France needs to abandon its rejection of globalisation, right? Get with the programme? Join the war against terrorism? Or face simply becoming irrelevant? We’ve blogged plenty at AFOE about the bizarre notion that France and the United States are suddenly irreconcilable foes, but here is some definitive refutation. Defensetech.org reports that the USS Enterprise had some French Dassault Rafales over to visit in the Mediterranean recently.
Author Archives: Alex Harrowell
History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes
The flipside of the European dream is that by its nature, the vision of “non-imperial empire” as Barroso calls it is a powerful encouragement to the paranoid imagination. Curiously, the vision remains much the same across different paranoid styles; almost uncannily so.
In Britain, a surprisingly large number of people in the Conservative Party – not just UKIP and the BNP – think that the existence of “regions” is a secret plot to dismantle the UK, somehow associated with a scheme to reduce the British Army to 100,000 men, at which point it magically becomes “a defence force” – that the Israelis call their military that doesn’t seem to register.
In the United States, fascinatingly, the know-nothing hard right is gradually developing an ideological position that can be best described as American Euroscepticism. Supposedly, George W. Bush is scheming to replace the dollar with a new currency for a tyrannous North American Union; it will be called the “amero”. The upshot is that Mexicans are coming to take your stuff. It seems clear that the Gedankengut of the British far right is being repurposed in the US.
And in Turkey, right-wing generals apparently think the AKP’s drive for EU membership is part of a cunning plan to Talibanise Turkey. By joining the EU, the army’s role in politics will be terminated. Then, the AKP will unmask itself and convert Turkey into Afghanistan. It’s astonishing how similar these paranoid structures are. They clearly bear some similarities to well-known cultural tropes about the seductions of prosperity and peace, which go back to the ancient Greeks, and to the fascist idea sometimes described as the “city as whore”. After all, there is no real future for a military-ruled Turkey that beats EU membership.
But it’s an occupational hazard of being the Borg.
The Lure of Membership in action
If the EU didn’t exist, would we have to create it? Arguably, one of the best reasons for doing so would be the power it has demonstrated to spread democracy, constitutionalism, peace, and other good stuff through the accession process. Today, we had an excellent example of this. On the 7th of July, the European Commission updated the list of airlines that aren’t allowed to land in the EU. In the wake of the ban, the Moldovan government decided to solve the problem by shutting down a succession of really dodgy operations, revoking the Air Operator’s Certificate that is required by international law and grounding the planes.
The reason for such dramatic action is simple enough – it’s not just flight safety that was at stake. The list of dodgy airlines includes one that was involved in a regrettable incident in which 99 tonnes of assorted firearms were purchased from Bosnian war surplus by the US Government, and flown in a couple of Ilyushin 76s to Iraq for the use of the Iraqi government. However, the guns never arrived, and their fate remains a mystery – perhaps the least disturbing theory being that they were never actually shipped, and the Americans were defrauded. More disturbing options include the suggestion that the weapons were offloaded somewhere else, switched with another cargo, and sold God knows where, or that they were delivered all right, but to the former Iraqi army. The airline which was meant to move the guns, Aerocom, was itself later shut down after a plane was seized in Belize with a load of cocaine – but it actually subcontracted the job to one of the current crop, Jet Line International.
Chris Walker is Ignorant
If you want to lecture the French on “economic reform”, it pays to have some knowledge of French economic history. If you insist on doing so despite knowing nothing, “Big Mouth Strikes Again” is not a good headline. Of course, it could be some downtrodden sub-editor’s revenge.
Anyway, Chris Walker writes in today’s Independent that Nicolas Sarkozy is “committed to privatisation, and many of the Mitterand legacy stakes are to be addressed, such as Renault, Safran, EDF, and Air France”. Renault was nationalised by Charles de Gaulle in 1945, as punishment for allegedly collaborating with the German occupier. This is not a legacy of François Mitterand, at least not one he’d admit to. EDF is also a creation of De Gaulle, or more importantly the technocrats who ran it and the Communist minister Marcel Paul. It is hard to find an argument that cheap power is a net loss for French industry. Air France has been semi-nationalised as long as it has existed.
