Author Archives: Guy La Roche

About Guy La Roche

Dutch translator and subtitler living in Brittany with his three cats. Has also lived in the Flemish part of Belgium. Speaks English rather fluently and in a former life used to have a decent command of Spanish. Knows swear words in German and Russian. Not quite francophone yet, but slowly getting there. Vaguely centrist observer of the world around him, extremely naive and, sometimes, rather proud of it. Writes Venale Pecus.

Turkey vs EU

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In both the French and Dutch No camps some voices were raised against Turkey entering the EU. Via Dutch weblog Sargasso I found a very interesting entry at Turkish weblog Turkish Torque. One excerpt:

It seems like AKP, like many Turks, has been discouraged by the French and Dutch referenda. This will only strengthen the hand of all the parties that have accused AKP with “selling out” national interests to the EU membership dream. (…) Letting go of the EU project would be a radical shift in foreign policy with serious repercussions on many foreign and domestic issues ranging from Cyprus to the re-trial of Ocalan.

It seems that the consequences of the demise of the Constitutional Treaty may reach further than ‘just’ an institutional crisis within the EU itself. Sadly, I do not have the time, nor the knowledge, to go into this but I believe it would be worthwile to follow this one a bit more closely.

Dutch referendum: some background

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Having been asked by AFOE to write a couple of posts for them in the coming weeks I am both honoured and horrified and apologize in advance for occasionally butchering the English language. A very short introduction: I am a Dutch translator now living in France after 30 odd years of residence in Belgium. I am totally incapable of producing fine scholarly essays but I can do my part of the vox populi pretty well? I hope.

To warm up I offer you some background relevant to the Dutch referendum before the official results start rolling in. First some figures, taken from a Eurostat news report (pdf) that was released today.

Dutch unemployment, while remaining well below the European average of 8,9%, has risen from 4.6% to 5%. By comparison, Poland has 17% unemployment and Ireland 4.2%. Eurostat also mentions that The Netherlands registered the highest relative increase in unemployment rates among the member states together with Portugal (6.5% to 7.2%) and Luxemburg (4.2% to 4.6%). Unemployment among young people in The Netherlands, while fairly high at 9.2%, is still modest compared to the EU average rate of 19%.
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