The Last Question, or How to Embarrass Tony Blair.

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I just watched the press conference Gerhard Schroeder, Jaques Chirac, and Tony Blair gave after their talks regarding Iraq in Berlin today. The last question came from a British journalist whom I wasn’t able to identify so far. But her question was quite interesting.


She asked the British Prime Minister whether he wasn’t embarrassed talking to his European colleagues given that (so many people believed) he was only an envoy for George W. Bush (from my memory, I couldn’t find a transcript so far).


Well, I don’t know if he was actually embarrassed when talking to his colleagues, but he was certainly embarrassed to get this question. I somehow had the impression that he was blushing a little bit when Gerhard Schroeder took over and answered the question for Mr Blair, saying something along the line of “Tony Blair came as himself, talked as himself, and will also leave as himself” before Jaques Chirac added that this is “a question so far out of the imaginable that not even the three governments’ communications people were able to dream it up it in their briefing to the heads of state”.


Unimaginable? Apparently not. Embarrassing? Definitely so.

Two years in Europe

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Two years ago today, I got off a Lufthansa flight from LAX to Munich and passed through Schengenland customs. I had originally been scheduled to fly on September 12, from San Francisco to Brussels via Frankfurt, but when it became plain that no one was going to be flying on September 12th, I called Lufthansa and changed my flight before the rush. After five hours in LAX getting past security (I had a very scruffy beard and a well-worn passport full of Asian entry stamps, so I got picked for a “special” screening) and ten hours in the air, I passed through customs in Munich, getting nothing but the most cursory glace at my Canadian passport and Belgian student visa from the Bundespolizei, even though it was barely a week after September 11. There was no passport check at all when I landed in Brussels.

My biggest surprise in moving to Flanders was how easy it is to get by here. Language doesn’t constitute a huge barrier either to school or to employment. My landlord doesn’t speak English, but he is old enough that he speaks fluent French, so my lease is actually in that language. I think finding an apartment is the only thing I’ve done here where I couldn’t use English.

There are a lot of non-natives living in Belgium who primarily use English, many of them are also non-native English speakers. There are so many that I’m beginning to think they form a sort of “Euroanglo” culture that merits some study. It is a culture that has adopted largely continental norms, but that still speaks English and has a set of common cultural references taken largely from the anglophone world.
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What kind of Europe?

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The Guardian recently hosted a debate on ‘What kind of Europe do we want?’ between writer (and Guardian columnist) Timothy Garton-Ash and Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore. The full transcript of the debate is available in pdf format, but there’s also a shorter summary that covers most of tha min points the two made. Given that most would label Garton-Ash a ‘europhile’ and Moore a ‘eurosceptic’, it’s interesting to see that there is quite a lot of common ground between their two viewpoints.

Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee also makes similar points to Garton-Ash, addressing the problem that many of us who are ‘pro-Europe’ face – that the ‘Europe’ of our ideals is not lived up to by the EU of reality:

The limping Britain in Europe campaign now needs to reform itself into a radical anti-government voice, not the pet of ministerial patronage. Time to lay into both Brown and Blair with full euro knuckledusters. Time to attack Brussels, too, and lead the charge for reform; it will never be credible to defend the inadequate status quo.

The European idea is magnificent, but pretending that current reality matches the rhetoric only heightens scepticism.

The combination of EU expansion, the constitutional proposals and the advent of the Euro have brought us to a ‘where do we go from here?’ moment. 50 years on from Schuman and Monnet, there is now a concept of ‘Europe’ as an entity that there wasn’t back then. However, the question of what that that entity will be in practice has still not been decided (and probably never will entirely be) but the onus is now on all sides of the debate to actually think about where we’re going and how to get there.

Back to the Future in Cancun

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I’ve been trying to understand exactly what happened at the WTO ministerial conference in Cancun. That they’ve come apart is pretty clear, but there is a certain amount of ambiguity about why and who is to blame. The crux of the matter appears to be the “Singapore issues”, for which you can find a more detailed discussion at Crooked Timber.

What are the “Singapore issues”? In most of the world, national governments get to write the laws regulating investment and taxing economic activity, and usually government contracts are, at least to some degree, offered preferentially to locally controlled or operated businesses. It seems that some combination of countries – the US, the EU and Japan – want to extend the WTO’s mandate to globalising investment and procurement rules. Apparently, the whole business first came up at the WTO ministers’ meeting in Singapore after the death of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998 – a treaty intended to address exactly these questions of government procurement and investment security.
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You can help

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Does anyone have suggestions for good blogs? I’m especially interested in blogs with an European perspective and ones covering the politics of a European country or region, but any good blogs are of interest of course.

One of my megalomanical hopes for AFOE was that we could use it to create a European corner of the blogosphere. Just as there is a comics blogosphere, a linguablogger blogosphere, a German blogosphere, and on a larger scale a techie blogosphere and a US politics blogosphere, there should be a pan-European politics blogosphere.

Basically I want every worthwhile English language blog about european politics to be on our blogroll. And I want as many as possible of them to become aware of each other and start talking to each other.

I think we have enough traffic for it to be actually achievable.

The result

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With the final result in Sweden’s referendum on the Euro being 56% no, 42% yes and 2% undecided the joint winners of the first Fistful of Euros prediction competition are Stefan Geens and our very own David Weman who both got closest, predicting a 54% no vote. It appears that the polls before Anna Lindh’s murder were actually quite accurate, both in predicting a ‘no’ victory and that it would be by a relatively large margin.

Calling Europe?

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You might remember Henry Kissenger’s famous quip about his decision making weakness with respect to the then European Community –

“If I want to talk to Europe who do I call?”

Well, the introduction of a European Foreign Minister in the forseeable future will probably solve this problem for the likes of Mr Kissenger. But what about the rest of us? Whom do we call when we want to talk to Europe because we don’t like the latest directive regarding the amount of bubbles in sparkling wine, or to cheer up Romano Prodi after the latest insult from Mr Berlusconi, or simply to chat about clever ways for extracting money from the EU film fund by presenting our latest holiday video from Spain as a culturally vitally important common European film production?

Well, gentle readers, search no more. Here’s your answer (I accidentally stumbled upon it while looking for EU press statements regarding today’s referenda). We can call the citizen support center called “Europe direct“, open on weekdays between 09:00 and 18:30 CET.

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The results are in

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Estonia said yes to the EU. 67% voted yes, 63% turnout.

Sweden said no to the euro. 56,2% voted no, 41,8% yes, 81,3 turnout.

The numbers are preliminary (postal votes aren’t counted). They can hardly change the result, but it might be too early to call a winner to Nick’s contest.

Update: In comments, Guessedworker raised the issue of another referendum. During the campaign, the prime minister and the leader of the second largest opposition party made a joint statement, explicitly ruling out another referendum in this parliament or the next, which means 2010 at the earliest. They’re not likely to go back on it, which means that Sweden will not join the eurozone until 2013 or later.

On another note, regarding Estonia’s vote, let me say Hooray! and a warm welcome our Estonian cousins.