As the rest of Europe wonders if the French elections prove the old adage that in all countries the government lies to the electorate, but in France the electorate lies to the government, John Kay in the today’s FT offers reasons why the French voted as they did. Basically France is a nice country to live in, with better bread and more free time, and the French want to keep it that way. He has a point, though cynics might note that Kay lives in France but works in Britain.
The Stomach For Reform?
In its assessment of the debacle for Chirac/Raffarin in this weekend’s French regional elections the German newspaper S?ddeutsche Zeitung asked one pretty pertinent question:
“‘are European societies capable of stomaching unpleasant reforms?’ ”
Certainly the evidence would seem to make it a fairly reasonable question to ask. Sunday’s elections have been billed as a victory for the left, but equally we have only recently witnessed Gerhard Schroeder, seemingly unable to inspire sufficient confidence in his proposed welfare cuts, stepping down as chairman of the Social Democratic Party just before suffering a significant defeat in the Hamburg elections.
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Two sad recent deaths: Legendary actor/writer/raconteur Peter Ustinov and British Letter From America broadcaster and writer Alistair Cooke
The beautiful game
Crooked Timber goes from strength to strength, now adding John Holbo and Belle Waring to the masthead. (John & Belle will also continue to maintain their own blog.)
Kieran Healy notes that CT now has the numbers to field a rugby side. (He even provides a diagramme.) Down in the comments, Cryptic Ned asks:
When?s the home-and-home against Fistful of Euros set for?
Now maths are not my strong suit, but a quick tally down in the sidebar suggests that the Fistful has too few fingers for rugger. But, if I count correctly, there are eleven of us, which lends itself nicely to the other code.
And anyway, AFOEers (and CTers) – who wants to be a gentleman when one can be a hooligan instead!
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An in interesting Guardian interview with European Parliament President Pat Cox
Late Last Week
German President Johannes Rau cancelled the last leg of his nine-day trip to Africa because of credible indications that he would be attacked by terrorists. Given that he was scheduled to stop in Djibouti, where German soldiers are serving in multinational efforts to help maintain order in and around the Horn of Africa, it’s a pretty good bet that there was an Islamic component to the threat.
When Rau landed in Berlin, he looked rested and fit in a tropical-weight suit. He sounded more disappointed than worried that he had had to break off the trip, the 75th of his tenure. Just days before, he had been encouraging African leaders not only to solve their own problems, but not to let a false sense of solidarity lead them to overlook repression. This last led the ambassador from Zimbabwe to walk out in the middle of Rau’s Nairobi speech.
On the tarmac in Berlin, Rau said that the deciding factor was that the threat was not just to him, but to the people around him, and that he had a responsibility not to endanger them for his own sake. From that, I would read that the indications were of an attack against his airplane, maybe like this. German media are also reporting that the local security forces had been infiltrated, meaning any changes in route would have been quickly betrayed.
Looks like a narrow escape, and a reminder that differences over Kyoto, genetically modified crops, copyright, film subsidies, tax flimflammery or any of the dozens of things we fight about within the western world don’t matter a whit to the people who want to bring death and destruction to the peoples of the west, its leaders and its symbols.
Pondicherry Calling
Pondicherry is in the news. The former French colony, handed over to India in 1954, has just become the lastest cause celebre in ‘the great outsourcing debate’.
Under the evocative title: Once they were French colonies, now they call back NewIndpress has a piece today on this very topic.
Says Joel Ruet, a researcher with the French Cultural Centre in Delhi: ??Companies?both French and Indian?now offer a variety of opportunities to French-speaking Indians in the software sector. Satyam, Wipro and other companies looking for opportunities in French BPOs have now started to have their own in-house French software translation units where Indians from the old colonies are hired,?? he says. This is apart from the French energy companies like TotalFina and EDS that have come to India and hire those proficient in the language.
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If you’re off to the pub in Ireland, leave your ciggies at home. As of today. smoking is illegal in public workplaces. Those near the border may slip across to the wee North for a fag with their pint.
Budding liberals
The fumes are billowing thick and hot in Berlin. The two parties that make up Germany’s governing coalition are at a standoff. J?rgen Trittin, the Green environment minister, plans to introduce emissions trading, and wants to achieve an initial reduction in emissions by 2007. Economics minister Wolfgang Clement of the SPD wants no reduction in emissions.
This is shaping up to be an ugly intra-coalition squabble. Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der is going to have to make a decision, and whichever way he goes, it’s not likely to have a happy ending for him. If he backs Clement, he risks by far the most serious crisis his coalition has yet faced. If he backs Trittin, Clement may walk. (You can read more about this, if you can read German, in this Spiegel article and on the pages it links to.)
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V S Naipaul
Last year, reading around a bit to try to come to grips with Islamic terrorism, and the mindset that drives it, I read Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. Published in 1998, it’s a bit of a seqel to Among the Believers, which was written in the wake of Iran’s revolution of 1979 and published in 1981. My copy of Beyond Belief is dog-eared and underlined, marked up by the kind of active reading I did in grad school, but haven’t done much of since then. A lot of what Naipaul had to say made sense to me. His psychological explanations seemed to open a window into a subject that had been closed to me: not just terrorists and killers, but the people who support them, who venerate them.
Then I read around a bit more and found that Naipaul was regarded as cranky, a dilettante, and that most academic of putdowns – a travel writer. So mentally, I moved his insights into a different column. Anecdotal, interesting, not comprehensive or systematic. That’s part of the reason I haven’t blogged about him before.
A couple of weeks back, I picked up a different Naipaul book, A Turn in the South. The South, as in the southern United States, Dixie, the old Confederacy, and not incidentally my native region. Territory as treacherous and contentious as any in Islam. Layers of history, violence, war, slavery, occupation, poverty, and migration. And deep religiosity. Naipaul wanted to explain – or at least illuminate – the history of the South, both black and white. A tall order.
He starts in Atlanta, a city I knew well, and where I lived for three years in the period immediately after the time that Naipaul did his interviews there. Throughout the book, he talks to people I have either known at one remove, or might well have known. In the first chapter, he stays at the Ritz downtown, which I thought a funny place to get to know the real South, which to me is rural, agricultural at heart, and can only be understood by building on that base. Turns out he was making a metaphoric point about new money in Atlanta, how the city had grown and changed from its origins. Compare that with the only other lodging he mentions, the Ramada Inn in Jackson, Mississippi, a personality-free chain hotel on a highway. Says something about Jackson, too.
Naipaul gets an enormous amount right. I think he does better on the white than on the black, but coming as close as he does is a substantial achievement. He’s up front about his limitations, too.
“Music and community, and tears and faith: I felt that I had been taken, through country music, to an understanding of a whole distinctive culture, something I had never imagined existing in the United States.”
I don’t know why he never imagined a whole distinctive culture existing in the US, but I’m glad that he could overcome that prejudice, and make that admission. The book also has occasional show-stopping revelations that could only come from Naipaul’s Indian, Caribbean, English melange of experiences.
“The past as a dream of purity, the past as cause for grief, the past as religion: it is the very prompting of the Shias of Islam to nobility and sacrifice, the dream of the good time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs, before greed and ambition destroyed the newly saved world. It was the very prompting of the Confederate Memorial in Columbia. And that very special Southern past, and cause, could be made pure only if it was removed from the squalor of the race issue.”
Naipaul is, in short, a very reliable guide for an outsider in very charged and difficult terrain. I not only recognized my native land in his description, I learned about it as well. I hope to write more here of his take on Islam – for Europe faces few challenges greater than understanding and coming to terms with contempoary Islam – and I think Naipaul’s two books are not a bad place to start.