Author Archives: Tobias Schwarz

About Tobias Schwarz

German, turned 30 a while ago, balding slowly, hopefully with grace. A carnival junkie, who, after studies in business and politics in Mannheim, Paris, and London, is currently living in his hometown of Mainz, Germany, again. Became New Labourite during a research job at the House of Commons, but difficult to place in German party-political terms. Liberal in the true sense of the term.

His political writing is mostly on A Fistful of Euros and on facebook these days. Occasional Twitter user and songwriter. His personal blog is almost a diary. Even more links at about.me.

One in a million!

Posted on by

It’s too bad that WordPress seems to break HTML in the title field – so I can’t use a modest Roman numeral to indicate that it’s you! Yes, you, reader from pol.co.uk, who clicked on a link in your google reader at 2:32 am CET, who is the one millionth sitemetered unique visitor to A Fistful Of Euros. Of course that doesn’t mean you’re actually the millionth person to see this page or read its content. After all, the definion of “visit” is different from counter to counter, as is the definition of unique visit. Moreover, Sitemeter.com doesn’t have a chance to count even one of the about 4000 feed subcscribers we have – according to our feed statisticians over at feedburner.com – if they don’t come here in addition to reading afoe in their favorite feed reader.

Still, it could have been anyone – but it was you! Congratulations! To you – and to us.

Une certaine idée de la France, pt. 2

Posted on by

History is an important participant in French politics. As, for example, François Hincker, notes, the lasting impact of the French Revolution on the contemporary French polity can never be underestimated – „[c]ertes, […] que l’essentiel de la France con¬tem¬poraine sortit d’elle est une idée dont la banalité n’efface pas la vérité.“ (François Hincker, La Révolution française et l’économie – Décollage ou catastrophe?, p 5)

The Revolution forged a nation based on Ernest Renan’s universalist “plébiscite de tous les jours” and introduced the French notion of the Republic, which is, according to the political scientist Michael Leruth “… all at once a form of government, a collection of venerable lieux de mémoire and familiar symbols, a political philosophy, and a secular substitute for religious faith.” (1998: p 60) Moreover, it is an ideology built on inherently conflicting, sometimes contra1dictory, concepts – liberté, égalité and fraternité – leading to a normative aim of active statism that is markedly different from the liberal political philosophy of other Western democracies. While French Republicanism is founded upon the rejection of all kinds of privileges and expects the state to intervene and protect the rights of the individual, other philosophical traditions are far more critical of the state, regarding it as one major source of arbitrariness.
Continue reading →

Une certaine idée de la France ?

Posted on by

It’s interesting that Emmanuel’s remarks about biased statistics about the French economy in Anglophone publications led to some comments trying to asses the extent to which France is perceived as “the other”, at least as far as “the West” is concerned. There have always been claims about a natural rivalry of the two main “universalist” western polities, France and the US, but there was, in my opinion, never too much hard evidence for such a claim. Still, intellectual traditions as well as institutionalised myths are often a very powerful element of public discourse, and sometimes even assume a certain life of their own if there are enough believers. In this case, there certainly are.

Since France will begin the process of electing a new President this Sunday, and since “Europe” wasn’t exactly a prominent subject on any candidate’s campaign agenda, I thought I share thoughts I once compiled with respect to the Europeanization of the French “other”, some parts of which have already been included in my guest post (in French) at publius.fr a couple of days before the now notorious French referendum on the European Constitution in 2005.
Continue reading →

The Jewish-European heritage

Posted on by

On the day following Israel’s national holocaust memorial day, writing in Haaretz, Fania Oz-Salzberger reminds both Israelis and Europeans that, for centuries, Jewish history has been an enriching element of European history. Concerned about the effect of class trips of “roudy groups” of Israeli teenagers to Auschwitz, she recommends trips to Spain instead –

