Germany: There’s more than the World Cup

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Assuming that you, gentle readers, are not yet entirely absorbed by your preparations for the upcoming month of watching simple games of 22 men runnung after a ball before, well, Gary Lineker will hopefully be proven right again*, here’s some more interesting information about the country that is now officially run from the FIFA headquarter in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Yesterday, the German statistical office published the 2005 microcensus, which includes some interesting numbers that are the result of a partly changed methodology. First of all, as Die Zeit online explains in more detail (in German), the statisticians finally decided to explain to the public that politicians are indeed prone to using numbers only based on political context, not on their factual one.
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Overdue Evaluation (The Prize, by Daniel Yergin)

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There is not much market for reviews of books published almost a decade and a half ago, so without further ado, my thoughts on The Prize, by Daniel Yergin. This evaluation is overdue because I started reading the book when I bought it, back in 1997. I put it down around page 400 (which is a little more than halfway), so this review is likely, very likely, to be stronger on the second half of the book.

Yergin’s subtitle is The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, which gives both theme and thesis. The title, if I am remembering an early part of the book correctly, comes from a statement made about oil by Winston Churchill: “The prize was mastery itself.” The argument is that understanding oil is central to understanding the twentieth century and, by extension, the world today. To complaints that the war in Iraq is “all about oil,” the only proper answer is “Of course.” The last century’s major conflicts, and many of its smaller ones, were driven by oil, determined by oil, or both. Without an understanding of oil, much of the period will remain opaque.
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Which side is your bread buttered?

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When I lived in Vienna, in 2001-2002, I lived in the 11th District, Simmering, a roughish working-class suburb struck through with railway lines and motorway spurs. Specifically, I lived in one of the four huge brick gasometers of the former city gasworks, once Europe’s biggest, now redeveloped as a mixture of shops, flats and a concert hall.

One thing that cheered me, looking at the dire OVP-FPO government with its mixture of dishonest hacks and barely-contained racist scum, was that surely this provincialism was on the way out. With the enlargement of the EU, not only did Austria stand to make huge economic gains, but surely it would liven up a bit?

There was at least some evidence of change. Around the 11. Bezirk, huge infrastructure projects were going on. The railyards were being enlarged, all kinds of commercial property being built, new terminal buildings at the airport..everyone was looking forward to a good old fashioned concrete binge.
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Closer than you think

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Remember this post, about Sweden’s new year’s resolution to give up oil by 2020?

According to Jeremy Faludi at Worldchanging.com, it might not be as difficult as you think.

For example, currently, 6% of Europe’s electricity generation is from renewable sources. If they wanted it to be 100% by 2025, they should expand renewable energy generation by about 15% per year, every year, compared to other power sources. (This does not mean 6% now, 21% next year, 36% the year after, etc. It only means 6% now, 6.9% next year, 8% the year after, etc.) This sounds small, and in fact is less ambitious than their current plan to grow renewables from 6% to 12% by 2010. That would require increasing renewables’ share by 17% per year. But if Europe kept growing its percentage of renewables by 15% per year until 2025, they would be at 100% green power. Perhaps such a policy would be both more ambitious and easier to achieve.

Who’s in?

Ursprache is German. And so is Weltschmerz.

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Well, gentle readers, here’s your occasional light Saturday post about transatlantic relations.

Should you or your children ever be interested in winning spelling bees, which, according to the Times Online, have enjoyed a recent explosion of popularity in the United States, choose words from obscure European languages, which, for some reason apparently made it into Webster’s dictionary. German, in particular, seems to be a safe bet –

“[Katharine Close, a] 13-year-old girl won America’s 79th national spelling competition last night, trotting out the letters of “ursprache”- a technical term for language [note by the afoe author – it actually means ‘the original language’ or ‘a very old language’] – in front of millions of viewers on primetime television.
…

The decisive moment … came when [Finola Mei Hwa ] Hackett stumbled over “weltschmerz” (world weariness), erroneously starting with a “v”. “

“Weltschmerz”, of course, is a tough one, certainly for a non-German. Not just as it may well still express the most German of all sentiments, but also because I have a feeling the American pronounciation thereof would have made me wonder about the “vw-question” as well…

Killer Workout

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Do gyms breed terrorists?

The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though—their members’ immersion in gym culture. Often, they met and bonded over a workout. If you’ll forgive the pun, they were fitness fanatics. Is there something about today’s preening and narcissistic gym culture that either nurtures terrorists or massages their self-delusions and desires? Mosques, even radical ones, emphasize Muslims’ relationships with others—whether it be God, the ummah (Islamic world), or the local community. The gym, on the other hand, allows individuals to focus myopically on themselves.

Seven Down, Eight to Go

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It hasn’t attracted a lot of attention, but seven of the EU-15 have now thrown open their doors to the free movement of labor from the new member states (NMS).

A bit of background: when the NMS joined in 2004, the EU-15 gave themselves the right to keep the walls up for up to seven years. The rather complicated agreement required the 15 to review their policies after two and again after five years.

Three countries — Britain, Ireland, and Sweden — decided to just admit people from the NMS. Britain and Sweden placed no restrictions; Ireland put in a modest one that emigrants would not be eligible for benefits for their first two years. (Because Ireland still thinks it’s a poor country? No idea.) Everyone else hunkered down behind walls of varying height.

So, the two-year review deadline came last month. And, lo and behold, four countries — Spain, Portugal, Greece and Finland — decided that they could live just as dangerously as the Swedes and the Brits. These four opened the doors effective May 1.

A couple of thoughts on this.
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Political Tide Still Flowing Leftward in Italy

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Prodi’s majorities in Parliament are still slim, and factional infighting is likely to remain Florentine, but Berlusconi’s political fortunes continued to float away in municipal elections just passed.

The municipal elections held in Italy from May 28 to 29 did not offer Berlusconi the revenge he was seeking. Massimo Giannini, the daily’s deputy editor, looks at the results and at a missed opportunity for the former prime minister. “The revenge, the dirty trick, the stiff uppercut, whatever the precise lexical nuance, Berlusconi’s political sally has failed. The municipal elections as an instrument of grass-roots ‘Jacquerie’ that was supposed to definitively deprive the centre-left government of its legitimacy – this strategy did not work. … And the 15 million Italians who went to the polls did not change the result of April 9 to 10 [legislative elections]. Much to the contrary. … The centre-left no longer has an alibi; it now has no choice but to govern. It can count on a new base: the roughly three million young people who massively voted for it.”

From La Repubblica via Eurotopics

No Way Forward in France?

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An establishment voice casts further doubt on whether French elites see possible progress in the European Union

Jacques Julliard, the weekly’s deputy editor, explains in an interview with François Sionneau that he does not see how the constitution could return to the agenda. “Projecting five to 10 years into the future – the most that is possible – I am frankly not that optimistic about Europe’s political hopes. We have fallen too far behind. We must also remember that an enormous gap exists between the motivations that pushed people to vote ‘no’ – reasons having to do with domestic politics which may be legitimate – and the consequences of this ‘no’, which transcend domestic politics and are not remediable in the short term. The world’s major dates with destiny will proceed without Europe. Large European countries will participate, but not as a Union.”

From Le Nouvel Observateur, via Eurotopics.

The Union’s energy is now mostly coming from the east, but will it be able to overcome blockages from the old members in the west?