Walker also repeats the content-free mantra that “a Thatcherite-style purge and return to free markets has not happened in France in the 25 years since” Mitterand – well, something. Mitterand came to power in 1981, 26 years ago, swung around to the franc fort in 1983, 24 years ago, went into cohabitation in 1986 with the Right, who forced him to privatise many of his nationalisations, won the Presidency again in 1988, won back the National Assembly…but on the way, French heavy industry went through a pretty grinding restructuring process, with tens of thousands of jobs lost. The whole coal industry was shut down. The French also invested heavily in the remaining big industries, which is why they can build trains and space rockets and mobile phone networks and we can’t.
Walker demonstrably knows nothing about France. However, he is an expert.
A (positive) German shock?
Eurozone Watch has two articles about Germany and Italy that offer support for an optimistic view of the European economy. For a start, Sebastian Dullein argues that a comparison of Germany today and the US after the early 90s recession shows that Germany might be on the brink of a productivity surge. Dullein argues that labour productivity growth at the moment is being depressed by the re-absorption of the long-term unemployed, which also happened in the US in the early 90s. He quotes a figure of 7.6 per cent for productivity change (per employee, rather than per hour worked) in the metalworking industries (in Germany, a term that covers most of the industrial sector), which is positively stellar – after all, the US didn’t pass 2 per cent per-hour until 1998, well into the boom.
He also criticises Wolfgang Munchau for arguing (in essence) that there had been no structural reforms that accounted for productivity growth, and therefore that there was no growth. At this, I think I heard J.K. Galbraith’s ghost chuckle into his martini – it is indeed a fine example of all that is wrong with economics as a discipline that one can argue that we must all reform because there is a crisis, the evidence of that crisis being that one’s reforms have not been adopted.
An alternative argument would be that there was not all that much wrong with German firms in the first place. It is suggested that R&D spending is too low, but Dullein argues that it’s picking up. And anyway, their products can’t be that bad, as the rest of the world wants to buy German exports more than anything else. He also notes that there has been a wave of capital investment since 2002.
This possible German shock is already reverberating interestingly. Italy, for example, is experiencing better economic times, with growth picking up and strong industrial order books – especially on orders from France and Germany for capital goods. The growth is despite an increase in the tax take, with the result that the government is likely to have a chunk of change on hand. The OECD and the EU Commission would rather like to see that used to cut the monster public debt, still running at over 100 per cent of GDP. But the political situation might make that unlikely.
That might be the good news, though. When wasn’t the Italian government up to its eyes in debt? And it’s almost traditional that political turmoil in Italy is accompanied by good economic news. The difficult bit, though, is that Italian inflation is running somewhat slower than German – this implies, of course, an improvement in the terms-of-trade. Probably, Italy has done some internal disinflation, being unable to devalue – but this implies that wages have suffered relatively. The question is how to redistribute the benefit of the German shock without killing the golden goose.
Web applications and geopolitics
I was recently fiddling with the German Federal Railways’ on-line European timetables, when I noticed something very strange. They have the best cross-European timetable, no doubt about it, but some odd things happen if you’re heading too far east. For example, when I asked it for a route from Paris to Tallinn, everything went a little bit weird..
To kick off, it suggested Nachtzug number 237 to Hamburg, which seemed fair enough. And, I was informed, I could take a limited number of bicycles with me on prior reservation. Things went wrong, though, at the next step. In Hamburg, there was a connection on EuroCity 31 to Copenhagen. You can see where this is going, can’t you – due north, essentially. There, I was to catch an X-2000 Swedish high-speed train to Stockholm and transfer to the docks by bus, before hopping a Silja Line ship to Turku in Finland. Presumably rested after the overnight crossing, I’d catch fast train no. R130 to Pasila/Böle, to meet a night train, D 31 (for some historical reason all the long-distance trains are numbered as German D-Züge) to St. Petersburg.
