Monthly Archives: September 2003

Work Freedom Day

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European countries never do very well in the gimmicky league tables or comparative indices of nations that thinktanks love to devise in order to meet the bills. You know the sort of thing ? the World Competitiveness Ratings or the Index of Economic Freedom. I thought it was time to come up with one that plays to Europe’s strengths.

What strengths, you may ask? Well the combination of gloomy back-to-work September, and a recent report from the International Labor Organisation, Key Indicators of the Labour Market, reminded me of something the continent has in its favour ? short working hours and long holidays. And so to boost European?s international self-confidence during these difficult economic times, I would like to propose a new measure of how much time we have to spend at work, Work Freedom Day.
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PKK ends ceasefire

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PKK ended its five year ceasefire a couple of days ago. This is very significant, and very terrible.

There’s been a lot of progress in Turkey, but the kind of moderation and impovement of the Turkish attitude and treatment of its Kurdish minority that would put the conflict completely to an end was several years away. Unfortunately, I believe those things, and democratic reforms in general, are now less likely. And of course, new hostilities will be very, very very bad for the poulation of eastern Turkey.

It’s likely the Turkish military will committ atrocities, which will make the prospect of opening negotiations about EU membership more remote, which will make the forces of reform weaker, which will make EU membership even more distant, etc ad infinitum.

One good thing is that a lot of reforms have already been implemented in the last year, most lately the military was stripped of their considerable political power, but the reforms need to be implemented on the ground, not just on paper.

As far as I can tell, the media hasn’t paid much attention to this story, which is sad and also odd since, unlike say the war in Congo, another (scandalously)underreported story, it has obvious geopolitical ramifications, even short-term ones, since, as Tacitus has pointed out it might further destabilize Turkey’s neigbour Iraq.

I’m hardly an expert on Turkey. I will look for quality analysis on the subject and update this post if I find something.

Grist for the conspiracy mill

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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

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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?

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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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Around the Blogs: CAP etc

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I finally got around to looking at the Guardian’s new campaign blog, KickAAS, which is dedicated to abolishing agricultural subsidies, certainly a laudable goal., and while I don’t know if it’ll be a regular read, it’s surprisingly non-boring. It’s also interesting as a phenomenon, especially for those buying into the hype on poli blogs.

Via their comments section I discovered ideosyncratic conservative Back40’s blog, where was delighted to find a coherent and reasoned defense of CAP*, probably the first time I’ve seen such a thing. The blog’s full of original takes on original choices of topics. (except when talking about ‘the liberal media’.)

Who knew agricultural subsidies could be fun?

Less fun is the news that Matthew Yglesias will do all his political blogging on The American Prospect’s staff blog – unaccredited. I join his commenters in wondering why they didn’t give him his own blog, which would presumably get them more of his considerable readership, and thus get TAP more revenue and exposure. Especially since he on his own has posted more frequebtly than all TAPPED contributors combined.

This is sad since Yglesias was one of my favorite’s bloggers and this will obviously not be the same thing.

Update: Henry Farrell gives us a nod (thank you!) and responds to Iain’s post. In comments, ‘Doug’ made this brilliant observation, that I gotta reproduce here:

“There?s an interesting article to be done on what fantasies European integration evokes from local paleocons. In Britain, it?s apparently Guy Fawkes. In Poland, it?s godlessness, Communism and abortion. In Hungary, it?s Jews and maybe Germans. In Germany, it?s waves of invaders from the East. There?s probably a specific set for almost any EU or soon-to-be EU country that would tell outsiders a lot about the neuroses in national history. And these, in turn, tend to draw on political tropes that are so old fashioned you wonder what steamer trunk someone lifted them out of.”

In Sweden, of course, it’s an evil neoliberal plot to destroy the welfare state.

*The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy.

Papists Under The Bed

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There’s an utterly mad article in this week’s Spectator, in which a rather overheated Tory called Adrian Hilton argues, with apparent sincerity, that the EU is a grand Papist conspiracy to subject Protestant Britain to Roman Catholic tyranny. I mention it, not just to point and laugh, but because one passage in it illustrates a peculiar blind spot that is very common amongst UK Europhobes:
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A fistful of Euro[s]?

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Michael Everson is one of the more interesting characters in my strange little branch of human knowledge. I’ve never met him, but I’m pretty sure we have some mutual acquaintences on various standards committees. He is one of the people behind the Unicode character encoding standard and has been particularly instrumental in getting a number of smaller and more out-of-the-way characters and scripts into the Unicode standard.

He has also been especially vocal in bringing linguistic issues to bear on the European common currency, the most nagging of which is: What is the correct plural of “euro”?
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