Author Archives: Alex Harrowell

About Alex Harrowell

Alex Harrowell is a research analyst for a really large consulting firm on AI and semiconductors. His age is immaterial, especially as he can't be bothered to update this bio regularly. He's from Yorkshire, now an economic migrant in London. His specialist subjects are military history, Germany, the telecommunications industry, and networks of all kinds. He would like to point out that it's nothing personal. Writes the Yorkshire Ranter.

Spies for Europe.

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We’ve suspected for some time that the French and German governments’ refusal to take part in the Iraq war had something to do with their access to independent overhead imagery satellites. Briefly, France and Germany did (with the HELIOS and SAR Lupe programs respectively), and didn’t take part at all. Spain and Italy had some access to French imagery and had advanced plans to get their own. They made a limited commitment. The UK, Australia, Denmark, and the ROK relied on the United States and were, in a phrase that should be better known outside Australia, all the way with LBJ. Turkey didn’t have its own, although it has since acquired a satellite from Italy and it did have liaison staff at the little-known EU Satellite Centre, but it probably had ample intelligence from human sources.

The original statement is in this Ken Silverstein piece (see this blog post of mine from 2006):

“They say everyone else was wrong,” said this former official, “but we conditioned them to be wrong. We spend [tens of billions of dollars per year] on signals intelligence and when we reach a conclusion, the people who spend less than that tend to believe us. They weren’t wrong, they chose to believe us. The British, Germans, and Italians don’t have all those overhead assets, so they rely on us. Historically they have been well-served, so they believe us when we tell them the earth is round. The French have their own assets—and guess what? They didn’t go with us.”

Guilhem Penent, of France’s IFRI and IRSEM thinktanks, writes in the Space Review as follows:

Regarding outer space, France’s main objective is to perpetuate its autonomy and national sovereignty. As sovereignty is the state of determining itself based on its own will without depending on other nations, satellites are, first and foremost, the guarantee of France’s autonomy in assessment and thereby in decision-making.

The decision not to follow the US in 2003 was thus taken by then President Jacques Chirac in accordance with intelligence based for the most part on Earth-imaging satellite HELIOS 1, whose findings were in contradiction which was being said at the UN Security Council. When the war in South Ossetia broke out in 2008 between Russia and Georgia, then President Nicolas Sarkozy, as chair of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), used images provided by HELIOS 1 and HELIOS 2 to deny Russia’s allegations about the withdrawal of its troops when those troops were actually progressing southward.

This is the first public confirmation, I believe, that the French did in fact stand out of the Iraq war because HELIOS imagery showed that the WMD claims were nonsense. IFRI, and even more so IRSEM, are organisations with the status of something like CSBA in the States or RUSI in the UK, so this should be taken seriously.

Chris Williams, who pointed me to the TSR piece, contrasts the British concern about sovereignty with regard to things like bananas, beef, and birth certificates, with the French equation of it with independent verification technology. He has a point. (So does Dan Hardie in comments there, who points out that perhaps the French could have benefited by worrying more about their influence over monetary policy, something no British Eurosceptic has ever omitted to worry about.) I’ve repeatedly argued this elsewhere.

There are a couple of points here. I feel a degree of contradiction between my suspicion of mass telecoms surveillance and my enthusiasm for overhead imagery. Perhaps that’s just the conviction that however much fuss I kick up, it’s unlikely anyone will burn limited delta-vee to get pictures of me, but you can’t say that about X-KEYSCORE. With more consideration, I think it’s the terms-of-trade in the relationships I described in this post that worry me most of all.

From a British point of view, the deal was fairly simple. The UK would concentrate on signals intelligence and would share everything with the US, and would stay out of the satellite business. In exchange, the US would share back their satellite product. We know that on at least one occasion, during the Falklands War, this didn’t happen. Later, the UK started a major project, known as ZIRCON, to build a signals intelligence satellite. This went overbudget badly, but got a surprising degree of support from Margaret Thatcher for reasons of sovereignty vis-a-vis the US, before being abandoned when the Americans instead offered a share of the targeting slots for their equivalent system in exchange for cash.

