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.

The last man in East Germany

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What must it have been like to be a Stasi case officer in the autumn of 1989? What did they do? The answer, in this fascinating piece in Der Spiegel, was that they kept going to the office. In fact, they kept on going about their spooky business – questioning detainees, trying to recruit informers – until the evil day when the mob stormed their headquarters in the Normannenstraße. This weird transition is captured in the testimony of the last prisoners left in the MfS detention centre.

Take the case of Manfred Haferburg. Haferburg, a reactor engineer from Greifswald who was a shift supervisor on East Germany’s only nuclear power station, was arrested in May, 1989 trying to flee the DDR via Czechoslovakia. His Slovakian girlfriend was in the next compartment on the train and got away. He, however, was extradited back to East Germany and dumped in a secret prison. It was within the Hohenschönhausen detention centre in Berlin, but the prisoners were deliberately kept in ignorance of where they were. The lights were switched on and off at 15 minute intervals, 24 hours a day. One day, in November, he was dragged from his cell, punched in the guts, and thrown into a van. He expected to be shot, but eventually he was left on a street corner to ask passers-by where he was.

There is a classic Berlin joke about the drunk who gets lost and asks a policeman where he is. The cop tells him he’s on Leipzigerstraße, Berlin-Mitte. Spare me all the details, he says – can you just tell me which country? In fact, he was in the Köpenick district of Berlin, but the first passer-by he asked of course gave him the street name, and he had to press them to find out he was in Berlin, thus playing out the joke for real.

Round about the same time, another prisoner suddenly received a TV set in his cell. Uwe Hädrich had been arrested for attempting to emigrate on the 13th of September, 1989. The TV could only be tuned from outside the cell, so he could only watch official TV; of course, the famous press conference with Günther Schabowski was very official indeed. But that didn’t affect the charges against him. The wall gone and the borders open, he remained detained, accused of espionage and illegally crossing the border, subject to constant interrogation and solitary confinement. (Hädrich was an executive with the DDR’s consumer goods system, and therefore presumably a show-trial candidate.) Eventually, on the 7th of December, the new Modrow government announced that there were no political prisoners in East Germany.

Except for Herr Hädrich, of course. He was suddenly released that afternoon, as if he’d been forgotten about in all the excitement and only now remembered. According to the files, he was the last political prisoner. He went home; back in jail, the Minister of Security himself, General Erich Mielke, had just been booked in and assigned the very cell Hädrich had left.

But the revolution, the emptying of the jails, and the mere arrest of its chief didn’t stop normal operations at the Stasi. At precisely eight o’clock the next morning, a Stasi case officer called on Hädrich to ask him questions about whether he had contacted the Federal German embassy in Hungary. Every day, the case officer arrived to quiz Hädrich, and presumably wrote up his findings back at the office.

Hädrich’s family had begun to go shopping in West Berlin. But Hädrich didn’t dare cross the line, still less refuse to speak to the case officer. The further questioning carried on deep into December, after citizens’ committees had moved into some of the regional Stasi directorates to stop them destroying the files, while Hohenschönhausen itself filled up with disgraced communists. The East German PTT was renting mobile phones to journalists, devices they had to borrow from Deutsche Telekom’s Berlin operation, and whose very existence in East Germany would have been unimaginably illegal a few weeks before. Every day up to and including the 22nd, the Stasi man made his clockwork appearance and Hädrich answered the questions.

There is something grimly theatrical about this setting. In a sense, Hädrich and his interrogator were the last men still living in East Germany.

Finally, four days after the sack of the Stasi headquarters, he moved to southern Germany and never came back. Well, he did come back once, wishing to speak to the diligent case officer. It turned out that the last spook was now running a souvenir stand on the Alexanderplatz. Hädrich couldn’t speak to him.

AFOE’s trip on the Orient Express

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How did we not blog this earlier? The Orient Express has made its last trip. In fact, this is one of those events that has happened and re-happened; the last train that actually made the trip from Paris to Istanbul/Sirkeci did it in 1977, and most people will now associate the name with the luxury London-Venice cruise train that Sea Containers set up in the 1980s. But the one we’re talking about is the one that actually had the title attached to the path in the railways’ working timetables.

