Tag Archives: Germany

Sensible German Regulations, Part 1

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The government of Berlin has become the first German state government to get out of the business of telling retailers when they can and cannot do business. Mostly, anyway. As the German newspaper whose web site could be better organized notes today (on page one, but is it on the front page of the web site? certainly not), Berlin has told shop owners that they may keep any hours they please from Monday to Saturday. Credit where credit is due, this is progress. Not leadership, not parity with numerous other EU nations, but still, progress.

On the other hand, the (Protestant) Bishop of Hanover said that quiet Sundays were good for everyone. Except of course tram drivers, bus drivers, conductors, police, firefighters, hospital staff, etc etc etc. Or maybe the good bishop is on to something, and a state-mandated day of rest really is the way to go. Why not Tuesday?

Power failure

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In more ways than one. On Saturday night, between 2230 and 2300 local time, a huge chunk of the European power grid fell over, affecting supply from northwest Germany, through Holland and Belgium, and mostly in France. Further afield, small areas of Austria and Italy lost power, and the Spain-Morocco interconnection was shut off to prevent the trouble spreading. Fortunately, power was restored speedily.

At the heart of the whole thing, meet the cruise liner Norwegian Pearl. This floating gin palace was recently completed by the Meyer Werft shipyard on the river Ems in northwestern Germany. Now, Meyer’s shipyard is a long way up the river. To get a ship the size of the Pearl out, you have to wait for a spring tide. But there’s a catch – just downstream of the yard, a 400 kilovolt transmission line belonging to the German utility company E.ON crosses the river. And the more water there is in the river, the less clearance there is under the wires. So, on Saturday night, when the weather and the tide were perfect for Captain Thomas Teitge to take the ship down the river, E.ON switched the wires off. And then the troubles began.

Update: She sailed today without further trouble.
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Virtual politics and real bullets

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The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, renowned for her reporting on the North Caucasus wars, was murdered yesterday in an evident assassination (three shots, two to the chest and one to the head) in the lift leading to her home. It was the birthday of the Russian President, and just after the birthday of the Russian-appointed prime minister of Chechnya, who she was about to accuse of torture. After a week of rising hysteria in the Russian media and state, with a wave of goon-squad assaults on Georgian businesses and the collection of sinister lists of Georgian-sounding schoolchildren – what, pray, is the purpose of this? – this ought to inter any lingering myths of Russian democracy. It is time to grasp that we are sharing a continent with a very large tyranny, in fact, that we never ceased to do so.

Exactly what will happen next is unclear, but the worst must be assumed. The reaction of Europe so far appears to be deafening silence. See the BBC report above for a tasty quote from the secretary of the Council of Europe, Terry Davis, suggesting she was killed by “self-appointed executioners”. Self-appointed? I don’t think his Midlands constituents lost very much when they voted him out back in 2004. No Baltic gas pipelines were involved, so German silence is a given, France will presumably continue to find Russian support on the UNSC useful, and Britain will probably shut up – hasn’t Tony Blair prided himself on his personal relationship with Putin? (Personal politics, the great delusion of the last hundred years.)

If you need any convincing, I recommend Andrew Wilson’s book Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World. This is a truly impressive march through a morass of deceit and state-sponsored bullshit, whose central thesis is simply that most of Russian politics, as it was marketed both to the Russians and also to the western politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats who funded it through the 1990s, does not exist. Parties do not have members, policies, or constitutions, and do not represent real interest groups. Even when, like the Communist Party, they actually do exist, they are frequently not actually trying to win the elections-sensationally, Wilson quotes a senior Communist as being horrified how close the party came to unwanted victory in 1996.

Instead, parties, movements and politicians are usually prepared from whole cloth for specific political projects, and created in the public mind by a barrage of TV advertising for the mass and outrageous web propagandists for the elite. It is possible to buy an entire political party, tailored to one’s specifications, from $100,000.
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When campaign songs come back to haunt you

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Angie, Angie, when will those clouds all disappear?
Angie, Angie, where will it lead us from here?
With no loving in our souls and no money in our coats
You can’t say were satisfied
But Angie, Angie, you can’t say we never tried
Angie, you’re beautiful, but ain’t it time we said good-bye?
Angie, I still love you, remember all those nights we cried?
All the dreams we held so close seemed to all go up in smoke
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The Gay Chancellor?

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In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the governing Social Democrat (SPD)s got whipped, to the tune of a 10 percent drop at the polls. In Berlin, by contrast, the SPD picked up 1.1 percent, received the most votes of any party, and now has the option of continuing its coalition with the Left (PDS) or forming a new one with the Greens. (Behind the SPD, the big winners in Berlin were the Greens — up to 13.1 percent from 9.1 percent — and “other” — parties that did not top the 5-percent hurdle collectively accounted for 13.8 percent of the vote.) Like its northern neighbor, Berlin has high unemployment. It also has a crushing debt that is slowly being worked out through budget consolidation and deals with the national government. It also still has lingering constraints from the old days (personnel appointed for life, pensions for former GDR bureaucrats, possibly some remaining double institutions). In short, economically Berlin is the kind of place that turfs out governments on a regular basis, particularly given voter volatility in postcommunist societies. Yet, the SPD-led government was not only re-elected, its share of votes even increased modestly. Why?
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Sandy Brown Baltic Shores

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Sweden wasn’t the only Baltic area with an election yesterday. The voters of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in Germany’s northeastern corner, dealt a heavy blow to the ruling Social Democrat-postcommunist (SPD-Left) coalition. The SPD dropped 10 percent, but still received the largest share of votes, topping the Christian Democrats (CDU) 30.2 percent to 28.8 percent. The postcommunist (or possibly post-postcommunist, depending on how you look at these things) party, now known as the Left, rose marginally from 16.4 percent to 16.8 percent. The SPD can either attempt to continue the current coalition, which would then have a one-seat majority, or it can try to forge a grand coalition with the CDU, with all of the pluses and minuses currently on display at the national level.

But relatively mundane state politics are not what today’s headlines are about.
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OK, Scott – hour of Europe not at hand

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Well, it now looks as if the window of opportunity for a ceasefire in the Levant has slammed shut on the fingers of its proponents. With the destruction of a UNTSO observation post, the mobilisation of three Israeli reserve divisions (by contrast, the total force employed so far has been one division-plus), Hezbollah’s successful defence of positions close to the Israeli border and their first launch of a long-range rocket, and the Israeli government’s claim that the world has given them permission to fight on, all parties to the conflict now seem to be giving war a chance.

If anything arose from the debate here, it was that the employment of an international intervention force might be useful in the context of a ceasefire and mutual concessions. There is no ceasefire, and even if by accident, the danger such forces would be in has been underscored. Worse, Hezbollah has tasted enough success to want to keep going, and the Israelis seem riled enough by this to escalate further. It is therefore unlikely anything would be achieved by sending NRF-7 to wander around the dry hills of the Litani valley.

Jacques Chirac’s remark that NATO, as the “armed wing of the West”, should not be involved is interesting. It admits both a Scott Martens/Sam Huntington reading-that NATO plus a few others roughly equals “the West”, so getting involved in a fight in the Middle East would be a step perilously close to religious war-and also a more limited one. Chirac may also have meant that any force should sail under the EUFOR or UN banner, or that a so-called “Virtual NATO” solution – a UN force made up of NATO member states’ forces, like KFOR or the intervention in East Timor – might be preferable.

It’s worth putting on record, however, that European forces (NRF7) were indeed available and ready when the crisis erupted.