Arriving in the northern capital at 1.40 am, I’d cross it to the Vitebski station and spend three hours on the platform waiting for the express 649-KH to Tallinn. Riiight. In all, some 63 hours. The only alternative differed in that I’d have to change in Brussels as well.
Somehow, the great clockwork was set up to try and avoid leaving EU territory – it’s the only explanation I could come up with. If, after all, I forced it to route via Minsk it produced a far better result, down to 33 hours and four trains – and no ships! But left to its own devices, though, it did go to Russia. I am fascinated by this application pathology – it’s quite routine for timetable servers to produce absurdly complicated routes in order to save a few minutes somewhere, and in fact it’s an important problem in Internet engineering that the system’s basic rules can easily create inefficiently large numbers of hops unless something is done to enforce a less specific route.
Or is there some sort of assumption that nobody wants to go via Belarus baked into the code?
Tidal Wave Fails to Devastate Rue de Solférino
Well, we shall wait to see the pundits explain exactly why the planned “vague bleue” for Nicolas Sarkozy failed to wipe out all traces of socialism in France as predicted. Leszek Kolakowski once described his Theory of the Infinite Cornucopia, which states that there exists an Infinite Cornucopia of reasons that can be invoked after the fact for whichever event actually happens. No doubt the cornucopia will be emptied and licked clean.
Le Monde reports – the PS has actually gained seats from last time, and the doomsodden predictions are exploded. Current forecasts put the UMP on 311-320 seats as against 359 in 2002, the PS on 210-212 compared with 149 last time out, the Communists on 17-18 (still in with a chance of saving their status as a parliamentary group), the Greens clinging on to four seats, the Nouveau Centre (the pro-Sarkozy UDFers) with 20 seats, and Francois Bayrou’s Mouvement Democrate with four seats. Le Pen gets zilch. Philippe de Villiers’ barking-right MPF gets anywhere between 2 and 6 seats.
It’s the leadership that suffered, though. Alain Juppé, the ex-prime minister and ex-con who was tapped to run a new, giant ministry of transport, infrastructure, energy and the environment, lost his seat in Bordeaux to the Socialist mayor. Arno Klarsfeld, one of the Right’s intellectuals, also got the order of the boot. Essentially everywhere, the MoDem voters swung to the Left.
So did François Hollande, although personally rather than politically. It emerged today that his partner, Ségoléne Royal, has thrown the First Secretary out of their home. Le Figaro found this such shattering news that they ran it on the front page lead, as a tiny news-in-brief ticker mentioned the insignificant detail that, well, the left got a majority of votes cast.
Laurent Fabius and Jean-Claude Cambadélis, who both rushed to the cameras with prepared doomsaying about how the PS must be “refounded” (translation = must be led by me), may be feeling a little stranded by the wave’s failure to arrive.
UKIP with adverbs
The “Open Europe” boys apparently think that giving the EU a legal personality would be a huge transfer of powers from the UK to “Brussels”. Legal personality, essentially, means that the EU would be allowed to sign cheques – or rather that it could sign for the member states.
Well, that sounds like a big transfer of powers, no? The EU could sign away the spoons and we’d know nothing of it! Sadly, as always with Eurosceptics, there is a lot of discourse abuse here. The EU is a law-governed entity. That is to say, whether it could sign something is governed by its own decision-making procedures. Having legal personality would not give the Commission, or whatever, more power to make decisions, as it is subject to its own procedures. The only situation where “Britain” would lose powers here would be if we were to assent to something (if it was this important, it would presumably be subject to unanimity) and then decide to refuse our signature, after ratifying it!
Why, in this wild scenario, would we care? Wouldn’t we be leaving anyway? Enough of “Open Europe”, anyway. How does this stuff differ in quality from, say, David Noakes?
