@foe is online again.
Just a brief note to those who were using our European web aggregator @foe before we had to take it down due to the CMS transition – the aggregator is online again. I will continue to improve a few things in the next couple of days, including adding more feeds, so you may still experience shaky behavior at times. But basically – it’s back. So go forth and vote…
Update – I just realised that there were a couple of CSS problems that were caused because the conditional IE6 CSS code wasn’t loaded properly since the transition to WordPress. Since all the about 20% of you, who are still using IE6, suffered in silence, I’m asking everyone else using a less frequently used browser to tell us if there are any issues with the design. Thanks for your help!
Ukrainian Disappointment..
While everyone is focused on the French elections, the Balkans, or the contreaty relaunch (in increasing order of wonkishness), it’s not going too well in the Ukraine. Back in the winter of 2004, you couldn’t move for bloggers taking sides on the Orange Revolution, but hardly anyone has noticed the progressive disappointment since.
Well, all revolutions end up eating their children, they say. But I think it’s fair to say that this one at least turned the country in a less Putin-like direction, and after all, past revolutions here have actually ended up with people eating *their* children. Recently, though, there’s been a political murder – one of Yanukovich’s backers from last time was assassinated by a sniper – and the Associated Press can no longer tell President Yuschenko from Prime Minister Yanukovich.
So, the crowds are out again, as are the tents…with the same leaders as before. Indispensable as ever, Veronica Khoklova reports, with video.
In a sense, I suppose it’s the aim of the European project these days – to shift away from snipers towards tents and blogs as a means of resolving political conflict, and in the fullness of time, to falling turnout and general apathy. Hooray! Not that there’s very much wrong with that. People who complain about the hegemony of liberal order rarely concede that it’s unlikely to kill you.
But there’s the rub. As Leszek Kolakowski put it:
The trouble with the social democratic idea is that it does not stock and does not sell any of the exciting ideological commodities which various totalitarian movements – Communist, Fascist or Leftist – offer dream-hungry youth. It is no ultimate solution for all human miseries and misfortunes. It has no prescription for the total salvation of mankind, it cannot promise the fireworks of the last revolution to settle definitely all conflicts and struggles. It has invented no miraculous devices to bring about the perfect unity of man and universal brotherhood. It believes in no easy victory over evil.
It requires, in addition to commitment to a number of basic values, hard knowledge and rational calculation, since we need to be aware of and investigate as exactly as possible the historical and economic conditions in which these values are to be implemented. It is an obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions which produce avoidable suffering, oppression, hunger, wars, racial and national hatred, insatiable greed and vindictive envy.
You could say much the same about the EU, with the rider that too many people think pretending to be the fireworks, etc, will bring in the dream-hungry youth its grinding seriousness tends to alienate. Which is, I think, what I was drivelling about in this Crooked Timber thread.
Serbia: the betting pool
By pure coincidence, next month brings not one but two major turning points for Serbia.
First, there’s the Ahtisaari plan for Kosovo. As we all know, the plan would give Kosovo de facto independence. On one hand, that’s just recognizing reality on the ground; 90% of Kosovo’s population wants nothing to do with Serbia, and they’ve been running their own house for almost a decade now. On the other hand, it would involve UN approval of the involuntary dismemberment of an unwilling member state. That’s never happened before, and it would be a big step into the unknown.
The plan goes before the UN Security Council next week, and it’s really not clear what will happen. Either Russia or China might veto it — Russia because of its traditional support of Serbia, China because of concerns about Taiwan. On the other hand, neither one may want to be responsible for vetoing a plan that has broad support in both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
Meanwhile, Serbia’s quarrelsome parties are still trying to form a government. They’ve been at it since the elections on January 21, so as of today they’ve gone 67 days without success. That would be amusing, except that if a government isn’t formed within 90 days, Serbia’s Constitution requires new elections. That would throw Serbia into a major political crisis.
Here’s the thing: I could see either of these going either way. The UNSC might approve the Ahtisaari plan, or reject it; Serbia’s parties might reach agreement, or not.
So how about a betting pool? Continue reading
Comments are open! All Permalinks work!
Welcome back to afoe 3.1 – now running on WordPress. What I considered to be a weekend’s job – moving a blog of the size of afoe from the multiblog capable Movable Type to the single blog CMS WordPress and hacking it to the extent necessary to keep the impression of a multiblog – turned out to be just a little more complicated and time consuming.
I’ll write about this in a little more detail in a couple of days, so those among you, gentle readers, who might suffer from the same comment spam/Perl induced server problems, can benefit from my experiences to some extent, should you ever attempt to make the switch.
There are a couple of new features, mostly concerning comment subscription possibilities. Unfortunately, apart from the occasional lack of appropriate WordPress CSS, some things still don’t work, like our aggregator @afoe, which won’t function properly until I’ve renamed a couple of functions in the meneamé and pligg scripts it uses.
