Tag Archives: countries

AIDS in Eastern Europe

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Actually the Scotsman puts it like this: “Enlargement of the European Union in May will bring the world?s fastest-growing area of HIV infection on to the doorstep of the EU, United Nations experts warned today.”

Which pretty much scandalises me: how can you turn a human tragedy into a eurosceptic thing, for gods sake? The problem isn’t either nearer or farther due to the enlargement process: it is simply there. The background to this is that Peter Piot, executive director of UNAids, the UN body with responsibilities for HIV/Aids, has been speaking at the start of a conference today in Dublin, held at the invitation of the Irish EU presidency. Among the preoccupying facts contained in Piot’s speech: as many as one in 100 adults in the eastern European states and their neighbours Ukraine and Russia are infected with HIV , and the numbers are growing fast.

?Of the states who are to join, the Baltic states particularly are affected. Then you have got at the borders Ukraine and Russia, where 1% of all adults are infected.

?What may be more important is that in 10 years? time, the number of people infected with HIV has multiplied by 50. There are now about 1.5 million people living with HIV on the doorstep of the EU.?

Would it be unduly hard-hearted of me to point out that these countries are already facing the most dramatic population crisis in Europe. ‘Sempre plou sobre mullat’ we say in Catalan (it always rains on the wet). Is there nothing we can get right. Couldn’t we try, just this once.
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Free movement of labor, redux

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On the previously mentioned subject of Europe’s “free” movement of labor (and the possibility of a massive influx of cheap labor from the east come EU accession time) here’s an article I wrote on the topic in November for Czech and Slovak Construction Journal (for some reason the article’s not posted online).

If you’re too lazy to read the whole thing… It talks about the onset of “EU fatigue” in the east, plus it cites a bunch of studies that discredit the fear of a massive influx of eastern workers wrecking havoc on Western European job markets. And this is really about Polish construction workers already living illegally in Berlin, not Czech IT geeks in London (nor British chefs in Prague). Enjoy.
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Eta And The Spanish Elections

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As someone who lives and works in Barcelona (capital of Catalonia, and formal definition in the eyes of the local nationalists of being Catalan), it is really rather frustrating to find that about the only time we make it to the European headlines (apart, of course, from when Bar?a wants to buy some world famous footballer like Beckham) is when one of the players in the greater-Spanish political arena – in this case Eta – wants to exploit some situation or other here to its own advantage. Outside of this context (and with, of course, the honourable exception of George Orwell) Catalonia is little heard of, and even less understood.
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New EU members — in name only

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To my new colleagues at Fistful, I’d like to offer an apology for being silent lately. I’ve taken over back-of-the-house management duties at the restaurant I co-own in Prague, Tulip Cafe and, well, managing a restaurant is about as much work as you’d imagine, and then some.

The kitchen at Tulip is truly a cultural melting pot: currently we have three people helping out there, one British, one Australian and one Russian, and the lingua franca is generally Czech. And in that regard, I recently discovered that the future of my little business is largely in the hands of Tony Blair.

Call it the old bait-and-switch: Despite widespread reluctance to jump onto a train whose destination is basically unknown, Eastern Europeans voted overwhelmingly to join the EU last year. One of the reasons was the idea of “free movement of labor,” which is supposedly one of the fundamental freedoms of the EU. As it turns out, this “freedom” is a bit of a sham for the easterners, as countries like Germany and Austria, fearing a flood of cheap labor from the east, have instituted “transition periods” (lasting beyond 2010 in some cases) severely regulation the rights of easterners to work in those countries.
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Reforming Germany. Just A Little Harder.

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On February 6th, just when I thought it was actually possible to escape the ?German reform debate? for only a couple of days, on the way from the slopes to the fireplace, Gerhard Schroeder hit back through the airwaves. A coalition of campaigning regional party establishment and the inevitable loony lefties had apparently won their war of attrition against the Chancellor. Reforming Germany is not just hard. It is harder.
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The EU and Zimbabwe

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A search for “Zimbabwe” on A Fistful of Euros currently yields:

No pages were found containing “zimbabwe”.

Not for much longer.

See the reports here and here respectively:

The EU is to increase the number of top Zimbabwean officials facing targeted sanctions by the end of February.
…..
The EU imposed travel sanctions on Mugabe’s regime in February 2002 [owing] to repression and human rights abuses associated with elections and the chaotic land reform programme.

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Public Demand and Social Prorities?

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Now here’s an interesting one. (And please note that in keeping with recent Fistful tradition – as identified by Ms T – I am putting a question mark before the title). Pascal Lamy is reportedly considering a discussion paper which proposes allowing countries to impose import bans on products from other countries that do not share their national values and standards.
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In Search of A Lost Time

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I don’t know if one day when historians come to examine what exactly happened (or should I say what went wrong) with the EU they will be able to identify that defining moment, the decisive hour, when everything went sailing down the river. If they are so able I wouldn’t mind a quick bet that it might be sometime about now. The ideal of the EU, it seems to me, is being blown away before our very eyes. Maybe the fault is with the politicians, maybe it is with the institutions, maybe it is with all of us: but this cannot be like this. Failure to advance a consensus on reform and the constitution cannot (or at least should not) let us fall back into our old ways of cynical cutting up the cake, power politics and triple alliances. We have, as I have been trying to suggest, a Euro which is about to fall apart between the competing pressures of Northern stringency (the Netherlands) and Southern laxity (Italy), while what is being proposed here will do nothing to help whatsoever.
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Welcome To The World Of Kofi Annan

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While EU politicians over at Davos have been mulling over the possibilities of Turkey’s membership of the EU, Kofi Annan apparently has things much clearer. In a speech to the European parliament he bluntly told MPs that Europe needs migrants to ensure a prosperous future and that Europeans should stop using immigration as a scapegoat for their social problems.
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European crony capitalism

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A post today on The Final Word, a Prague-based email bulletin put out by a local English-language Czech news digest, got me thinking. Titled “PPF spreads its tentacles,” it’s about the secretive Czech corporate conglomerate PPF and how it uses its media holdings to advance its numerous business interests.

It’s long been the Czech Republic’s dirty little secret that it’s one of the bastions of corruption and crony capitalism in the middle of Europe. After basking in the glow of much of the 1990s as the “star pupil” of economic transition, it took a much deserved fall from grace starting in the late ’90s, with much publicized cases like Ron Lauder’s suit against the Czech Republic over TV Nova giving the little nation plenty of bad press. Vaclav Klaus, ex-premier and now the president, has often been complicit in securing the country’s dubious reputation, if not the very nexus of crony capitalism. Today, far-flung provinces of the empire like Estonia and Slovenia appear clean as a whistle compared to the Czech Republic.

This is all pretty old news. But what strikes me today is how this compares to other European countries.
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