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.

Italian Elections: Still too close to call.

Posted on by

UPDATE below the fold.

With respect to the Italian elections, there’s still only one thing certain – it’s going to be a long night, and, possibly, not the last one. There have apparently been, if my rudimentary understanding of Italian news broadcaster Rai News 24 is correct, unjustified delays in data processing. Thus, given the closeness of the race between the center-left and center-right coalitions, Italian expatriats may be the ones who cast the decisive votes for both lower and upper chambers of the Italian Parliament, since a law, introduced in 2001 formed four “overseas constituencies.” They will, accordingly, choose 12 of the 630 MPS in the lower, and six of the the 315 senators in the upper house.

So, instead of news, just some more context. At wwitv.com you can find a whole page full of web streams provided by Italian tv stations. Electionresources.com features a long explanation of the Italian electoral systems, both old and new. As the author, Manuel Álvarez-Rivera explains, the system has been altered in numerous ways for this election –

It is widely anticipated that in the event of an Unione victory under the new PR systems, the resulting center-left majorities in both houses of Parliament would be considerably smaller than under the previous systems, and the leader of the Unione, former Prime Minister (and former President of the European Commission) Romano Prodi has promised to undo the changes if the center-left returns to power in this year’s elections.

Finally, here’s the google-translated election website provided by Italy’s interior ministery, which, hopefully, is, where you can find the eventual election results as soon as they are released officially.
Continue reading →

A Coalition Of The Willing?

Posted on by

Thursday’s edition of the International Herald Tribune features an interesting article concerning the recent European rows about state interference in favour of so-called national champions.

Quoting Elie Cohen, the Tribune’s authors – Katrin Bennhold and Graham Bowley – suggest that both the French government’s allegedly new/refound role as M&A consultant in the Suez and Gaz de France deal (to avoid a bid from Italy’s ENEL) as well as the Spanish government’s attempt to thwart a takeover of Endesa, a Spanish utilty by E.ON, the German power corporation, are indicative of a resurgence “nation state” as a political concept in the Europe of the 21st century.
Continue reading →

Burn your hard drives.

Posted on by

The day is approaching fast (likely the release date of Microsoft’s next version of its Windows operating system, called Windows Vista) on which a so-called trusted platform module on your computer’s motherboard will be able bar you from accessing the data on your computer, or at least bar you from doing with it what you want to do, if what you want to do does not comply with the rules embedded in it.

This is on the one hand a consequence of the entertainment industry’s global strategy to reduce the utility of their products to be able to command higher prices for them, and on the other an attempt to increase the security of data on a computer – in case you would not be able to access your files, it would be rather certain that no one else would be either.

Well, don’t be too sure.
Continue reading →

A different kind of clash.

Posted on by

While I’m still struggling to put my reaction to the cartoon row into appropriate writing, today’s Spiegel Online’s English edition features an interesting and important article about a different kind of culture clash. It’s a timely story about the fact that Islam the religion and Islam the cultural practice are often quite distinct. It’s a story about the slow and violent death of traditional hiearchies during modernisation, particularly if modernisation is perceived as imperialist. But above all, it’s a story about allegedly legalised crime against a young woman and her incredible courage to resist what would have been her traditional duty: suicide. Her faith, she states, gave her the strength to keep telling her story. As Uwe Buse writes on Spiegel Online –

“Mukhtar Mai, the daughter of a Pakistani farmer, thought she was apologizing for the misdeeds of her brother. Instead, she was gang raped by men in her village. After the rape, Mai contemplated suicide. Today she is likened to Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Islam; internal discussion, pt 5

Posted on by

Alex, I agree. But to know what happened to the ideals when they became their respective opium can only serve as a reminder to be careful, and, that politics matters. In fact, my idea of “dealing with Islam” doesn’t necessarily include the CRS, but compulsory Europe-wide reading of the relevant articles on Wikipedia, for example. I mean, look at what’s going on, this is not about state-prescribed belief, or even opposition to it, it’s about campaign management.

I think on of the fundamental problems with today’s version of enlightenment is that it is actually quite unenlightened. It’s no longer a conclusion but just another start of a thought process. Today, I’d say that most Europeans are orthopraxically not-religious as many Muslims are, and many people in Alabama probably are (again).

We will need to socially reconnect with our own enlightenment roots if we are to convince anyone of their value. We probably need to focus on the 16th – 18th century ourselves for a bit.

Islam, internal discussion; pt 3

Posted on by

Alex,

a) I love the term „snack thinker“. She may well be, but her narrative lends a credibility most people do not have. She’s paying a high price being who she is and as such is probably entitles to being over-the-top at times. And, of course, there’s the Dutch history of pillarisation, which radicalises this debate in my opinion.

b) I don’t think most of the people I mentioned in the email are non-Muslims. But even if, given that almost no secular religious research into Islam is being conducted in countries where it is the predominant or state religion, I don’t think dealing with Islam from this perspective is necessarily wrong. And, despite the fact that he was certainly read to often by the wrong people, Bernard Lewis does still make some important institutional points, in my understanding. If he had not, we would not see this kind of rage on the streets. All this is a complex, and mostly political, issue, much less religious. Still – even though life in the 16th century wasn’t exactly fun for a lot of people, it was the time when European societies were able to be taken to the streets and fields for principles handled solely by their principes in earlier times. If you don’t buy the argument made by some with respect to Germany, that it was “reformation” that later caused the spiritual inspection and took the political out of the public realm when collective action would have been needed to avert a political disaster, ie that reformation is, in some sense, opposed to true democratisation, then reformation is what is needed these days. It would mean the unquestioned individual and social acceptance of a modern version of “cuius regio, eius religio” , and make the Jihad of Dar al-Islam vs Dar-al-Harb a solely personal, and spiritual one, not a “geographical” or national fight. Of course, it looks once again like Europe will be this battlefield, which is even more reason to deal with Islam, and Islamic modernisation even if you’re not a Muslim.

