Author Archives: Scott MacMillan

About Scott MacMillan

Scott is on hiatus from afoe. An American freelance journalist who lived in Prague for nine years, where he also owned a restaurant. He is now on the run and was last spotted beneath a table at a pub in Dublin. An occassional contributor to Slate, Scott considers himself center-left in America but increasingly center-right in Europe. Writes Scotty Mac.

Hey, what are you doing inside on this lovely November eve?

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I, too, have been following the situation in Ukraine — my roomate has been there for a week as an election observer — and I briefly flirted with the idea of writing something snarky and facetious about the developing situation. But I realize now this may be the wrong tack. After all, there may be a few Ukrainians who read AFOE, and whatever heartfelt words we might offer could theoretically make a tiny difference in this drama’s outcome. So here goes.

If you’re Ukrainian, and you live in Ukraine, and you’re reading this blog, I basically have one thing to say: Please stop.
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Margaret Hassan

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“This is a crime. Even God will not accept it.” And God, we know, is willing to put up with a lot.

I don’t think there’s anything to be said beyond the obvious about the death of Margaret Hassan: This person sounds like a real heroine, it amazes me that two or more people can get together (presumably this was not the act of a lone individual) who are able to justify this to one another. Why?

Slouching toward Strasbourg

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Trying to explain the inner workings of EU governance to non-Europeans is a bit like trying to explain the importance of the American League’s designated hitter rule to baseball neophytes. So it’s in the spirit of the 2004 World Series Champion Boston Red Sox that I present my European press review, written for Slate, for your rumination and criticism.
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Governments in “Crisis”

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Sorry for long hiatus recently — I’ve been quite busy with the restaurant these last few months.

In the meantime, however, two Eastern European governments have fallen, and nobody really seems to care. In Prague, the ineffectual Vladimir Spidla resigned as Prime Minister in late June. Most of the country was too wrapped up in the Euro 2004 quarterfinals to really give a hoot. As Doug Arellanes summed it up: “Football! Yeah! Oh, and the government fell…”

Then last night I happened to be speaking on the phone with a fellow journalist in Budapest who informed me that Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy resigned yesterday. We both snickered at the non-newsworthiness of the event.
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Schr?der’s tax plan

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Am I the only one here that thinks Gerhard Schroeder’s making himself look like a bit of a goon with his condescending lectures to east European countries that they’d better raise their taxes… or else?

Here’s an issue that’s been quietly bubbling for some time, at least here in Prague. Either both sides have raised the rhetorical notch a level, or the media’s just starting to pay attention. In an interview with The Slovak Spectator, Slovak finance minister Ivan Miklo? puts it nicely: “The fact is that many European states should make structural reforms like those that we are now carrying out in Slovakia if they want to prosper…”

In other words, yeah, tax harmonization, great idea! So let’s start with France and Germany lowering their taxes! Ha.
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A call to arms

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More on the British referendum, here’s Johann Hari’s clarion call for pro-Europe Brits to finally stand up and fight. The money quote:

This is a European country, and we must not allow a lying Australian-American billionaire and his paid lackeys to poison our sense of our own national interest.

Indeed. A minor quibble, however, with this statement:

No other major European political party – except for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s neo-fascist National Front in France – supports the Tory position of not having a constitution at all.

This is debatable. Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president and the figurehead leader of the most popular Czech political party, ODS, has gone on record saying saying he hoped the proposed EU constitution would be rejected. Not amended, mind you — rejected. Whether he wants a constitution at all, I suppose, would depend on what you mean by “constitution.”
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The Price of Rice: Is It Nice?

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I haven?t seen much discussion here about some of the weirder effects of the May 1 EU expansion. As one of the representatives of ?New Europe? (a moniker I generally loath) that’s partly my fault, as I?ve had zero time to post recently.

I was unable to come up with any news links about the following topic, since every search involving ?rice? invariably spits out stories about Condoleezza Rice. But yesterday I heard a rumor that the price of rice (yes, rice) is going to shoot up something like 100% in the Czech Republic come May 1. Legions of Czech babičky ? the little old ladies that are the lifeblood of Czech society ? have therefore begun hoarding rice.
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Free movement of labor, redux

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On the previously mentioned subject of Europe’s “free” movement of labor (and the possibility of a massive influx of cheap labor from the east come EU accession time) here’s an article I wrote on the topic in November for Czech and Slovak Construction Journal (for some reason the article’s not posted online).

If you’re too lazy to read the whole thing… It talks about the onset of “EU fatigue” in the east, plus it cites a bunch of studies that discredit the fear of a massive influx of eastern workers wrecking havoc on Western European job markets. And this is really about Polish construction workers already living illegally in Berlin, not Czech IT geeks in London (nor British chefs in Prague). Enjoy.
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Minding the parking meters

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The Czech press digest Fleet Sheet puts out a free email bulletin with blog-like observations on Czech culture, business and politics. Though it’s sometimes a bit off base, it’s worth looking at to get a sense of the scene in Prague. Today’s…

Why does Prague airport have expensive self-service parking machines, when the CR is a mecca for low wages?… It’s still possible to get shoes or a broken TV repaired in the CR, but the march toward the European welfare state will soon raise taxes and wage costs so high that it’ll be cheaper to throw out the old shoes and buy new ones. Premier Spidla told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that reconciling the costs of modernizing the welfare state and the impact on common people is a European-wide problem without a solution. If the European welfare model collapses, he said, so will the EU itself. Then Czechs could go back to minding the parking lot.

An interesting statement with wide implications, although I’m not exactly sure there’s such a strong connection between parking meters, broken televisions, and the European welfare state.

New EU members — in name only

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To my new colleagues at Fistful, I’d like to offer an apology for being silent lately. I’ve taken over back-of-the-house management duties at the restaurant I co-own in Prague, Tulip Cafe and, well, managing a restaurant is about as much work as you’d imagine, and then some.

The kitchen at Tulip is truly a cultural melting pot: currently we have three people helping out there, one British, one Australian and one Russian, and the lingua franca is generally Czech. And in that regard, I recently discovered that the future of my little business is largely in the hands of Tony Blair.

Call it the old bait-and-switch: Despite widespread reluctance to jump onto a train whose destination is basically unknown, Eastern Europeans voted overwhelmingly to join the EU last year. One of the reasons was the idea of “free movement of labor,” which is supposedly one of the fundamental freedoms of the EU. As it turns out, this “freedom” is a bit of a sham for the easterners, as countries like Germany and Austria, fearing a flood of cheap labor from the east, have instituted “transition periods” (lasting beyond 2010 in some cases) severely regulation the rights of easterners to work in those countries.
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