By the finish, it only did Paris-Budapest and then only Paris-Vienna, which is fine but hardly the Orient. (Seat61 informs me that the through Paris-Budapest and Paris-Bucharest cars were dropped in June, 2001.) To do the full route, you had to make a connection in Budapest, which could be harder than you think as that city has almost as many conflicting major railway stations as London. Also, trains from the West frequently arrived at the Southern Station there, just as the late Orient Express used the Westbahnhof in Vienna.

I took the train in 2002, taking advantage of a rare moment of reduced poverty to visit my partner and her dad in Paris; Paul Theroux, who did the full Paris-Istanbul trek in 1974, remarked that it was indeed murder on the Orient Express. I wouldn’t be quite so harsh, although had you asked me on the outward trip I might have been. Showing up in good time at the station, I found the train, a gaggle of Hungarian rolling stock, lurking in a dark corner and immediately went to look for things to eat, drink, and read during the trip – it didn’t look promising. I had a bunk in a couchette; on the way there, I noticed the route card on the end of the carriage read “EN-262: Orient-Express” and cheered up somewhat. (In fact, I’ve still got the route card. The Austrian Federal Railway can sue me.)

Actually, that version of the Orient Express was hitched to the evening Vienna-Salzburg as far as Salzburg, so there was in fact a dining car and it made reasonable speed. The problems began when I tried to sleep; there was actually a cello in the compartment, and Americans kept getting on and off the train at every intermediate stop in Germany. Outside, in the corridor, there was a Balkanish type who wanted me to share his first-class sleeper. It was not a good night; after it was over, somewhere in the Champagne, a long announcement was made in French about all the good things that were available for breakfast from the steward. Then, the voice repeated this message in German. This is the exact text of the translation:

Paris. Ende station.

And good morning to you too. Then, of course, the sinister long mobilisation-grade platforms of the Gare de l’Est, and enough coffee to get alert enough to poodlefake her dad.

On the reverse trip, things were more spartan, there being no food except for sausages from the steward and Austrian lager, so I spent the evening eating käsekrainer for their nutritional value and drinking beer with various people who all turned out to know people I knew at Vienna University and to be interested to find out what had happened with the demo that weekend (a riot, as it happened – it was a good weekend to be out of town). Eventually, the steward opened a empty compartment for the corridor party to move into. I recall someone carrying a copy of a book called Das Schwarzbuch der Menschheit, which struck me as impressively even-handed but rather depressing – hey, even plants have tried to kill the world. Sleeping Car Guy was on the train, but he didn’t recognise me, or perhaps he did and kept his trap shut.

I even got a wink or two of sleep, and we pulled into the Westbahnhof in good time and a small rainstorm. Good times.

The reason why the service is being withdrawn is optimistic; the high-speed trains now go so far and so fast that you can get from London to Vienna in a day by rail (although, rather you than me – it leaves at 0827 and arrives at 2322 with connections in Brussels and Frankfurt, a long day’s train ride by anyone’s standards). And, of course, if they have power sockets, WLAN, and a rail to hang your jacket on, like the business sections on Swiss trains, you’ll be able to conspire just as much if not more.

Thinking about it, the experience wasn’t something that foretold the future, but rather a hangover from the recent past. Sleeping Car Guy, like the huge, filthy Südbahnhof in Vienna with its parallel network of long distance buses into the Balkans, was a leftover of immediate post-Cold War Europe – something of the spirit I tried to convey in this post. Like our Transition and Accession category, though, that’s now done.

the theatre of terrorism has a backcloth of newspapers

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Australian “security beauty” (at least that’s what the other side call her) Leah Farrell on Swiss minarets:

To my mind the most telling thing is that this is yet another example of people failing to realise that terrorism’s efficacy stems from its ability to manufacture difference. This is the true impact of terrorism. It doesn’t come from the immediate death and destruction caused by a terrorist act no matter how hideous and how truly awful it is for its victims. The true power of terrorism comes from reactions to terrorist violence by those watching.

If terrorism is theatre, then this is set-design. BildBlog points out that the photoshopped image in several German newspapers that seems to show a minaret looming over a church tower actually shows a church twice as tall as the mosque.

Danny Cohn-Bendit, meanwhile, thinks the Swiss should be asked to vote again, which probably manufactures a little bit of difference itself.

