Is Romania really ready for the EU? asks Cristian Lupsa in the New Republic.
Author Archives: David Weman
Dear Dmitri…
Terrific appreciation of Dmitri Shostakovich in the weekend FT (not this last weekend, of course, I’m a little behind on my reading) on the centenary of his birth:
The Fifth Symphony was a compromise that didn’t compromise. It was a squared circle. It was genius with a welcome mat. It made the Soviet state pigs feel they could wipe their trotters at the entrance and hand you their hats. Yet it was still a work of genius. Today the symphony is just as interpretable as a cry of grief and wrath over Soviet Russia as an endorsement of Stalin.
You carried on, avoiding the gulags, smuggling impertinences into your music (the Sixth Symphony) and writing string quartets as private therapy. Meanwhile friends and fellow artists were being dragged to Siberia, shoved in the Ljubjanka, or otherwise stiffed or silenced. You dreaded the knock on the door.
Read the proverbial whole thing.
A squabble
The next anniiverssary guest post is by the funny and clever Michael Manske.
Border disputes between Slovenia and Croatia flare up with the regularity of teenage zits, and they’re about as equally exciting. The latest one to pop was in the swampy little Slovenian hamlet of Hotiza last week, when Croatian police arrested some Slovenian journalists and the tired cycle of outrage and mutual recrimination began again. Slovenia’s foreign minister promptly tattled to the EU, and Slovenian special forces were sent to the area where they and their Croatian counterparts engaged in a brief, but intense, staring match.
The EU has never shown much of an interest in the dispute, and this time was no exception. Commissioner Ollie Rehn, like a teacher in an unruly classroom, admonished the two neighbors to behave as befits an EU member and an EU candidate country. But otherwise the EU’s tried and true doctrine of telling everybody to just get along had very little effect on the Slovenian-Croatian dispute.
So what is the problem exactly? I don’t want to get too much into it (like I said, it’s not the most exciting topic — there’s an overview of it over here at wikipedia if you’re interested) but it goes beyond the ill-defined border to a chronic inability, or perhaps cynical desire, to let the issue fester on indefinitely.
Slovenia and Croatia have been independent now for 15 years, the wars of Yugoslav secession have been finished for more than a decade, and still the border isn’t clear. The closest the two sides came was in 2001 when they almost accepted the so-called Drnov¹ek-Raèan agreement. In the end, the Croats failed to ratify it — a mistake that may come to haunt them in any future negotiations, since next time around Slovenia will bring a nuclear weapon to the table: the EU membership veto. It’s been dangled threateningly in front of Croatia before. Back in 2004, the previous center-left government (during another border incident) explicitly said as much. Now the government is comprised of center-right parties and even includes Janez Podobnik, a man who personally got roughed up at the border a few years ago. (He’s now serving as environment minister.)
Slovenia knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a threatened veto. During Berlusconi’s mid-90s reign, Italy strong-armed concessions out of Slovenia with regard to property rights and the Italian minority. This culminated in the so-called Madrid (or Spanish) Compromise of 1995. The question is whether Slovenia will decide to pay it forward, this time with Croatia. And what effect that may have on already soured relations.
Change
So, we have a new government, and Göran Persson is resigning as party leader. I ended up voting for the Center party, the most inoffensive of the rightwing parties. I was a little tempted to vote a blank ballot. I know this new government will do all kinds of bad things, and now I’ll be responsible. I’ve never had to vote for a party that I thought would be on the winning team before.
I can’t really think of any particular issues that defined the campaign. That might be a little troubling I guess, but there weren’t any particular non-issues either , so to speak, or a great deal of “politics as spectacle”. People weren’t too riled up, there was just a general feeling of twelve years being enough. Well, good for the voters. 16 years of uninterrupted rule by one party wouldn’t have been healthy, especially this party in this country.
Inherently Left of Center?
Romano Prodi, writing in Le Monde, claims that the European Union is inherently a left-of-center project. It’s an interesting claim–certainly one that Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl would probably dispute. But certainly the European institutions have changed since either of those Chancellors’ days, and a contemporary view might lend more strength to Prodi’s views and explain the relative prevalence of anti-EU sentiment on the right side of the political spectrum.
I’m of course relying on the summary from the estimable folks at Eurotopics, but it’s an interesting thought.
The new great game
Our next anniversary guest post is written by the the great Jonathan Edelstein.