But the ZIRCON strand of the story doesn’t cover imagery. It seems that the national interest was very poorly served by this part of the deal – the implicit sigint-for-imagery trade – to say the least, both in Iraq and possibly later in Afghanistan.

Since the 1980s, the cost of satellites has fallen sharply, notably due to the work at Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. in Guildford. The UK had a very quiet test project between 2005 and 2009, and going ahead with an operational system on a similar basis to the Germans’ was being discussed openly by the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills as late as early 2011. Since then, it’s all gone quiet over here…so what did happen to that project? And do we need more Europe here?

I think the answer to that is much more clearly Yes than it ever was with regard to the Euro. The main objection from the UK side (and from Atlanticist Europe more broadly) is that the Americans might not share as much stuff with us. But this makes less sense on close examination. In so far as it is a market-like, bargaining relationship, we would be in a stronger position. In so far as it is a relationship of integration among allies, the alliance would be better off as a whole and might be more allied. In so far as it is a feudal, tributary relationship, it would be less so. (You’ll notice that Penent alludes to this in the TSR article.)

And this doesn’t take any account of the quality of the information received. It seems that the information the US shared with its partners in the intelligence special relationship before Iraq was worse than useless – in fact, functionally defined, it was disinformation. Its recipients were less informed after receiving it than they were before. Even a small increase in independent capability might have the useful effect of keeping both parties more honest.

The United States economy recovered.

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So I was arguing with Jamie Kenny about Obama’s economic record.

It was Friday night, so I had no inclination whatsoever to do economics. Anyway, I got around to it.

fredgraph

The top, blue line is the civilian unemployment rate in %, on the left scale. The next, red line is average weekly wages, on the right scale. The next, orange line is the average hourly wages for nonsupervisory, production employees, seasonally adjusted, multiplied by 40 to be comparable to the economy-wide, weekly series. Of course, this may be misleading if there is a big difference in average hours between them, but I wanted a measure that wouldn’t be skewed by Wall Street or Silicon Valley executive salaries. And the green line, on the left scale, is real-terms GDP growth per quarter.

Growth could certainly be higher and unemployment could be going down faster, but both are going clearly in the right direction, and at least in cash-terms, wages are up. This is, in a word, recovery. It’s far from obvious from these data that it constitutes “economic royalism”, even if the economy-wide wages measure is growing faster than nonsupervisory production.

Bang!

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Oh well, here it is: yes, Virginia, the BND shared enormous amounts of surveillance material with the NSA, both from their military SIGINT group deployed with the German army in Afghanistan and from, well, Germany. Officially, this didn’t contain any information on German citizens. Also, the Germans offered the Americans the use of two software applications they developed, presumably as part of the deal for X-KEYSCORE.

Meanwhile, the Germans have given notice on an agreement from 1968 that permitted the western allies to request surveillance in cases that affected the security of their forces in West Germany. This document had apparently not been used since 1990 (they say). Oddly, the US and UK agreed immediately to terminate it by exchange of notes, but the Germans were still negotiating with France yesterday.

Edward Snowden and the Political West

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Germany is the theatre in which the consequences of Edward Snowden’s disclosures are being played out. Why is this?

Obviously, privacy and data protection are especially sensitive in Germany. After the Stasi, the centrality of big databases to the West German state’s response to the left-wing terrorists of the 1970s, and the extensive Nazi use of telephone intercepts during the seizure of power, it couldn’t really be otherwise. Privacy and digital activism is older and better established in Germany than anywhere else – in the US, for example, I consider the founding text of the movement to be the FBI vs. Steve Jackson Games case from 1990 or thereabouts, while the key text in Germany is the court judgment on the national census from ten years earlier. But the UK has a (strong) data protection act and no-one seems anywhere near as exercised, although they probably should be.

