Further to my piece on the troubles of the Conservative Party the other day – Iain Duncan Smith was defeated in the confidence vote – The Guardian has a roundup of some of the European press’ reaction and comment to the news.
The importance of economic integration (and some investment advice)
In the comments to one of the posts below, I raised the point that America’s prosperity owes a great deal more to its economic integration rather than to any particular shared value system, and that this was part of logic behind the founding of the EU. I want to demonstrate exactly how important a point that can be by using my own line of work as an example.
I work for a medium-sized Belgian translation firm. We have a handful of full-time staff and some 200 freelance translators who take work from us. Our freelancers can and do take work from other sources, what we do is mostly dealing with clients. Like all good middlemen, we make it possible for businesses to negotiate a single price for their translation work and we act as an insurance policy. Avoiding the middleman may sometimes cost less, but if your freelance translator is sick or busy and you have a deadline to deal with, you have to scramble to find a substitute. If you deal with us, we have many translators on tap and someone will always take your work. Few firms – only a few very large ones – still keep in-house translators. Translators generally agree to charge us less than they would charge clients directly because we can bring them a great deal of work, and we take away the cost of billing and accounting. We charge customers a bit more because we simplify billing and guarantee schedules. This is pretty much how modern translation firms operate.
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Close Encounters of the Virtual Kind
You can tell Saturday has come round again. I’m here with another of those ‘mindless’ posts. Still, anyone not suffering from too much of a post-halloween hangover, and looking for a cool bit of culturally-correct entertainment should try this (especially mousing over top-right exhibit two). If however you are in the mood for a culturally less-correct but nonetheless fairly enjoyable quick read try this. And the point of all this, the place I found the links: Henry Schroy’s Blog. Now Henry is a musician (more culture: check out the music for Orixas), born in Rio and now living in Brooklyn New York: so what the hell has this got to do with Europe? Good question. The answer is probably very little. However…….
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Get Well Soon Tobias
Just a short line for Tobias:”God Speed Your Recovery”. We and Europe need you. BTW: doesn’t this make an even stronger case for good public transport and walking!
just a short note to let you know I will presumably not be able to write much for the next four to six weeks as I broke my left arm yesterday and am right now reeducating myself to get on with single handed typing, which is not too easy once being used to ten fingers on the keyboard. I will try though, as part of my physiotherapy ;). One tip from the expert: Don’t ever attempt ride a bycicle in autumn when the streets are slippery…
Tobias
If I were you I would try the local zoo. See if they have any macacos, because with “Um n?mero infinito de macacos, com um n?mero infinito de teclados…………….”
The people you meet on the plane
You sometimes meet interesting people flying across the Atlantic, and this trip has to just about take the cake for it. On the way from Minneapolis to Amsterdam yesterday morning, my flight was carrying a group of Amish bound for Zurich.
Now, the Amish are perhaps another institution Americans are more familiar with then Europeans. They are not very large in number, but they have enough media presence that most people know who they are. The Amish are a Protestant religious group who, beyond just ordinary adherence to their faith, also live moderately segragated lives from the American mainstream. They speak a southern German dialect commonly but inaccurately called “Pennsylvania Dutch.” They wear a particular style of clothing, the men tend to wear long beards but not mustaches, and the women dress very conservatively and wear small bonnets, as commanded by Paul in the New Testament. They also don’t drive cars and restrict their access to quite a few other modern conveniences.
The Amish are widely seen as more isolated from the world than they really are, and their society is a great deal less idyllic than it is made out to be. Since I’m ethnically Mennonite (a related but more mainstream faith) and spent my college years in a heavily Amish area, I have a bit more experience with them than the average American and I can assure you that the Amish are good deal more connected to the world than they are made out to be. Quite a few leave their communities and join more mainstram life. There are drug problems, and I gather domesitic violence and child abuse are not rare. They are not subsistence farmers; they sell their crops for cash, put the money in banks and buy food at grocery stores. Apparently, roller blades are very fashionable in Amish communities right now, and I remember seeing a lot of horses and buggies at Taco Bell on Sunday afternoon.
Anyway, why would they be travelling to Zurich, and what does this have to do with Europe?
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What Does Europe Stand For?
Twelve golden stars on a deep blue field. Soon to fly alongside the national emblems in twenty-five states, with more than a dozen more conceivable in the medium term. Why should hundreds of millions of citizens want to join their futures to this project?
Are Europe, and its Union, just shorthand for peace and prosperity? Normality? Is that enough? What did the dissidents of the East want, when they wrote that they yearned for the return to Europe? High taxes and state day care? Is that all?
What hopes and dreams are bound up in that simple band of stars?
The trials of the Tories
Later today, Iain Duncan Smith, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, will face a vote of confidence in his leadership that he’s widely expected not to survive. (For those of you looking for blogged coverage during the day, I recommend British Politics, Anthony Wells, Iain Murray and our own Matthew Turner. We’re yet to have a blogging Conservative MP, but there’s some interesting perspectives from inside Westminster from the MPs Tom Watson and Richard Allan.)
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Europe hors l’Europe
Since I’m on the subject of things extra-European today, I note that Le Monde is reporting that there will be a referendum in Guadéloupe and Martinique in December over changing the status and government structure of France’s Caribbean colonies. France has a tradition of being a very centralised state, but the last 20 years or so have seen the end of the old regime. Powers are now devolved to regional governments, and the DOM-TOM’s are increasingly autonomous. Corsica’s little set-back recently is, I suspect, just a speedbump in the decline of the centralised French state.
What I would like to propose is the idea that maybe there needs to be some debate on the status of Europe’s extra-European areas as whole.
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European free riding?
Doug and Elliot Oti brought up the subject of European free riding in the comment’s to Doug’s latest post.
Let me pose this hypothetical. After his landslide win in 2004, president Kuichinik, slashes the US military budget to a third of its current size.
Do you think the European countries would feel compelled to raise their own military expenditure? A huge or a modest increase? (Or perhaps they’d cut their militaries?) How would their security policies be affected?
For what reasons would they do whatever you think they’d do?
What should they do, i.e what would – if this were to happen – be in their best interest?
Life outside of Europe
So, today I’m blogging from Idaho where I’m visiting the in-laws. This is the first time I’ve been back in the States long enough for the place to feel foreign since decamping off to Belgium a couple years ago. Actually, the strangest part of this trip has been the feeling of being in a foreign country, even though it’s a country that I’ve spent almost half my life in.
Some of that could be Idaho. I’ve lived in California, Colorado, Indiana and New Jersey, and this is a bit like Colorado. Of course, I haven’t lived in Colorado in 20 years. But, considering that I’ve spent most of this trip either working on a white paper for my employer or planted in front of basic cable, I have to at least consider the possibility that Idaho isn’t really the problem.
[Warning: This post is long and will contain extensive references to life in America. The Americans will probably all get it. You may not.]
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