It’s starting to look like the season of referenda in the near abroad.
On September 17, less than a week from today, voters in the unrecognized republic of Transnistria, located between Moldova and Ukraine, will be asked to vote on whether to “renounce [their] independent status and subsequently become part of the Republic of Moldova” or “support a policy of independence… and subsequent free association with the Russian Federation.” The option of “free association” with Russia, which is widely considered a prelude to outright annexation, is reportedly backed by a large number of Russian-financed business and political organizations, some with long-standing presence in Transnistrian politics and others apparently formed for the occasion. In the meantime, South Ossetia, which had earlier explored the possibility of petitioning Russia’s constitutional court for annexation, has just announced its own referendum for November 12, and although Abkhazia currently denies similar plans, there are rumors that a plebiscite may be in the works there as well.
The referenda, which are rather transparently supported by Moscow, represent something of a change in policy for the Russian Federation. It’s certainly nothing new for post-Soviet Russia to attempt to maintain its influence over the countries comprising the former Soviet Union, and it has at times used Russian citizenship to cement the “soft” annexation of neighboring territories; for instance, at least 90 percent of Abkhazians and South Ossetians now hold Russian passports. Nevertheless, up to now, it has soft-pedaled the issue of de jure territorial expansion. The forthcoming vote on whether Transnistria should become a second Kaliningrad suggests that policymakers in Moscow are at least starting to think seriously about taking formal responsibility for the territories that have broken away from other former Soviet republics.
At first glance, it’s hard to see why Russia would push such a policy at the present time. All three of the breakaway republics have substantial minorities who oppose union with Russia; Transnistria is almost evenly divided between ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Romanians, and despite post-Soviet ethnic cleansing, South Ossetia and Abkhazia retain Georgian minority enclaves. The recent wave of terrorist bombings in the Transnistrian capital of Tiraspol may well be linked to the referendum, and Russian annexation of the Georgian breakaway republics would only intensify border conflicts such as the Kodori Gorge. Nor would successful plebiscites lend a veneer of legitimacy to a Russian annexation; indeed, given the current international attitude toward non-consensual secessions from recognized states, this would only make Russia’s legal position worse by transforming it into an occupying power.
In other words, the referenda seem like a recipe for stirring up ethnic conflict within the breakaway republics, making Moldova and Georgia even more alarmed over Russian political ambitions than they already are, and creating new diplomatic and legal problems for Moscow. Which leads naturally to three questions: why now, what does Russia stand to gain in compensation for these risks, and how much should the rest of the world (and particularly Europe) care?
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Analytic philosophy
This anniversary guest post is from the brilliant John Emerson.
“It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me ?…..
He holds him with his skinny hand,
`There was a ship,’ quoth he.
`Hold off ! unhand me, grey-beard loon !’….
(Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner”)
“I alone have escaped to tell thee. ”
(Job 1:19)
When I attack analytic philosophy, a very common response is bafflement: why do I dislike it so much, and just what it is that I would prefer? I have recently come to understand that this bafflement is sincere and real, and that no one younger than forty-five or so can remember a time when analytic philosophy was not dominant. Even by the time of my own undergraduate years (1964-7) the kind of thing I wanted to see was being phased out, and by now I am effectively a fossil. This post is my attempt to clarify my objections to analytic philosophy, and to sketch what it is that I would have wanted.
I think that it is agreed that analytic philosophy descends from Frege, and the short way of expressing my dissatisfaction is to say that Fregean philosophy does some of the things philosophy used to do much better than any earlier philosophy did, but at the cost of ceasing entirely to do some of the other things that philosophy used to do. Analytic philosophers speak with condescension and scorn of anyone who regrets the loss of the old “big picture” philosophy, but I think that their condescension and scorn are not justified and, in fact, justify my own low opinion of them.
By and large the problems I see in analytic philosophy come from the attempt to make philosophy into a scientific, technical, professional activity. In particular, I think that the standards of truth and clarity, the general bias toward analysis as opposed to synthesis, and the skittishness about “thick” or mixed discourse have played a malicious role. The philosophy I would prefer would be more inclusive and more enterprising, but less certainly true, and in this would resemble the pre-Fregean philosophies.
I’ve put my criticisms / proposals in four categories, which I will just sketch. By and large, my criticisms are especially of analytic philosophy’s approaches to social, political, historical, ethical, and other “humanistic” questions, though I suspect that the analytic philosophy of science is dubious too.