So here’s an important German word, which we could well import into English: Deutungshoheit. This translates literally as “interpretative superiority” and is analogous to “air superiority”. Deutungshoheit is what politicians and their spin doctors attempt to win by putting forward their interpretations and framings of the semirandom events that constitute the “news”. In this case, the key event was Snowden’s disclosure of the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT slides, which show that the NSA’s Internet surveillance operations collect large amounts of information from sources in Germany.

The slides don’t say anything about how, whether this was information on German customers handed over by US cloud companies under PRISM orders, tapped from cables elsewhere, somehow collected inside Germany, or perhaps shared with the NSA by German intelligence. This last option is by far the most controversial and the most illegal in Germany. The battle for Deutungshoheit, therefore, consisted in denying any German involvement and projecting the German government, like the people in question, as passive victims of US intrusion.

On the other hand, Snowden’s support-network in the Berlin digital activist world, centred around Jacob “ioerror” Applebaum, strove to imply that in fact German agencies had been active participants, and Snowden’s own choice of further disclosures seems to have been guided by an intent to influence German politicians. Der Spiegel, rather than the Guardian, has been getting documents first and their content is mostly about Germany.

In this second phase, the German political elite has shifted its feet; rather than trying to deny any involvement whatsoever, they have instead tried to interpret the possibility of something really outrageous as being necessary for your security, and part of fundamental alliance commitments which cannot be questioned within the limits of respectable discourse. The ur-text here is Die Zeit‘s interview with Angela Merkel, in which Merkel argues that she knew nothing, further that there was a balance to strike between freedom and security, that although some kinds of spying were unacceptable, the alliance came first. The effectiveness of this, at least in the context of the interview, can be measured by astonishingly uncritical questions like the one in which she was asked “what additional efforts were necessary from the Germans to maintain their competitiveness”.

So what’s going on? British intelligence historian Richard Aldrich’s history of the UK signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, is illuminating. He argues that since the 1980s, the (West-) German government has had a long-term policy of building up the BND intelligence agency’s SIGINT capability. This was explicitly encouraged by the NSA, specifically its then director William Odom, who wished to get less European intelligence from the British. Obviously, this implies German intelligence sharing with the NSA.

At the same time, the (West-) Germans wanted to get more of their own information on subjects that interested them, notably operational-level (corps and above) military intelligence on the Soviet forces. The British were also concerned about this, for different reasons. The intelligence alliance between the UK and US, and the so-called Tier 2 partners (Canada, New Zealand, and Australia), predates NATO and was often sceptical about the security of NATO and West German institutions. As a result, signals intelligence reaching NATO commanders in Germany was often marked CAN/US/UK EYES ONLY and therefore too secret to show the Bundeswehr, who were providing 500,000 soldiers in 12 armoured and mechanised divisions with 24 hours’ notice. The absurdity of this can be seen from the fact that NATO multinational HQs often had a German general as one of the three posts of commander, deputy commander, or chief of staff. The British were, for their part, concerned that the US system was not going to get usable reports forward into the field in time to be any use. Both the UK, with the Nimrod R1 program, and the Germans spent serious money to solve this.

Another factor in the 80s was that France was encouraging other European countries to contribute to its own intelligence collaboration. Joining this would only add a further degree of dependence, on France, if Germany didn’t bring something to the table. Building up the BND and sharing information therefore served several different motives.

There was a patron-client motive, in which the Germans sought greater independence from the US (and its allies). There was an alliance-integration motive, in which the Germans (and the UK, and the US) sought to strengthen the alliance’s (or alliances?) technical capability and to deepen the partners’ commitment to it (them?). And there was also a bargaining or marketlike motive, in which the Germans were seeking to have more intelligence on hand that could be traded for advantages, whether with the French, the US, or whoever. I think this is also true of the other participants in the intelligence alliances – the UK, for example, didn’t build its own satellite capability, partly because there was a feeling that the Americans would do it better, but also because participating more deeply in the US satellite program, by having part of the take from the satellites downlinked at Menwith Hill and analysed at GCHQ, created a stronger bargaining position with the Americans (and others) in terms of the final intelligence product.

