Monthly Archives: October 2003

Shoes, Other Feet, Fits

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EU unilaterally blocking Russia’s entry into the very very multilateral WTO.

How many poles is this multipolar thing going to have, anyway?

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Putin Doesn’t Like EU Terms for Entry
October 9, 2003
By Natalya Shurmina

YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin sharply
criticized European Union “bureaucrats” on Thursday for pressing the
country to raise domestic energy prices as a condition for joining the
World Trade Organization.

“We cannot move to world energy prices in a single day. It will ruin the
country’s economy. Eurobureaucrats either do not understand this or are
trying to impose conditions which are unacceptable for Russia’s entry to
WTO,” Putin told a Russian-German summit meeting in the Urals.

“Such a tough position toward Russia is unjustified and dishonest. We view
this as an attempt at arm-twisting.”
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Comment allez-vous?

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From John Vinocur in the commentary pages of the Hairy Trib:

“At its most hurtful and remarkable, and yet perhaps its most honest, there is the start of acceptance by segments of the French intellectual community that French leadership, as it is constituted now, is not something Europe wants – or France merits.” …

“Of all the [current self-critical] books, the current No. 2 on the bestseller list of L’Express, ‘La France Qui Tombe,’ by Nicolas Baverez, has been the focus of unusual attention.

“Baverez, a practicing attorney and economist who has a strong place in the Paris establishment, argues that France’s leadership hates change. Rather, it ‘cultivates the status quo and rigidity’ because it is run through the connivance of politicians, civil servants and union officials, bringing together both the left- and right-wing elites. They are described as mainly concerned with preserving the failed statist system that protects their jobs and status.

“Although he has little patience with the American role in the world (it is branded unilateral, imperial and unpredictable, yet flexible and open to change) Baverez charges that the failure of French policy on Iraq and Europe – resisting the United States with nothing to offer in exchange, and attempting to force the rest of Europe to follow its lead – ‘crowns the process of the nation’s decline’ and leaves France in growing diplomatic isolation everywhere.

“Over the past year, said Bavarez, ‘French diplomacy has undertaken to broaden the fracture within the West, and duplicate American unilateralism on the European scale by its arrogant dressing down of Europe’s new democracies. It has sustained a systematically critical attitude that flees concrete propositions in favor of theoretical slogans exalting a multipolar world or multilateralism.’

“As for Europe, Bavarez maintains that France has been discredited by its reticence to transfer any kind of meaningful sovereignty to the central organization, its resistance to giving up its advantages in the area of agricultural policy and its disregard for the directives and rules of the European Union executive commission.

“He does not stop there. Of a united Europe, Bavarez said, France has ‘ruined what might have remained of a common foreign and security policy, deeply dividing the community and placing France in the minority.’ His country was at the edge of marginalization in Europe and the world, he claimed, because of its ‘verbal pretense of having real power’ that is ‘completely cut off from its capacity for influence or action.'” …

Ouch.

“Now, in response to the Bavarez book, there is public rage from the Chirac camp, which the Bavarez book charges with having neither the courage nor the competence to confront the basic problems.

“But the density of Bavarez’s factual argumentation, bolstered by the presence of the other books, all treating France’s pride-of-rank and French conceits with brutal disrespect, have given the notion of French decline a legitimacy, reality and currency that it lacked before in public debate.” …

“Daniel Vernet, a former senior editor of [Le Monde], wrote, ‘We often irritate our partners because too frequently we have the tendency to want to impose our views, or only to consider as truly European those positions that conform to a French vision, however much in the EU minority it may be.'” …

“The sum of the messages of the books, in French to the French, is that this vision of the country’s current circumstances is not a French-bashing invention from afar, but a home truth.

“For Bavarez, France is threatened with becoming a museum diplomatically and a transit center economically. To do anything about it, it must revive itself internally first, getting away from what he calls its ‘social statist model.’ To advance, it must end the dominant role of a ‘public sector placed outside of any constraint requiring productivity or competitiveness.’

“The reform of the rest of French policy, based on genuine integration into Europe, should follow, he argues.”

Pens?es?

[Complete text of IHT article]

Europe as an economic irrelevancy

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By 2050 Western Europe could be an economic irrelevancy, with its four leading economies, the UK, Germany, France and Italy (note the order?) enjoying a combined output of less than half India?s and a third of China?s. Both Brazil and Russia will be twice as large as any single Western European economy.
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France to be the fourth nation in space

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The credible recent rumours that China is less than a week away from it’s first manned space flight appear to have stimulated some other potential space-faring nations. France and Russia have announced an accord en principle to launch manned Russian Soyuz craft from the ESA launch centre at Kourou in French Guiana. The Soyuz is the now roughly thirty-five year old Russian three-man launch vehicle which China has cloned for its space programme. France will be footing approximately half of the €350 million the ESA has allocated to the programme, making either France or the ESA the world’s fourth space power. Agence France-Presse, via Spaceflight Daily, is reporting that launches could take place as soon as 2006.

