral results that seem somewhat odd to an external observer. Since 1945, no party has won more than 50% of the national vote (the Conservatives came closest in 1955 and 1959) but only one election – in the February election of 1974 – has seen neither of the two main parties (Conservatives and Labour) achieve a majority of the seats in Parliament.
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Pin the capital on the country

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It’s in German, but the idea behind this game should be obvious to everyone – it gives you a capital city and you have to ‘throw’ a dart to hit its location on the map. I was closest to the centre of Lisbon (just 18km out, which is effectively a direct hit, given the scale of the map) and a slightly embarrassing 406km away from Moscow. (found via The Ex-Communicator)

The Greens and Die Gr?nen

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Via Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber, an interesting article by Matthew Tempest in Spiegel Online (in English) comparing the rather contrasting fortunes of the German and British Green Parties. Both were founded at around the same time (the article does make an error in saying the Ecology Party renamed itself as the Green Party in the 70s – the change didn’t take place until the 80s, partly to link in with the increased use of the name Green across Europe and the rest of the world) but while the German party is now part of the Government with a number of representatives in the Bundestag, the British Party (or parties, given that the Scottish and Northern Ireland Green Parties now organise separately from the England and Wales Party) still seems some way from a breakthrough into Parliament, let alone government.

The article highlights two main reasons for the different levels of success achieved by the two parties – firstly, and most obviously, the different electoral systems in Britain and Germany and secondly, the way internal divisions were resolved in the two parties. Where the realists (‘realos’) won the internal party debates in Germany, the fundamentalists (‘fundis’) won in Britain, preventing the move towards mainstream politics that benefited the German party.
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