We now know, thanks to the latest Snowden event, that the BND and the federal version of the Verfassungschutz were offered the use of the X-KEYSCORE system, which seems to be an analytics tool for working with a wide variety of Internet surveillance data sets. Interestingly, the Verfassungsschutzer were offered training by BND officers, implying that they already had the system.

The US motive can also be analysed in the same terms as above. As an ally, they may have wished to strengthen German antiterrorist efforts (this happened shortly after the discovery of a terrorist plot in Germany). As a patron, they may have wished to reward their client, and also discourage them from developing their own technology or cooperating with some other party (like China!, following Britain’s lead). This was fairly common in the cold war era, according to Aldrich, when there was both a will to improve NATO communications security and a will to maintain some advantage over the other NATO partners. And as a bargaining actor, they may have acted because they were offered a good deal in return. So, what was the deal?

(If you want a clue, you might wonder what the large company operating in both the US and Germany mentioned in some of the PRISM documents is.)

In general, I think the BND is likely to have shifted from being closer to the “patron/client” model, towards “bargaining/market”, while still being very much “alliance/integration”. After all, the last sections of the NSA facility in Germany were handed back in May last year. It is very telling, though, that one of the first reactions to the Snowden disclosures from German politicians was outrage that Germany wasn’t considered even a “Tier-2” partner – probably fake outrage from those in the know. (As we have seen, this term has a definition.) This isn’t the reaction of people who are horrified at the thought of spying, though, rather that of people shocked that their investment in spying is not paying off as well as they hoped.

So, to round off, the point of the battle for Deutungshoheit is to maintain the primacy of Atlanticism in German public debate on foreign policy. This is, in many ways, the mirror image of the primacy of ECB-ism in debate on economic policy. Those who accept the consensus are respectable, those who aren’t, aren’t. If you doubt, the same issue of Die Zeit would tell you that the EU-US trade agreement must be signed for the sake of the “political West”. Everything going on here is touching on German privacy fear, but also on profound questions of geopolitics, and just politics. It is therefore very interesting that Der Spiegel, usually very, very NATO-minded, is being so difficult and un-biddable.

It is also probable that Edward Snowden’s best chance to get out of Russia is to disrupt the politics of SIGINT in Europe as much as possible.

Massive Volumenreduzierung

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The Guardian‘s scoop on GCHQ’s submarine cable tapping:

The processing centres apply a series of sophisticated computer programmes in order to filter the material through what is known as MVR – massive volume reduction. The first filter immediately rejects high-volume, low-value traffic, such as peer-to-peer downloads, which reduces the volume by about 30%. Others pull out packets of information relating to “selectors” – search terms including subjects, phone numbers and email addresses of interest. Some 40,000 of these were chosen by GCHQ and 31,000 by the NSA. Most of the information extracted is “content”, such as recordings of phone calls or the substance of email messages. The rest is metadata.

German politicians are horrified:

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the German justice minister, said the report in the Guardian read like the plot of a film.

“If these accusations are correct, this would be a catastrophe,” Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement to Reuters. “The accusations against Great Britain sound like a Hollywood nightmare. The European institutions should seek straight away to clarify the situation.”

The FAZ reports in some detail and talks to the German intelligence services:

Man arbeite ganz anders als die transatlantischen Partnerdienste, heißt es. Wenn Amerikaner oder Briten das große Schleppnetz auswerfen, dann sieht sich der deutsche Dienst als der Schwimmer, der mit einer technisch ausgefeilten Harpune darauf erpicht ist, den großen Fisch zu erlegen. Tatsächlich kann der BND mit seinen insgesamt rund 6500 Mitarbeitern den Abhördiensten der Amerikaner und Briten rein personell nicht das Wasser reichen. Anstatt große Datenmengen abzuspeichern, rastert und verdichtet der deutsche Dienst sie.

