Well as everyone who reads Afoe assiduously already knows this is my opininion: demography does matter. And now this is doubly official as some of us demography enthusiasts have just set up the demography matters weblog. This does not mean that you, gentle readers, will now be completely spared, but it does probably mean that my Afoe posting may become a little less ‘monothematic’ given that I now have another outlet from which to vent my obsessions.
Author Archives: Edward Hugh
Troglodytes in Turkey?
Well it seems that Spain’s troglodytes aren’t the only ones hovering around the EU arena. Turkey’s Land Forces Commander Gen. Yasar Buyukanit might be another case it seems:
As we feared in our editorial on Monday the accusations from the prosecutor that the Land Forces commander tried to influence the judicial process by making statements on behalf of a defendant have been blown out of proportion that could well turn into a full-blown domestic crisis….
The background to this situation is explained here:
The reasons for the tension between the government and the military, which are now rising over Gen. Buyukanit, are briefly as follows:
Erdogan’s presidential bid: Some circles claim that the AK Party leader wants to become president through majority support in Parliament in 2007. But people close to the AK Party indicate that Gen. Buyukanit, who is set to become chief of General Staff this August, is the biggest obstacle to Erdogan’s presidential aspirations. That’s the reason for rumors about Gen. Buyukanit sparked before he became Land Forces Commander and that some circles argued that the AK Party didn’t want to see Buyukanit helm the land forces
Uneasy AK Party members: The AK Party deputies see the presence of Buyukanit — who often inveighs against fundamentalist movements, uses Kemalist undertones in his statements, makes statements contradicting the AK Party’s policies on many issues ranging from Cyprus to northern Iraq, and terrorism to religious vocational Imam Hatip high schools — as a direct threat to their rule. Some AK Party deputies don’t want Buyukanit to assume the post to show the AK Party’s power to everyone. It’s striking that some AK Party deputies say, “He did what we couldn’t do,” referring to the prosecutor that prepared the indictment.
Now from the standpoint of my sparse knowledge of Turkish politics it is hard to tell just what sort of a ‘troglodyte’ General Buyukanit actually is, or indeed whether or not he is a troglodyte at all. One thing however is clear: the balance between military and political institutions in Turkey is far from ‘normalised’ and a right royal battle seems to be going on.
On another front, this article by Ayhan Simsek draws attention to the extent to which developments in Iraq may cast a long and important shadow over Turkey’s EU accession aspirations.
Sustaining Growth in Turkey
I don’t suppose it’s much of a secret that Turkey is one of the main ‘growth tigers’ in the ambit of the EU. The big issue is, I suppose, just how sustainable Turkey’s growth is. Well the World Bank is on the story, and now has a Country Economic Memorandum entitled Promoting Sustained Growth and Convergence with the European Union. As the FT notes:
Turkey needs to create more jobs, get more women into the workforce, and send its children to school for longer if it is to improve its chances of joining the European Union, the World Bank said on Monday.
I absolutely agree, and address the significant inequality between Western Turkey and the Kurdish east, may I add. But I do find myself having the thought, if Turkey does all the things which she is being encouraged to do. If Turkey becomes one of the largest and most dynamic economies in the neighbourhood of the EU, will this really increase the membership chances, or will this only make the resistance in some quarters even stronger?
Italian Elections 2006
Ok, the Italian elections are now just about one month away, although you wouldn’t guess this from reading the British press where the David Mills/Silvio Berlusconi case is what seems to be making all the running. Now as I indicated in this post, I will try and give some systematic coverage to the election issues as they evolve during the campaign. In that post I outlined 7 issues which I thought would be worth looking at in an election which I think is going to be very important not just for the Italian people themselves but for all citizens of the EU. I had a first pass at one of the topics here (and here).
Maybe the best starting point is number 7 on the list: the sense of denial.
Looking at the fact that Berlusconi himself seems to have started his campaign in Washington, while former Commission president Romano Prodi now seems to have become an early convert to neo-protectionism (and this piece), I would definitely say that this is really the number one issue. In order to help me on my course through these troubled waters Roberto of Wind Rose Hotel has kindly offered to send me some on the spot material. Here is his first missive. It confirms my worst fears.
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Damage at heart of Europe’s single market?