Boring EU Institutions Post

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The collectif antilib̩rale makes the excellent point that there is no problem with the appointments to the new jobs created by the Lisbon treaty. Two things will control their in-trays, after all Рthe first is the job of getting a major new institution, the EU external action service, operating and building up its credibility and budget-attracting power, and the second is the eternal one of seeking consensus between the major powers, institutions, and interest groups in a diverse confederation with a small central government.

If the EU has an effective diplomatic service and at least a rough consensus on policy, it can’t help but be listened to – it’s too important for this not to be the case. But if the member states, the institutions, and the interests that underly them don’t have a minimum degree of consensus, or the administrative machine doesn’t work, it won’t be – and it won’t matter who gets the job. And, of course, a major reason for the top level changes in the Lisbon treaty is to make it easier to achieve political consensus within the Union.

The most common way in which individuals influence history is through incompetence. We had to listen to George Bush as much as we have to listen to Barack Obama; the realities of US power explain that. By contrast, it’s very rare that individual brilliance can win anything against the tidal forces of strategy. It does seem, though, that anyone can change things for the worse by their bungling; you can argue that the Bush presidency demonstrates that this is true, despite everything the instititutions and the power of the US could do, or that it demonstrates that the institutions were strong enough to survive misgovernment that would have finished a lesser state.

So, in principle, we shouldn’t worry about the jobs except to the extent that some people shouldn’t be let anywhere near them.

And there’s a positive side. Hermann van Rompuy’s last job was as prime minister of Belgium, or to put it another way, he has made a life of doing nothing else but seeking consensus in a diverse confederation with a weak central government. Catherine Ashton’s chief achievement in government was setting up and launching Sure Start, a new, large, and complex institution that both created new structures and integrated bits of older ones – however, as this was an integrated social service for the children of the poor, this doesn’t count as institution-building. It’s women’s work.

Meanwhile, it’s been suggested that this is a policy of weakening European institutions in order to strengthen the intergovernmental side of the union. But there is nothing intrinsically beneficial about putting more stuff into the Commission. In fact, there’s been a very significant expansion in European integration that happens intergovernmentally, but for some reason this again does not count. The “community method” isn’t a religion, or rather, for some people it is. But if you must think in these terms, I reckon there is a case that we’ve had quite a bit of the famous “spillover” – in fact, working together through the core institutions has created a culture of institutional cooperation that has helped to create more cooperation.

Perhaps more could have gone through the Commission, but there has to be a better explanation as to why it should than “Monnet would have liked it”.

Meanwhile, I’d be delighted if we could start thinking about the EU without using the supranational/intergovernmental divide at all. Over time – as the original integration theories suggested – the distinction has progressively lost its explanatory power and its specificity (which one is the Eurogroup in? is Catherine Ashton obliged to divide her office into two halves?), and it may prevent us from thinking about it in other ways. After all, nobody would suggest that studying political institutions purely in the terms they themselves provide is a rigorous approach anywhere else.

(There’s a good ticktock on the appointments from Jean Quatremer, which makes clear that it was indeed Angela Merkel who selected out Blair.)

Are the Germans taking over Romania?

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Not quite those Germans.

What’s happening in Romania, then? Handelsblatt reports. It’s time to pick a president, and the Social Democratic candidate looks in a strong position – although he finished second by a few points in the first round of the French-style presidential election, he’s got promises of support from several other parties, notably the Liberals and the Hungarian minority.

Fascinatingly, though, as part of the agreement with these groups, he’s promised to appoint the independent mayor of Sibiu – Hermannstadt in German – as prime minister. That’ll be one Klaus Johannis. Yes; he’s a Transylvanian German, the first time that a member of this minority will head the government. Of course, Romania has a hell of a lot of problems; the economy’s going to shrink between 7.5 and 8 per cent this year, there’s an IMF requirement to cut the public sector deficit to 7.3 per cent of GDP at the same time (ah, the IMF – never an institution to risk popularity by changing its ideas), and the country’s elite is full of old spooks from the Ceaucescu years.

But I can’t help but be amazed at the idea of a Romanian government that includes the Hungarians and is headed by a German, within 20 years of the revolution and 5 years of the CIA operating a secret jail in the suburbs of Bucharest. Well – non- or quasi-revolution might be more like it, which just adds force to the point. There are other reasons to be cheerful; HaBa also points out that there is some €32bn in EU funding heading that way in the next few years, which ought to help. If you want an inspiring European story, it’s right there.