Dabei nimmt man in Anspruch, immer effektiver zu arbeiten. Hatte man 2010 noch 37 Millionen Kommunikationen, im wesentlichen E-Mails, gefiltert, so waren es im folgenden Jahr weniger als drei Millionen. Im Jahr 2012 liegt man bei weniger als einer Million Daten, weil die „Selektionsfähigkeit“ aufgrund bestimmter Suchbegriffe und Algorithmen verbessert wurde. Die Zahl der sicherheitsrelevanten Ergebnisse – es sind wenige hundert – ist gleich geblieben

I translate:

We work quite differently to our transatlantic partners, a source said. If the Americans or the British throw out a big trawl net, by contrast, the German service sees itself as the swimmer who sets out to catch the big fish with a harpoon honed on the cutting edge of technology. The BND, with around 6,500 staff, can’t keep up with the British or American SIGINT agencies in terms of personnel. Rather than storing huge volumes of data, the German service condenses and filters it.

This requires a constant effort to work more efficiently. 37 million communications, essentially e-mail messages, were caught in the filter in 2010, but less than 3 million the following year. For 2012, the figure is less than a million, because the system selectivity has improved with better algorithms and better search queries. The number of results that were relevant for national security, a few hundred, stayed the same.

Note the careful spin here. We don’t take all that traffic. No, only carefully selected nuggets out of it. The numbers are falling every year!

But it’s obviously impossible to filter the traffic, however selectively, without first pulling it in. And if the numbers are falling, it’s because the filtering process, and presumably the analytical capacity and computing infrastructure involved, has become more effective. You could even call it “massive Volumenreduzierung” or something. What a masterly piece of non-denial denial.

I note that Steffen Bockhahn of the Linkspartei has made this point at the foot of the piece.

Here’s something about Turkey, and everyone else

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So, the urban development that kicked off all the protests in Turkey.

“This is the only place to hang out here,” says Yavuz Selim, 17. “And everything is very expensive. As students we cannot afford it.” His friends agree. “We are quite bored here. There is nothing to do for us.”…

While the municipality has increased local transport over the past year, the last buses leave at 10pm and many of the families living in Kaya?ehir cannot afford cars.

“We feel isolated from the city centre here,” Yusuf Sari, 16, points out. “A bit cut off, really.” Analysts say this kind of segregation changes the idea of a city – a space where different parts of society coexist – and will create long-term social and economic problems.

“It is very likely that these will end up like the banlieues in France,” said Adanal?. “Spatial isolation and the social concentration of certain segments of society will create discontent. This discontent, too, is isolated from the rest of society. People start to feel that they cannot escape this isolation, which makes matters worse.”

Actually, then, it’s not an urban development but a suburban development, or perhaps more to the point, an anti-urban development. As Jamie Kenny says:

Historically, the whole thing has a 19th century French feel to it, in the sense of government dominated by a pious, provincial bourgeoisie wanting to tame the big city antinomians. But reading about this stuff it’s amazing how well a certain type of – in this case – Islamic piety dovetails with neoliberal concepts of modernization. Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising when you look at places like Dubai, but it’s remarkable how exact the comparisons are. The same basic suspicion of ‘urbanity’ in the widest sense of the word, the dislike for forms of life, commerce and culture perceived to be messy or low prestige, the way in which a form of commercial standardization seems to complement or substitute for a repressive moral code and the way in which the only unthreatening secular activity that the economic, political and in this case religious establishment can imagine is shopping.

Or, over here:

They started sinking their teeth into Taksim first by imposing a table ban two years ago: No tables on the streets. This deceptively simple move instantly drained much of the spirit of Taksim, since much of the charm was just walking around in seas of people who felt like your friend simply by virtue of being there, and probably were if you dug deep enough. That shattered the sense of community.

This reminded me of my review of The Spirit Level, and specifically this bit.

The states of the Deep South are reliably terrible. They are highly unequal, and they get the effects – but they are far off to the top right of the trendline. In a sense, their marginal productivity in terms of inequality is unusually high – for every extra point on the Gini coefficient, they manage to produce a sharply higher degree of suffering than the national average.