Eins, Zwei, Polizei…ZWOOOOSH!
God knows I’ve been snarky about German lefties before. Look, not everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi. Lectures are not a form of rape. Osama bin Laden is not on the side of eco-feminism. (The last one is a true story, although Austrian rather than German.) But it’s very true that the modern German police gets the hot shivers for new kit.
Was there any reason at all for this? For non-German readers, during the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, the police seem to have obtained the use of a Bundeswehr Tornado reconnaissance plane, and to have sent it to photograph a camp of protestors. That is creepy, but this is inexcusable: the pass was carried out as if the aircraft was doing its 1980s mission, at 150 metres’ altitude and maximum speed.
Naturally, the Greens point out that aircraft of the same type are in use over Afghanistan, and therefore Germany is Iraq and everyone is a nazi, or something. But it’s impossible to see any justification for this except for a pure indulgence in power. If they really had wanted photographs, they could have had better ones with less drama. But someone felt it necessary to drop a sonic boom over the autonomous chaosists, and the pilots are not born yet who would pass up the chance for some very fast low-level flying with an audience. Neither is the Interior Minister yet born who would pass up the chance to impress the Bild Zeitung with a binge on force.
As so often, Germany and Britain are more alike than anyone would care to admit. Not that the RAF was available to buzz demonstrators on the road to Gleneagles in 2005, but there is little in current government practice to support it. I am reminded, though, of Tim Garton-Ash’s description of a huge police deployment to squash a far-left demo on the day of reunification in Berlin. He referred to Hartley Shawcross’s crack that “we are the masters now”. Well, this is over. If there’s anyone who can’t appeal to that glee of first days, it’s the G8.
The Sky, the Sea
Armscontrolwonk has a seriously unreported scoop about the great Czech radar kerfuffle. Namely, why is the US playing down the capabilities of the one element of the missile defence plan that actually works, and wouldn’t need anything as politically contentious as a new missile base? Defence geeks will already guess what we’re talking about, which is the capability of the US Navy’s Aegis air defence cruiser to shoot at missiles in the boost phase. It seems the Missile Defense Agency isn’t keen on the notion.
There’s a lot going for it. For a start it, ah, works – the problem is much simpler. In the boost phase, the rocket is going up, but not covering much ground towards you, so it’s easier to shoot at. And the enemy ends up with the bits. Ships go to sea, and lurk in international waters – they can move to cover a specific threat, and don’t need to be based very near their patrol areas.
So, a suggestion. ACW mentions a souped-up version of the SM-3 rocket that’s being developed with the Japanese. They, after all, have bought four destroyers equipped with the missiles and the fancy radar and computer systems. Why, then, can’t Europe buy its own? A lot of objections to the whole plan are based on them being “American” bases. After all, we can’t be totally sure that the missiles would hurtle up to intercept nukes inbound to London, Vienna, Toulouse, or Tallinn – can we? So why not have our own? – during the cold war we thought this argument very important with regard to offensive nuclear weapons. Presumably, such a purchase would bring in lucrative workshare for Thales, Astrium, Matra-BAE Dynamics & Co.
And you could even call it a force de défense spatiale tous azimuts. Ships sail, right? Including to the North Atlantic, if need be. There is, however, a probby. Putting ships in the eastern Mediterranean is easy enough. Putting them in the high North and the North Sea is politically and militarily easy, although it’s a tough job in winter. The Baltic? Well, there’s nothing to stop you, and both sides are in friendly hands. The Russians wouldn’t be happy. But then, they wouldn’t anyway. ACW, though, reckons you might need one in the Black Sea.
Special international agreements exist regarding the transit of the Straits, to which Russia is a party. Specifically, you can’t send aircraft carriers through. An Aegis ship is no carrier, but that don’t mean they aren’t going to make a big fuss about it. Update: WSI Brussels Blog has more.