First, I think that at least some philosophers should reverse the priority that analytic philosophers give to rigor over comprehensiveness. Rather than reducing problems to a size which can be successfully handled with rigor and certainty, I think that philosophers should try as best possible to handle large questions in their entirety. And these should be actual, real questions in all their thickness, and not questions about formalized models or imaginary hypothetical questions.
Second, if questions have both a normative (political or ethical) and a factual component, as most do, both components should be discussed together, rather than simplifying them by the “bracketing-out” process, and assigning the separate parts to the respective specialists.
Third, discussions should be oriented both to persuasion and to truth, and this means, to a degree, the renunciation of expert professionalism. The kinds of philosophical questions I’m talking about are of very general concern, and to treat them as specialized subjects not accessible to laymen has not only the disadvantage of elitism or even authoritarianism, but also that of presumption. The technical devices by which philosophers exclude laymen from their discussions have the effect of excluding very intelligent, concerned
non-philosophers from the argument. There are reasons why fluid dynamics, for example, should be a specialized topic, but ethics and politics should not be. (To put it differently: philosophy can be as
difficult as it wishes, but it cannot intentionally reserve itself for professional philosophers alone. And yes, Kant and Hegel were more accessible than contemporary philosophy is, because they did deign to address “the things that matter in [people’s] little lives”. )
Finally, philosophy should be constructive, and for that reason cannot be truth-functional. Every writer and every reader faces an uncertain future which can be influenced by his or her actions. Comprehensive
philosophies are by nature, and absolutely should be, constructive proposals or projects about how we should make our futures. And proposals and projects cannot be true, but can only be constrained by truth.
All past philosophies exaggerated their claims to truth, and the Fregean critique was a powerful one. But Fregean philosophy cannot produce a thick, constructive, persuasive, comprehensive world view,
and has thus renounced one of the functions of philosophy. Not all analytic philosophers fail on all four of the counts I have listed, but as far as I know they all fail on at least one of them. In effect, the philosophy profession has delegated some of the most important traditional functions of philosophy to journalists, freelancers, politicians, administrators, and charlatans.
Why reform has become a dirty word.
This anniversary guest post was written by the indispensable Jérôme Guillet, who normally writes for The European Tribune.
Laurence Parisot, the head of MEDEF, the French business
organisation, recently complained that:
There is one word who meaning for the public has changed in the past 25 years: “reform”. It used to be synonymous with progress, and now it means social regression.
One wonders why. Or not. As I’ve written incessantly over the past year at European Tribune (for instance here), “reform” has come to mean only one thing: less regulation of corporations, lower wages, fewer rights for workers, and weaker unions, i.e. the elimination of anything that can impede corporations’ freedom to make profits in the short term.
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Who gets under the EU umbrella when it rains?
This anniversary guest post is written by the clever and wittty P O’Neill.
For understandable reasons — the addition of 10, and soon to be 12, new member countries, and the constitutional crisis, the European Union has been preoccupied with foundational questions in recent years. But an older concern is working its way back onto the agenda: how to handle an economic crisis in a member country. The last major convulsion was Black Wednesday in 1992. Yet the only real long term impact of Black Wednesday was on the electoral fortunes of the Conservatives, as the legacy of mismanagement proved very difficult to shake. But there was little other damage: the UK economy managed to shed an exchange rate straitjacket that it had never particularly liked and growth recovered quite quickly, and the Eurozone project, then its in infancy, shed its most reluctant large member, setting the stage for monetary union 7 years later. Furthermore, the crisis itself was limited in scope, as it never concerned the ability of the UK government or the country as a whole to pay its bills.
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So, how long until Blair resigns?
Right now it feels more like twelve days than twelve months.
There’s been a lot of anger and unrest in the last few days, as Labour politicians have pressured th increasingly impopular Blair to name a date for his departure. Today two members of the government, including one minister, has just resigned and called on Blair to step down. Amusingly, the minister is blogging MP Tom Watson, until now strident blairite, who made himself very impopular in the British blogosphere and tangled with our own Nick Barlow.
Gordon Brown must be very happy. Blair has not only tried to delay his ascension, but also tried to set the stage for a challenger to Brown, maybe John Reid or esp. Alan Johnson. I think at the very least, Blair will be forced to publically anoounce a departure date, as Brown demands.