On the other hand, there’s the importance of being urban. The more metropolitan the state, the less it suffers from the impact of inequality – New York has the social problems of the average, despite being very unequal.

There are good reasons for this. Big cities tend to be unequal because they have some rich people. This does not preclude having a well-funded school system; in so far as the rich want to live there, it may be possible to squeeze some tax out of them. Further, there are limits to how far you can send the people off to the suburbs for the whole thing to work. It is hard to opt out completely in town. You may take a cab to the bank headquarters, but you’ll still curse in traffic.

Pulling this together, people fight over urbanity because it’s a sort of substitute for equality. In some ways, it’s real equality, as the institutions of the city are often open to all. In others, perhaps more important, it’s potential equality – we can all be the minority, we can all fall into the path of a tube train, the mob is out there.

This draws out different responses. One is an intense identification with the city, which turns out to be a latent coalition across all kinds of groups. Another is a deep horror of the mess of it all. Erdogan, like the mayors who went after Occupy, is constantly whining about needing to clean up and vandals and did you know some of them have dogs? Better to move out to somewhere on the motorway.

I met this response back in 2001, on the scene of a long-term occupation protest. Austrians, or possibly more importantly, Viennese who didn’t want Jörg Haider in government had set up a camp called the Concerned Citizens’ Embassy (BBB in German) outside the prime minister’s office in part of the old imperial citadel. Others held demonstrations marching there every Thursday. I remember vividly that on one of these, people carried a blank banner and pulled a projector on a supermarket trolley, throwing a documentary someone made about the campaign itself up on the banner so we could watch it.

Suddenly, the Fortress Captain – that was his title, the guy in charge of the Hofburg, a school friend of the prime minister – discovered that there was some rubbish lying about, it was ugly, there were rats, he had to clean it up, I quote. This completely circumvented the various legal protections of protest. The rubbish, of course, was us. There was stuff, nobody claimed to own it, and the imperial stormtroopers moved in.

We whined and sued and marched harder, but it was the finish. Anyway. We’ve established the motive. Here’s a piece about the characteristic protest style that goes with it. It doesn’t seem to work. Perhaps because the theory of victory for such a campaign is a flash revolution, like something from 19th century France?

And that reminds me of Pierre Mauroy, who died last week. As French prime minister, he insisted on sticking with European fixed exchange rates, but also on (as he said) holding out on the ridge line at 2 million unemployed. Looking back, it seems unsurprising given the first point that he lost the ridge and resigned. He then set about pulling money towards his home town and power base, Lille, specifically through the Euralille megaproject around the TGV station.

I have never seen a grimmer public space. It seemed to symbolise the combination of Euro-austerity macroeconomics and the effort to build shinier things on top of the city, as two halves of the same project. Similarly, the empty neon of Budapest’s EU-membership centre the last time I was there howled with blankness.

Housing bubbles and capital controls

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I picked up this OECD chart from Sigrun Davidsdottir on twitter:

House prices EO 93-500x424

This is something interesting, and possibly worth watching for the future. Obviously, wondering about the problems of Cyprus’s economic recovery is very much long-term thinking, but what is the betting that we won’t see more capital controls in the future?

In the event of recovery, and even more so, boom inside an economy under capital controls, there would be a substantial potential for a housing bubble, or a bubble in some asset. Depending on your preferences, as nominal incomes rose, or the money supply rose, or bank credit expanded, you could easily get a bubble as there would be a much restricted tendency for capital to get exported. That is after all the point.

On the other hand, the experiences of the European periphery, very much including the UK, suggest that inflows into an open capital account are also dangerous in this sense. My intuition is that they are more so because they can reverse quickly, and also that after all, if people whose wages go up can’t buy a house, who can? Thoughts are appreciated.

High-Trust and Low-Trust Societies, Banks, and Europe

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Pawel Morski:

A “banking system responsive to local needs” quickly becomes “piggy bank for local politicians”.

