Monthly Archives: September 2006

Who gets under the EU umbrella when it rains?

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This anniversary guest post is written by the clever and wittty P O’Neill.

For understandable reasons — the addition of 10, and soon to be 12, new member countries, and the constitutional crisis, the European Union has been preoccupied with foundational questions in recent years. But an older concern is working its way back onto the agenda: how to handle an economic crisis in a member country. The last major convulsion was Black Wednesday in 1992. Yet the only real long term impact of Black Wednesday was on the electoral fortunes of the Conservatives, as the legacy of mismanagement proved very difficult to shake. But there was little other damage: the UK economy managed to shed an exchange rate straitjacket that it had never particularly liked and growth recovered quite quickly, and the Eurozone project, then its in infancy, shed its most reluctant large member, setting the stage for monetary union 7 years later. Furthermore, the crisis itself was limited in scope, as it never concerned the ability of the UK government or the country as a whole to pay its bills.
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So, how long until Blair resigns?

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Right now it feels more like twelve days than twelve months.

There’s been a lot of anger and unrest in the last few days, as Labour politicians have pressured th increasingly impopular Blair to name a date for his departure. Today two members of the government, including one minister, has just resigned and called on Blair to step down. Amusingly, the minister is blogging MP Tom Watson, until now strident blairite, who made himself very impopular in the British blogosphere and tangled with our own Nick Barlow.

Gordon Brown must be very happy. Blair has not only tried to delay his ascension, but also tried to set the stage for a challenger to Brown, maybe John Reid or esp. Alan Johnson. I think at the very least, Blair will be forced to publically anoounce a departure date, as Brown demands.

Is Trichet’s Optimism Justified?

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Our next anniversary guest post is from the estimable Mark Thoma.

The Fed and the ECB have different economic outlooks for the U.S. and European economies. For instance, the Financial Times reports:

Fed and ECB diverge on economic outlook, by Chris Giles and Ralph Atkins, Financial Times: The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank painted contrasting pictures of the US and European economies… Together, the statement by Jean-Claude Trichet, ECB president, and the speech by Mr Bernanke indicated that European interest rates were likely to rise while there was no urgency for further US rate rises.
Mr Bernanke gave an optimistic assessment of the US economy’s ability to continue rapid economic growth without triggering further inflationary pressures. … Across the Atlantic, Mr Trichet announced big upward revisions to the ECB’s inflation forecasts … and called for “strong vigilance” to defend price stability – code words used to signal an interest rate increase in early October. … Mr Trichet’s comments followed the unexpected strength of the eurozone recovery in the second quarter, and ECB fears about the impact on inflation
in 2007… Eurozone consumers’ fears about inflation increased in August to the highest level since the introduction of euro notes and coins in 2002…

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A Face That Launched A Thousand Ships

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An unlikely Helen, Spain’s deputy prime minister, Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, that’s for sure. Yet outside a few thousand years difference in timing the two seem to have been cut out for one and the same the same historical role: urging the boats to go back. Indeed the only thing which really separates them might be the magnitude of the problem to hand, since Coalición Canaria president Paulino Rivero suggested this weekend that what might be involved were not a mere 1,000 ships, but anything between 10,000 and 15,000 currently being built along the Mauritanian and Senegalese coastlines.

Joking aside this post is about tragedy, a human tragedy. According to the NGOs who are involved some 3,000 people have already died in attempting to make the hazardous crossing, a crossing which was actually completed over this weekend by a record 1,200 people in 36 hours.

As well as tragedy the post is also about folly, the folly of those economists who think low fertility isn’t an important economic issue. This opinion was recently expressed by respected US economist Greg Mankiw, (on his blog) who described the very idea that it might be as ‘wrong headed’ and, to boot, suggested that a poll of the world’s top ten economists would draw a blank on names who thought that low fertility was among Europe’s major economic problems. I am sure Mankiw is right about the poll, and this is why I use the expression ‘folly’. So what do I mean?
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Al-Qaeda Recruits in Egypt

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The first in our series of anniversary guest posts comes from the great Praktike, who normally writes for American Footprints.

The number two man in al-Qaeda, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, made waves when he announced on August 5th via a taped statement that five members of the Egyptian Islamic Group (EIG) had joined al-Qaeda. Ominously, he implied that they were just the tip of the iceberg. The revelation seemed to confirm what many terrorism analysts have been saying for some time: that the American response to September 11th has radicalized the region and made recruiting an easy task for al-Qaeda. Excerpts of the video, in which Al-Zawahiri appeared with the little-known Mohamed Khalil al-Hekayema, originally aired on the Al-Jazeera satellite channel.
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1..2..3..And They’re Off – The Left

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On the other side of French politics, as I promised, the internal conflicts are if anything stronger. To start with the most important ones, the Socialist Party is about to do something quite rare in its history – have a contested primary election. The only other was that of 1995, when Lionel Jospin beat Henri Emmanuelli to succeed Francois Mitterand. Before that, the candidacy normally went to the party’s first secretary, who was usually Mitterand anyway. (Before 1971, when Mitterand set up the modern PS, the various splinter-groups from the old SFIO that made it up of course had their own arrangements.)

Since the disaster of 2002, though, this looks like it’s going to change, chiefly because there’s a strong external candidate. Ségoléne Royal, the head of the Poitou-Charentes regional government, has been campaigning vigorously all year with some success. The success can be measured, in fact, by the frequency with which she is being accused of “Blairism” by the rest of the possible candidates. This looks like being the content-free insult of the campaign, in fact, as could be seen with the PS official quoted by Libération who remarked that he didn’t want Royal to “come back from London and abolish the social security” – after all, everyone knows that the UK provides no social security whatsoever, right?

It would be more accurate to place Royal on the soft-left. (If anyone’s Blairite in this game, it’s Nicolas Sarkozy – this speech is a classic of early Blairite rhetoric circa 1997.) She is no more “neoliberal” than Lionel Jospin was in government, for example, or for that matter Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and is closer to the Greens than some. She is given to vaguely conservative speaking, but it’s harder to discern where a concern for civisme, secularity and Republican values (in the French sense) stops and where a rather stern law-and-order politics begins in a French context.

However, it looks more and more as if the rest of the party is gearing up for an “anti-Blairism”, stop-Sego campaign. And policy doesn’t matter very much in this sense.
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Europe: feudalism and tribes

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From The Weekly Standard’s essay The return of the tribes by Ralph Peters (emphasis mine):

Now, in 2006, we see one European state after another enacting protectionist measures to prevent foreign ownership of vital industries (such as yogurt-making). France paused, as hundreds of thousands of its best and brightest protested the creation of new jobs for the less-privileged in a spectacular defense of the ancien régime. And a new German chancellor has called for saving the European project by destroying it–or at least by hewing down the massive bureaucracy in Brussels that alienated the continent. The future of Europe lies not in a cosmopolitan version of the empire of Charlemagne, but in a postmodern version of the feudal fragmentation that succeeded the Frankish empire. Brussels may be the new medieval Rome, its bureaucratic papacy able to pronounce in limited spheres, but there is ever less fear of excommunication.

You know the drill: discuss if you like.

(hat tip)