Can either host score in their opener? Can the Germans live up to their high expectations? Is it a replay of Slavic Europe vs Germanic Europe, or is it just a game with a ball?
All this and more in Sunday’s games…
Monthly Archives: June 2008
A Geeky Moment
Switzerland’s roster for their opening game (loss to the Czech Republic) contained a reminder of one of the wonderful ways I misspent my youth.
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Thank God for anthems
There I was thinking that the Euro 2008 opening ceremony was the usual bizarre interpretative dance performance to which UEFA seems addicted — not even good on TV, for which the visuals seem designed — when a singer (must figure out her name) and the Basel crowd did a great job on the Swiss national anthem, the Schweizerpsalm.  Let’s play football!
The Paradox of Selective Immigration Policy
The paradox is that countries attempting to screen immigrants by skill level, so that they only get the more skilled ones, end up with an immigrant mix that is less skill-intensive than countries with open immigration. This apparently is a consensus message from the Munich Economic Summit: countries like Ireland, the UK, and Spain, which have had major episodes of open immigration from EU accession countries and/or general amnesties for non-EU immigrants have higher proportions of highly qualified immigrants —
For example, 45% of Ireland’s foreign-born residents and 34% of Britain’s have a university degree, compared with only 19% in Germany and 11% in Italy, Mr. [Hans-Werner] Sinn said.
In global terms, the case study is the USA, which despite having various qualification and skill weightings in its immigration system, has fewer such restrictions than other magnet destinations (e.g. Canada) and is still a brain-drain recipient country. So what’s at work? Is it that countries more likely to choose relatively liberal immigration policies are also more likely to have the policies that attract skilled immigrants? That low and high skilled immigrants are complements; you can’t have one without the other? Or that when you have a relatively open policy, you don’t alienate the source country by seeming want to cherry-pick only their “best” people? Â
One interesting thing about the EU is that there is enough variation in national policy to learn from this episodes. Willingness to learn is another question.
“Well… I guess that’s what you’d call ‘the conscious’.”
A warm welcome to guest poster Joanna Walsh.
I’m reading the guide notes on the walls of the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. They’re annoying me. I’m seeing the exhibition with a friend. It’s always good to have someone to complain to.
“Look, here it says about how miserable she is again: ‘depression, anxiety, the fear of abandonment, of loss of love.’ It says it’s all going on in the ‘depths of her unconscious’.”
Although Bourgeois’ material comes from the unconscious, and often from misery, she transforms it with tough, highly-articulate and playful conscious thought.
Ok – let’s look at the most immediately obvious things about an artist who is shown in the bank of photos outside her exhibition, unfailingly smiling. She smiles wisely, secretly, ironically, openly; she smiles from inside her sculptures; she smiles at Andy Warhol; she smiles wickedly and most famously holding under her arm a latex phallic sculpture entitled, ‘little girl’.
Let’s look at her early, isolated, stick-like, sculptured human figures whose fragile attempts to connect with each other are described by the artist with a nod and a wink – look at those two stick-people standing together, the ‘female’ inclining her head toward the ‘male’, ‘listening’ (as in the title of the piece) clearly not only with affection, but a definite touch ‘yes, dear, very nice, dear,’ in her attitude.
It’s so hard to ignore the hard hysterical, joke-y surrealism which inhabits her sketches and prints of ‘house-wives’ – women imprisoned by their domestic role. So – let’s not ignore it.
Her 1960s ‘body parts’ sculptures of penis-breasts, which she teasingly denies are sexual are not only ‘repellant, and unsettling’ but also meltingly and sensually textured: here is someone who enjoys sex and likes to play around with gender.
It’s good to see a room of pieces inspired by the artist’s mother whom Bourgeois had a deep need to rehabilitate from her role as silent witeness to a powerful and adulterous husband. Bourgeois transforms her into an enourmous spider – a huge, twisted being; the domestic become monstrous through a change of size – but also a friendly maternal force with her well-protected bundle of eggs. In the end, this spider scares me less than the ones I find in the bath. I’d like to have this spider on my side.
And let’s not shy away from the fact that Bourgeois’ work is and has always consciously followed fashion. As maxi-skirts followed minis, so Bourgeois’ early Giacommeti-like figures were superseded by her installation works in the 1980s then by her currently fashionable use of embroidery and textiles. If she’s ‘impossible to categorise’ it’s not through iconoclasm but her knowing and eclectic use of any art movement she finds lying around.
