Photo from ?A History for Today? (Anne Frank House)
Keeping Tabs on the Constitution
The Center for Applied Policy Research (CAP) has put up a page detailing the steps on the way to ratification for the European constitution. Green, yellow and red lights mark the status in each country, and the chart can be viewed by country name or by ratification date. Unfortunately, the page is only available in a German version. (Full disclosure: I used to work at the CAP and still count a number of their projects as clients. But don’t think that means I will be able to persuade them to put up an English version.)
Fortunately, the Commission has done something roughly similar. Its page features an interactive map along with the expected list. The CAP’s commentary is more interesting, as might be expected. The Commission has also posted a version in French.
One of the CAP’s experts told me last week that the only significant problem for the constitution is the UK. Sentiments in France appear to be moving in favor of ratification. The other big and medium countries are also expected to have relatively easy paths toward ratification. And as for the smaller ones, well, it’s not like Malta would be truly missed if it opted to leave the Union.
But the UK is another matter. Not only politically and economically significant for the EU, but also home to one of the few fundamental debates about the Union. Normally this is a handicap, but in this case it will air essential issues in a way that probably hasn’t been done since the UK originally voted to join. This will probably be a real roller coaster ride.
Votes? We’ve got your votes right here!
If you haven’t yet noticed, voting has now opened for the first AFOE European Weblog Awards, so you can now get voting.
And in other awards news, we’ve been nominated for Best Group Weblog in the 2005 Bloggies, so if you’re not completely tired of voting for stuff then please consider voting for us in that.
Tony Judt in the NYRB
Tony Judt reviews three books about Europe and America in the New York Review of Books. He’s nothing extremely original to say, but he’s eminently, and refreshingly sensible. Go read it.
The general topic should be good for a discussion.
Yushenko inaugeration
A happy ending for once. Has he died his hair brown?
Neeka liveblogged it. See my Ukraine Kinja digest for more blogospheric reactions.
(Added on Monday: I never got a round to publish my draft yesterday. Bollocks.)
Pin the capital on the country
It’s in German, but the idea behind this game should be obvious to everyone – it gives you a capital city and you have to ‘throw’ a dart to hit its location on the map. I was closest to the centre of Lisbon (just 18km out, which is effectively a direct hit, given the scale of the map) and a slightly embarrassing 406km away from Moscow. (found via The Ex-Communicator)
Pink, Orange, Banana
Neglected to note this at the time.
BELARUSIAN PRESIDENT PROMISES NO REVOLUTIONS. Alyaksandr Lukashenka said while attending an Orthodox Christmas service in the Holy Spirit Cathedral in Minsk on 7 January that there will be no revolutions in the country, Belapan reported on 8 January, quoting the presidential press service. Lukashenka’s assertion reportedly came in response to a letter from Orthodox clergy who called on him to preserve peace and stability in Belarus. “They draw my attention to what has happened in Ukraine,” Lukashenka said. “I want to assure you that our country, the generations that live in our state, have exhausted the limit of wars and revolutions. I ask you to remember this and not to return to this subject. There will be no pink, orange, or banana revolutions in Belarus.”
From Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
I’m told that orange is an awfully, and perhaps dangerously, fashionable color in dreary Minsk this winter. No word yet on whether there has been an upsurge in people giving roses. (And absolutely no truth to the rumor that the film “Ray” has been banned because of the prominent role played by the song “Georgia on My Mind.”)
Next presidential election expected in 2006. More on how you can help as we become aware of it.
Orange Shadows
How some of the siloviki went over to Yushchenko and, in their account, helped prevent a crackdown in Kiev on or around November. One of the reasons the orange revolution didn’t end in blood red.
Difficult to check, of course, and naturally the services want to ingratiate themselves with the new regime, but consistent in its outlines with what we were hearing at the time, too.
While wet snow fell on the rally in Independence Square, an undercover colonel from the Security Service of Ukraine, or S.B.U., moved among the protesters’ tents. He represented the successor agency to the K.G.B., but his mission, he said, was not against the protesters. It was to thwart the mobilizing troops. He warned opposition leaders that a crackdown was afoot.
Simultaneously, senior intelligence officials were madly working their secure telephones, in one instance cooperating with an army general to persuade the Interior Ministry to turn back.
The officials issued warnings, saying that using force against peaceful rallies was illegal and could lead to prosecution and that if ministry troops came to Kiev, the army and security services would defend civilians, said an opposition leader who witnessed some of the exchanges and Oleksander Galaka, head of the military’s intelligence service, the G.U.R., who made some of the calls.
Read the whole story before it disappears into pay-per-view.
Paul Johnson: carried away as with a flood
The catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean gave many of us reason to crack open the dictionary and reacquaint ourselves with the term ‘theodicy’. Crooked Timber‘s Brian Weatherson, for example, saw in the catastrophe an opportunity to discuss the ‘problem of evil’ (i.e., given the manifest existence of evil in the world, is it not correct to say that God, if he exist, may be all-good, or all-powerful, but in any event cannot be both?).
Now that is is a very proper thing for a philosopher to discuss. As for me, though, I have never found the problem of evil very interesting, as it seems to presume that God plays a much more direct role in the day-to-day running of the world than I think he does.
But this is not the place to explore my unorthodox religious views. I wish instead to consider the religious views of Paul Johnson, which are presumably much more orthodox than my own and are at any rate, I think, far more offensive. For Johnson regards the tsunami from the perspective of classical theodicy, and concludes that it was a Good Thing.
Change in Germany
John Kornblum, former US Ambassador in Berlin, knows a thing or two about Germany from his forty years’ acquaintance with the country.
In a nation traumatized by violent upheavals, voters seem to demand an emotional insurance policy before accepting change. This insurance must promise that new methods will not undermine the social and economic stability, which is so important to their special postwar sense of self.
New ideas must be sold as not really changing anything. Change must be seen as a method of strengthening stability, not as a new way of doing things. German politicians have become adept at making new ideas sound like old ones. In the words of Konrad Adenauer: ?No experiments.?
A current example of this phenomenon is the tone of political and economic writing in Germany. With a few notable exceptions, authors focus on the inevitability of collapse. Germany?s economy is destined to decline, the Chinese will rule the world, and America is finished as a great power.
There are few grand visions for a new future. Instead, readers are warned that if they do not move quickly, their comfortable world will collapse around them. Motivation is negative rather than positive.
However strange this discussion may sound to outsiders, it seems to be serving an important purpose within Germany. Belief in the old stability is wearing away. As 2004 comes to an end, the most important question is not whether there is going to be change, but how it will come and which direction it will take.
The whole essay is here. I think the part about undertaking significant change while maintaining the whole time that nothing is changing is particularly accurate.
When I was doing more transatlantic bridge-building, I used a sports metaphor.
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