I’ve got it. Germany has finally encircled itself. With 10 countries out there desperately looking for help from the East, 5 (including Austria) about to do so from the South, and two more (the UK and Ireland) from the West, news now comes in that one last group of walking wounded have finally made their way into that hastily erected field hospital – the Scandinavian countries. Perhaps all that is left is for Germany itself to finally throw the towel in and turn to the Union for help. Go to it France! Continue reading
What This Weekend’s EU Summit Did And Did Not Achieve
Well reading the press this morning it would be fairly easy to reach the conclusion that nothing really happened yesterday in Brussels, and that a great opportunity was lost. The latter may finally be true, but the former most certainly is not.
Let’s look first at what was not decided on Sunday. The leaders of the 27 member countries in the European Union most certainly did not vote to back a proposal from Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany for a 180-billion-euro ($228 billion) aid package for central and eastern Europe. They did not back it because it was not even seriously on the agenda at this point. These people move slowly and we need to talk them throught one step at a time. So what was on the agenda. EU bonds for one, and accelerated euro membership for the East for a second. And once we have the EU bonds firmly in place, then that will be the time to decide how we might use the extra shooting power they will bring us (boosting the ECB balance sheet would be one serious option they should consider, see forthcoming post from me and Claus Vistesen). That is when the emergency blood transfusion Gyurcsany was rooting for might come into play, but on this, as on so many items, the details of how we do what we do as well as the “what we do” will become important, so the moves we do take need to be well thought out, and systematic, they need to get to the roots of the problem, and not simply respond to problems on a piecemeal, reactive basis. Continue reading
Saving Europe?
It appears that many of us have had quite a bit of a weekend these past few days. Sitting here in Barcelona’s airport on my way home from a whistestop visit I can happily look back at some very nice dinners and conversations in the company of friends and colleagues as well as the odd stroll down La Rambla. I can also look back at some nice cultural experiences in the form of trips to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see the exhibitions of Thomas Bayrle, Joan Rabascall, and Cildo Meireles and a visit to the National Museum of Catalonia where I only managed to see but a small bit of its extremely well endowed selection of Catalonian painters not to mention their fascinating display of church frescos and artifacts.
All in all, a most satisfying and enriching weekend for me.
However, not everyone would be able to say the same thing I’d imagine; at least not with a straight face. I am of course thinking about the big EU summit on Sunday where the lot of European leaders met to discuss the economic situation, how to deal with it, and ultimately how to avoid the whole European edifice collapsing under their feet. Continue reading
arrr!
Liberation‘s Jean-Dominique Merchet mentions the most European of events, the collision between a British and a French ballistic missile submarine. I was especially interested to know that the British boat Splendid had collided with a huge Soviet missile boat of the Typhoon class back in 1987.
They probably gave the captain a medal. Now, not so much.
Europe Cuts CO2 by 3% in 2008
Perhaps no surprise with the doomflow of neganews slinking catlike through your windows, but it looks like the EU cut its emissions of carbon dioxide by 3% last year. Worldchanging quotes an analyst report that reckons this is attributable to the European emissions trading system. I’m not so sure; what about all the cliff-diving?
However, the target of 80% reduction by 2050 means an annualised cut of 1.95%. Who would argue with a fair wind?
“There Is No Deflation Threat In Europe” – Jean Claude Trichet – Oh Really!
He’s at it again. Last year he was busily trying to worry us all that inflation was set to get completely out of hand among the 16 countries who make up the eurozone. Now the President of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, is hard at it on another tack and is busying himself trying to convince us that there is no credible deflation threat facing these countries. Apart from getting it wrong on both occasions, the common point here would be a certain inbuilt “inflation bias”, a bias which was earlier called “the original sin of the Bundesbank” by nobel prize winning Italian economist Franco Modigliani.
“There is presently no threat of deflation,” Trichet told a committee of the European Parliament on Wednesday 14 February. “We are currently witnessing is a process of disinflation, driven in particular by a sharp decline in commodity prices.” …”It is a welcome development,” he said, adding that the fall in energy, and other prices should help boost struggling economies.
Apart from manifesting a spectacular lack of economic judgement, the Financial Times’s Banker of the Year 2007 is now forcing us to ask the embarassing question as to just how far “out of touch” you can get with the material you are supposed to be handling and continue to hold down your job. It seems we are forced to come up with the rather worrying response, that, in the case of the principal EU institutions (remember the sad case of Economy and Finance Commissioner Joaquin Almunia), the answer is “bastante” (consideably), since a quick look at the data we have to hand shows us that Eurozone inflation is already significantly undershooting the European Central Bank’s own target (and principle policy objective) of maintaining the annual rate “below but close†to 2%. Worse, by all appearances the rate of consumer price inflation in the eurozone is now set to head straight off into negative territory. Continue reading
Sentence of the Day (2)
For a small break from Brussels and the economic crisis:
Nothing fades so quickly or so tackily as a Soviet resort.
One of the lighter observations (on p. 139) from The Spirit-Wrestlers by Philip Marsden, a journey across southern Russia and the Caucasus in search of various religious non-conformists who fell afoul of both Russian and Soviet states.
