A pyrrhic victory for privacy?

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Today, when annulling the Council decision about the transger of European airline passenger name records (PNR) to the US, the European Court of Justice made an important decision, highlighting both the weakness of current privacy protection schemes and essential problems in the European institutional set up. While it is not unlikely that privacy concerns, particularly the increasingly problematic lack of state enforced privacy regulation in the US, have guided the Court’s decision, its legal argument is not based on privacy infringement, but on fact that the EU-US agreement fell outside the scope of the European data protection directive. In fact as statewatch.org explains, the privacy plea by the EP has therefore not been considered at all. Statewatch therefore considers the judgment as a phyrric victory for the EP,

“as the agreement will now be replaced either by national agreements, or by a third pillar agreement with the US. Either way the EP has no power over approval of the treaty/treaties or even the power to bring legal proceedings against them. The press may describe this as a victory for the EP or for privacy but they will be mistaken. Moreover, there is a risk that if an EU treaty or purely national treaties are signed with the US that the standard of privacy protection could actually be worse than in the original PNR deal.”

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Bleg: the new EU Services Directive?

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Blegging for information here.

Apparently we’ve passed a Services Directive. Remember the Bolkestein Directive that everyone was excited about? Well, same same, except not. The new version, I’m told, is a much-watered-down version of Bolkestein.

Only thing is, casual googling doesn’t turn up much. Am I badly confused? Or is this just a story that’s not attracting much attention?

Links welcome; and also, if anyone can tell us more (like, whether this actually accomplishes anything), I’d be interested to hear.

Start in Cologne.

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The New York Times’ Jeff Z. Klein decided to go to Germany early so he could tell his travelling countrymen how to best organize their trip to and through Germany during the football world cup next month. Now he’s all figured it out, and it’s easy: If You’re going to “The World Cup’s World Class Party“, start in Cologne, he says,

“… where the spirit is welcoming and properly fixated on fussball.

“The World Cup is not really for us here,” said Christian, a 40-ish punk musician who was watching the German Cup Final in a tiny bar on Weidengasse. “It’s for all the people coming from around the world.”

Raising his glass of whiskey and laughing he added, “And we’ll be right here ready to show everyone a good time.”

Meeting Up Again in Europe

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Europe’s newest state, Montenegro, has just been given the go-ahead for the first step towards EU membership, as Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn agrees with the Montenegrins that a Stabilisation & Accession Agreement could be signed by the end of the year. Rehn is due in Belgrade next, although you’d have to be very optimistic to expect anything concrete.

It certainly looks like a certain theory of post-cold war Europe is being born out. As early as 1996, Tim Garton-Ash was arguing that perhaps the international community’s failure in Bosnia was down to trying too long to keep a unitary state in being, or in slightly different terms, that diplomats tended to assume any move from bigger to smaller units decreased stability. Perhaps it would be better to accept that the genie was out of the bottle and instead seek peaceful separation, with an eventual view to reintegrating all the units into the European Union.

Well, here we are. The last domino has clattered to the ground, and we’re already talking about agreements with the EU. It’s just a pity about the blood and treasure lost before then. Realistically, there’s probably a preliminary, “little EU” stage of regional integration to go through – getting the quango count down somewhat by sharing some of the new “entities” and states’ responsibilities, whilst also starting the process of making the borders less relevant – before looking at EU membership for the lot. Fine. If France and Germany could be in the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation and the European Payments Union by 1948, the ECSC by 1950, NATO by ’55 and the EEC by 1958, thirteen years from the end of the war, surely intermediate integration is possible before 2009 – ten years from war’s end.

The Edwyn Collins option – rip it up and start again – does pose some serious questions. If anything, if peaceful separation was a good idea in 1995-6, it would have been even better in 1992. But equally, if the eventual solution is to get back together and melt the borders in the EU, couldn’t we have skipped the whole horror show? Doug Muir’s last Montenegrin post caused a thread that with luck should yet reach the half century. In that thread, the point was raised that during the 1980s, Yugoslavia – the old full-cream version – actually made noises about joining the EC (as was) before being dissuaded.

