The European Military project at a cross-roads

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There’s a good article in today’s Le Figaro (a conservative French national newspaper) about the recent summit on a European military project in Arcachon. It’s titled L’Europe militaire ? la crois?e des chemins, and it is pretty pessimistic about the whole project.

A l’actualit? d’une loi de programmation militaire tangible, g?n?raux, ing?nieurs, chefs d’entreprise, parlementaires et experts en strat?gie ont pr?f?r? consacrer leurs interventions ? une Europe militaire encore tr?s virtuelle. C’est le seul consensus qui ait ?t? d?gag?. Car les Etats-Unis n’ont pas de souci ? se faire: si la r?union d’Arcachon devait servir de barom?tre ? l’Europe de la d?fense, l’avenir de celle-ci appara?trait des plus maussades.

Given the present lack of any tangible legal mandate for a military programme, the generals, engineers, CEO’s, members of parliament and strategists prefered to focus on a still highly virtual European military. That was the only consensus to come of all this. America has nothing to worry about: if the Arcachon conference is any measure, the future of a common European defense is gloomy indeed.

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European Quote of the Day

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“Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.”

     – Albert Camus

Supply-Side Economics takes root in Belgium

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Today’s Brussels Metro (bilingual FR/NL – registration required), reports that Belgium’s social security budget deficit may pass the €2 billion mark in 2004, although the relevant Belgian minister claims that these figures are not definitive. The socialist union FGTB/ABVV wants to shift social insurance payments from being a payroll tax to an income tax, because non-salaried workers – independents and the like – pay into a separate fund.

What I find surprising in this short, front page article is towards the end, when Pieter Timmermans, head of the Belgian Chamber of Commerce, claims that:

Il ne faut pas plaider pour des recettes suppl?mentaires, le taux d’imposition en Belgique est d?j? trop ?lev?. Il faut plut?t diminuer les imp?ts pour red?marrer l’?conomie et garder la r?duction des charges de €800 millions pr?vue par le gouvernement. Ce genre de mesure permettra de cr?er de l’emploi et d?gagera des recettes suppl?mentaires pour la s?curit? sociale

We shouldn’t be asking for more taxes, they’re already too high in Belgium. We should lower taxes to get the economy moving and keep the €800 million tax cut that the government has already passed. This kind of measure will create jobs and lead to higher social security revenues.

That certainly sounds to me like supply-side economics. It hasn’t worked terribly well elsewhere, as others have pointed out. Europe has largely been free of this sort of thinking and I certainly hope that it doesn’t spread beyond the employer’s associations. Either cut taxes and accept lower spending, raise them and accept the consequences, or run deficits with the knowledge that you have to pay them back. This doctrine of painless tax cuts is not going to help anyone.

Bermuda triangle to swallow EU savings tax directive?

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Well, not quite the Bermuda triangle – but the Cayman Islands might do just that.

In what is likely going to become a case study regarding the complexities of European multilevel governance, pooled sovereignty, and the complex relations of institutional Europe and the world, it seems a legal challenge brought forth by the government of the Cayman Islands, a British dependency, and thus an EU associated territory, could at least severely delay the EU savings tax directive‘s implementation – after a mere 13 years of negotiations to come up with a common solution to taxing capital gains without tampering too much with the capital’s mobility and important privacy issues.

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Work Freedom Day

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European countries never do very well in the gimmicky league tables or comparative indices of nations that thinktanks love to devise in order to meet the bills. You know the sort of thing ? the World Competitiveness Ratings or the Index of Economic Freedom. I thought it was time to come up with one that plays to Europe’s strengths.

What strengths, you may ask? Well the combination of gloomy back-to-work September, and a recent report from the International Labor Organisation, Key Indicators of the Labour Market, reminded me of something the continent has in its favour ? short working hours and long holidays. And so to boost European?s international self-confidence during these difficult economic times, I would like to propose a new measure of how much time we have to spend at work, Work Freedom Day.
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PKK ends ceasefire

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PKK ended its five year ceasefire a couple of days ago. This is very significant, and very terrible.

There’s been a lot of progress in Turkey, but the kind of moderation and impovement of the Turkish attitude and treatment of its Kurdish minority that would put the conflict completely to an end was several years away. Unfortunately, I believe those things, and democratic reforms in general, are now less likely. And of course, new hostilities will be very, very very bad for the poulation of eastern Turkey.

It’s likely the Turkish military will committ atrocities, which will make the prospect of opening negotiations about EU membership more remote, which will make the forces of reform weaker, which will make EU membership even more distant, etc ad infinitum.

One good thing is that a lot of reforms have already been implemented in the last year, most lately the military was stripped of their considerable political power, but the reforms need to be implemented on the ground, not just on paper.

As far as I can tell, the media hasn’t paid much attention to this story, which is sad and also odd since, unlike say the war in Congo, another (scandalously)underreported story, it has obvious geopolitical ramifications, even short-term ones, since, as Tacitus has pointed out it might further destabilize Turkey’s neigbour Iraq.

I’m hardly an expert on Turkey. I will look for quality analysis on the subject and update this post if I find something.

Grist for the conspiracy mill

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Iain’s post on Tuesday identified the belief of some that the EU represents a giant Papist conspiracy. I can’t help but wonder what they’ll make of the report in today’s Guardian that a group of Polish Catholics are investigating whether Robert Schuman is a candidate for sainthood, specifically relating to his work in founding the ECSC:

His sponsors say that Schuman’s claim to heavenly fame is that he was France’s foreign minister in 1950, when he put forward a revolutionary plan for pooling French and German steel production – to prevent the two countries from ever going to war again.

What became the European Coal and Steel Community, run by a supranational authority, was the embryo of today’s EU. It was an undreamed-of success, though certainly not the miracle normally required to qualify for canonisation.

Schuman was born in 1886 and died in 1963. His memory is already celebrated across the continent on Europe Day, May 9, the anniversary of the announcement of his plan.

Transatlantic Trends

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The 2003 Transatlantic Trends survey , conducted for the German Marshall Fund, Compagnia di San Paolo and Fundacao Luso-Americana, has recently published and the results from it make for some interesting reading. Some of the findings confirm what you might expect, while others confound expectations somewhat.

There’s a key findings report available in English, French, German, Italian and Portuguese (English and Italian in pdf only, others also available in Word). There’s also coverage of the report from EUObserver, The Guardian, BBC News, Yahoo! News and The Hindu, for a perspective from somewhere non-Atlantic.
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Creating Europe through tourism?

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One of the long-running stories in the British media over the summer has been the antics of British tourists in the Greek resort of Faliraki on the island of Rhodes. Stories of the misadventures of ‘Brits abroad’ have been a staple of the British media over the last few years, fuelled by TV programmes like the Uncovered series that’s highlighted various resorts over the year such as Ibiza and Ayia Napa, but this year there’s actually been a real story for them to focus on. First, a British tourist was killed in a bar brawl and then others were arrested for lewd conduct and indecent exposure, giving the media a chance to moralise and ‘why oh why?’ about what goes on when British youth meets the Mediterranean.

However, while the existence of resorts like Faliraki is often portrayed as a new development, it can be seen as merely the latest incarnation of the British experience of the rest of Europe as a location for escape from the realities of life at home.
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