With the final result in Sweden’s referendum on the Euro being 56% no, 42% yes and 2% undecided the joint winners of the first Fistful of Euros prediction competition are Stefan Geens and our very own David Weman who both got closest, predicting a 54% no vote. It appears that the polls before Anna Lindh’s murder were actually quite accurate, both in predicting a ‘no’ victory and that it would be by a relatively large margin.
Author Archives: Nick Barlow
Sweden and the Euro – you decide
With Sweden voting on whether to join the Euro tomorrow, it’s a good time to test the predictive knowledge of the readers of A Fistful of Euros. So, what do you think the result of the referendum will be? Give us your prediction in the comments box and we’ll announce th winner on Monday, along with a link to your website or blog, should you have one.
This Reuters article gives the latest polling figures, with both sides averaging around the mid-40s and the undecideds seemingly the key to victory.
My prediction? No, by 53%-47% though that’s based on nothing more than pure guesswork. What do you think?
Not the European quote of the day
“That was a much more benign dictatorship ? Mussolini did not murder anyone.
Mussolini sent people on holiday to confine them” – Silvio Berlusconi (Google News has a range of stories about it here)
Grist for the conspiracy mill
Iain’s post on Tuesday identified the belief of some that the EU represents a giant Papist conspiracy. I can’t help but wonder what they’ll make of the report in today’s Guardian that a group of Polish Catholics are investigating whether Robert Schuman is a candidate for sainthood, specifically relating to his work in founding the ECSC:
His sponsors say that Schuman’s claim to heavenly fame is that he was France’s foreign minister in 1950, when he put forward a revolutionary plan for pooling French and German steel production – to prevent the two countries from ever going to war again.
What became the European Coal and Steel Community, run by a supranational authority, was the embryo of today’s EU. It was an undreamed-of success, though certainly not the miracle normally required to qualify for canonisation.
Schuman was born in 1886 and died in 1963. His memory is already celebrated across the continent on Europe Day, May 9, the anniversary of the announcement of his plan.
Transatlantic Trends
The 2003 Transatlantic Trends survey , conducted for the German Marshall Fund, Compagnia di San Paolo and Fundacao Luso-Americana, has recently published and the results from it make for some interesting reading. Some of the findings confirm what you might expect, while others confound expectations somewhat.
There’s a key findings report available in English, French, German, Italian and Portuguese (English and Italian in pdf only, others also available in Word). There’s also coverage of the report from EUObserver, The Guardian, BBC News, Yahoo! News and The Hindu, for a perspective from somewhere non-Atlantic.
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Creating Europe through tourism?
One of the long-running stories in the British media over the summer has been the antics of British tourists in the Greek resort of Faliraki on the island of Rhodes. Stories of the misadventures of ‘Brits abroad’ have been a staple of the British media over the last few years, fuelled by TV programmes like the Uncovered series that’s highlighted various resorts over the year such as Ibiza and Ayia Napa, but this year there’s actually been a real story for them to focus on. First, a British tourist was killed in a bar brawl and then others were arrested for lewd conduct and indecent exposure, giving the media a chance to moralise and ‘why oh why?’ about what goes on when British youth meets the Mediterranean.
However, while the existence of resorts like Faliraki is often portrayed as a new development, it can be seen as merely the latest incarnation of the British experience of the rest of Europe as a location for escape from the realities of life at home.
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