A fine counterfactual question, no? What would have happened had Yugoslavia joined the EC?

A Tale of Unintended Consequences.

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Wisely, most European governments that were opposed to the war in Iraq have constrained themselves since it has become evident that the fall of Saddam’s statue in April 2003 and the American crash course in Democracy has not (visibly) helped to speed up the region’s modernization or led to a self-reinforcing trend of ethnic accomodation and democratic governance. But now Joschka Fischer, former and famously “unconvinced” German foreign minister, has allowed Spiegel Online English to publish an “I-told-you-so-manifesto” taken from the foreword of his forthcoming book “The return of history“.
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Photographs on the fence

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If you’re ever in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, you’ll want to swing by the Government building.

(It’s called the Government building because, well, that’s where the government is. The Parliament, the Prime Minister, the President, and half a dozen or so government agencies are all squashed into one huge building downtown. It’s sort of refreshing. Imagine being in London or Berlin and just popping down to “the government”.)

Why? Because there are these photographs. Between two and three thousand of them… closer to two, I think. The government building has a fence around it; and, since the building is pretty large, the fence is easily a couple of hundred meters long. And it’s covered with the photographs of Kosovar Albanians missing in the 1999 war.

It’s not a very cheerful display, obviously. But it’s certainly food for thought. And if you walk the length of the fence, you’ll spot some patterns.
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A pro-dismal bias in economics?

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In a comment to his earlier assessment of the OECD’s new economic outlook, Jasper is raising an interesting, almost philosophical question that I think is worth a discussion in its own right. He claims that –

Economists should study the economy so they can finetune it to suit the needs of the people living inside this economy. They seem to be studying the economy so they can promote policies that finetune the people to suit the needs of the economy.

I would argue that Jasper’s statement correctly captures the sentiment, but not the rationalised opinion, among a growing part of the European population. The disconnect is palpable. So the question seems to be whether our governing institutions (and those trying to capture the essence of reality for them) are not able to accurately understand the people’s true preferences, whether our institutions do not allow an accurate externalisation thereof, or whether this is not simply a matter of lack of understanding.
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Stanley Kurtz….

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…is at it again.

Gay marriage undermines marriage….okay, I admit it. I’m a cranky, stick-in-the-mud conservative who keeps making the same tired old point.

And again, he fails to provide proof, sticking instead to his familiar method of talking out of his ass.

So, once more I get to remind people that Stanley Kurtz is a quack who got his Harvard PhD by expanding Freudian quackery from the mere individual to entire peoples (“psychoanalytical sociology” it’s called. You should read Kurtz on the Oedipus Complex of the Trobriand Islanders). Quackety quack.

(Crossposted at Hollandaise)

New OECD Economic Outlook….

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…below the fold.

But first an introduction. I’m guestblogging from Amsterdam and my site can be found here. Very much honored to post at the Fistful (I would be, they’ve got visitors), although in all honesty they might be better served by a Francophone blogger.

As it is, they are grossly misunderestimated by the French part of the blogosphere (le sphère au blog?).
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The European culture of free speech

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Her lies in the naturalisation process notwithstanding, it seems that, one way or another, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the controversial feminist, Islam critic, and former Dutch parlamentarian, will be able to retain her Dutch citizenship. If she still wants it.

Even though she had reportedly planned to move to the United States to work for the American Enterprise Institute for a longer time and a number of reasons – not the least of which may have been that, as argued by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (in German), the Netherlands had grown a little tired of paying the bills for her non-compromising, crusadesque stance against Islam (as opposed to her new employer) – the circumstances causing her immediate resignation from the Dutch Parliament are a significant event in Dutch, maybe European politics, although I suppose it will only later become clear what exactly it means.
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