Mass-producing the change; the Constructivists in London
The Tate has a major exhibition of the Russian Constructivists Alexander Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova. It’s a brilliant and seminal look at a movement that practically buzzes with contemporary relevance and all must see it now.
Constructivism began as a sort of parallel development to Cubism; breaking form down into elements that could be recast and remixed. But it also had a fascination for technology – they considered themselves as technicians of images, creating a universal artistic tool-kit to replace representational art. This phase of the movement rose through the First World War and came into its own with the Revolution, being entirely identified with the Left.
But the really exciting change was yet to come; in 1922, the Constructivists decided to abolish painting itself, on the grounds that artists in a Marxist society should integrate their work into the process of production and that only by inserting art into industry could they reach the masses. Instead, they fanned out into a variety of trades – graphic design, product design, architecture, film, theatre, fashion. With the arrival of the New Economic Policy, Rodchenko and the poet Mayakovsky started a graphics and advertising business.
There is an old joke about the Soviet Union that suggests they decided to experiment with socialist advertising during the Khrushchev thaw, but gave up after the slogan “Fly by Aeroplane” hit the streets. As you might expect, Rodchenko & Mayakovsky’s treatments were rather punchier. And indeed, this was explicitly socialist advertising; the Constructivists were opposed to NEP and one of Mayakovsky’s motivations was to help the industries that had already been collectivised compete with the Nepmen. Popova designed prints and eventually whole outfits for the textile industry; they all contributed to the Novy Byt project, which aimed to produce a suitably revolutionary range of home products in fulfilment of Trotsky’s Questions of Everyday Life, whose cover Rodchenko designed.
Technology played an interesting role; the new media, radio, the cinema, power-jacquard textiles and newspapers were a major theme. Popova remarked that no achievement had been as satisfying as seeing a peasant woman buying a bolt of one of her fabrics to make a dress; Rodchenko designed a prefabricated Workers’ Club as a sort of integrated Constructivist experience, as classroom, clubhouse, library, cinema, union meeting hall – an immersive user interface for the revolution, which would wrap around film, print, radio, and theatre as the revolution’s communications system.
Of course, it didn’t turn out like that; the politicians they agreed with won on the issue of NEP, which was absolutely the worst thing that could have happened. Looking back, a Tito-like compromise between big state industry, small private business, and perhaps a third sector of workers’ cooperatives sounds like the best possible outcome from where they started. Instead, the command economy was extended to cover absolutely everything, the new leader was Stalin, and the cultural revolution was dropped in favour of Socialist Realism.
Every attempt to break away from the GOSPLAN legacy was eventually squashed or subverted; in the late 40s, after Krushchev, and it’s arguable that the power interests – the secret services, the military industries, and the bosses of agriculture and oil – chose to destroy the Soviet Union rather than accept the Gorbachev reforms. Perhaps the final guarantee of Constructivism’s relevance was that it was incompatible with Stalinism; a truly frightening percentage of the faces in the photos from the early 1920s ended up dead in a variety of horrifying ways, and those who survived the Terror rarely survived the second world war. Soviet culture would never recover Constructivism’s innovation, panache, or humanity, and who could say that Soviet product design ever achieved much?
So far, Constructivism sounds like chilly, serious stuff, and quotes like Rodchenko’s remark that all his paintings were “as useless as a church” but it would be a shame to burn them because of all the work involved seem to bear it out. It’s a valid critique, and it was one thing where the Constructivist women provide a saving grace; Popova’s Space-Force Constructions, painted onto bare timber, playing with the warmth of the wood, are far more humane. (Varana Stepanova’s paintings are pretty stellar, too.) Similarly, you could compare her dresses with Rodchenko’s cover for the 1923 edition of All-Russian Postal and Telecoms Statistics, and you’d be right, even if the whole project reminds a little of this.
The link goes to Bruce Sterling’s blog, which is highly appropriate. After all, Constructivism was a movement dedicated to the proposition that rather than being the change, you should mass-produce it. Sterling’s own Viridian Design Movement was intended to reach the people through the material culture. In a real sense, the best of Internet culture is highly Constructivist; you wonder what would have happened when those clubs started talking back on the expanding telephone and radio networks.
For the EU summit agenda
One of the original motivations for tomorrow’s EU summit was the perception that Nicolas Sarkozy’s aid plan for French carmakers was in effect encouraging them to preserve production in France at the expense of Slovakia and other central European countries. In that light, how should one interpret the following apparently likely sequence of events: Government of Germany takes equity stake in Opel; Opel sells one of its German factories to Daimler, and Daimler aborts a project to build a new factory in Hungary since it will now have the extra German capacity?
Japan’s Industrial Slump Deepens In January
Japanese manufacturing output fell in January by a record 10 per cent month-on-month while new job offers declined 18 per cent, reflecting the deepening recession in the world’s second biggest economy. Industrial production was down a whopping 30.8 per cent year-on-year, as manufacturers of vehicles, electronics parts and devices and general machinery cut output to adjust to the rapid fall in global demand.