But for the moment, I’ll just sit back and wait for your participation – because the most important good news is the following:
Coments are open again – and despite the beautiful categorised permalinks which we are using now, not a single one of your links to any afoe archive page will break…
What the hell is an economic government?
So, somebody has a brilliant idea to solve all Europe’s problems. What is it? It’s to set up a European economic government for the EU. It’s not exactly new – several people in the Jospin government thought so, including Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It might have something going for it.
But what is it? The EU already has – already is – an economic government, in that it handles trade negotiations, operates a single set of product standards, interworking arrangements between big networked systems, some social and environmental regulations, and even operates some fiscal rules. If you include the European Central Bank, and why not, it conducts monetary policy.
Continue reading
Another Trip to 50-50 Land
It’s getting terribly close…
The last two opinion polls in the French elections put Royal and Sarkozy level pegging in the first round, with one of them showing nils apiece in the second round too. With numbers, the first poll, carried out by CSA on the 21st, shows Royal on 26 per cent, Sarko on 26 per cent, and Bayrou on 20. The second, by LH2 for 20 Minutes, puts the top two on 27 per cent each.
The really interesting thing is that both polls also measured voting intentions for the second round. CSA showed Sarko and Sego breaking 50-50. LH2 put Sarko up 51-49. But that’s not the really interesting thing. To both come in at 49-50 per cent, the top candidates will have to gain about 48 percentage points between them. Obviously, if you voted in the first round, you’re likely to vote in the second. Which poses a question: how’s it going to happen?
Francois Bayrou’s support is around 20 per cent. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s is 13 per cent. Olivier Besancenot is at 3, Arlette Laguiller at 2.5 (up 1.5 per cent!), Marie-George Buffet 2, Frederic Nihous 2, de Villiers 1, Voynet 1, Schivarni 0.5. A total, then, of 44 per cent up for grabs. Out of which, say, 9 per cent can be attributed firmly to the Left and 15 per cent to the Right, before the difficult question of how to attribute Bayrou’s voters. Assuming the Le Pen/de Villiers vote goes to Sarko, that would put the balance at 35/42 of the original vote..but how do the Bayrou Boys and Girls break? At a minimum, the Left would need to hold its ground, then persuade 7 percentage points of Bayrou voters – not far off a third – plus a majority of the remainder to switch.
Not that this is reflected by Royal’s rhetoric..
Finnish Parliamentary Election 2007 – Lessons Learnt
Well, as it happens I know even less about Finnish politics than I do about the Italian version, so I thought I’d put up this piece that Aapo Markkanen of Aapotsikko sent me on the recent elections in Finland – Edward Hugh –
Finland has chosen its new parliament, and the result was a historic triumph for the centre-right National Coalition Party. The last time the two non-socialist parties had as many seats as they do now was in the early 1930s, and they came near to it in 1960s when the Social Democrats had a disastrous election result. Manuel Alvarez-Rivera has written a thorough background article on Finnish politics for Global Economy Matters, and the blog is also hosting my own piece on the Finnish economy (available here). For further analysis of the election and the ongoing cabinet talks you can visit my personal blog – but right now I’d like to focus on two issues that, in my opinion, were the most important ones in this year’s contest.
Continue reading
Moving again
Gentle readers,
should you be concerned about the relative silence on afoe while seemingly everyone else is celebrating the European anniversary, I would like to let you know that, afoe is once again in the midst of an important transition: Following the recent comment spam/Perl-related server issues with our host that forced us to temporarily disable the comments in order to keep the site online, I am now porting the blog from Movable Type, the blog CMS to which we have been faithful since 2003, to WordPress, which, as you can probably imagine, is not too simple given the plethora of small functionality differnces, differences in template structures and, not least, the size of the afoe blog family.
For you, I suppose the most important information will be that I am fairly certain we won’t loose even a single permalink during the transition due to a lot of google research and a hack for the WordPress Movable Type importer that allowed us retain the post IDs once assigned by Movable Type. Thus, at the end of the transition all MT Permalinks will be seamlessly redirected to the respective WordPress entry. No need to adjust any of your links.
So, if all goes well, we will be able to reactivate the comment functionality in a day or two, and hopefully, you won’t even notice that we’ve switched to WordPress.
Second Life, Second EU?
Right on time for the 5oth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the European Union’s Communications Department, is thinking seriously about establishing a digital “embassy” in the (currently more hyped than) popular virtual reality Second Life. According to a pressetext.at (in German) report, EU spokesperson Mikolaj Dowgielewicz explained that an EU office in Second Life was intended to reach out, get closer, and communicate better with individual European citizens, since 54% of the alleged 4.4m virtual inhabitants of Second Life are European nationals, according to Second Life operator Linden Labs.
Continue reading