Take the money, enlist more supportive foundations, and take select groups of Israeli pupils to Andalusia, in the south of Spain. Because there, in many ways, begins the story that ends in Auschwitz: the story of Jewish Europe, which is both an Ashkenazi and Sephardi tale.
…
Somewhere in Andalusia there was a small paper mill at the end of the Middle Ages. It was at that time that the ancient Chinese technology arrived, after a long journey across Asia and North Africa, and entered Europe via Spain. Without it Gutenberg would not have been able to print. And lo, that mill was operated by two partners, a Jew and a Muslim. Their clients from the north were Christians. This story, symbolic rather than historic, should be told to 17-year-old Jewish and Arab Israelis. You have to be a great pessimist not to tell it. It is a story of life and rejuvenation. It would not overshadow the story of the persecuted and the murdered, but empower it greatly.

Woe to a Jewish-Israeli identity that relies only on the ashes of the crematoria. Our European past also includes a thousand years of life, art and the spreading of knowledge.

I don’t think trips to Andalusia should replace trips to Auschwitz, but they certainly seem like a valuable addition. They represent what I like so much about the the Jewish Museum in Berlin – it’s not just a holocaust memorial but also offers a glimpse onto Jewish European’s life before the Shoah – as well as thereafter. Because, as opposed to Ms Oz-Salzbergers claim above, I don’t believe the story of Jewish Europe ended in Auschwitz, not even in Germany.

The statistics of recent Jewish immigration, particularly from Russia, are unequivocal. But it’s the anecdotal evidence that, I think, matters more in this case. The Jewish community in my home town, Mainz, is one of the oldest in Germany, dating back to the 10th century, possibly even to Roman times. In the 1970s, there were only about hundred community members. Today, there are about a thousand, and a new Synagoge – architecturally slightly reminiscent of the Jewish Museum in Berlin – is currently being planned.

Easter Egg Vlogging: statistics and swords

Posted on by

Well, sort of. But don’t be scared, gentle readers, I’m not torturing you with a video of myself watching Edward Hugh watching Alex Harrowell watching me watching Edward, thus entirely disregarding the possible value of such a video for media theorists and social psychologists as well as the fact that all the cool kids are apparently engaging in such technically mediated low level chain-voyeurism these days…

Last December, I saw the Swedish demographer Hans Rosling’s presentation about his project gapminder at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris. Professor Rosling and his team have developed the “Gapminder Trendalyzer”, recently purchased by Google (and now available on http://tools.google.com/gapminder/), a truly stunning tool to flexibly visualize and break down statistical time series, currently particularly relating to UN world development data.

Rosling’s presentation, in which he demonstrated beyond doubt that top Swedish students statistically know far less about the developing world than chimpanzees (who are on par with Nobel laureates), was one of the most interesting parts of the conference, and, as Loic LeMeur mentioned then, eye opening. Professor Rosling’s statistically derived world view is very different from the gloomy preconceptions most people are often mistaking for reality when talking about the state of the world’s development and demographic situation, particularly with respect to Africa, as Bruno Guissani remarks on Lunch Over IP –

My experience in Africa, he says, is that the seemingly impossible is possible. Even bad governments have gone in the last 50 years from pre-medieval situation to sometimes decent infrastructure and conditions. … “You can believe statistics when you can relate them to your grandmother”, he says. By which he means that he has mapped his family history comparing the situation of Sweden in the different years in which his family members lived to that of different nations of the world today. His great-great mother born in the early 1800 lived in a country similar to today’s Sierra Leone; his g-g-mother in one that looked like Mozambique; his g-mother’s living conditions were close to that of Ghana today; his mother lived in the equivalent of Egypt. “And I am a Mexican”, he says, while his kids were born when Sweden was similar to today’s Chile and, in the case of the youngest one, like Singapore.

Luckily, for your Easter Vlogging pleasure, the TED blog has a video of Professor Rosling’s speech at the TED conference 2006, which is basically the one I saw in Paris. Unfortunately, there seems to be no video of his appearance at the TED conference 2007, where he demonstrated that demography and sword swallowing are two rather compatible activities. But there is a picture…

@foe is online again.

