…but I think you’d enjoy reading them anyway. While we get all exercised about one small corner of Eurasia, they’re eyeballing exciting things from around the whole world.
The inimitable Bruce Sterling:
The slightly wacked Cory Doctorow and the definitely out there Mark Frauenfelder:
A Directory of Wonderful Things
Getting more or less serious about building a better future:
Over on Crooked Timber, Maria Farrell has some thoughts on the coming Irish EU Presidency and why the presidencies of small countries seem to get more achieved than those of the large countries. (She’s following on from this FT article)
The whole post is well-worth reading and I heartily recommend it, but she ends with an interesting point that I think is worth repeating here:
And let?s not forget, that as of 1st May next year, small countries will be in the majority of EU member states. We?re loud, we?re proud, and we?re here to stay?
Hi folks. I’ve been off-line a bit fighting with my landlord and trying to get my new apartment straightened out. I’ve moved as of the first of December. My new Internet connection is up and running, but my workstation hasn’t been able to talk to my monitor since the move. I have to bring it in to work to get it fixed, and until then, I have limited ‘Net access. There’s a post coming one of these days on the joys of IKEA when you’re an expat.
A lot’s been going on while I’ve been offline. Chirac and Raffarin have started acting like idiots over how kids dress at school. The EU constitution looks like a casualty of rapid expansion. Jean Chrétien calls it quits – the last of the Pearson-era Liberals still in the Liberal party – and turns the reins of power over to borderline conservative Liberal Paul Martin. And, Saddam Hussein is now in American hands, which will make excuses for failing to find WMD or links to Al Qaeda just that much thinner. Go ahead and browse around here to get in contact with the lawyers you need.
Speaking of Iraq, I wanted to draw your attention to yesterday’s New York Review of Books. Especially to a piece entitled Delusions in Baghdad. If Marshall McLuhan were alive today, he could stand fully vindicated before his critics.
Very young men in tan camouflage fatigues, armed, red-faced, flustered; facing them, the men and women of the world press, Baghdad division, assembled in their hundreds in less than a quarter of an hour […] as Lieutenant Colonel George Krivo put it bitterly, to “make the story. Here, media is the total message: I now have an understanding of McLuhan you wouldn’t believe. Kill twenty people here? In front of that lens it’s killing twenty thousand.”
When the US Army starts appreciating someone like McLuhan, you know the world has changed.
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Writing in The Guardian under the headline ‘Why I am no longer a European’ Max Hastings explains why, though he remains committed to the idea of Europe, he can no longer support the Constituion. His feelings, I think, represent a growing tendency of people throughout current and future members of the EU to support the ideal of European unity and integration but not necessarily the way in which it is currently being carried out.
It’s a grouping in which I would tentatively include myself and, I suspect, several of my colleagues here on AFOE. The problem comes, I think, from the fact that while there is a growing sense of a common European cultural identity, it’s in danger of being swamped by an overly techno-bureaucratic notion of integration being imposed from above. I’m planning a separate post on European cultural and national identities (hopefully it’ll be done before Christmas) so for now I’ll just look at the main points of Hastings’ article.
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One of the things that I do in addition to ruminating about ‘Europe’ is to report on the biotechnology industry in Germany and Austria. One of the tools that I use to make the job easier is Google’s News Alert service. And sometimes the service turns up surprising articles.
European summit ends in failure
EU constitution talks set to fail
Echec des n?gociations sur la Constitution europ?enne
Wlosi oglaszaja fiasko negocjacji
Update:
Liberum veto, an old Polish custom with unfortunate precedents and consequences.
British Spin, the anonymous author of the British Politics weblog makes an interesting suggestion about how European politics could become more interesting:
One of the problems of Europe (of many) is that it is just too respectful. It is a good sign for Europe when various leaders clearly wish to bitchslap each other. Frankly, to build a stronger european community, nothing would be better than a no holds barred brawl.
Think about it. If British politics was conducted with the restraint, the gentle diplomacy and careful choreography on Euro-summiteering we would not only be asleep, but we would be far less alive to the vital issues of the day.
This is why I cheered when Silvio Berlusconi made a tasteless joke about a German MEP, and why I cheered louder when Schroeder then cancelled a holiday in Italy. I can?t wait for Blair to liken the Franco-German alliance to two drunks staggering down the street (c. Bill Clinton) or for Chirac to tell the Poles that they don?t have a right to a veto because they should be jolly grateful not to still be communist.
This stuff isn?t just trivia, or froth, or yah boo politics. It?s a sign that passions are engaged and that politicians need to speak to their people, not just to each other.
The demotic and the democratic voices are the same. They are loud, energetic, rough, vicious and full of life. Courtly language, diplomacy and soft speaking are the language of the elite, of the few, of the exclusive.
I’m not sure I agree with the idea of controversy for the sake of it, but it is an interesting point. Do we need more confrontation within Europe to make people more aware of what’s going on? Does the relative lack of public disagreement between Europe’s leaders make the people at large feel excluded from the process, or make them think it’s about technical issues rather than real and important matters? Would we see more of the European Parliament in the news if there were more heated debates going on there?
In the US presidential elections the big news of the week must be the endorsement of Howard Dean by Al Gore. A somewhat smaller, but still interesting, development – although this isn’t exactly new, but simply new to my attention – is the fact that someone has created an Economists for Dean weblog. Finally, if you are really short on ‘breaking news’ and if you really want to go down to the fine print of the week, you might just notice that I seem to be included in the sidebar, in amongst a variety of other economists who undoubtedly have rather more public appeal than I do. I would like to say that as a European I consider it an honour to figure in such company: this does however present us with a number of questions worth thinking about, and it is to those that I would now like to turn.
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Jiri Pehe — once an advisor to Vaclav Havel, now an academic and a go-to man for international journalists seeking smart quotes about Czech politics — once pointed out to me that Czech president Vaclav Klaus is more anti-integration than just about every mainstream politician in Europe with the exception of one branch of the British Conservative Party. The only other guy who might approach him is Hungary’s nationalist noisemaker Viktor Orban, whose star was fading last I checked.
Yesterday’s Czech papers were awash with Klaus’s comment that he’d prefer to have no European constitution at all. He’s thus the first European head of state (but oddly, not an EU head of state) that has rejected the constitution. EuroSavant hits the nail on the head with this sentence: “I get the picture here of old grandpa over there sounding off in the corner, right when the rest of the family has gotten together to try to make a decision – he’s got some mighty strange views, and he’s sure to express them in his cranky way, but as long as you are polite and say ‘Yes, grandpa’ you can otherwise pretty much ignore him.” (Pragueblog expressed similar sentiments recently: The Czechs are dealing with Klaus the same way they dealt with the Communists. That is, let him have his special title and then ignore him.) But…
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Is that there won’t be a compromise under the Italian Presidency. I remeber hearing a few weeks back that the Irish government has been making plans to finish up the IGC’s business during its six months at the helm.
How much of the current worry is due to Berlusconi’s initial fumbles? Six months disappear awfully quickly, if you spend the first two healing self-inflicted wounds.
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