Following up on the points made in this post and this one, former EU competition commissioner Mario Monti has a comment article in today’s FT (behind the firewall unfortunately, but his point is clear from the extract):
The single market, a key pillar of the European Union since its foundation, is in danger. Several member states are reluctant to proceed further in building it; they oppose, for example, the services directive. They even try to undermine the working of those components of the single market that are already in place – and oppose foreign takeovers.
Worryingly, the epicentre of this revolt against the single market lies in countries that are at the core of the single currency. The eurozone, in order to deliver the benefits expected from the euro, needs to have more of a single market than the rest of the EU, but already it is getting less. The euro, meant to be the crowning achievement of the single market, looks increasingly like a currency in search of its market.
More Troubling News
Just off the wires from Iraq:
The sectarian cleansing that drove 68-year-old Abbas al-Saiedi from his home may be as alarming a sign of a country on the brink of civil war as the killings that have swept Iraq in the past week…….
Al-Saiedi’s story, a tale of fear and desperation told to The Associated Press on Wednesday, represents a growing phenomenon of religious cleansing in which members of each Muslim sect are driving the others from neighborhoods where they have long lived side by side.
The practice, which has been going on for some time in neighborhoods south of Baghdad, is a barometer of the degree to which the Shiites and Sunnis have moved on the path to civil war. The number of incidents cannot be fully gauged, but is not yet at the level of mass expulsions of the kind that took place in the Balkans during the civil war there in the 1990s.
For their part, Sunnis have long-standing claims of attacks by Shiite-dominated and, some say, government-linked death squads and eviction from homes in the very neighborhoods now being occupied by Shiites displaced from Sunni areas.
Italy Had Zero GDP Growth In 2005
I am sure some people must sometimes feel I am exaggerating when I try to explain the rather dire straits which I feel the Italian economy has fallen into. If you are one of those people I would ask you to take a good look at the latest data release:
Official statistics published on Wednesday showed Italy experienced zero growth in 2005 underlining the dire state of the country’s economy and dealing a blow to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s election campaign…..Istat, the official statistics institute, said that the weak data contrasted with the US’s 3.5 per cent, the UK’s 1.8 per cent, the 0.9 per cent of Germany and Spain’s 3.4 per cent.
And it’s not as if 2005 was a bad year for the global economy generally, the world economy steamed ahead at a rate of around 4.25% last year, driven by systematic development in India and China and strong growth in the US. Italy has now had an annual growth rate of around 1% per annum over the last decade, and I see no good reason to justify the expectation that this is going to perk upwards sharply anytime soon.
Cyfarchion a’r dydd Gwyl Dewi ein nawdd Sant
Today is Saint David’s day, or Dewi Sant, so greetings to you all everywhere. As you know I am not a person with nationalist sentiment, but a good excuse for a celebration is always fine with me. One of my cousins, she must be in her seventies now, wrote to remind me:
“Greetings to you all on Saint David’s Day. Cyfarchion a’r dydd Gwyl Dewi ein nawdd Sant.
I hope you are all well. My Daffodils are out in the garden and I will wear my Daffodil and enjoy leeks – not from my garden! I am having a holiday on 1 March and so are many others inspite of Mr. Blair, who will not grant us a holiday. We will soon wear him down as the demand for a Welsh National Holiday is getting stronger every year.”
So onwards and upwards to the coalition of the willing, that’s what I say!
Saving The Euro
Do you want to save the Euro? Well one idea for how to do it has been proposed by University of Missouri-St Louis history professor John Gillingham: reissuing the 12 national currencies that were replaced with just one, while at the same time retaining the euro as a parallel currency that finds its market value in competition to reissued national currencies (podcast here).
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Oh We Are The Champions
Yes we are really, aren’t we. Especially if we are called Arcelor, or Danone, or Endesa, or Eni, or Enel, or Banca Antonveneta or Pekao. And what these champions have in common, and it is this which sets them so much apart from their footballing equivalents, is not the ability to win anything, but rather their capacity to lose, especially in a take-over battle from a foreign pretender. And just for this very reason it is, it seems, ok for you to include the referee in your line-up. Indeed such is the sporting prowess of these ‘champions’ that it is deemed that what they are most in need of is not the cold harsh wind of competition, but rather protection, and indeed protectionism, anything rather than face outright competition from would-be global rivals. A rare breed of champions these.
I think before I go further, I would like to draw attention to one idea which holds us all together here at Afoe:
“Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels. – H.A.L. Fisher”
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