I’ve added a new blog to the blogroll that has quickly become one of my favorites.
Col Lounsbury is a financier currently in Jordan, involved in Iraqi reconstruction. He’s a scathing critic of the administration’s efforts.
He’s quite bright, extremely knowledgable about Middle Easter culture and society. He’s also a delight to read, with a very distinctive style, and also a very distinctive, larger than life personality.
Well it certainly seems to have gone eerily quiet over here. Meantime the Intergovernmental Conference has been working its weary way onward. Perhaps it’s a measure of the magnitude of the boredom that no-one has felt sufficiently inspired to get down to writing about it. This definitely hasn’t been the case with fellow blogger Eurosavant, who has a substantial piece reviewing the response across some parts of the European press. His principal conclusion on the progress: there hasn’t been any. His feeling: that we Europeans need to ‘be more decisive’. Maybe he has a point. He certainly is right that pragmatically this might have been better sorted-out if things had been done before the membership expansion. I suppose in the end we will ‘muddle through’. I don’t share the disintegration perspective, I don’t really think there’s anywhere else to go in an increasingly interconnected world, but equally I don’t really suppose we have missed an opportunity to inspire the world with our dynamic and vigourous European leadership. I don’t think things ever were going to pan out in that direction. The future is looking as if it’s going to have a decidedly Asian flavour about it.
Continue reading
The Economist has a couple of useful pieces this week ( here and here ) comparing the politics of immigration in the US and the UK. Meantime US economist Richard Freeman has an NBER paper where he argues we should “Stop spending so much time thinking about the WTO. Technology transfer, international migration, and financial crises have orders of magnitude more important impacts on human welfare and the state of the economy”. In other words globalisation is not after all so much about trade as about labour migration and capital movements. And just how is Europe shaping up to the challenge? Well, by all accounts, not very well. But a surprising proposal has just surfaced from a very unexpected quarter. Immigrants in Italy may (eventually) get the right to vote. Even if this is a very limited proposal, it is certainly a positive one. I am just very surprised by its source.
Continue reading
1978
Pierre Trudeau
Val?ry Giscard d’Estaing
Helmut Schmidt
Giulio Andreotti
Takeo Fukuda
James Callaghan
Jimmy Carter
Leonid Brezhnev
John Paul II
Continue reading
In order to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Franco-German friendship treaty, on January 22nd the French newspaper Liberation and the German Berliner Zeitung linguistically unified the two countries and created La Fran?allemagne. This Friday, the European Council will witness another day in this beautful country.
Both Chancellor Sch?der and Foriegn Minister Joschka Fischer have to leave the two day Brussels meeting late on Thursday because the German Bundestag is voting on a crucial reform bill this Friday. Their presence in Berlin is indeed important, and most likely not only symbolic: Someone from the SPD’s loony left might need some hand holding in order to avoid a last minute hold up of the coalition’s slim majority, and, of course, the two men need to vote themselves.
As civil servants aren’t allowed to represent their countries in the European Council, Chancellor Schr?der, according to Spiegel Online (in German) and various other news sources, asked French President Jaques Chirac last Sunday to help him out and also take care of German interests in this Friday’s (supposedly not too important) Council meeting. Chirac agreed. German civil servants will only be present just in case urgent need for consultation with the Chancellor should arise.
A French President speaking for Germany… talk about powerful Euro-symbolism.
Over the weekend, the final group matches of the qulaifying tournament for the 2004 European (football) Championships took place, while the draw for the final five play-off matches took place today.
Continue reading
“When the proposed Constitution issued from the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, Alexander Hamilton foresaw that opposition to it would be great, and though he thought the document would probably be adopted he couldn’t be sure. Three members of the Convention, all of them prominent, had refused to sign it, and others, including Hamilton’s two fellow delegates from New York, had left before the end of its deliberations. Indeed, the form in which the Constitution was approved gave it the appearance of unanimity: the delegates subscribed to it in the name of their states. This covered over defections and absences; for example, Hamilton alone signed for New York, and at least one delegate would have been unwilling to subscribe in his own name.”
So begins my edition of The Federalist, the collection of 85 essays written by Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay under the name Publius. (The authors went on to become the new nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, fourth President and first Chief Justice, respectively.) The essays were written at a speed that would put many bloggers to shame and distributed by the most advanced technology of the time. They address the toughest criticisms leveled at the proposed Constitution, from the charges that a unitary government would trample citizens’ rights and well-established prerogatives to the supremacy of federal law to the separation and blending of powers.
The title of the final essay sums up the argument: “Not perfect but good. Should adopt and seek to amend.”
Europe has had its Convention, and Europe’s governments are now having their Conference. Soon, there will be referenda, with high stakes and uncertain outcomes.
Where’s Publius?
As told by the Associated Press:
CARSON, Calif. — Germany won the Women’s World Cup 2-1 over Sweden on Nia Kuenzer’s header in the eighth minute of overtime Sunday.
A substitute who came on 10 minutes earlier, Kuenzer soared high to deflect Renate Lingor’s long free kick over the outstretched arm of goalkeeper Caroline Joensson, who was brilliant all day.
The German players mobbed her and rolled together on the ground, while Sweden’s beaten players were motionless and stunned. Much of the crowd, which was decidedly pro-Sweden, cheered the Swedes even as the entire German team stood on a podium, jumping up and down as they received their championship medals.
Germany’s first women’s world title came in the same fashion as it beat Sweden in the 2001 European Championship final – on an overtime goal. …
Continue reading
The controverse reaction to Edward’s use of a French block quote in a blog that claims to be the place for intelligent English language coverage of European affairs, made me remember my first blogging conversation. It was a discussion about Germans not publishing in English and the stipulation by the Norwegian blogger Bj?rn St?rk that ??nothing beautiful or sensible should ever be written in Norwegian, if it could be written in English.? So after speaking French all evening, and in light of the above mentioned comments as well as my imminent visit to the Frankfurt International Book Fair (link in English) I felt compelled to recycle my defence of linguistic diversity as a virtue of its own right, which was first published in a slightly different version in almost a diary on February 2nd, 2003.
Bj?rn St?rk had a look around the web and was astonished by the fact that he could find relatively few European, particularly German and French, (particularly political) blogs published in English. Contemplating the deeper issue at hand – the relation of national cultures and supra-national languages – in this case English – in an age of global interaction – Bj?rn made an interesting argument concerning cultural imperialism, linguistic protectionism, linguistic economies of scale and scope as well as the advantages of publishing in English instead of one?s native language.
No doubt about it – English has become some sort lingua franca in many respects.
I’m going to get a reputation for never putting up very serious stuff on this blog if I keep posting this sort of thing, but here goes.
So, I’m watching the coverage on Nederland 1 of today’s announcement from Prince Johan. It seems that, like his older brother, the number two prince of the Netherlands also has a penchant for falling for the wrong woman. Mabel Wisse Smit – a career UN human rights worker – may or may not have had a relationship with murdered gangster and suspected drug smuggler Klaas Bruinsma sometime in the distant past.
Continue reading