With the American space shuttle (also designed roughly 30 years ago) grounded indefinitely and no new money going into the design of manned launch vehicles, the Soyuz is the only manned space vehicle currently in service and appears likely to stay that way

According to French primeminister Jean-Marie Raffarin, “Cela nous donnera une grande base [permettant] ? nos industries spatiales, avec les Russes mais aussi avec les Allemands et les Europ?ens [..] d’avoir acc?s ? l’espace et ? toutes ses richesses dans l’ind?pendance.”

It seems that the Columbia shuttle accident and recent US-EU tensions have forced the ESA to evaluate its options for an independent manned space capability. At present, only the Russian space agency is able to reach the International Space Station. I guess the ESA figured that if China could afford to launch Soyuz capsules, then it’s probably the cheapest option for European manned space travel.

If €350 million will buy you a copy of the Russian manned space programme, can Japan be far behind? Perhaps even Brazil will want to join the game, since it has a really quite well developed unmanned space programme. €350 million isn’t that much money. There are individuals with more in assets than that.

It has become traditional for each space-faring nation to come up with a new word for people who travel in space. Americans are astronauts, Russians are cosmonauts, and Chinese space travelers are taikonauts (from tai4kong1 taikong – Mandarin for “space.”) Will an independent manned EU space programme require a new term? Enquiring minds (well, pedantic lexicographers at any rate) want to know.

My Petit Robert already has a French appellation for space travellers: spationaute. The term is, apparently, in actual use, since googling it gets approximately 2,300 hits. Some of the French press – and even a few anglophone outlets – have used the word to refer to Frenchmen (and women) who have travelled into space on the shuttle and on Russian launches. My Robert dates it to 1962, but doesn’t tell me if it was an Académie Française invention or a spontaneous production of the French media. It also marks it as rare, but that seems to be rapidly changing.

From a lexicographic standpoint, this one-word-per-nation approach is a disaster. I wonder if the other members of the ESA will be demanding their own words for their space travellers. Will Germans taking off from Kourou demand to be refered to as “Raumonauts”? How about the Brits and the Irish? Will they demand separate terminology from the Americans? Or worse, from each other? Will the Irish demand to be known as fanasonauts? Perhaps, in the name of European cooperation, we should all agree on a single term. Euronaut is a distinct possibility. The Latin root vacuus suggest vaconaut, but something tells me that will not fly. Any suggestions?

He Who Pays the Piper

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My Bulgarian ‘assistant’ still won’t let me forget Chirac’s last faux pas: that the biggest favour the candidate countries could do for themselves was to stay quiet. It looks like we’re going down the same road one more time. I really don’t think it is possible to effectively ‘buy’ opinions. I mean in the short term it may work as a tactic, but long term this will lead to more, not less, resentment and tension. I already feel that the Swedish euro vote was more a political statement than an economic one. The Netherlands are getting louder and louder in their denunciation of stability pact ‘flexibility’, and now the aid-recipients are effectively being told to put up and shut up. This is not a very auspicious start for a new constitution, nor does it offer a very encouraging insight into how it might work.
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A Laid-Back Notion of Risk

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I was listening to a programme on French radio about whether the government should intervene to prohibit investigation related to genetically modified food when I came across this piece about obesity in the US. Food and the way we eat it seem to constitute an important part of our cultural identity. Do we have a distinctive European attitude to food, or are the North European cultures more like the US, and the Southern Europeans in a class of their own?

On the other hand when I accepted the idea of Americans as ‘risk takers’, it wasn’t exactly the risk of being a cigarette-smoking, six-pack-drinking, couch potatoe that I had in mind. But then again maybe we are not so different, since most of the Parisians I get to speak to these days go on less about ‘je t’aime, moi non plus’ and more about ‘boulot, metro et bobo’.
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Sheiken, Not Stirred

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The Washington Post reports on:

Spreading Saudi Fundamentalism in U.S.
Network of Wahhabi Mosques, Schools, Web Sites Probed by FBI

“On Aug. 20, 2001, Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen, a man who would soon be named a minister of the Saudi government and put in charge of its two holy mosques, arrived in the United States to meet with some of this country’s most influential fundamentalist Sunni Muslim leaders.

“His journey here was to include meetings and contacts with officials of several Saudi-sponsored charities that have since been accused of links to terrorist groups, including the Illinois-based Global Relief Foundation, which was shut down by U.S. authorities last year.

“He met with the creators of Islamic Web sites that U.S. authorities contend promote the views of radical Saudi clerics tied to Osama bin Laden.” …

“Backed by money from Saudi Arabia, Wahhabis have built or taken over hundreds of mosques in North America and opened branches of Saudi universities here for the training of imams as part of the effort to spread their beliefs, which are intolerant of Christianity, Judaism and even other strains of Islam.” …

“The Saudi government, through its embassy here, declined to discuss any aspect of the probe. Embassy officials agreed in August to forward a request for an interview to Hussayen, but provided no response.” …

“The most intriguing aspect of Hussayen’s journey may be entirely coincidental: his brief proximity in a hotel near Dulles International Airport to three of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers the night before they crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon. On the night of Sept. 10, Hani Hanjour, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi checked into the same hotel, a Marriott Residence Inn.