Well, local politicians are elected, after all. Democracy is a thing. But I know what he means. That Spanish caja that was run, into the ground, by the Catholic Church. That kind of thing. WestLB back in the day when it financed William Hague’s best friend buying all the pubs and the Ministry of Defence married quarters and Peer Steinbrück was its regulator, before it blew up and the explosion threw him all the way from Hannover to Berlin and he got to be federal finance minister, SPD leader, Mr Prudent McBluebollocks an’all.

Does Neal Ascherson really not know about HypoVereinsbank?

I think the operational question here, certainly as far as the UK is concerned, is “are we a low-trust or a high-trust society?” It works for the Germans (for some values of works, and except when it doesn’t work), it doesn’t work for the Spanish (except of course when it did).

Sparks = high trust, cajas = low trust. We like to think we are a high-trust, low-corruption north European country, but I often think the history of the UK post-1979 is the history of an emerging low-trust society.

Of course, when we were canonically much more trust-y, Jimmy Savile was raping everything in sight, the Met Police was basically our biggest organised crime gang, and the MOD was perfectly happy to test nuclear weapons on our own soldiers. But then, trustful Germany has had some pretty decent scandals. Do you remember before Wolfgang Schäuble was All Better Now, when he was responsible for a massive illegal party financing system linked with the Elf-Aquitaine scandal? ‘Course you do. And further back, when he did precisely the same thing with German arms manufacturers?

But trust is an interesting concept. If you knew for a fact the people you dealt with were honest, you wouldn’t need to trust them. Trust and betrayal go together. High-trust societies are ones where people behave as if they could trust each other, and that choose to deal with the inevitable abuses of trust in certain ways. Low-trust societies are ones in which people behave as if they cannot trust each other, and especially, as if there was no realistic hope of sorting out abuses of trust later.

I actually wonder if the distinction is really about what happens after a breach of trust is discovered. J.K. Galbraith’s bezzle, the inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in an economy, is a universal phenomenon but the means of dealing with it differ dramatically. When an aeroplane crashes into the ground, in the UK or, say, the Netherlands, the first people on the scene after the fire brigade are the AAIB inspectors, whose mission is to establish the facts. In Italy, or Greece, the first people after the fire brigade are the police, come to arrest any of the crew who survived. The distinction is telling. If you can’t expect justice, and you can’t expect the truth, you might as well practice cynicism like you practice an instrument, as a skill or even an art.

In a sense, social trust is an ideology. We choose to believe that our neighbours are basically decent people in a civilised society, or that of course they’re all the same and all crooked, but wouldn’t you be if you had the chance, and so you better look after number one. And if it is an ideology, it is part of the political sphere and it can be changed. Now there’s something for you – hope. But I fucking hate hope and hope-mongers, so…ah.

One way of looking at Francois Hollande’s campaign for the “moralisation of politics” is an effort to do just that, to keep France from becoming even more of a low-trust society than it already is. Of course, whether France is a Latin country (stereotypes: Catholics, inflation, tourists, Picasso, bureaucracy, conspiracy politics) or a northern one (stereotypes: Vikings, Gothic buildings, electrical engineering, the Republic, international modernism, ENA) is a cliche up there with whether Britain is facing Europe or the high seas or whether Russia is in Europe. But perhaps there’s some truth to it. Is it…spreading?

Low-trust societies, I think, emerge when the norms imposed by the elite are both compulsory and also impossible, and especially when the elite doesn’t seem to practice them itself. You could put it another way: it’s Berlusconi’s Europe, and we’re just living in it.

Daddy, what did you do at the University?

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From the department of cross-European otherness: some German politicians never finished their university degrees. Apparently, this is shocking. To the point where some of them worry about explaining it to their sons, and Green leader Claudia Roth gets hate mail for it.

That said, more than one confesses to having their staff regularly edit their Wikipedia entry to eliminate the stain. Now, that is shocking.