However, they also note that the Renault Logan car factory accounts for 2 per cent of GDP and 15 per cent of net exports. I guess they can’t really be criticised for pinning their hopes on export-led growth when the UK and Germany are doing exactly that.

the least significant bill the House of Commons will ever see

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I probably shouldn’t be, but I’m quite shocked by the fact David Cameron is proposing a piece of legislation that will, on its own terms, have no effect whatsoever. I mean, of course, his “UK Sovereignty Bill”; this horror would “reiterate” that the British parliament remains ultimate master of its relations with the EU.

But anyone with a passing knowledge of the British constitution should see the flaw here. No parliament can bind its successor; it can at any time repeal or amend anything that was legislated in the past. So the proposed Bill is completely vacuous. Tory Eurosceptics should know this, as they are very keen indeed on the European Communities Act 1972, the instrument that puts the Treaty of Rome in effect. They are mostly keen on the idea of repealing it – before the Lisbon treaty introduced an explicit procedure for exit from the EU, this was the closest anyone could think of to a procedure for departure.

Cameron, in my cynical view, is pushing this precisely because the final design of the bill might involve amending the 1972 Act, and so many of his party have been fantasising about this for years. Similarly, Dan Hannan has accidentally confirmed something I long suspected by quitting his job as legal spokesman for the Tories in the European Parliament in order to campaign for more referendums in general; it’s not any specific European treaty provision that excites him, it’s the idea of having a referendum he thinks he could perhaps win. It’s the mirror image of Der Tag, the day of the revolution.

It may be that the whole point of this was to flush out the crazies. Supposedly, old-fashioned drill sergeants would use various tricks to encourage the potential fainters to faint before the parade; in the same way, it’s better if people like Hannan and Roger Helmer to explode now and then have nothing left for when it matters.

But I’m still repelled by the idea of passing entirely pointless laws for intra-party political purposes.

How Tony Blair lost the presidency 20 years ago

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It’s the 9th of November…so, in total observance of my usual standard operating procedures, let’s think about the European presidency, or as my wonderful, wonderful Soizick puts it, who’s going to get the job of being Tony Blair.

It looks a lot like the lucky girl won’t be Blair; the reason why is more interesting and more telling. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a string of small states around Germany take quite a daring stand in foreign policy; Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, all progressively came out against Tony Blair. It seems more obvious that this is an interesting or daring stand if you take a Brussels view, in which Blair is still a respected member of the world elite, than if you take a street level view, in which he’s widely despised. Also, if you consider the UK or Norway to be a 10 on the NATO scale, the Netherlands must be about an 8 – the presence of the Joint Forces Command in Brunssum, and the long-standing and very close relationship with the British armed forces over the commitment to the NATO Northern Flank, are the most obvious manifestations of this. Indeed, the Dutch army served in the British zone of Iraq and its Apache helicopters, the first European-owned ones, are still flying in Afghanistan. (That the first AH-64Ds in European ownership are Dutch is a marker of NATO spirit in itself.)

So the fact they came out against Blair is interesting.

Further, it’s incredibly rare that the Austrians would launch a significant foreign policy initiative without first clearing it with Berlin. This has been true since at least 1878, and the most famous example is one that neither party would like to recall – the Blankoscheck of 1914. Dutch policy is not much different. The upshot is that in opposing Blair, this odd block of states was in a sense acting for Angela Merkel. Not long ago, and we’re talking two months here, Nicolas Sarkozy was being tempted to support Blair; relations between Britain and France have rarely been better than during the last three or so years, it being a major priority for both sides to mend fences after the ghastly Alistair Campbell-inspired frogbashing campaign in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The Franco-German alliance is considered untouchable by both allies, and everyone else – we all know only too well the alternatives. Practicality requires both of them to maintain a relationship nearly as close with Britain, as does the value of having other options. So, assuming Merkel doesn’t want Blair, it was necessary to have the opposition to him floated by others.

In terms of foreign policy, this is the Germany that resulted from the 9th of November, when Merkel herself decided to go to the sauna rather than rush to the border. She apparently reasoned that, once open, there would be no closing it again, and therefore there was no hurry; of course, she was right, but when you think of some of the stories from the Wall years about people whose lives were utterly changed by which side of the border chance put them, it demonstrated a lot of confidence in her reasoning.