The slightly po-faced exhibition guide has concentrated on Bourgeois’ pain rather than the angry, intelligent, tough jouissance with which she transforms into a clearly-articulated visual language her hard, priviliged, trivial, serious life.
We get to the last of the noticeboards. My friend agrees:
“They keep on going on about the subconscious meaning. I don’t think it’s subconscious. It’s – what do they call that thing that’s above the subconscious.”
“Well… I guess that’s what you’d call ‘the conscious’.”
…
“I am a scientific person. I believe in psychoanalysis, in philosophy. For me the only thing that matters is the tangible.†Louise Bourgeois
That Nice, Warm Glow
Hungary faces rude awakening from welfare state dreams
The release of a recent poll showing that most Hungarians preferred life under communism caused a mild shock in the foreign community, but provoked little more than a characteristic shrug from Hungarians. After all, under János Kádár Hungary was one of the least repressive regimes in the Soviet bloc, the “Goulash Communism†of the 1980s allowed a certain amount of private business, inflation was unheard of, while the state was able to borrow on Western markets to fund a generous health and welfare system. As the number of Hungarians feeling nostalgic for those simpler times has risen from 53% in the last such survey in 2001 to 61% today, it’s clear that Hungarians are having trouble adjusting to modern-day reality.
Economically, the country has been living in a dreamland since Fidesz got elected in 1998 by running against economic reform. Until recently, no politician dared touch the idea again, until current PM Ferenc Gyurcsány made his now infamous speech to party MPs in which he said “we have lied morning, noon and night†about the economy. That came shortly after winning re-election in 2006 following a campaign in which the growing state and current account deficits remained the “elephant in the room†about which neither leading party said anything.
A Warm Welcome
To Desmond McGrath, adding his expertise, wit and wisdom to the AFOE mix as a guest writer for the next three weeks. Desmond is based in Budapest, Hungary, so we are getting a few forints’ worth along with all of our euros. If we’re really lucky, he’ll explain the wonders of the double-long vowel and old Hungarian currencies.
Though Canadian by background, he’s been in Hungary since the early 1990s. He remembers when FIDESZ really was a youth party, Meciar’s first tangles with his country’s Magyar minority, and all the heady days of looking forward to EU membership. Now that Hungary is on the inside of the tent, he’s continuing to give astute analysis as an editor at Hungary Around the Clock.
He’s said that his first post will be on the ironies and peculiarities of Hungary’s current minority government. Welcome Desmond!
EURO 2008 football (not soccer!) fever
Only a couple of days before the big European sporting event of 2008 kicks off in Austria and Switzerland. Who will be crowned European football champion of 2008 in Vienna on June 26th?
For my own country The Netherlands, which finds itself in a Group of Death with France, Italy and Romania, the odds do not look very good. Solid individual players, apart from maybe the current defence line-up, but not always up to par as a team.
Current world champion Italy recently lost star defender Cannavaro because of an injury, but even so the signori di catenaccio won’t have much trouble keeping the gates tightly closed.
The French side, the current vice world champion, looks pretty solid too, with fresh new players like for instance attacker Bafetimbi Gomis. And then there is the Romanian side, a strong outsider wolf comfortably clad in underdog’s clothing. Nobody seems to expect the Romanian inquisition, but this side has nothing to lose in this group and could very well upset at least one of the higher ranked teams.
Last year a Dutch clairvoyant (or maybe somebody who just follows Dutch football very closely) already predicted the Orange Team won’t make it past the group stage. And to add insult to very probable Dutch injury the English, who failed to qualify for EURO 2008, have taken it upon themselves to have some preemptive fun at the expense of the soon to be blue orange squad.
A certain Jon Gledstone from the creative design agency 5th Of November thought up a web campaign called Just Go Dutch to urge his compatriots to support, of all possible teams, the Dutch. You can find the guy’s rather funny webpage here. The Dutch, being the good sports they are, have already thanked Gledstone for his support with an official orange T-shirt showing his name in ‘Dutch’: Van Gledstone.
Anyway, what is your favourite team to win the EURO 2008 Championship? Or, alternatively, who would you like to see defeated? After all, as those dastardly English are showing us in a reverse psychology kind of way, cheering against a team can be fun as well.