“The FBI has examined hotel videotapes and interviewed employees, but has found no indication that Hussayen and the hijackers interacted, law enforcement sources said. After the attack, an FBI agent interviewed hotel guests, including Hussayen and his wife, but did not get very far.

“According to court testimony from FBI agent Gneckow earlier this year, the interview was cut short when Hussayen ‘feigned a seizure, prompting the agents to take him to a hospital, where the attending physicians found nothing wrong with him.’

“The agent recommended that Hussayen “should not be allowed to leave until a follow-up interview could occur,” Gneckow told the court. But ‘her recommendation, for whatever reason, was not complied with,’ he said.

“On Sept. 19, the day air travel resumed, Hussayen and his wife took off for Saudi Arabia.”

Is anyone in the European press doing this kind of investigative reporting on the Islamist networks that are still active in Europe? I haven’t seen anything in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, but there’s obviously lots of the German press that I don’t get to. France? UK? Nordics?

Odd, But Interesting

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Gregg Easterbrook of the New Republic writes:

MOSCOW LOST THE COLD WAR, BUT DREAMS OF WINNING THE GLOBAL WARMING WAR: Why won’t Russia ratify the Kyoto Treaty? It would seem very much in Moscow’s interest to do so.

The United States has dropped out of Kyoto negotiations, but most other Western nations remain in. Russia now holds the swing vote on whether Kyoto goes into effect for most Western nations except the United States. If Kyoto actually did take effect, requiring most Western nations to make dramatic reductions in greenhouse gases, Europe would inevitably end up involved in “carbon trading” with Moscow. The European Union would invest in modernization of Russian industry, in order to reduce Russian greenhouse-gas emissions; then Europe would buy the reduction credits so created. The European Union also would reduce its use of greenhouse-offender coal, substituting lower-carbon natural gas from Russia. Thus it seems Moscow and its industries would come out a winner under a Kyoto regime. Yet the Duma has been resisting ratification of Kyoto for two years, and yesterday, Vladimir Putin said he is also opposed.

Possible reason for Russian resistance–Moscow wants global warming! Much of the world might suffer, but the freezing former Soviet states might be better off. The agricultural region of Russia might expand significantly, while Siberia became reasonably habitable. If Siberia and other ice regions became reasonably habitable, global warming would effectively be expanding Russian territory by climate change, not war. And what government doesn’t want more territory?

Sidelight: Why does Germany favor the Kyoto Treaty? Not so much for greenhouse reasons but so that Berlin can shut down the country’s subsidized, politically powerful coal-mining industry. German leaders have wanted for decades to cut subsidies for coal production–even the presumably pro-labor current government wants this–because coal mined in Germany costs more than twice the world price, mainly owing to featherbedded work rules. Every move to reign in the German coal industry has been greeted by public howls. But if Berlin could blame a coal shut-down on an international obligation, and polls show the Kyoto accord is very popular among Germans, the equation would change.

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The sidelight is even odder and even more interesting. Hmm.

Quiz time

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Bored? Think you’re an expert on EU matters? Then try the BBC’s Brussels Brainbuster quiz. OK, it’s just 10 multiple choice questions, not really a true brainbuster, but it should fill a minute or two of your time. You can even share your results with everyone else in the comments section – especially if you beat my rather pathetic 7/10 and want to gloat.

Berlusconi’s Road to Damascus?

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The Italian unions are threatening to strike against pension reform, while Berlusconi says government plans to reform Italy’s expensive welfare system are “necessary, fair and wise” (Silvio ‘el savio’?). The Unions say: “There is no pensions emergency. The government…is dramatizing the pensions problem. It doesn’t correspond to reality,” while Corriere della Sera finds a new Berlusconi, one who is a ‘reformed’ character who “For the first time…..turned his back on the miraculous optimism and creative economic recipes of the last two years and smiling persuasively,……tried to reassure people, to win more of their trust”. Meantime one Bank of America economist is reported as saying that “the reform is very weak. They should have gone for something much stronger but that’s more to do with internal opposition rather than the union threat”.

So where are we, is the pension reform question simply an excuse to have a battle with the unions, or is there a real problem in Italy? My own feeling is the latter. In a way I find myself agreeing with Pedro Solbes (which is why, pragmatically I would prefer him not to resign over the Eurostat scandal, although ethically I think he probably should). We have focussed too much on the question of the 3% limit on the decifit, and not enough on the level of the debt (Italy’s debt is currently over 100% of GDP). Even with this small reform Italy’s financies still look very precarious. But cutting pensions, as we can see, is not popular. So which is it? Can Europe reform itself and face up to its demographic reality, or are we going to have to go for ‘fiscal trainwreck’ US style? Do our politicians have more in common with the US ones than we like to imagine?