This is the Berlin republic, then; discreet, hypercompetent, and steeped in that distinctly northern European combination of self-effacing modesty and intense pride. Like 17th century houses in Amsterdam or 18th century ones in Edinburgh or York; ostentatiously modest, excessive in their austerity of design. Or the supposed Yorkshire traits – being both taciturn and opinionated is quite a trick. It’s been said before that in German, there’s no distinction between the words for citizen/civil/civic and for bourgeois, and that the revolution worked in this ambiguity. Merkel is exhibit A.

The Fistful Option

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So, the planned ballistic missile defence installations in Europe have been cancelled, and the US is looking instead at deploying ships with an upgraded version of the Aegis air-defence missile system in European waters, backed up with mobile and airborne radars. (There’s a lot of detail here.) This is sense. It’s sense for a number of reasons:

Firstly, the GMD system that was originally proposed has a famously poor track record, so the concrete advantages to be gained from it were dubious. The SM-3 missile and the Aegis radar/computer complex have done much better, and have the huge advantage of being useful in other tactical roles. And they have significant scope for further improvement.

Secondly, it’s much more likely that any threat to NATO with missiles would involve short- or intermediate-range missiles rather than ICBMs – they are easier to make, more available, and more usable in the context of “not triggering a nuclear strike from the Americans or Russians”. The Aegis system was designed in large measure to deal with precisely these threats; the GMD was designed to intercept intercontinental missiles on their way to the US, and would have been vulnerable to shorter-ranged rockets. However, Aegis does have the potential to engage longer-ranged missiles early in their flight as part of a boost phase defence.

Thirdly, it doesn’t involve stationing a very long range radar very close to the heartland of Russia.

Fourthly, it’s actually in production now, and therefore represents technology under active incremental development rather than an experimental job.

Taken together, you have to wonder who would have ever thought the GMD installation was a good idea. The answer was, roughly, “neocons”; to a large extent, the fact that it pissed off the Russians was a feature not a bug. The cattle-market between Poland and the US over the issue also demonstrates that even the Poles were a lot keener on the side benefits of the deal – i.e. US security guarantees and a great deal of modern equipment for their armed forces – than the actual rockets themselves.

After all, as the system didn’t really protect Poland, it was a pretty weird way to signal Atlantic solidarity and deterrent support. For all these reasons, we blogged back in June, 2007, it was an awful idea and the seaborne option was far better.

The European integration of extreme-right wing nonsense

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Here’s a weird story. OK, so we’re into the last lap of the Irish re-referendum; Jean Quatremer has the latest polls, which put the yes camp well ahead. But what about that weird poll last week that put the noes ahead?

British blogging institution Anthony Wells’ UK Polling Report seems to be about the only media outlet to have hit the nail on the head, denouncing it as a voodoo poll as far back as the 21st of September.

As far as I can tell, this poll is hokum. The company don’t seem to have a website so I can only go on what I’ve got, but the sampling of the poll seems to have been conducted at just ten sample points, suggesting a face-to-face survey with no attempt at a broad representative spread of sample. Compare this with a professional Ipsos MORI face-to-face poll, which uses in the region of 200 sampling points. Worse, a couple of sources indicate there is no attempt at weighting the poll…

Now, it turns out, not only is the poll indeed deeply flawed, but it’s the work of an ex-IRA terrorist who left the organisation because it wasn’t nationalistic or Catholic enough. It seems that his “Gael Poll” consisted of asking people he and his friends knew, thus constructing a sample they knew would provide the right answer.

The researchers were friends of the organisers who in turn interviewed people in their social groups, paying some attention to the spread of social class… It is, in effect a huge straw poll of the friends of Gael Poll, a derivative project of a pretty extreme ultramontane Catholic magazine, The Hibernian.

But the really interesting bit is how they got it into the news; they passed the fake poll to UKIP, who distributed it to bloggers, including Mick Fealty’s much respected Slugger O’Toole, and used the blogfroth this generated to reflect it back into the mainstream media. Even more interestingly, the no campaign turns out to have been receiving actual financial subsidies from UKIP; even their anti-Europeanism is European, it seems, and possibly paid for with European Parliament expenses.