The Self-Deception Game

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In a week which has already seen Rai president Lucia Annunziata announce her departure (Rai is Italy’s state-run television and radio network), the latest statements from the Italian government about the future of Alitalia only serve to reopen one of the old questions floating round my head: just how solvent is Italy?

The Rai scandal has a total feeling of deja vu : Ms Annunziata resigned whilst accusing Berlusconi and his centre-right government supporters of trying to pack Rai with political appointees.

The Alitalia bankruptcy statement too may be just one more case of its kind. Indeed, following the bizarre logic of these things it may be that the declaration is intended to avoid the eventuality, if you see what I mean.

“If everyone understands that Alitalia could go bankrupt, then it will be relaunched,” Rocco Buttiglione, European affairs minister, told reporters. “But if anyone deceives himself into thinking that it can’t go bankrupt, then it will.”

So maybe this could and should be discounted as just one more bankruptcy (scare?), probably it is, and there’s nothing more to be said, but I would just like to take the opportunity of rephrasing the Buttiglione quote:

“If everyone understands that the Italian State could go bankrupt, then it might just get relaunched,”…….”But if everyone deceives themselves into thinking that it can’t go bankrupt, then it will.”

Cyprus Coda

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After the referendum in Cyprus, I asked a friend of mine who works for the UN Development Program what the local mood was like:

really for the time being it is disappointment…with the amount of misinformation out and the also the tight timelines that were imposed….really hard to know who to blame, but I blame the GC [Greek Cypriot] radio/tv channels most of all…people want to be convinced i feel but they need not be pushed into something….easing of economic restrictions for the northern part would be inevitable i think….they deserve the credit for sure….

More in a couple of years, I suppose. In the meantime, travel to the North should be easier, and a baroque, possibly roccoco, thicket of regulations will spring up about how to treat the citizens of the North, the products of their labor, and every other little thing that the EU looks after.

Bump Right Ahead.

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In my post celebrating the EU’s enlargement I reminded that the road ahead is going to be bumpy. Well, the rough ride starts today. On Tuesday morning, the European Parliament will have to vote again on the issue of whether to endorse or reject an agreement between the EU and the US on the controversial transfer of Airline passenger name records (PNR) (.pdf). The EP has already voted twice on this issue and as opposed to the Council and the Commission ? which has negotiated the agreement with the US – insisted on a Court of Justice verdict establishing the agreement?s compliance with EU data protection regulations or rejecting it. According to Statewatch and EUpolitix.com, the Council of Ministers ? fearing an ECJ ruling against the agreement – has now invoked an ?urgency procedure? to hold a third vote on the issue, hoping to overturn the slim majority of 16 votes with the help of the new – inexperienced and unelected, government dependent – MEPs from the new member states.

Freedom, these days, is not what it used to be. There was a time when most people were afraid of governments? efforts to collect data about them. For a long time, there was a general uneasiness with respect to the privacy related consequences of data processing technologies. But terrorist attacks, and the success of the technology I am using to publish this article have, over the last decade, slowly eroded most people?s resistance. A frog being boiled slowly will not jump out of the kettle. And now, secretly and diligently prepared, the widespread introduction of biometric data in identification documents and passports, as well as the creation of centralised databases to store them along with as much of electronic communication traces as possible ? as Maria Farrell reported last week – has almost become politically inevitable.


Caricature by Sebastian Linke

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Germany, the Uberpimp?

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While the British government is about to introduce legislation which, as a consequence of efforts to limit child abuse, makes it formally illegal for teenagers under the age of 16 (the age of consent in the UK) to engage in any mutually agreed sexual activity, including kissing or even hand holding, it could appear as if the German government were moving in the opposite direction. But that’s a complicated story. One that suggests the German government has decided to add a little fun to the otherwise joyless job market by mocking itself.


Run by the government?Everyone who is familiar with the record of the current German government will probably remember that their initial reformist zeal quickly turned into a series of legislative and then economic disasters in the course of their first two years in office. In a truth-or-dare speech, Chancellor Schroeder even admitted this to the Bundestag a couple of weeks ago.

An important part of the problem in 1998 was that in order to be able to govern, the relatively weak Chancellor had to cut the SPD’s loony left’s influence within his Parliamentary party – epitomized by then SPD chairman and finance minister Oscar Lafontaine. So after beating the left with the stick by forcing Lafontaine to resign and assuming the SPD leadership himself, Mr Schroeder had to feed them some carrots, too. That is why the labour market became even more rigid in the first two years of the SPD government. A legacy still haunting the government. Yet history seems to be about to repeat itself.
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It’s 15+4 now.

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Bridging what is left of the Iron Curtain will not be easy. But that is always the case when great things are at stake. That – not tonight’s celebrations – is what Europeans, old and new, East and West, should remember when the road gets a little bumpy along the way.

Only a few minutes ago, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, and Lituania became members of the European Union! Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Malta will follow within the hour.

But as I have decided to celebrate the enlargement offline with some friends and a bottle of champagne I once lost to a Polish friend by insisting that 2004 would be too early for Polish membership, I will now act against my German instincts and welcome the remaining new-members-to-be about 30 minutes early – willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!

But then, what do I know?

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Via Desbladet and Libé, I see that the PUF will be releasing, for the first time, a Que sais-je? in English.

The Que sais-je? series is an essential reference title, something missing in the English language market. French reference books on the whole are better than English ones, and there are a number of gaps in the anglophone reference publishing business. But anglo firms have been catching up in recent years, particularly British publishers motivated largely by an enormous demand from English-second language users. In my particular field – lexicography – the British Collins Cobuild dictionary and its copycats at other British firms are well ahead of their French equivalents.

Still, French publishers have two big products with no adequate equivalents in the English-speaking world: the encyclopedic dictionary and the Que sais-je? Although this new English Que sais-je? is written for a francophone market, I do wonder if this doesn’t augur a change in reference publishing. Will French firms now start moving into English reference book publishing? Will Que sais-je? become as indispensable in English as it is in French?