A decent overview of Poland and the EU, from a business and economic perspective.
Monthly Archives: May 2004
Terror in Greece.
Earlier today three bombs exploded outside a police station in Athens. One policeman wass slightly injured.
They apperear certain the perpetrators are homegrown.
Cyprus Coda
After the referendum in Cyprus, I asked a friend of mine who works for the UN Development Program what the local mood was like:
really for the time being it is disappointment…with the amount of misinformation out and the also the tight timelines that were imposed….really hard to know who to blame, but I blame the GC [Greek Cypriot] radio/tv channels most of all…people want to be convinced i feel but they need not be pushed into something….easing of economic restrictions for the northern part would be inevitable i think….they deserve the credit for sure….
More in a couple of years, I suppose. In the meantime, travel to the North should be easier, and a baroque, possibly roccoco, thicket of regulations will spring up about how to treat the citizens of the North, the products of their labor, and every other little thing that the EU looks after.
Bump Right Ahead.
In my post celebrating the EU’s enlargement I reminded that the road ahead is going to be bumpy. Well, the rough ride starts today. On Tuesday morning, the European Parliament will have to vote again on the issue of whether to endorse or reject an agreement between the EU and the US on the controversial transfer of Airline passenger name records (PNR) (.pdf). The EP has already voted twice on this issue and as opposed to the Council and the Commission ? which has negotiated the agreement with the US – insisted on a Court of Justice verdict establishing the agreement?s compliance with EU data protection regulations or rejecting it. According to Statewatch and EUpolitix.com, the Council of Ministers ? fearing an ECJ ruling against the agreement – has now invoked an ?urgency procedure? to hold a third vote on the issue, hoping to overturn the slim majority of 16 votes with the help of the new – inexperienced and unelected, government dependent – MEPs from the new member states.
Freedom, these days, is not what it used to be. There was a time when most people were afraid of governments? efforts to collect data about them. For a long time, there was a general uneasiness with respect to the privacy related consequences of data processing technologies. But terrorist attacks, and the success of the technology I am using to publish this article have, over the last decade, slowly eroded most people?s resistance. A frog being boiled slowly will not jump out of the kettle. And now, secretly and diligently prepared, the widespread introduction of biometric data in identification documents and passports, as well as the creation of centralised databases to store them along with as much of electronic communication traces as possible ? as Maria Farrell reported last week – has almost become politically inevitable.
Caricature by Sebastian Linke
Germany, the Uberpimp?
While the British government is about to introduce legislation which, as a consequence of efforts to limit child abuse, makes it formally illegal for teenagers under the age of 16 (the age of consent in the UK) to engage in any mutually agreed sexual activity, including kissing or even hand holding, it could appear as if the German government were moving in the opposite direction. But that’s a complicated story. One that suggests the German government has decided to add a little fun to the otherwise joyless job market by mocking itself.
Run by the government?Everyone who is familiar with the record of the current German government will probably remember that their initial reformist zeal quickly turned into a series of legislative and then economic disasters in the course of their first two years in office. In a truth-or-dare speech, Chancellor Schroeder even admitted this to the Bundestag a couple of weeks ago.
An important part of the problem in 1998 was that in order to be able to govern, the relatively weak Chancellor had to cut the SPD’s loony left’s influence within his Parliamentary party – epitomized by then SPD chairman and finance minister Oscar Lafontaine. So after beating the left with the stick by forcing Lafontaine to resign and assuming the SPD leadership himself, Mr Schroeder had to feed them some carrots, too. That is why the labour market became even more rigid in the first two years of the SPD government. A legacy still haunting the government. Yet history seems to be about to repeat itself.
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