PS: A big kiss to Gledstone & Co for at least giving us Dutchies a little bit of attention before we inevitably sink into total oblivion.
*end counter jinx alert*
The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East by Olivier Roy
It is reading time again here at AFOE. I am happy to invite you to read The politics of Chaos in the Middle East by Olivier Roy. If you like the world to be simple and easy to understand then you will hate The Politics of Chaos.
Olivier Roy offers his readers a descriptive overview of the many and ever moving social and political currents and dynamics in the Middle East. Understanding these will give a clearer insight into many of the conflicts in the region. Roy places the conflicts within their own context and separates them from the idea of ‘a clash of civilizations’. As the title of the book suggests, there is no single formula, or a ‘geostrategy of Islam’ as he calls it, that would explain everything that currently goes on in the Middle East. In the rather provocative introduction to the book, which you can read at the Columbia University Press website (pdf), Roy States:
Far from bearing out the prevailing theory that there is “a clash of civilizations†and a confrontation between the Muslim world and the West, the conflicts and realignments affect primarily the Muslim world itself and operate along fault lines that have very little to do with ideology.
It is true that some people, in their discussions about Islam, tend to forget the actual social and political ‘realities on the ground’ and see the Muslim World as a huge monolith. Olivier Roy addresses this issue in the first chapter of the book called Who is the enemy? Where is the enemy?, in which he describes how current Western, and notably American, Middle East policy was shaped and why it failed. Talking about the failure of the democratization of Iraq he writes:
Why then, is there talk of failure? Fundamentally because, for the neoconservatives and international institutions alike, democracy is a simple question of building institutions and electoral mechanisms. (…) What is lacking in this theory of democratization is the entire political dimension of a modern society (state), and the entire anthropological depth of a traditional society.
In short, the West looked at the problems in the Middle East from a purely Western perspective that largely ignored ‘the reality on the ground’.
Olivier Roy then goes on to describe ‘this reality on the ground’ in a second chapter called The Middle East: Fragmentation of Conflicts and New Fault Lines. It would be impossible to give a decent summary of all the different actors and complex dynamics Roy describes at length in this most fascinating part of the book. To give you an idea, consider this quote:
A major problem in the Middle East is that of political legitimacy. Local nationalisms generally develop around states, not regimes, but the political ideologies on the market are supra-nationalist while the political “grammar†(the game of individual alliances and loyalties) is inter-state (all that is contained in the term asabiyya or “solidarity groupâ€: clannism, tribalism, sectarianism). (…) And yet nationalisms remain the key to conflicts, but are undermined by internal divisions (…) which can be linked to ideologies and transnational networks.
It is in this chapter that we discover the true political, social and ideological kaleidoscope that is the Middle East. If there is one thing that does unite the countries of the Middle East, it is not a desire to bring down Western civilization but rather an ongoing search for identity (based on nationalism or religion) in a globalised world. And this search is very much influenced by the role the West has played and continues to play in the internal affairs of this region.
The complexity continues in a third chapter that is dedicated to Iran and in which Roy sheds some light on the internal dynamics of that country, its ambitions as a regional power, its nuclear programme and the Ahmadinejad phenomenon. And in the fourth and last chapter of the book Olivier Roy discusses Al-Qaeda and explains why this organization, potentially lethal as it may be, has no real future and that its activism is increasingly detached from actual political developments. As Roy states, “Al-Qaeda’s recruitment map in no way reflects the flashpoints in the Middle East†and, one of many surprising facts in this chapter, “10 to 25% of activists are convertsâ€.
With this short summary, which does no justice to the wealth of insights and information this new book by Olivier Roy provides, I can highly recommend The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East as an excellent introduction to the diverse political and social realities in the Middle East. If you are interested in the subject, you can use this book as a primer to get a better understanding of the Middle Eastern Zeitgeist, its contemporary history and sensibilities with regards to Western influence in the region.
For more information you can visit the book’s webpages of Columbia University Press and Hurst & Co.
And, as a bonus, go have a quick browse through the books on offer in Columbia University Press’ White Sale. Today (Monday June 2nd) is the last day of the sale.
I would also like to take this opportunity to recommend two other books that I received from Hurst & Co: Iran in World Politics, The Question of the Islamic Republic by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam and Hamas in Politics by Jeroen Gunning.