Monthly Archives: October 2004

Arrivederci Lisbon?

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The Financial Times reports today that the team lead by Wim Kok, set up after the March economics summit, and charged with carrying out a review of the Lisbon process, is likely to find that we are badly behind schedule. This is hardly surprising since the Lisbon agenda was rather stronger on rhetorical nicety (including the now famous objective of turning Europe into the ?most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world? by 2010) and rather weaker on concrete policies and objectives.

The intention is now to change this balance:
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Turkey and the Constitution

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Ohhhhhh, I can’t resist this. Anatole Kaletsky writing in the Times:

Turkey is likely to scupper the strongest argument in favour of ratifying the European constitution: the claim that voting rights among the EU member nations must be reformed to accommodate past and future enlargements. The fact is that, far from preparing the EU for the future, the constitution will have to be torn up if Turkey joins. Turkey?s rapidly growing population, which will overtake Germany?s by 2015, would give it more votes under the new constitution than any other nation. Since an EU with Turkey as the single most powerful member would make no sense to anyone, including even the Turks, enlargement would mean completely rewriting the constitution just five years after the new arrangements are supposed to come into force. While conspiracy theorists suspect that the constitution was drafted to block Turkey?s accession, it looks increasingly like Turkey will sabotage the new constitution.

We do seem to be creating something of a muddle here. Many thanks to Dave at North Sea Diaries for the link and extract.

This summary of yesterday’s Commission discussion on Turkish entry also makes interesting reading.

Google Book Search

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Whilst speculation abounds in the weblog world that Google is about to launch its own browser tchnology, more traditional media seem to be enthusing about the possibility of Google book search:

Google, beset by a growing number of competitors in the internet search business, will shortly unveil a number of new features to its own search engine, according to one of the company’s directors.

It has also started testing a service that lets users read book excerpts online, echoing the popular ?Search Inside the Book? service created by Amazon.com.

The book excerpt service, called Google Print, aims to give users links to relevant books among the other search results they receive. Clicking on the link will then lead to the book excerpt, where users can read two pages forward or back from the relevant page and also click on another link to an online store to buy the book.
Source: Financial Times

Obviously the internet war is hotting up. Meantime I’m having fun playing round with Amazon’s A9.

What You Look For Is What You Get?

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Ok, I’m feeling in a wicked mood today, so how about something really controversial (just for a change). It’s now as near to official as we’re going to get it that Sadam Hussein wasn’t making any serious advance towards the development of WMDs.

So, this being the case, what exactly is going on in Iraq?
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Bulgaria and Romania to Enter in 2007?

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Amidst all the fanfare about negotiations opening on Turkey’s membership, we shouldn’t lose sight of other things that are in the pipeline. EU enlargement commissioner G?nter Verhuegen has just given Bulgaria and Romania the green light for a January 2007 target date.

?For the year 2007 we feel that accession may be appropriate and these two countries will be ready by then,? Verhuegen said.

?Negotiations with Bulgaria are technically speaking closed. We wish to conclude negotiations with Romania by the end of the year, we are aware that this will be difficult.?

Now I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood here. I am perfectly happy with Bulgaria and Romania as EU members, under the right conditions, just as I am happy with Turkish membership. But I do think that Turkey’s point about the same standards being applied is a valid one. I personally – and based among other things on extensive converstaions with migrants from these countries – have plenty of reservations about just how ‘ready’ these societies are if we are using the yardstick currently (correctly) being applied to Turkey. Corruption and lawlessness would be among the issues that immediately spring to mind. So, if there is a time to ‘turn the screw’, it is now.

Mid-term I am still convinced that Turkey will have much more to offer economically. Both Rumania and Bulgaria already suffer from many of the major problems facing existing EU member states – low fertility, rapid ageing, serious problems in paying pensions moving forward – and they have the added problem of the meaningful functioning of their democratic processes. Turkey is already making important steps forward, it would be nice to feel re-assured that the other two were.

Addendum: North Sea Diaries has a spoof text of a speech Erdogan might have made to the Turkish parliament explaining how the EU meets Turkey’s criteria as a suitable place to be. As our diarist wryly puts it “he made it clear the EU would be allowed to join Turkey”. You can find a summary of the speech he actually made in Strasbourg here.

Turkey recommended for EU accession talks

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The European Commission has recommended that accession talks for Turkey should begin, but hasn’t laid out any dates for the process:

Commission officials are reporting on the progress Turkey has already made, along with Bulgaria and Romania.

The final decision on Turkey rests with the leaders of all 25 EU member states in December – with accession years off.

The Commission’s recommendation is a milestone in an increasingly impassioned debate.

The decision was reached by a “large consensus” among commissioners, one EU official said, but no vote was taken.

There was also no recommended date to start negotiations with Turkey.

More from The Scotsman/PA, EU Business, Reuters and EU Observer.

Update: The full text of Romano Prodi’s speech can be found here and I’ve copied it below, so you can click on the ‘continue reading’ link to see it as the English HTML link on the site doesn’t seem to be working (pdf and doc links are).
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State of Mind.

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This post might not pass any seriousness test, yet when a friend sent me the photo below I could not help but feel that this clearly unindented design is a subconscious consequence of the embryonic German desire to actually look into the future and reap the benefits of the socio-economic changes (“Hartz IV”) as well as of the periodically reappearing shadows of the pasts (Bernd Eichinger’s movie “Der Untergang“) and as such rather well describes the current German state of mind, for the minute assuming that there is such a thing… (for the non-Germanophones, the text on the additional red Stern cover-layer reads: “how to become your own boss”).