Islam, internal discussion; pt 1

Posted on by

a reference I read a while ago and found very interesting with respect to Islamic reform movements.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17054

Also, just two weeks ago, there was a highly praised symposium in Bonn with, among other speakers, Tariq Ramadan, about this very topic (some add. info, for those who read German) –

http://www.qantara.de/uploads/463/Schimmel_Symp.pdf

http://islam.de/4661.php

http://www.faz.net/s/Rub5C2BFD49230B472BA96E0B2CF9FAB88C/Doc~E51FA69281734495BB6E9C87271C8049C~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

Interestingly I just found out that, Christoph Luxenberg (psd) has written a new book that is about to be published. If it is anything like his “syro-aramaean interpretation of Qran”, a book (which is my translation, I don’t think the book has been translated yet) in which he linguistically deconstructs the classical readings of the Qran, eg arguing that using the syro-aramaean reading the famous huris for whose attention martyrs/terrorists blow themselves up are not virgins but “crystal clear grapes,” this will be fuel to the flames these days.

Googling his name I found an interesting article in German in which he argues that alleged referenced to the hijab are, according to his reading of Arabic, referring to a “belt intended to cover the loins” rather than the head – http://www.phil.uni-sb.de/projekte/imprimatur/2004/imp040204.html (in German)

And Der Spiegel international called up Ayan Hirsi Ali and talked about caricatures and “Submission II”.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,399263,00.html (in English)

On the road again…

Posted on by

Gentle readers, the 2006 Satin Pajama voting period is approaching and we have a couple of great things in the afoe r&d pipeline, which we will tell you more about soon. But for all this we needed a less error prone server. So we’re on the road again, and thus, there’s a certain probability you might have problems accessing afoe and afem during the period of DNS propagation, which will probably begin Thursday night.

Update, 23:10 CET – Our comment function has been disabled temporarily to ensure database integrity during the move.

Update, 00:45 CET – Comment functionality has been reenabled.

What’s in it for Putin?

Posted on by

If there’s one mystery trumping all the others in the recent Russian-Ukrainian gas supply row, it is the one concerning the role and intentions of the Kremlin, particularly with respect to Vladimir Putin: Why fight a public battle over an issue that is almost as intransparent and complicated as the geological processes that created the gas in the first place? Veronica Khokhlova is trying to make some sense of the deal –

On the surface, it’s all clear and nice: they’ve reached an agreement, and we aren’t paying what Gazprom initially wanted us to pay. Europe can relax, too. But … it’s a complex deal. The Reuters piece [she cites on her blog] doesn’t mention Rosukrenergo as part of the scheme, an intermediary company that will be buying Russian gas from Gazprom for $230 and then selling both Russian and Turkmen gas to Naftogas for $95. A Gazprom affiliate and Austria’s Raiffeisen Investment AG own 50/50 stakes in Rosukrenergo, which, in a way, means that Gazprom will be buying gas from itself. Rosukrenergo is registered in Switzedrland, and Raiffeisen Investment AG has, allegedly, nothing to do with Raiffeisen Bank. Oleksandr Turchynov, former head of SBU and Yulia Tymoshenko’s man, launched an investigation into Rosukrenergo in summer 2005, but was not allowed to finish it.”

And Jerome at Eurotrib keeps arguing that all this is (simply) a matter of oligarchic infighting at the expense of the peoples involved (as they are paying significatnly higher energy prices than those paid by their countries/oligarchs energy corporations).

Be that as it may – the real question at hand is, as I see it, the following: did Russia/Putin want to appear weak in this matter, demonstrating to the west that he needs to do in Russia what he deems necessary (remember Yukos, the NGO law), or is the Kremlin/Putin indeed so weak that it has to accept oligarchic infighting to the extent of creating a foreign policy crisis, and that, as a result, the Kremlin needs to tighten its grip? Quite frankly, neither alternative is likely to make anyone happy.

The end of the world as we know it…

Posted on by

Just on the day when the French Assemblée Nationale kind of accidentally introduced some kind of “cultural flatrate” (which is obviously opposed to the government’s intent) the Independent has learnt that the British government is demonstrating boldly that digital technology need not be used to free either bits and bytes, or even people.

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years. … Every time you make a car journey already, you’ll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car’s index plates will be read as well,” said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).”

When will the responsible people realise that we are likely to have already passed the point where freedom is enhanced and protected by security measures. When I was at the LSE, I attended a seminar held by David Held called “rethinking the modern polity”. We started by thinking about Hobbes. But we did not think we’d end up there again.