Ireland’s taoiseach (and current EU head) Bertie Ahern expresses sympathy for Germany’s position on voting under the proposed EU constitution, reports EUobserver.
Tag Archives: European Union
A Not Very Gloomy Post?
David has been suggesting that I might be a gloomy person, so I’d like to try and kill that idea stone dead, and quick as a flash, with an extraordinarily optimistic post about a key EU topic: Turkey.
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Certains animaux sont plus ?gaux que d’autres
Brussels is sparing a thought for filmmakers in the newly acceding member states, reports the Independent. The idea is to facilitate subsidies to help films from our soon-to-be brother countries stand up to the Hollywood juggernaut.
But off in one corner there’s a villain twirling his moustaches. That would be France, which doesn’t like the idea. Now, if nos amis were taking a principled stand against subsidies of any sort, as a good liberal I could only applaud. But if France is about to abandon state support for its own ‘exceptionalism’, I must have missed the memo. Why is it that hypocrisy is always called an English vice?
In Search of A Lost Time
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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Flirting on the west-?stlichen Divan
Joschka Fischer, visiting Ankara, comes out strongly for (eventual) Turkish accession to the EU, reports the S?ddeutsche:
Europa werde ?einen hohen Preis? daf?r zahlen, wenn es die T?rkei aus der Europ?ischen Union heraushalten wolle. F?r Europas Sicherheit sei die T?rkei wichtiger als ein ?Raketenabwehrsystem?…
[Europe will pay a high price if it wants to keep Turkey out of the European Union. For European security, Turkey is more important than a missile defence system]
But there are not a few hurdles in the way. In an interview with H?rriyet, the German foreign minister noted that, in Germany as well as other EU lands, there are ‘rational as well as emotional objections’ to a Turkish accession, and that these will need some serious wrestling.
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Item
Europe: adding value, changing quickly – last Monday, the President of the Commission spoke at the LSE about the prospects for a European Constitution (pdf).
Another disaster
On thursday a split European Commission “decided to launch unprecedented legal action against member states over their effective suspension of the euro rules last November.”
“The Commission will now ask the European Court of Justice to rule on a procedure taken by finance ministers last November to avoid disciplinary action being taken against France and Germany for their persistent breaking of the rules underpinning the euro. Brussels believes the procedure was “not appropriate” and has received legal advice confirming this.
The spokesman also confirmed that the Court would be asked to “fast-track” the case, which would mean the issue is resolved in 3 to 6 months rather than one or two years. But it is up to the court to decide whether to grant this.”
I’ll writing some belated commentary of my own, but meanwhile you can talk about it here.
I Don’t Understand Modern Conservatism
The recent biography of Mrs Thatcher by John Campbell (in particular volume one, The Grocer’s Daughter) did a good job of setting out just how much Hayek’s writings shaped Thatcher’s political outlook from her student days in Oxford onwards, in particular by paying close attention to her political speeches around 1950, when she was running for Parliament in Deptford, some of the few occasions in her early political career when she was making speeches without being bound by front bench discipline.
That part of the Right of the Conservative Party which is most keen to claim its legitimate political descent from Mrs Thatcher is most adamantly opposed to the European Union in general and British participation in the single European currency in particular.
I sometimes think that this should puzzle us more than it does…
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Fabian Funnies
I was reading the new almost-worthy-but-dull Fabian Society pamphlet by Gisela Stuart MP on “The Making of Europe’s Constitution” on a bus-ride yesterday.
“There were moments in the sixteen months I spent in close proximity with my fellow Europeans when I had great sympathy with the suggestion of my laptop spellcheck; which, whenever I typed in the word Giscard, replaced it with ‘discard’.”But that’s the only highlight, I’m afraid.
Methinks We’re On The Slippery Slope
OK you may be in for a bout of solid over-posting. There seem to be some signs in the air that push may be about to come to shove. Tomorrow I will try and do something on financial architecture and the euro. Meantime this is a ‘light’ warm-up post. The efficient cause is today’s news from Portugal, which suggests that the supposed Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson free-lunch-honeymoon (which has to count as one of the worst pieces of ‘justifying what there is simply because it is’ pieces of quackery where there should have been solid science known to recent history) may be about to come to an end. One of those darned ‘catch up’ economies may have just caught up so hard that’s it’s come to a dead halt. The Bank of Portugal has predicted growth of only 0.75% this year, and even that only if there is the anticipated growth in global demand (which I doubt extremely). Those who have read my Parmalat post will have seen that I am already begining to speculate about whether we are about to see the end of growth in the Italian economy, well just remember Portugal is lined up nicely in the queue to see where lunch is going to be served.
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