Posted on by

Just a brief note to those who were using our European web aggregator @foe before we had to take it down due to the CMS transition – the aggregator is online again. I will continue to improve a few things in the next couple of days, including adding more feeds, so you may still experience shaky behavior at times. But basically – it’s back. So go forth and vote…

Update – I just realised that there were a couple of CSS problems that were caused because the conditional IE6 CSS code wasn’t loaded properly since the transition to WordPress. Since all the about 20% of you, who are still using IE6, suffered in silence, I’m asking everyone else using a less frequently used browser to tell us if there are any issues with the design. Thanks for your help!

Comments are open! All Permalinks work!

Posted on by

Welcome back to afoe 3.1 – now running on WordPress. What I considered to be a weekend’s job – moving a blog of the size of afoe from the multiblog capable Movable Type to the single blog CMS WordPress and hacking it to the extent necessary to keep the impression of a multiblog – turned out to be just a little more complicated and time consuming.

I’ll write about this in a little more detail in a couple of days, so those among you, gentle readers, who might suffer from the same comment spam/Perl induced server problems, can benefit from my experiences to some extent, should you ever attempt to make the switch.

There are a couple of new features, mostly concerning comment subscription possibilities. Unfortunately, apart from the occasional lack of appropriate WordPress CSS, some things still don’t work, like our aggregator @afoe, which won’t function properly until I’ve renamed a couple of functions in the meneamé and pligg scripts it uses.

But for the moment, I’ll just sit back and wait for your participation – because the most important good news is the following:

Coments are open again – and despite the beautiful categorised permalinks which we are using now, not a single one of your links to any afoe archive page will break…

Moving again

Posted on by

Gentle readers,

should you be concerned about the relative silence on afoe while seemingly everyone else is celebrating the European anniversary, I would like to let you know that, afoe is once again in the midst of an important transition: Following the recent comment spam/Perl-related server issues with our host that forced us to temporarily disable the comments in order to keep the site online, I am now porting the blog from Movable Type, the blog CMS to which we have been faithful since 2003, to WordPress, which, as you can probably imagine, is not too simple given the plethora of small functionality differnces, differences in template structures and, not least, the size of the afoe blog family.

For you, I suppose the most important information will be that I am fairly certain we won’t loose even a single permalink during the transition due to a lot of google research and a hack for the WordPress Movable Type importer that allowed us retain the post IDs once assigned by Movable Type. Thus, at the end of the transition all MT Permalinks will be seamlessly redirected to the respective WordPress entry. No need to adjust any of your links.

So, if all goes well, we will be able to reactivate the comment functionality in a day or two, and hopefully, you won’t even notice that we’ve switched to WordPress.

Second Life, Second EU?

Posted on by

Right on time for the 5oth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the European Union’s Communications Department, is thinking seriously about establishing a digital “embassy” in the (currently more hyped than) popular virtual reality Second Life. According to a pressetext.at (in German) report, EU spokesperson Mikolaj Dowgielewicz explained that an EU office in Second Life was intended to reach out, get closer, and communicate better with individual European citizens, since 54% of the alleged 4.4m virtual inhabitants of Second Life are European nationals, according to Second Life operator Linden Labs.
Continue reading →

Comment Spam Problems

Posted on by

Gentle readers, as so many other blogs, afoe is having major problems with the way Movable Type, the system we’ve been using to run this blog since 2003, is handling comment spam.

Unfortunatly, as you may have noticed, our host, totalchoicehosting.com, decided this morning that it had to suspend our domain temporarily because of the excessive server loads created by our comment spam – we’re talking about a couple of thousand comment spam entries per day.

In order to avoid future suspensions, I have disabled the comments on the entire system until we have worked out a solution that will avoid future account suspensions.

You can still contact us by email and the contact form on the about page. I will update this post as soon as we’ve worked something out.